A Happy Bureaucracy by M P Fitzgerald

Author:M P Fitzgerald [Fitzgerald, M P]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RevFitz
Published: 2019-01-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

The setting sun offered great relief to the field of cages. The rage it had been beating into the hot earth was finally subsiding and the blood orange smear across the dead horizon radiated a sense of peace to the slaves. It was the only beautiful thing most of them had seen in months.

The rows of cages were uniform following a strict grid, yet the cages themselves were anything but. Some were the kind of cage one would expect to find holding an animal; professionally built, made of steel bars and definitely from before The War. Some were built from scrap, a mixture of chain link fence welded around rusty car frames. Some were just boxes of sheet metal with penny-sized air holes drilled into them. No matter their shape, they all held living and breathing people, their numbers in the high dozens.

Arthur had been put to work to “earn his keep” before finding himself in the remnants of a van turned cage. He was marched from one side of Slaver City where the slavers’ well had been dug, and forced to carry two five gallon buckets of water across to the cage fields, a good mile away, and dump them into a large trough. He did this over and over as the sun hammered the earth with cosmic rays. He wasn’t allowed a single drop for himself.

The trough of water stood dead center between the rows of cages, and to Arthur’s great dismay was not for the slaves. It was for the guards; a place where they could openly drink to diminish the hopes of the men and women they held captive. A slave was only allowed water after they “earned their keep” and when customers arrived.

Arthur sat down in his cage as soon as he was thrown into it. The van that the cage was built out of was cut in half with the back portion stripped of all seats, doors and windows, and then wrapped with a thick chain link. It was directly opposite the front half, made in the same fashion. Despite the setting sun, the cage’s metal floor was still hot, but Arthur’s tired and aching muscles had voted that the discomfort was worth it to endure.

This was all his fault.

Sure, he was just doing what he was told to do, but at the end of the day, he still chose to do it.

This was going to be his life until he was sold. The frightening part? This was better than being sold. He had already heard rumors from the guards who marched him up and down Slaver City that many buyers bought slaves to dig for food. There was a sort of mad gold rush fever for canned goods that had been buried by the radioactive blasts of fusion bombs. It seemed unlikely to Arthur that anyone would find anything near the craters, and if they did it was probably awash with radioactivity. This did not matter. If the slave found nothing, the

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