Barbequeue

The row of heads bobbed at a steady pace. Surely not much further. We’ve walked for a while now, and we’re tired from tests and injections.

Impossible to say how long we’ve been walking. The corridors pulsed and contracted around us, breathing in time with our shuffling steps. The metal walls glistened with a sickly sweat that beaded and congealed into runnels, adding another layer to the already suffocating miasma.

It’s always the same—walk forward, make a sharp left turn, continue forward for another hundred thirty-two paces, make a sharp right turn, then walk one hundred thirty-four paces. The corridor bent into a winding loop like a giant robot intestine.

All we see are the heads and backs of those ahead, dressed in the same cheap white suits given to us on our first day. The constant scrape and clang of boots on metal reverberated through the floor into our bones.

The stench was indeed a living thing, a putrid monster that coiled its tendrils around our nostrils before slithering down our throats to steal the very air from our lungs.

Our breath collects on the ceiling. In some places, it beads, concentrates, then rains down. We drank the rain only once, long ago. Now it’s as invisible as our life outside this metal tube.

The temptation to seek fresh stimulation diminished after the first twenty or thirty turns. We carried on, pressed forward, skin streaked with powders suspended in the air. It congealed in our sweat, and in the breath-rain, only to stream down in brown rivulets to our boots.

Paint had long ago been scoured from the walls by desperate fingernails, leaving jagged hieroglyphs of madness etched into the metal flesh. Initially there were numbers scratched in humidity-softened paint. Low numbers were easy to mark. Eventually, errors were made, corrections scratched over errors. Soon, the insane, or merely mischievous, randomly scored the walls, ruining any chance of reading them.

As the wall’s color was leached away by countless hands’ touch, it also drained any remaining vibrancy from our lives, reducing us to identical husks in the monotonous parade.

Communicating is pointless. Our names, our pasts, dissolved into the rhythm of footfalls, each indistinguishable from the next. Uniqueness became a threat, a disruption to the order, swiftly trampled underfoot.

There was a constant noise; the slap clomp crunch of our cheap workers’ boots as they deformed the floor into two foot-width troths. Even with our eyes closed, we could still follow the path.  

With each turn, reality stuttered, the mundane blending into the grotesque until we could no longer differentiate waking life from delusion. Will we check the structure upon leaving? The silence of life outside would draw us back into step.

All of us falling into step.

Impossible not to fall into step.

Even the occasional dragged foot scrapes in rhythm. The echo from the next turn always sounds the same, slightly off our timbre. Not by much, a bit more crunch, possibly more grinding than our place in this chain. Without doubt, less slap, less thud, but still the same rhythm.

There was singing early on. That’s stopped. As had the murmur of conversation—joviality was lost long ago. Humor demands subversion of the predictable. We had become predictable, as predictable as the old joke—slap clomp crunch. Predictable cogs in an endless machine, our humanity rendered down to mere efficiency.

What purpose guided this monotonous march? The corridor twists on endlessly, an industrial serpent devouring us inch by inch into its metal gullet. The answer to a purpose in this space slipped through our fingers like the grains of our former existence.

For a long moment, this was the truth:

Our planet is in the center of the solar system.

Our island is the center of the map.

Our person, the center of existence.

Our steps—center us still.

The floor shifts beneath.

The island shifts at our turned corner.

The planet shifts to keep connected to the island.

The solar system shifts to match the planet.

…All this at each footfall.

This is the perception of any one of us. But it is impossible for more than one.

In a moment of clarity, we noticed we were descending.

Frivolous.

Worse, these thoughts are pointless to think. Each becomes triggered in a chain as if it has folded itself up and glued itself to the previous thought, and set to follow an endless corridor of the mind. Far too many times we have mused these musings.

The walls are darker. We only noticed when we stumbled over an old man. We saw him, but still tripped. All of us tripped. It was the rhythm.

Rude to be jarred back into thinking again. Had we been sleeping? The steps are distinct, more shuffling and dragging feet, quieter but with the same rhythm. The lights are dimmer now, constricted to faint dots above us. It’s tiresome, our eyes are dry.

First lesson—we must continue, lest we be trampled. Second lesson—thinking wastes energy and makes us go mad. This also results in being trampled.

This too has been thought before. Too many times. How inconvenient, such a waste of our time to think these turgid recycled thoughts. The mind wonders.

Hours or days passed with no more distraction. The lights flickering above sprouted twisted halos, hallucinatory auras pulsating in time with the rhythm of marching feet and thudding hearts. Musk of these poor old souls, concentrated, industrialized, but unnoticed. The structure itself held its breath. With each turning of the eternal corkscrew path, the air thicker with human spice—each twist squeezed out what minuscule pockets of respite remained.

What’s this invasion of our stilled thoughts?

What’s this we see?

A finger on the floor?

We’ll give it a good thrashing!

Teach it to upset our blissful silence of still stepping!

We must preserve the rhythm!

We’ll swoop on it in a clever lunge; just off step to move without changing pace!

In three, two, one—

The world spun furiously.

When the floor, island, and indeed, universe, caught up with his now motionless, severed feet, he found himself—with some bemusement—caught in a tangle of metal jaws, clamps, and spinning blades.

He watched as the nearest of his comrades were rendered. The machinery’s whirring spindles and pincers flashed like grotesque hospital tools, coldly and efficiently separating the living from the dead matter. Scraps of flesh and viscera were sluiced away down hidden drainage channels on the floor.

Quicker than a heartbeat and in groups of four—the top part of their heads are pierced from above. They are sliced cleanly through the jaw line. The head removed and spun up through a hatch. The tongue was then removed with a flash of finer tools.

And just as the next step would fall, the thorax was split upwards. Claws stripped meat from the shoulders, arms, chest.

The machinery going through the motions of harvesting his body retracted—to prepare for the next piece of walking meat. His musky husk dropped to the floor like a shed snakeskin, much empty of the spark that once animated it.

He settled in a heap at the skirting, with what was left of his back bent up the wall. Chest down, head facing the future, accused now by his own finger on the floor beside him.

He could taste the stale air, thick with the copper tang of blood and the charnel reek of slaughtered humanity. As what blood in his brain drained, the last few beats of his heart thudded in his ears. With him, the rhythm didn’t die. It crossed him, stomped a course through him, beating itself into his back with those cheap factory boots.

Yet in those final moments, his mind rebelled against the cruelty. A fleeting vision burst through—his childhood home bathed in golden summer light, the calming scent of freshly cut grass. His mother’s smiling face as she embraced him, her arms a sanctuary against the cruelties of the world. Such simple human tenderness now made obscene by the sterile brutality surrounding him. Other memories flickered—a woman’s gentle laugh, the warmth of an embrace, the abstract concept of human kindness now rendered obscene by the choreographed butchery. He had been more than this ruined husk of meat and bone. He had been young once, they all had.

He remembered that youthful freedom, when the future seemed to stretch on with infinite possibility. Lazy afternoons cloud-watching with friends, catching fireflies at dusk in a meadow, their warm glows cradled tenderly in small hands. Such innocent, transcendent magic. They dreamed of adventures beyond their small town. How could he have foreseen such waking nightmares calling from the infinite expanse?

A fragile spark of defiance flickered in his consciousness. He turned his gaze towards the oncoming march, eyes refocusing on the procession of blank faces, bodies moved by nothing but the invasion of the next boot fall. If he could just…reach them. Rouse that last shred of humanity…

His trembling fingers inched across the metal floor, desperately trying to inscribe one last message, any word to shatter the cycle. But his strength failed before his spirit could. The last thing he saw before the shadows mercifully claimed him was his own hand, grotesquely crushed underfoot as any other errant thing in the path. He would not feed the next generation. His death, like his life, was a pitiable failure eclipsed by the soulless industrial lights flickering dispassionately above—mocking life’s beautiful impermanence.

The boots that trampled him today would trample again. The circle remained unbroken. Obscene machinery resets, hungry for its next sacrifice, hungry to fulfill its role, hungry to make the next sausage filling. Soon, a new crop will be raised on the rotten soil from the last, in an Ouroboros of oblivious cruelty.