Meat

Part 3

During the night the wall vanished, revealing the now familiar desolation of a depopulated town littered with the shells and detritus of its former human inhabitants. Dogs barked, protecting the turf of their absent masters from the legions of strangers creeping watchfully along the barren streets. Cats yowled in protest at the tardiness of their dinners. Commercials bled through open doors from huge plasma TVs pitching products to empty rooms. Cars and trucks filled the streets, doors agape, each one the starting point for a trail of clothing dropped like markers leading lost and wary outsiders to the center of a labyrinth.

The next strike four days later provided the clue for which desperate authorities had been searching. It happened in Stillwater, Minnesota. Seven thousand men, women and children — half the population of the town — were swallowed up by another gray cylinder. But this time a note had been scrawled at the epicenter of the disaster. It was in red paint on pavement in the center of town, the spray can lying a few feet away.

 

WE WILL CONTACT YOU. BE ONLINE

8:00 PM

The FBI found a clear set of fingerprints on the can. It took only minutes to learn they belonged to Latoya Cohen, a Stillwater police dispatcher listed among the missing.

The Pentagon, FBI, CIA, the Homeland Security Agency and other guardians of the peace went into hasty consultation with the White House to determine whether the internet could be shut down to keep the message, whatever it might be, from alarming the public until an appropriate response could be developed to avert a possible panic. But the President's re-election advisors warned him that any such attempt to keep the American voters in the dark would be political suicide. The President, ever mindful of priorities, was quick to see the wisdom of their counsel.

As it turned out, it was a moot point. At 7:59 that evening, Eastern Daylight Time, nearly every computer connected to the world-wide-web was on line and waiting. Precisely one minute later a pop-up box appeared on every screen, undeterred by any firewall or blocker and blotting out whatever else might have been there. The message it contained was in English with links to translations in more than one-hundred languages and dialects:

DECLARATION OF POSSESSION

We, The Gatherers, hereby inform you that your species, homo sapiens (human), has been determined to comply with all our requirements for meat, both gastronomic and aesthetic, and exists in sufficient quantity to sustain our needs indefinitely. Accordingly, we invoke the Right of Discovery to lay claim to the species homo sapiens in its entirety and without exception as our exclusive property.

It has further been determined that most members of the species homo sapiens are of Level Five intelligence and will therefore, as a matter of efficiency, be allowed to become involved in the selection and management of human livestock. Accordingly, we are prepared to negotiate specific contracts with existing political and business entities that will be satisfactory both to you and to us. In return for successfully providing us with a consistent supply of quality product, we will assure you extremely favorable profits and will cease random harvests.

All communications with us must be through official governmental or business electronic sites. The full text of the communication along with our response will be posted on the internet in the same manner as this message. There will be no secret negotiations. We are aware of all governmental and business entities and will respond to messages from any of them. Meanwhile, except for those governmental areas where an acceptable contract has been agreed upon, we will continue to harvest humans at random and as needed.

Please note that we will not tolerate waste within this livestock colony. Hostilities among humans that result in mass killing will not be permitted. Wherever we detect such activity, we will immediately harvest all those within the area of conflict. If governments or other organizations wish to settle disputes by thinning out human population in any area for any reason, it must be approved and carried out by us. Upon petition by any government or organization recognized by humans, we will select the appropriate livestock to be culled. We must warn you, however, that this could include the petitioners.

Please do not bother us with questions about our identity. It is beyond your understanding. Be advised that we are capable of harvesting selected individuals. Those who bother us with spurious messages not directly related to genuine business offers will be included in the next harvest.

The initial response was world-wide outrage. The secondary response was world-wide panic. The third response was a flurry of international conferences to determine how to resist these unspeakable demands while at the same time protecting innocent citizens from continuing atrocities.

But who was the enemy? Who were these “Gatherers” and where were they? It was the ultimate guerilla terrorist challenge! Inevitably, action was mired in a swamp of speculation and indecision. One school of thought held that they must be aliens from some distant galaxy. Others noted the absence of the words “planet” or “world” in the message, and took this to suggest they were right here on earth. Still others postulated that they were probably “on earth” but in some kind of parallel universe. The no-nonsense types insisted they were simply terrorists or radicals using some new kind of weapon. None of these theories drew anyone any closer to a decision on how to deal with them.

Four days later the peril of continued bickering and indecision was underscored when the Gaths (as they were soon being called) touched down (or rose up, or materialized, or whatever) in the center of Hamburg, and seventy-eight thousand German citizens vanished in the course of a day.

More desperate consultations followed! Lots of military movement! Howls for action from terrified citizens of every nation! Loud declarations of promised action! Religious and ethnic groups blaming each other for the abominations! It was God's wrath! It was a madman with a new weapon! It was a Satanic cult!

Four days later there was yet another unchallenged catastrophe, this one on the African continent. The center of Johannesburg was stripped of humans. Four days after that more than a million residents outside of Beijing were gone. Iran was the next victim. Then Indonesia.

More frantic conferences! More attacks! England, Hungary, Japan, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Turkey, Mexico, Israel, Brazil, Morocco!

Then came the clincher. The Big One. The last straw. Two and a half million men, women and children vanished overnight in the heart of Manhattan.

The time for prevaricating was over. Military pissing contests weren't working. The world was in a panic! How do you battle specters?

The Congo was the first to come to an accord with the Gaths. Then Nepal, followed quickly by Libya, Saudi Arabia, India and China. Pickup locations were agreed upon where undesirable persons would be assembled to meet relatively modest contract demands for humans to be turned over to the Gaths. Prisoners, mental patients and the terminally ill were obvious choices. The cure was no prettier than the disease, but it stopped the random attacks in each country that drew up a contract. The rest of the world began catching on to this solution. As more and more nations contracted with the Gaths, random attacks increased among the holdouts. When the prisons and institutions began to empty, the collaborating nations came up with more creative contracts.

It was the free market that supplied the ultimate answer. Certain major corporations and independent entrepreneurs proposed using volunteer women to breed babies that would be raised specifically for harvesting by the Gatherers. It turned out that the Gaths were perfectly willing to delay collection of such children until they reached maturity (which they defined as sixteen years) and exempt entire nations (which they called “governmental entities”) from random harvests if they permitted such operations to exist. Their only requirement was that the “breeding farms” produce a sufficient crop of growing livestock to meet specified annual quotas. The Gaths even offered breeding operations generous futures for their young livestock to help them flourish during the initial sixteen year growing period.

Naturally there was much outraged opposition to the idea of “growing slaves as food for godless aliens,” but as more nations signed on to the plan and were eliminated as targets for the random every-fourth-day harvests, the pressure on the holdouts grew exponentially. Terror soon trumped righteous indignation. Within nine months every “governmental entity” on earth had officially sanctioned at least one breeding farm and had a publically avowed contract with the Gaths to sell a graduated annual quota of human livestock for a handsome profit. Within ten years every nation on earth was bristling with breeder farms and the raising of humans as food for the Gaths had become a vital multi-trillion dollar global industry. And, of course, random harvests had long become a thing of the past.

At first the breeding operations had depended on volunteer women to produce babies. Additionally, as each nation joined the bandwagon it passed laws allowing the breeding farms to purchase young women and girls for use as brood moms. It turned out there was no dearth of poor parents willing to sell a fertile daughter or two for a fine profit, and there was no shortage of pregnant women willing to sell themselves and their baby to help their desperate family.

Once the ball was rolling, the Gaths let it be known that they preferred (and would pay premium prices for) young, attractive females. It didn't take long for the industry to figure out that with the judicious use of genetic engineering, breeding farms could produce a crop of highly fertile and mostly female offspring, and they could do so using their own studs and female breeders, greatly reducing the need for buying girls. Aside from maximizing per-unit profits, they were able to assure the Gaths of a product that met their highest standards of flavor and appearance. Females were breed at age fifteen. If they failed to become pregnant and deliver a healthy baby by midway through their sixteenth year, they became part of the next harvest. Fertile girls were expected to produce at least one offspring per year to stay out of the harvest. The Gaths paid top prices for sixteen-year-old females, with prices graduating downward for older girls to about half as much for twenty-two-year-olds. The price for women over twenty-two dropped so sharply that the breeding operations found it more profitable to include even their most productive brood moms in the harvest at that point.