“Nobody passes through,” a woman in the front row said. Her head hung at a broken angle, and blood streamed from a long gash in her belly. Mark saw the glisten of intestine through the gash and forced himself to look away.
“I’m going to NightWhere,” he said. “I’ve been there before.”
“You’re in NightWhere,” someone said with a laugh that ended in a scream of sudden pain.
“The real NightWhere,” another voice continued. “This is the field that feeds the evil. We bleed for you.”
Mark noticed then that there were gutters in the stone floor on either side of each row of bodies. He stepped closer. The troughs were about six inches deep and maybe three inches wide. At the front of the human garden, he could see the grey of the stone at the bottom of the gutters. But by the third body down the line, the bottom stone was obscured by the dark flow of crimson that rained down the chests and thighs and feet of each ravaged body. From some, the flow was thick, especially from those missing whole limbs, but lacking any tourniquets or bandages to staunch the blood.
From others who simply were cut, the blood flowed slower…but all contributed some flow of pain to the drains that leached their lives away. Mark guessed that this was the reservoir that fed the steady stream of crimson down the walls in The Red.
“We bleed for you,” several of the bodies echoed. The whisper of that phrase spread across the Field of Flesh like a slow wind, and soon Mark could hear hundreds of echoes.
“Not for me,” he said. “I don’t want your blood.”
“Then you will join us,” an old woman in the second row said. She had raw circles of meat where her breasts had once been, and her belly had been flayed open. The skin hung in wrinkled flaps and clung wetly to her thighs.
Mark shook his head and decided to waste no more time. He stepped forward, walking with tentative strides between the rows of bodies. He was careful not to step in the troughs, but he couldn’t help but walk through the crimson on the path. It was covered in blood that was slowly, steadily draining across it into the gutters. The whispers grew in volume as he passed-voices calling out in laughter and pain alike, “We bleed for you.”
Hands grasped at him as he passed, but most seemed to barely have the strength to move, and he brushed them off easily.
Mark began counting the rows, but after he had reached fifty-seven and still couldn’t see the end, he gave up. There were thousands of people in this room; now that he was in the middle of the field, he couldn’t see anything but bloody, staked-up bodies in every direction. Most of them didn’t move as he passed. Those were the best ones. It was the ones who had intestines trailing out of their midsections, or who had eyeballs hanging from strings of gore across their cheeks, that really freaked him out when they moved slightly and reached for him.
The pleas of “kill me” grew more frequent as he walked.
Soon the fear that he would never reach the other side began to gnaw at him. He’d been walking for ten minutes, and still he saw no end to the path. The rows seemed to stretch on forever as the bloodied fingers grasped at his shirt, staining his clothes with their pain as he passed.
Mark walked faster, willing down the panic that was beginning to grow in his gut. He was trapped here…lost in a field of death. Or near death.
The heavy stench of iron hung strong in the air; he could taste it on his tongue. It reminded him of the heavy, palpable air of the Everglades. It was like he was walking through the swamp of death.
Mark ran.
Laughter rang out behind him and rippled through the bodies like a breeze. “You can run…” one ghastly woman cackled, reaching out a hand with no fingers to brush him as he passed.
“But you can’t hide,” a man with no lips finished.
Mark didn’t slow down. Until he fell down. His foot hit a heavy slick of blood, and he tried to catch his balance, but instead he overcorrected and pitched forward, landing with his face inches above the canal of dark blood flowing away from the Field of Flesh. The smell was ripe-rich and thick and metallic, but also somehow sweet-to the edge of rot. Mark pushed away from the wet, slick stones and stifled the urge to gag. His arms were wet, and he tried to wipe them off on his jeans before moving forward again, this time at a slower but still-urgent pace.
The whispers now quieted, and as he looked around, he realized that the bodies here were thinner. Paler. Closer to death?
Their skin all shared a similar parchment-like texture; in some, he could literally see the emaciated muscles beneath. These must be the oldest ones, he surmised. Many of them were missing lips and eyelids; their faces looked like clotted clay over bones, their eyes rheumy, blue pools of jelly. Many of the women still had full, prominent breasts-the badge of youth,-yet their lined, faded faces suggested an age difficult to mesh with the fading youth of their bodies.
He stopped at one woman who lacked both an arm and a leg; blood flowed in a steady trickle from her stumps, but her stomach, though almost translucent, still had the form of a twenty-year-old. The nipples of her breasts protruded in an apparent constant state of excitement. Her cheeks were high, and her lips tight; but the hair had fallen from her eyelids and lashes. Her eyes had the milky sheen of the blind.
“How long have you been here?” Mark asked.
She was slow to speak, lips moving in obvious pain. “How old is the earth?” she answered in a voice like sand.
Her eyes moved to stare in his direction, but he could tell she did not see him. “There is no beginning and no end. Only this moment forever.”
“How did you get here?” Mark asked, his voice almost a whisper.
“The same as you,” she said. Her voice barely whispered above the faint whispers from elsewhere in the field. “I accepted the invitation.”
“But when…” he began to ask, but she cut him off.
“You have very little time,” she said. “Use what you have before you are planted here with us.”
Mark nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
The girl laughed, her voice growing stronger. “You would be,” she hissed, “If I still had my arm…”
Her eyes seemed to focus finally then, and Mark saw a hunger that decades, maybe centuries, of racking pain had never stilled.
Behind him, a flurry of voices suddenly let out a series of cries and screams. Mark turned and saw a disturbance in the field, many rows back. The bodies looked as if they were swaying in a heavy wind.
“Are you the harvester or the harvest?” a shrill voice called from his left.
Mark had a sudden chill in his stomach, as he considered the prospect of joining the field.
He began to run once more, and after a few more rows of faded flesh, he turned to look behind him. The screams and cries from the field were closer now. Just a few rows away. He could see something moving now in the field. Something black.
A Watcher?
Mark swore and turned to run down the path as fast as he could. From the sounds behind him, the Watcher was closing in.
Finally he saw the end. The pale corpse-like bodies gave way to a darkness. He couldn’t tell what that darkness really was, but Mark breathed a sigh of relief for it. He wasn’t lost. The end was in sight. Really…it was the beginning. Somewhere in that black, the rest of NightWhere lay.
And Rae.
Somewhere ahead, was his wife.
He broke through the last row of bodies and stopped, doubled over, trying to catch his breath. Behind him, the bodies shivered and moved. Whispers turned to cries. A black figure moved just a couple rows inside the field, coming towards him.
Mark turned back to look ahead. The stone path stretched out in front of him for several yards, interrupted in the middle by a dark canal. Mark took a deep breath and straightened up. Then he sprinted forward to stare down into the channel. He could see the small gutters all along the path that exited the field and emptied into the channel.