The "station with no name" by Tony Forest

"Thinking about what a friend had said, I was hoping it was a lie"

(Neil Young - After The Goldrush)

Subways usually roll in, come to a halt and people just get in. Something was wrong here and it was my job to find out.

The line was hardly moving and it seemed to take forever before I could get close enough to get a glance inside to see what was holding people up. Security with their greasy barets, jackboots and leather gloves...something you get to see almost daily. Take an unemployed butcher, give him a uniform, a billyclub and can of pepper spray, tell him he's in charge and he'll believe it.

Only for a split second but long enough to make him out, I saw a man wearing a white Kittel. He had a syringe in his hand! I figured the Security butchers' job was to keep people in line and moving forward. That's when they spotted me and I saw the one with the stripes on his shoulder raise his walkie-talkie up to squeal on me. I turned and ran, zig-zagged through the crowd and jumped over the railing to get the stairway to the next lower level where I jumped into the U5 as the doors closed right behind me. It didn't matter where it was going as long as it went.

Our advantage was the way we communicated. We didn't need walkie-talkies or cell phones or any other electronic gadget like the jackboots did. We weren't organised in any way but we all had one thing in common: we were wide awake and aware of something very wrong, something very evil. Instinctively, we pushed forward from all sides to find out what is was.... the truth.

The subway station we found ourselves gathered in was not on the map, neither new nor old but covered with dust. Unlike other stations, it had no name. Crates full of dehydrated food packages cluttered the station. In some places, the crates were stacked all the way from the floor to the ceiling. It looked like a bomb shelter of some kind, just waiting for the day it would be filled with people on their way to nowhere, on the run from what was soon to be going on on the surface. Two of us volunteered to make our way to one of the exits above to get a picture of where we were. It took us the better part of an hour to make our way through the labyrinth. Daylight had us squinting as the smell of fresh air told us we had made it, and what we saw was beyond our imaginations.

The place looked like your typical construction area with beeping yellow bulldozers shoving dirt around, leveling it out. Dirt and dust filled the sky and we could just barely make out the size of it all. The complete areal must have been the size of a small city. A tall fence surrounded it and what must have been concertina wire was stacked outside the fence, up against it all the way to the top as it glittered in the sunlight. Two mountain ranges, one to the left and one to the right came together at the far side of the areal, adjacent to where we were perched. We could see this place was the perfect location for a secret lab or something, and that's when it hit us.

It was a massive concentration camp in the making we were looking down upon. The subway station with no name was probably one of many. We took one last look around before slowly making our way back down the labyrinth to inform the others.

The weirdest part of it all is how openly these operations are being carried out. It's as if they're done in slow motion so no one will notice them. The "station with no name" was one of multiple operations we were able to identify over the span of a few years. There seems to be no real hurry, no rush, no deadline, no real enemy to be afraid of except maybe, progress.

tf