OFF-CUTS!

Babylonian Harvesters

We used to crawl beneath scores of badly rotted pine left unguarded for eons, where we'd hide together and sit for hours in the dirt, chatting about nothing and everything all at once, like real teenagers on the surface.

He was like me, birthed at the same time, there aren't many quite like us, the others birthed alongside us are all older, much older; for some reason they took him today and left me here with them.

That mysterious venture to the top isn't always the end, although those who come back are never the same as they were before their trip.

Last week, they took old Lady McCormack up top for a few hours, when they brought her back, her right arm was missing from the elbow.

I asked her about it, and she said she remembered having it before she went up there, though she hoped since it went missing that easy, it might just come crawling back.

The oldies are weird sometimes.

I wonder if they're different on the surface, they certainly don't act anything like the oldies in the films the workers show us when we're good.

Old Lady McCormack's change was bigger than the others who've returned, although I'm worried that if they bring him back, he'll be missing something too.

I hope not; he was my only real friend down here.

Not long after our birthing, we sneaked up the cold concrete steps because we were curious what the workers were hiding from us; rumors of large huts where the workers slept upon the other side of a forest spread throughout our community because the workers disappear upstairs late at night and come back downstairs in the morning.

Although we'd been told how gruesome the forest was, neither of us expected the nightmarish display which awaited us; the moment we crossed through that threshold, we saw dozens of sleeping naked fleshy creatures strung to the high ceiling by a series of these large electrical cables which pierced into their backs.

We held each other as we slowly walked, the feel of his body heat gave me the courage to carry on; unfortunately, our huddling together proved to frighten us further when we bumped into one of the bodies, turning it to reveal a horribly deformed monstrous face; each one in that line had a similar face, the further back we got, the more humanoid their facial features became.

Above a small metal door on the other side, we read the words "harvest room", although I didn't get a chance to look what lay beyond it as he grabbed my hand and turned my attention to the face of the final hanging body, turns out it was my face at the end of the line!

We both ran back downstairs, and tried to forget all about ever going up to the meat-forest, or anywhere near that metal door ever again; although I wonder if perhaps there's another him there.

Don't they know, I need him?