Humans and Other Snack Foods

“They call themselves human.” Marik reached into the bowl in front of him and scooped one up. It struggled in the cage of his palms and fingers, tickling him. He unceremoniously popped the thing into his mouth and bit down, smacking his lips with each subsequent chew.

“I call them delicious,” he said. He swallowed, and wiped the juice from his chin with the back of his hand.

“Ugly little creatures,” said Arlo.

“They are energetic, though,” said Lida. She was peeking into the bowl, watching the little humans tumble and climb over each other, trying to get out. The high, slick sides of the bowl kept them in place.

“May I?” Lida asked.

“Of course. Help yourself.” Marik held the bowl for her while she chose a sample.

“I don’t want a big one. I just want to try it. Oh, here’s a little one.”

She grabbed a human by a limb and brought it up to her face. “Do you eat the shell?” she asked.

“I do,” Marik said, “but they’re quite easy to remove.”

She watched the thing struggle in her grip for a moment, and then dropped it into her mouth.

“Mmm… that is delicious! And there’s a planet of them, you say?” She took the bowl and passed it to her left.

“Ready for harvest. We can send two processing ships out and have an order ready for sale inside of a week.”

“Now let’s not rush things,” said Arlo. “I had a chance to see preliminary business reports. These things live in cities and create vehicles that crawl and fly. They seem sentient.”

“Pah!” Marik sneered. “Half of our customers believe that ratbirds are sentient. Doesn’t stop them from eating ratbirds by the crate.”

“He’s right,” said Lida, and then added, to no one in particular, “I don’t believe it myself.”

“How stable is the supply?” asked Creen. He was licking the human juice off his fingers as he spoke, delighting Marik.

“It’s quite stable, right on par with the ratbird population. Our engineers have found ways to make the humans breed even faster and more often. Current estimates project a steady crop for at least the next ten years.”

“Exquisite!” said Eid, smacking his lips. He had the bowl of humans in front of him, and juice running down his chin. “Such a rich blend of flavors! This could be a very lucrative discovery for our company.”

“If we act quickly,” Marik warned. “We’re not the only ones who know of this planet.”

“They seem sentient,” Arlo repeated. He looked into the bowl. “We should do more research on their lifecycles and breeding habits before we begin harvesting.”

“They’re not sentient, Arlo.” Marik was growing impatient with the issue of sentience. What difference did it make? So, they built things and socialized. What creature on any planet in any galaxy did any less? Profit – the humans were a potential source of limitless profit, nothing more. To pass up this opportunity based on sentimentality would be throwing money away for no good reason. That was not the way Marik conducted business.

“Think of them as ratbirds,” he said. “Without the wings or scales, of course.”

“Ooh, I could go for some ratbird right now,” Lida said. “Grilled and skewered.”

“Which leads me to wonder, can these humans be cooked? Or must they be eaten raw?” Eid asked.

“Our research suggests that they are preferable alive and raw, but they can be cooked, certainly. The texture and flavor changes somewhat – here, why don’t we try it?”

He brought out a portable cooker and a handful of metal skewers. He took five humans from the bowl, impaled them through the bellies and held them over the heat.

“Good thing I was prepared for a cooking demonstration,” he grinned.

########

Danny stayed crouched in one spot during the entire ordeal, holding his knees, remembering what his grandfather had told him about panic.

“Panic,” his grandfather once said, “is another form of crazy, and crazy people do crazy things. If there was a fire in the kitchen, would you throw grease on it?”
“No.”
“No. Of course not. But if you were in a panic you would. I’ve seen it done. Now, if you got lost in a city, would you just wander around, getting more lost?”
“No.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. That’s crazy. But if you were panicked it would seem perfectly logical. So here’s what you do to avoid panic: you breathe.”
Danny laughed. “Breathe? I always breathe!”
“No, no, listen. You breathe slowly. You know how when you get scared you start to breathe heavy and fast? Like when you go through the haunted house at the carnival? You wouldn’t be so scared if you just took three slow deep breaths, like this.”
Danny watched as his grandfather inhaled deeply through his nose and exhaled through pursed lips, exactly three times. He remembered that when he was in the earthquake room and did exactly as he’d learned, three slow deep breaths.
“Brings oxygen to your brain. Keeps the crazy panic away for a bit, let’s you think clearly.”

Yes, it worked; not as well as he’d hoped, but Grandpa was right. Around the screaming and rain of excrement and filth, it took more than three breaths to get himself thinking clearly, but it did work.

“Now that you’re calm, use your eyes. What’s around you? Details! If you’re outside, are there trees, buildings? Are there signs anywhere? Are you inside? Where are the doors and windows? What do you hear? What does it smell like? What time is it? The more of these things you notice, the better your chances of getting out of a jam.”

As far as jams went, this was a doozy. Details! Danny looked around. He was in a huge room full of people, men, women, and children. He knew it was a room because the walls were too smooth to be a cave; yet the earthquakes made him question. Maybe this was a new, undiscovered kind of cave. Maybe it was a kind of metal no one had ever seen before. The walls sloped up and away from the floor for several feet before starting their curve back in, way over his head. There were no corners. He recognized many of the people in the room from his neighborhood, but he couldn’t see his mother or brother. Lots of them were hurt – broken arms or legs, gashes in their heads. From the earthquakes. That’s why he stayed away from the walls. When the earthquakes came, it seemed safer to get on all fours and brace himself, rather than run around getting smashed into the walls the way a lot of these people did.

There were no windows or doors in this room, but the strangest thing was that there was no ceiling. The sunlight seemed weak somehow – maybe it was near dinnertime? But he could always tell there was an earthquake coming when the sky went dark grey and it seemed filled with clouds. No clouds that he’d ever seen before. Then they’d see shapes at the tops of the wall, big as buses, but they looked soft, like giant grey leather fingers. The room would shake violently, then two more of these fingers would come in from the sky, and they would chase everyone around until someone got cornered and plucked away. The ones who ran around always got plucked up, and somehow he knew that that was not the way out of this hell.

Danny’s ears always popped when the earthquakes came.

There was always screaming, and crying, from the men, from the women, the ones who survived. The place smelled horrible, a rank mixture of blood and shit and body odor that got worse with every earthquake.

The sounds. There were muffled noises coming from somewhere outside the walls, loud vibrations that rose and fell, like swarms of bees, only much louder.

No doors, no windows. The only way out was up, and there were no ladders or stairs anywhere. He couldn’t remember how he got in this room. He must have come in from above, but how? Did the giant fingers drop them all in this room? He couldn’t remember.

All he knew was that the way out was up.

Danny remembered the way his grandfather taught him to measure distances using his thumb and forefinger. He flipped his thumb and forefinger together; anyone watching might have thought that he was playing itsy bitsy spider. Actually, he was guessing that the walls were about 18 feet high, judging by the height of some of the men standing nearby and the finger trick.

He was using the finger trick at the game – he remembered now. The soccer game at Bryant Park. He was sitting in the bleachers, bored, watching his brother defend the goal, listening to his mother cheer him on. There was a big oak tree on the other side of the park, and he was using the finger trick to see how big it was. He’d done it dozens of times, and always came up with the same number: 20 feet. That’s when he saw them – the giant globes swooped down from out of nowhere, grazing the top of the tree. Then there was a blinding flash of light, as if someone flipped a switch in a dark room, even though it was bright daylight outside. Everything went glaringly bright, and he remembered his mother looking up and around and saying, “What the hell?” and pulling him close. There was a loud whining sound that came from nowhere and everywhere. Everyone in the bleachers and in the field covered their ears. Everything went black. Then… he woke up here.

Three men could do it. If they stood on each other’s shoulders, they could reach the top of the wall and climb out.

“Hey!” He ran to a huddled group of people across the room. “We need to get over these walls.”

The three men in the group were injured, bleeding from their heads. One of them had a broken arm, the splintered bone tearing out of the skin just below his elbow. There was a blond woman with them, and she crawled over to Danny and tried to scoop him into her arms, but he jumped out of her reach.

“Listen to me!” he yelled. “We have to get over these walls. If three tall people stand on each others shoulders, someone can climb out and go get help.”

The woman started crying, and the men didn’t seem to notice that he was there.

Off to his right, some people were already trying to climb out. A man squatted down, another man standing on his shoulders, and when he stood up, a petite woman started to climb them like a ladder. A couple of other people stood in position around the bottom man, who seemed to be struggling under the weight. The curve of the wall made it impossible for him to lean and support himself, so some of the people held him steady. The woman stepped on his head, and he grimaced, but he held up as the man above helped her onto his shoulders. She reached for the top of the wall, her fingertips gripping the edge. With everything she had, she pulled herself up, finally getting an elbow onto the top rim of the wall.

Danny was watching her face. Whatever she saw wasn’t anything she recognized, her eyes wide, her mouth twisted into something between crying and screaming.

That’s when it happened. The sky went grey again, and the fingers came in and plucked the woman off the wall. Once her scream faded in the distance, there was a light shower of blood, and before anyone could react, the two men were snatched up. More blood, more screaming. Then two of the injured men were snatched up, the blond woman scrambling to get away as they disappeared into the sky, raining blood.

Minutes later, the smell. It was sickening, like rotted meat and hair cooking in a stew. Black smoke drifted in over the walls.

Danny went back to where he woke up and sat down. He put his head in his hands.

Deep breaths. No panic. Whatever was over the wall was terrible, he could see that on the woman’s face. He wished there was a way to see for himself. His mother and brother might be out there, looking for him. He studied the wall where the blond woman and two injured men were sitting just minutes before. No corners, just curves. Like a bowl. Was that it? Were they in a bowl? It would explain the quakes. Something out there was holding them up, moving them around, and then setting them down again. If it was curved inside, maybe it was curved outside too. And if it was just a giant bowl…

He looked around at the group of people. Fifty at least.

“Hey!” he yelled. He stood up and went to the largest group of people. “We need to get together and tip this over!”

Again, someone tried to pull him in close, as if to protect him. Again, he pulled away.

“We all need to shove against the wall at the same time!” he cried. “In the same spot. Look at the curve at the floor – we’re in a bowl!”

Some of the people were listening and seemed to understand. One of the women took a few steps back and then ran up against the wall, hands stretched before her.

“Come on everybody!” she yelled. “We need to roll this!” A few more people joined her, but it wasn’t enough. Danny ran around recruiting more people, and when they saw what the plan was, they came and helped. Once they got into a rhythm of stepping back and then running forward onto the wall at the same time, they felt the room tip a little bit, and then fall back down. The sensation made their situation immediately clear. Soon, nearly everyone was working on the same section of wall.

#######

Everyone seemed to be agreeable to the harvest except for Arlo. He wouldn’t even try a human, not even a taste! Maybe this would change his mind.

It didn’t take long to roast the humans until they were good and crisp. Lida was practically salivating over the smell; he gave her the first skewer. She bit into it tentatively, obviously enjoyed the taste and scraped the skewer clean with her front teeth.

“Yum!” she said. “Cook me another, please.”

Marik passed the skewers around, saving Arlo for last. As Marik chewed he watched Arlo. Always a finicky eater, Arlo pulled the charred human from the skewer with his fingers and placed it on his tongue. His brow furrowed as he tasted the thing. He closed his mouth and began to chew. He smiled.

He spoke with a full mouth when he asked: “There’s a whole planet full of these, you say?”

Marik chuckled. Arlo had come around. “A whole planet, ready to make us a lot of money. And now,” he said, “I’ll show you my recipe for human soup.”

From under the table he produced a pitcher of broth. He poured it into the bowl and set the bowl onto the cooker. He stirred the contents of the bowl with a spoon.

“You’re gonna love this,” he grinned.