The room had to have been an easy three stories tall, the ceiling a network of diamond-shaped beams and narrow walkways and overlapping grids. The vats were big enough to boil station wagons in. I walked among them, staring with something like awe at those huge vessels and their snaking tubes and pipes and coiled hoses. I listened to them hissing and bubbling and simmering. They were warm to the touch and looked like gigantic deep-sea squids with all those tubes and conduits twisting above and around and to either side.
That I was in a factory, I didn’t doubt.
And the farther I went, the more obvious things became. It was like being in a human cannery, but instead of fish guts, scales, and sea slime on the floor, there was three inches of accumulated blood, fat, and offal, the by-products of the rendering process. The stench was unimaginable and sickening. The stink of acids and oils, stabilized fats and raw tallow, embalming fluids and preservatives, human grease and hair and bone.
This place was a slaughterhouse.
I stumbled along, my hand covering my nose and mouth as I pushed through an envelope of odors that reminded me a little too much of the smell of a clogged drain—a heavy, meaty odor of blood and tissue and dissolving fat that was moist and nauseating.
As I panned around with my light, I became even more convinced that something had happened, some sort of mechanical failure. Some of the vats looked damaged and the hoses and conduits above were blackened as if from fire. As the smell worsened, I came to a vat that had literally burst open…ribbons of steam were escaping the bubbling witch’s cauldron. They blew in my face in a burning, repulsive wave that almost brought me to my knees. It was the stink of putrefaction, of carrion stewing in its own rancid juices. A rank, foaming stew of something dark and oily and vile had leaked out. There was a great pool of it whose surface was clotted with great islands of creamy-looking fat and gobs of hair.
I couldn’t stand it.
I started running and the vats went on forever. Finally, the air grew chill. Not just drafty, but actually frigid like the wind from an icebox. I pushed on and it got colder. I moved through a high archway and I felt that sense of pressure again as when the cable pulled me through the opening into the collector. Another palpable but invisible membrane or bubble. A blast of arctic air fell over me and made me suck in my breath in quick, short gasps.
I was in a freezer, a cold storage area. Every meat-packaging house has one. Before me were rows upon rows upon rows of what looked like long, heavy plastic bags covered in frost that hung from hooks. I walked among them, looking, looking. When I got up the nerve, I went up to one and brushed away the frost to see what was inside.
I almost went to my knees again.
I knew what I would see, but a dark terror still roiled through me. I was staring at the face of a woman, stretched out, exaggerated, boneless. She had been shaven bald, twined up with wire, and stuck in that heavy transparent bag. Nothing but a package of meat.
I went to the next bag and then the next and the next. Men, women, and, yes, children. I wandered among those sides of human beef, taking it all in, letting the horror fill me like poison until it began to seep out of me. I had no idea how many bodies were in that endless black chamber, but I was certain there were thousands. The entire population of the town at least. Somewhere, I knew, was Kathy and Billy and Bonnie and all the others.
I took out my jackknife and tried to puncture one of the bags. It felt much like polyethylene. I managed to slit it after some sawing and there was a hissing of air either rushing in or out. But the most disturbing thing was that the bag was bleeding. A thin trickle of some pale blue liquid was dribbling from the slit.
I guess I panicked then.
I freaked out.
I backed away from the bag and bumped into another and then flinched, stumbling into yet another. And suddenly it seemed I was lost among them, lost in a forest of icy body bags and they were swinging from their hooks and bumping into me and brushing my back and arms and I fought and pushed my way through, seeing meat locker faces pressed up against the plastic material and feeling their hideous swinging weight. I fell to the ground and crawled on my hands and knees until I was clear of the freezer again.
I made it out of the chamber, gasping and shaking, a raw knot constricting in my belly.
I kept running. I had no idea where I was going. I slipped on the waxy, greasy floor once and plunged into the fetid, stygian depths of some kind of collection pool. A noxious pool of fat and filth and bones breaking the surface like they were clawing their way from quicksand.
The bones were human, of course.
I was pretty much out of my mind by then. My skin felt like it was scummy with human grease. My nostrils were thick with its stink. My flesh was crawling and my belly was filled with tar. I don’t remember much, only running, stumbling, and crawling until I finally fell out of one of the holes that brought me in.
I recall hitting the ground and running from the immense, towering shape of the dead collector.
19
That’s all there is.
That’s really all there is.
I’m sitting on my porch now and looking out at the ruined houses across the street and the gargantuan shell of the crashed and disabled collector beyond. It took out eight square blocks. They were flattened beneath it. In the light of day, it still looks like a gigantic block of quartz, jagged and crystalline, completely lacking any earthly symmetry. It does not even look like a machine. It looks like some kind of crazy crashed asteroid. Even its surface is burnt in places, cracked and broken and punched in with what almost look like meteor impacts. Who sent it and from where it came and how long ago that might have been is anyone’s guess.
Its nature is obvious.
It was an automated factory ship, an extraterrestrial version of a long-liner, a deep-sea trawler. As our fleets go great distances to remote fishing grounds to harvest the depths of the ocean, the collector and its kind go unimaginable distances through the depths of interstellar space to remote worlds to harvest entire populations. The journeys might last a thousand years or ten thousand or ten million for that matter. And like our fleets, now and again a ship doesn’t make it back.
The one I’m looking at will be grounded here forever, I suppose.
As a science teacher, it makes me think. Not just about who might have built it and where it came from and what kind of propulsion might drive it or what sort of software package might do its thinking, but how long this has been going on. Maybe I’m reaching, but I keep thinking about the mass extinctions on our planet. There have been five major extinction events. The K-T extinction—Cretaceous-Tertiary—that everyone hears about was the last one. It took out the dinosaurs and the giant sea reptiles and flying reptiles 66,000,000 years ago, allowing for the mammals to rise and man to evolve. Before that, the Triassic-Jurassic event left dinosaurs as the dominant land animals. And before that, the Permian-Triassic event some 250,000,000 years ago closed the Paleozoic era and wiped out 95% of the species on the planet. Before these were the Devonian and Silurian events.
You get the picture.
Life forms disappear from the fossil record with unsettling regularity in the greater scheme of geologic time and I believe another has followed suit.