Hostage

8

The front of the meat processing plant, the part that people driving by on Old Slaughterhouse Road could see, was a modern three-story steel and glass office complex, a building that could have housed a software company or the headquarters of a bank or a gleaming new lecture hall at a university.

But it didn’t house any of those things.

It housed death.

Or it had, anyway.

As Retro made his way past the concrete fountains and the overgrown rock beds that had once been so meticulously maintained, as he carefully rounded the corner toward the staging corral where the trucks from local farms had made their deliveries, he could almost hear the frantic squeals and moos and bleats from the livestock, animals that somehow seemed to know they didn’t have long to live.

Retro had worked at the plant three summers in a row when he was in high school, and it was during that time he’d decided to become a vegetarian. He just couldn’t bring himself to slice into a thick juicy steak after witnessing the terror in the animals’ eyes on a daily basis. Fish was the only flesh food he’d been able to stomach since he was fifteen, and he only ate that once in a while. For the most part he lived on fruits and vegetables and grains and legumes, foods that kept his waist lean and his conscience clean. Most of his friends and family members ate meat, and he didn’t have a problem with that, but he just couldn’t do it himself. He just couldn’t.

Retro walked around the entire perimeter of the office complex, and it didn’t appear as though the building had been broken into. All the windows were intact, the deadbolts on the doors secure. If Vaughan and the man who’d abducted her were on the property, they were probably somewhere in the crumbling brick structure on the other side of the corral, somewhere inside the original processing and packaging rooms that once provided employment for nearly half of Hope’s residents.

Retro knew that Ashton was right, that he should wait for backup. The inside of the plant was a labyrinth of hallways and staircases and conveyor lines and packaging stations, scaffolds and storage tanks and hooks and grinders, drip pans and mixers and slicers and smokers, everything necessary to change a fresh carcass into something that could be slapped onto a sandwich bun. It was a dangerous place to be, even under the best of circumstances.

Retro knew he should wait, but he couldn’t.

He just couldn’t.