They used an ancient word to describe this place; The Coffin Room. It was three hundred years or more since anyone had witnessed a coffin enter the earth, or slide towards the incinerator of a crematorium. But the word had continued use in common language, synonymous with death.
It was a dark room, lit only by several dull orange lights which were fixed around the walls. The Coffin Room was a processing plant and its design practical. It paid little homage to death. At the highest point of the triple height room an octagonal human sized ‘pipe’ entered into the room. The metal pipe had heavy thick rubber junctions which provided turns and drops between the sections of metal tubes. The piping system was suspended by thick wires fixed to the ceiling of the vaulted room. Each section of metal pipe was connected to thinner metal pipes which extended from a central column. This column pumped chemicals and gases through the small pipes, into each large metal section. The larger sections had in each one oval window. Eventually, the complex piping wound down around the central column which ended at head height. Here the metal piping was connected, by the last rubber junction, to a large square steel tank. It had several portholes revealing a stark interior. At the far end of the battered and stained tank an extractor pipe slowly whirred ready to fire up.
The whole structure was dull, worn and in parts rusted. It dripped condensation from the glass in the pipes, residual chemicals leaked through the worn rubber junctions raining onto the floor of the room. Gases escaped through cracks in the glass and filled the room with a cloud coloured orange by the lights. The structure pumped and heaved, like the organs of a great metallic beast, making a regular and consistent thrusting sound.
Many corpses moved through the piping at regular intervals of fifty feet or so.
Each corpse was sprayed and smoked with both gas and chemical, treatments to stymie any infections a rotting body might present. These cadavers were mere husks, their horrific deaths had disfigured each person beyond recognition. Sunken faces with gaping mouths and hollow sockets where eyes once looked out, crisp skin covering each body like parchment. Limbs thin and hollow with a little rotting soft flesh left in each corpse. Each cadaver was twisted and crumbled in its own unique death sculpture.
At the final junction to the tank, the pipes joining the last metal section blasted hot dry air, evaporating any residual moisture in the corpse. At the point of entering the steel tank the cadaver was not unlike beef jerky in its look. Each body would then slide into the tank, through a steel portal, which would close behind the dead person about to be processed.
The steel tank, with its mottled walls plastered with a fired concrete resin, would vibrate. A coil around the inside wall glowed and increased the heat in the vessel. The husk that was once a person quivered as the tank whirred into life. The heat reached a thousand degrees Celsius, no flames just hot energy building inside the tank. Each corpse would rapidly dry and begin to crumble. The large extractor after a short time would kick into life, accelerating from its steady whir to a thirty three thousand revolutions per second rotation. The spinning blades of the extractor were dotted with steel holes, each hole razor sharp.
A red light on the outside of the tank would indicate the process was complete in its preparation of the corpse. Unceremoniously the extractor would be opened and the corpse vacuumed from the steel tank. The fine dust would be collected beyond the coffin room. This would be screened and released to family, if requested by the relatives.
At the highest point of The Coffin Room a gallery, screened by thick protective glass, overlooked the pipe and tank structure within the room. In the gallery room control panels and touch-screen regulators were monitored by the uniformed operatives.
Two men stood in silence watching this procession of death and the systematic administration and disposing of innumerable bodies. Looking into the room for some minutes and a score of corpses would be processed, after thirty minutes a man would lose count. The two military uniformed men shared a brief exchange.
“This has to stop, so much death.”
“I know, too much death and no more time, we must prevail.”
10.