THE CAN
Mass execution

    It is called the can, a code word that those in the know treat as an inside joke even though it is no joke to those unlucky enough to be sent to it. It sits in a lovely spot, high on a bluff overlooking a ocean bay with deep blue water. Nearby are a few buildings that house the staff and serve to help process those sent there. A dead end road leads to it and a few large pipes lead from it to the water below. It is a steel structure round and twenty feet tall. About sixty feet across and surrounded by various gantries and other support structures. At the base a large pipe runs around it and supplies water to a series of slots in the bottom. If slot is the proper word for an opening a foot long and six inches high. But this can is not tin, it is constructed of the same steel used for nuclear subs. Very strong and hard it is almost armor plate and at four inches thick it would stop most anything. Inside there are a series of large drain grates and in the center of it all sit a heavy steel mushroom or table. A foot thick cylinder of the same steel supports a three foot surface about thirty inches off the floor. The inside walls are dimpled almost like a golf ball and are still wet from the wash down that proceeds and follows each use. The steel is warm from the sun and the sunlight washes the inside through the open top.
    Two windowless buses drive up to one of the buildings and park tight to one of the two gates. From each fifty teenage girls and older women are led inside. They have been brought from one of the cleansing camps. Always two buses and always fifty each. They are dressed in little more that rags and most have been raped and abused since they were rounded up and separated from their loved ones. Men to one camp, women to another, children under twelve taken away for adoption although the whispered rumors speak of other less promising fates. When there is a surplus of inmates in a camp one hundred are loaded onto the buses after being told they were being transported for resettlement in another country. As the camps were only a bit more that death camps most wanted to believe and thus meekly obeyed orders and filed aboard the buses. 
    Once inside all clothes were removed and taken away. Crude nooses were tied around each neck and then used to tie all one hundred into a line. As this method had been used on them before it fails to cause more that a slight concern. A few of the younger and prettier ones were separated out and replaced by ones brought from the other buildings but this was also something that had happened before and there was nothing save a few pitying glances for them as they were lead away. Everybody had been through similar things and all knew what waited for them. The rest were lead out through a closed walkway to the can. Passing through a dogleg entrance they were made to stand around the inner wall where men quickly tied each one’s noose to a ring welded there for that reason. Most stand quietly but some look about and the sight of the overhead nozzles and piping is reassurance that the promised shower is the reason they are there although a couple might wonder why a shower was built from such heavy steel or why the nozzles were so big but mostly they stand and wait for whatever will happen. Just as the last one was tied in place two men enter pushing a cart. On it is a dull golden cylinder about a foot in diameter and two feet tall. There are a few thin wires trailing from it. Those looking closer at it would see some kind of rods imbedded in the translucent maternal. It was set on the top of the mushroom and the wires quickly plugged in behind a small thick door. The men then left.
    Very soon a horn was heard and then another and then a countdown. By now a few of the women are starting to worry but there will be no time. For the cylinder is more that any of them suspect. It is made of a resin and the rods are really stacks of small pellets each one a half an inch long and wide. There are thirty six in the outer layer and there are six layers. Each rod has forty eight of the pellets for a total of almost ten thousand of them. The center is filled with C-4 explosive and the wires are the means to detonate it. 
    Ten thousand steel pellets traveling at several thousand feet per second are about to be launched. One hundred for each body in a pattern covering from the knees to the top of the head. One hundred pellets which will rip and tear and puncture before striking the steel wall and rebounding back through the soft flesh and the only slightly harder bones of the doomed women and girls. Just as some began to realize that something is very wrong the countdown reaches zero and the current passes through the wires to ignite the blasting caps. There is a thunderous roar and in a split second one hundred living bodies are transformed into several tons of ripped, torn and blasted meat. The pellets arrive and perform their function just ahead of the blast wave that slams the torn bodies into the unyielding steel and pulps whatever bones and organs missed by the flying steel. A red mist rises over the top of the can and hangs there in the sun, an obscene monocolored  rainbow marking the deaths of so many. Then it settles and the nozzles come alive.
    A first wash down cleans away  the worst of the blood and small bits of blasted woman flesh. Then men enter and with sharp knives cut down those ragged remains still hanging from the nooses. As they leave the grates lift from the floor and the huge pumps start the water flowing through the slots. The flood washes the mangled bodies across the floor and down the waiting drains to be ground up by the machinery hidden under the floor after which the water and meat mix will be pumped through a large pipe and dumped into the deep water of the bay. A second wash down removes the last traces of one hundred lives that were snuffed out here today and leaves no trace to alarm the next one hundred that would all too soon stand in their places and wait for their showers.
    The workers feel good about their day and look forward to their time spent with those few girls who were lucky enough to live until the next time. For there will be a next time. The can waits and wants and is always fed.