What Did We Do To Deserve This?
A short story by Mike Lucas
The year was 2090 A.D. Twenty years before; human beings were defeated by an alien race from the planet kcotsevil. Humans have not walked freely upon the earth for years. Instead, they were enslaved and even domesticated as “pets” for the amusement of the beings from the new alien order. After the great invasion, humans were subjected to torture and misery. Entire families were separated and moved to massive detention centers all over the world never to see sunlight again.
Dave Kroch was a great man. Before the great invasion, he worked as an executive for a major restaurant chain. He spent a lot of time with his family and loved the comfort of his home. For the ten days he sat in his small detention center cell, he thought about the life he no longer had. He could still feel the soft hand of his wife stroking his face. He could hear the laughter of his children as they carried on playing in the yard. He missed the smell of his wife’s perfume. When he had these thoughts, he often wondered if his wife and kids were still alive.
Suddenly, a Kcotselvian cell keeper prodded him with a stun beam back into the corner. As the gate opened to the small corral like cell, twenty other humans were crammed into the small holding space. The gate slammed shut as the cell keeper walked away. Too exhausted to speak, Dave pressed his back against the wall to make as much room as he could for his new cell mates. This particular group of humans had been selected and moved from a different area of the huge factory detention center.
For everyone in the cell, there was uncertainty, fear, and confusion. The group consisted of men and women mixed together in the cell. Most of the women had been traumatized from the last location of the detention center. Many of them served as breeders for the last ten years. Often they produced an average of eight to nine children before being moved when their bodies could no longer produce or handle the process.
The breeding process for human women consisted of forced intercourse with numerous male humans. Women were kept in holding cells, fed supplements, and gave birth only to repeat the entire process again several months after the births took place. The strongest males were kept alive to produce more desirable children. When the men developed diseases or could no longer produce, they too were relocated.
As Dave moved closer to the corner of his cell, another man in the group vomited on his feet. When this happened, Dave could not help but feel disgusted and disgraced by this. He hated the smell of vomit and feces from the cell. He looked down at the cold steel floor and wiped off the human feces and vomit with his hands as he began to weep quietly. Nobody spoke a word when this happened. They just looked at Dave as they stood in the cell with their naked bodies pressed up against each other. As they continued to watch Dave, the loud electric snap of the cell keeper’s beam zapped a human standing next to the gate. Five more humans were herded into the cell. After he wiped away the tears from his eyes, Dave was beginning to wonder about his fate.
As the humans stood up in their confined space, feed pods would hover by occasionally. The feed pod was an overhead mechanical bucket that would slide directly above the human’s cell troughs spilling food and water on top of them. Sometimes the pods would miss and the humans had to eat from the floor or pick food off of each others bodies to eat their fill. When some of them didn’t have enough food, they would fight or collapse and die of starvation. When this happened, the cell keepers would not remove the bodies. They would be left on the floor to bloat up and decay. The aliens held no value on human life at all.
After five days, the cell keepers opened the door. One by one they prodded the humans out of the cell against their will. When the humans refused, the cell keepers would zap them and beat them into submission until they did. Dave was the last one to leave the cell. He had an idea of what was about to happen based on the screams he had heard for days beyond the big doors of the detention center. As they were being herded in a straight line towards the doors, they observed several disturbing acts of torture along the way.
A human man was being restrained by cell keepers as they forced food into his mouth through a tube. People yelled and screamed as they witnessed this ghastly site. Annoyed by the screams the cell keepers zapped the humans into quiet submission. As they passed another room, they had seen little hands behind small dark metal boxes. Children could be heard weeping and crying in the small solitary chambers. The humans looked on in horror as a cell keeper could be seen using a large metal club to break the legs of children one by one. They did this to prevent from moving or running away. They were then thrown into the boxes and tied up. Dave could only wonder why children had to be treated this way. He wondered what humanity could have done to deserve such treatment. As they continued their long walk through the detention center, they noticed more bloated bodies on the ground.
One human tried to retreat and run after seeing too much. The cell keepers were quick to beat him back into submission as the others looked on helplessly. Finally they had come to the big doors. The cell keeper banged on the doors with his prod. As the doors flung open, the most wretched odor permeated the air from the pitch black room. The cell keepers began to gather around the human line with prods charged to full capacity. The cell keepers took the first human in alone. Screams could be heard from outside the doors after the first victim entered the room. One by one the rest of them entered. Scream after scream Dave grew hopeless and fearful.
“Maybe it will be quick.” He thought. As he sat there waiting for his turn to enter the big doors, he thought once more about his wife and family. He thought about the last time his family was together before the invasion. It was a perfect sunny day. He thought about his wife smiling at him as he stood in his back yard cooking on the grill on the 4th of July Holiday a few days before the invasion. He thought of his kids running carefree throughout the yard laughing and giggling. It was indeed a perfect day. The cell keeper zapped Dave out of his thought with the whip of a beam. As he wept, he took a deep breath and followed the keeper into the room. The room was very dark and hot. Dave could not see what was happening in front of him. Suddenly he felt a sharp blow to the head. He fell to the ground instantly. He felt another blow to the neck. He tried to shout, but he didn’t have to energy to move. In fact, he couldn’t move at all. His neck had been broken and he couldn’t feel any part of his body moving. After his body was broken and beaten down to the steel floor, he kept asking himself in his mind, “What did we do to deserve all of this.” Dave was lifted from the ground by the burly cell keepers. They carried him down the hall to a conveyor machine where he was placed on a metal hook. As he hovered in the air he could see other bodies hanging in mid air. Most of the people were dead, but a few looked like they might be alive like Dave was. He could not be entirely sure.
He did see one man who was still able to move his arms and legs a bit. The man screamed for help, but the screams fell upon deaf ears and those that could not move to help him. Suddenly the conveyer came to a stop. Dave’s body was positioned so that he was able to see in front of him. Ironically, the body of the screaming man was in front of Dave. Directly beneath the man, was a hot boiling tank of scolding water. The steam could be seen rising from the tank. The man’s screams started to amplify even more as he felt the steam beneath his feet. A loud mechanical hum started to fill the air and the water started to boil louder.
Suddenly with a loud click the conveyor holding the man across from Dave started lowering the man into the large tank of water. His body was kicking and screaming as he was lowered. His skin began to hang and sag from his body as the hook made continuous dunks into the water. The screams had suddenly stopped. The conveyors paused and lifted to the original position. The man’s body was no longer recognizable as a human being. Dave continued to look on in horror unable to muster the energy to scream. The cell keepers motioned to other aliens to come over. They carried long carving knives in their hands. They cut the skin from the melted human body and placed the pieces in large metal containers that sat next to the boiling tanks.
Dave was mortified and tired. He heard the loud hum of the machine again as his body began to lower down above the tank. He kept watching the poor man’s body across from him being torn to pieces as his own body continued to descend into the tank. He had one final thought, “What did we do to deserve this? What is to become of my body after this? What was the meaning of my life?”
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Hi everyone! I hope you enjoyed the story. I wanted to write this for you for a reason. The purpose behind my story was transport you into the minds of many of the animals that become food. I wanted you to experience what they might be thinking of just before the prod sparks and the club falls on them. Most of what you read above happens in slaughterhouses everyday. I am not asking anyone to change their eating lifestyle. People are often set in their ways and choose not to change. That is just fine. I just wanted to you to think and reflect. Either way, I hope that you enjoyed my dark science fiction story! Thanks for reading!
