“Of course…”
“Good luck with your work, Keeper.”
“Thank you.”
The two soldiers headed toward the elevator, unmoved, and Giovanni stood and watched them disappear behind the sliding doors. The dark buzz of the descending cabin vibrated in his ears, steadily growing quieter, until a thud informed him that his escort had reached its destination.
From that moment on he was the only one left in the Tank. And of course the guests, as the manual named them. Giovanni could never understand whether that term was only accidentally ironic or the person who chose it wanted to mock – yet always respecting the limits imposed by the ever-present martial formalism – the condition in which all those inside the Tank passed their last days.
There were five keys in the set. The one that opened the reinforced door of the flat was long, similar to a two-headed axe. Three others were smaller and they were for the rooms of the flat itself, while the last one, recognizable by the green plaque, had to be for the security exit, also called, with very little technicality – Escape. The keys were attached to a ring with a metal four-pointed star hanging from it. It didn’t look all too comfortable to keep in a pocket. A tad of masochism would be needed to appreciate it.
The door to the flat, now wide open, led to a narrow vestibule that contained only a chest and an old-fashioned three-legged hall stand, maybe a remnant of some old dismantled office. A calendar with an NMO symbol hung from a wall on the side. Giovanni wondered how he would feel while turning the twelfth page.
There were three doors, one for each of the smaller keys. The one in front of him led to the kitchen, extremely clean and functional, with light colours and wooden surfaces, all bathed in a white light coming from a small window placed between two walls and a cupboard. The small flat screen of a television was almost perfectly fitting in the space between two shelves; only the lack of an handle prevented mistaking it for a microwave (which was on another shelf, opposite to it). In one corner, on the floor, there was a sturdy grey styrofoam bin used for food supplies and garbage disposal.
He instinctively opened the fridge with simple curiosity: it was already filled with food and drinks, arranged with a precision worthy of an advertisement photo. He then tried to open the sink tap: a clear, cold stream of water (coming from the large aqueduct conveying to each of the Camp’s buildings) promptly came out. Excellent.
The door on the right side of the vestibule led to the bedroom. His gaze, attracted by the light, flew to the window, completely filled by the sky’s glare; then it slowly hovered to the bulky three-door wardrobe, the bedside table, the queen-size bed covered by a brown sheet that reminded him of the military and hospitals. Everything was very spartan-looking, but comfortable. He didn’t fail to notice that his luggage, two suitcases and a bag, were already there, as they previously agreed. Efficiency on every level.
Over the bed’s headboard a white-lettered motto on a black background had been framed:
NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT
No one can harm me unpunished. On one side of the writing there was the ever-present red tetragram. Opposite to the wardrobe a small door with no lock led to an evenly small bathroom equipped with a shower (he was well informed about the water’s temperature: a capacious LPG tank was placed underground at a short distance from the Tank, fueling the small boiler that was fixed on the wall).
The third room, on the left of the hall, was the Control Room, a windowless room floodlit by a long neon tube. It was a bit bigger than the bedroom and on the far side there was a console full of buttons, switches and warning lights, a 70x50 screen on top of it. The screen was on. Giovanni took a couple of steps in, choosing not to look right away at the greenish figures moving inside the big monitor.
He was prepared for everything and his entrance in the Tank signed the end of his training; he could rightly say to know the place in its every aspect even without having stepped foot inside it before then. There was no handover, either. As a matter of fact he didn’t have the chance to speak to his predecessor, who was probably escorted out not fifteen minutes before his arrival.
Since the NMO had seized power over the country everything worked by very rigorous schemes. Respect for the rules, self-discipline, knowing to be part of a whole and intransigence towards transgressors. These were the true four points of the tetragram. Giovanni felt them all well engraved in his head and heart. But no matter how hard he tried to strip himself of any useless emotion he still felt an overwhelming pride. For being chosen, for winning over any other aspirant, for being there.
He stopped with his legs lightly spread, crossed his arms and finally checked what the big screen was offering him.
An expanse of clumping human beings, bodies teeming supine, kneeling, prone or curled up like fat green-grey worms or frail, wretched foetuses.
A silent churning of forms, shadows, disjointed limbs, everything in an almost fluorescent world corrupted by the greenish, mouldy luminescence emitted by rot. In reality this effect was due to the NV filter. The camera hung from the Tank’s ceiling like a chandelier, pointing downward, connected to the Control Room twenty-four hours a day, feeding it with images of all those bastards in the utter darkness, thrashing, crawling on one another, screaming their inaudible hate, their pain, sometimes raising their wide-open eyes similar to opalescent dots.
Several bodies lay still, but the majority was shaking like a bait on the hook. A bearded man, right in center of the frame, managed to stand up, his hands tied behind his back, and raised his gaze towards the camera. The small, milky eyeballs made him – like all the others guests, when they kept their eyes open – vaguely resemble a demon. His mouth moved, speaking useless words; then, a movement from the prisoners he was standing on top of forced him to fall backwards like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
Those were the most recent arrivals, the surface. At a first glance they were about forty. How many layers were behind them? Nobody could say for sure. Another thing that was impossible to tell was how many corpses there were inside the Tank at any given time. Not that it mattered, anyway. There were so many bodies inside that ascertaining how many were still breathing, especially in the lower layers, would be quite the feat. His curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied. How many angels can dance on the tip of a needle? Giovanni smiled remembering that stupid old question.
For those how deserved the Tank death was the only absolute certainty. When it came, be it days or weeks, was irrelevant. Maybe not for them, the guests, but the fact that they were in there implied that they deserved it. The manual mentioned the subject with brevity; everything else was left to logic and guesswork. Suffocation was the most common cause of death, that much was quite obvious. It could also be injuries or fractures from the fall or self-inflicted wounds to shorten the agony; all this, of course, while waiting for the Cleansing to tend to the overpopulation.
Giovanni stared at that tangle for a few more seconds, finding it similar to a cauldron where weird reptiles and anthropomorphic amphibians were boiling; when he came to, he started rubbing his hands.
“Everything is all right, Giovanni.” He told himself loudly. “All perfect.”
He wasn’t used to talking to himself and he wouldn’t start now. He didn’t have any need for neither encouragement nor reiterating his satisfaction. He approved of the NMO, of its methods, its decision and its politics. Those who were thrown in the Tank weren’t human anymore, they lost every right to be a part of the renewed social fabric. What followed was that any moralist fit – legacy of an induces, hypocritical and finally surpassed moral – was to be compared to a momentary itch, a speck in the eye.