www.morpheustales.com Harvest By J.B. Ronan “Wakey, wakey, Samuel my dear. It’s almost time!” Astrid crooned, kneeling down alongside a shirtless man strapped face down to a filth-soaked dining room table. Black-ringed holes pocked the breadth of Samuel’s back, buried deep in the muscle. When Samuel woke and moved, weakly and with great effort after all the weeks of imprisonment, thin puss collected at the edges of the holes, dribbling down the contours of his back to the floor. “Now, now my dear, it’s almost time! Soon our babies will be free.” The pain was unimaginable, and the strong, vital body Samuel had once loved, built up over the years, and fed well with protein bars and good organic food, was now withered and sad like a forgotten piece of raw catfish rotting in the back of a dirty refrigerator. He could feel things moving inside of him, writhing in the holes his captor tended, feeding on his blood… Astrid pulled a delicately carved wooden box from the collapsing hutch along the stained walls and opened the lid. A long, thin set of tweezers sat on what looked like a piece of folded crimson velvet, its tapered, pointed tips crusted with rust. The box smelled like death. “Almost time... almost time... any moment our babies will be ready!” Samuel fidgeted again. Blood tinged drool pooled around his face and smelled like rot. The whole room – everything attacking his failing senses as viciously as it had the first day he woke there – smelled, tasted, even sounded like rot. “These are my first, you know.” Astrid plucked the tweezers from the box and held them up, examining the tip, pinching them open and closed. Fat, shiny black flies collected around her, their activity mirroring the excitement in her eyes. “I’ve been waiting a long time for them. We had to find the right kind of person who could handle the incubation. Regular people die way too early, but you were strong – you made it!” Despite all the rage that flourished in Samuel as his body festered, he could not bring himself to speak. It was too much, and his constant struggle against the straps that held him sucked him further into the pit of no return. “Oh, did you notice that I took the neck strap off of you today! You really can’t do much to disturb our babies now anyway and I wanted you to see them when they’re born!” Astrid smiled, beaming with all the bright hope of a proud, expectant mother as she waved her hand around the room. “I know you haven’t had much of a chance to look around, but I thought you would want to see where your babies are going to grow up! It’s perfect for them! I got the nesting thing really bad, I just couldn’t wait till they came!” At first, Samuel didn’t want to move anymore. He only stared at the floor, which swirled and ebbed like a tide with cockroaches, but Astrid insisted, lifting his heavy head so he could see everything even though his eyes were bleary and the shafts of dusty light that speared past the tattered, molded black-out curtains in the living room were too much for him. Dead bodies littered the floor, rabbits writhing with maggots, human corpses along the walls, their wrists and hands dislocated and damaged from restraints, all in various states of decomposition. Rats fed along their exposed ribs, sitting in the empty abdominal cavities and crushed collar bones, fat and lazy on maggots and flesh.
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