Harvest

I have heard countless stories about how it all began. Some people believe that God wanted to punish us for the sins of our fathers, while others say that the Devil conquered God and now is taking his vengeance on his little planet. Others claim that a pack of witches made a pact with the void, agreeing to forfeit our world in return for a mythical power.

Utter nonsense. These are all aimless attempts to explain the unexplainable, to give an answer to a question that doesn’t have one. Humans like to pretend that they know everything and cannot fathom that something is beyond their comprehension. But regardless of all these tales, they all seem to have one similar element. They all talk about an outbreak that was ravishing the planet and destroying mankind. Some sort of mutated flu that was killing people within days of infection. Even with all of our technological achievements, it was spreading so quickly that we were unable to produce a vaccine in time. People were forced to abandon their cities and live in the forests to avoid contracting the disease. We were staring at our own extinction, but then they came. We didn’t see them until they were in orbit. The most sophisticated militaries in the world with all their highly advanced radars did not detect them. They didn’t attack us. They didn’t send their air fighters or shoot us with energy weapons. They didn’t send mutated creatures to murder us. What they did instead was much more terrifying. They said that we are a lesser species than they are, and they simply wish to harvest us. Our response was that of a terrified animal. We attacked them with everything we got. But alas, they stopped our missiles like giant squashing flies. Even our nuclear rockets failed to harm them. Our weapons were less than an inconvenience to them. They didn’t attack back, however. It was as if they wanted us to know how insignificant we are to them.

Once we realized we were no match for them, they sent the first wave of small ships. Hundreds of thousands of them. They used these ships to take people back to their master ships which orbited the globe. According to most accounts, the ships were without pilots, and once a ship landed, people in a 1km radius felt intense light blazing through their eyes and then fell unconscious. When they regained consciousness after minutes they realized something was wrong. People were missing.

For years we never knew what they were doing with the people they took. No one ever returned after being taken. And to make things worse the mutated flu had already claimed the lives of almost 6 billion humans and even more animals. This crippled food production, water supplies, and almost everything we needed to survive. They did however send us food—some sort of gel. This gel contained all the necessary nutrients for us to survive but the taste was horrible. They also built devices worldwide that purified seawater and made it drinkable. Their help stopped here. They just wanted us to survive. Nothing more, nothing less.

After a couple of weeks, we realized that opposing them was hopeless.  Governments collapsed, and people started stealing, looting, and killing each other. Essentially, we ourselves were the final nail in the coffin.

Fifty-six years have passed. Nothing changed except that their abduction ships came less often. What remains of the human population lived in small camps scattered across the globe, and in those fifty-six years we regressed to the point that we no longer have a concrete history of what happened. Everything we know is what lives in the minds of the people who still have the will to remember. But regardless of all this, some of us still had hope that we would reclaim our planet. I was one of them, even though I only knew about what was before from stories.

I was on a regular scavenging trip along with my friends Yulia and Markus. We collect whatever we can to help us rebuild what we used to have. Anything that would give us a small measure of hope that we can restore our glory. When we arrived back at our camp we noticed people gathering in the middle of the camp. We asked what was going on and we were told that a woman had just arrived at the camp and she claimed that she escaped the Overlords. That’s what we call them now; the Overlords. We didn’t actually believe it. We thought it was another person who lost their mind and made things up. There was no shortage of such people. Being invaded by aliens while the human race is being wiped out by a super-flu does this to  people. But we wanted to hear her story nonetheless. She was sitting by a campfire surrounded by half the people of the camp. We were told that she was completely naked when she arrived at the camp. “Can you tell the story again?”, said Joana, one the oldest people in the camp. The woman looked shocked and disoriented, but she retold her story anyway. She said that some sort of malfunction must have occurred because her bonds were suddenly unlocked. She did not know what to do at first, but then her instinct kicked in and she started looking for a way to escape. She said that she didn’t see any of our visitors. Only machinery was around her. She managed to get in one of the cargo ships. These ships are used to transport the food-gel to various locations. She was talking very slowly and I could see that everyone was very anxious to ask her the question but no one wanted to pressure her, or maybe they didn’t dare to. Except for Yulia. She couldn’t wait anymore. “What were they doing to you up there?” she asked. The woman looked at Yulia with a pair of emotionless eyes. “They were harvesting me. They are harvesting everyone up there!”, the woman said. “What do you mean ‘harvesting’?” Yulia replied. The woman looked up to the skies and kept staring for a minute. “You don’t want to know”, she answered. “Yes, we do”, replied Yulia. The woman looked at Yulia and then at the woman next to her, then she went back to staring at the sky. It was as if she was finding the strength to speak .“They artificially impregnate the women. They inject us with some drug that makes us give birth within weeks instead of 9 months. Once we give birth they take the newborns. Then a machine is latched to our breasts that takes all our milk. Then they do this all over again and again and again”. She said this without blinking once. Without a change in her voice. It was as if she had rehearsed this countless times. Or maybe because she had lost all hope. As for the rest of us, we were shocked beyond belief. Most of us were in denial and insisted that she was making this up. That she went crazy from being a prisoner of the Overlords. Some even accused her of having been turned, and now she is working for them. I did believe her. Her eyes were not lying. For some reason, it made sense to me. Nonetheless, I had a feeling I never felt before. No matter how hard my life was, I always had something to live for. But now I feel I’m losing my will to live. The others reacted differently. Some didn’t believe her at all. Others descended into a dark depression. And there are others who didn’t care.

A couple of weeks later, we were on another exploration run. We do this frequently hoping to find something, anything, that can either help us defeat our invaders or give us some answers. There is a lot we don’t know. Most sources of knowledge were destroyed. Almost everything we know is transferred using tales and songs.
We reached an area we never visited before. There was a two-story building surrounded by a wooden fence. We jumped over it and went inside. It always excites me to explore new places, never knowing what we will find. There were 8 rooms on each story, each room had the shape of a rectangle. We split up. I went to the second floor while Yulia and Markus stayed on the first. I entered the first room just to the right at the end of the stairs. There were broken chairs and tables, vines growing on the cracked walls, water the color of dead leaves in one of the corners, and a closet. I went directly to the closet hoping to find something inside. I slid the door and my eyes lit up when I saw what was inside. Some of the old people in our camp told us about these things called books and magazines. They said that these books and magazines can contain all kinds of things; real stories, made-up stories, and information about what was happening in the city, country, and the world. I decided to take them all with me to the camp as my reading skills are not perfect. However, I was so excited I started flipping the pages. They all were in bad shape. Shredded parts, smudged parts, and even what looked like a bitten part. One of these books (or maybe this was a magazine) had a picture of what looked like a cow (we were told that cows were a source of nutrition for billions of people around the world). I’ve never seen one with my own eyes, just what others described to me. I opened that book/magazine and tried to read what was written inside. It looked like something bad was happening to the cows. The people in the book/magazine were trying to uncover the truth while others were trying to hide it. I couldn’t understand why they would want to hide it. I continued reading as I was so curious to know what was happening to the cows. The next couple of sentences brought chills to my bones. The cows were being harvested. Just like the woman told us was happening to her. But this makes no sense. From what I understood from Joana and the other elders at our camp the Overlords only abducted humans. I felt something on my left shoulder that made me jump in fear. “You scared me, Yulia” I screamed at her. Yulia laughed at me but then she noticed there was something wrong going on with me. “Are you ok?” she said, “I’m really sorry I didn’t think you would get so scared”. “It’s not you,” I told her. “Here, take a look at this”. I handed her the book/magazine and pointed to the part I was reading. She was a better reader than I am. I was looking at her face while she was reading and I could see the horror in her eyes. “Do you know anything about that?”, I asked. “Do you know if the Overlords abducted cows before abducting humans?”. She looked at me with horrified eyes and said “it wasn’t the Overlords. It was us!”. She was trembling with dread all over her face. “We did this to the cows!”. She dropped the magazine to the floor while I stood there trying to understand what she was saying. I couldn’t process it at first. The sentences did not seem complete. They sounded as if they were missing parts. It took me a while to comprehend what I had just heard, and when I fully did, despair took over me and I felt hopelessness fill up my body. Yulia was still shaking uncontrollably. I took her hand and helped her sit on the ground. I stroked her hair, kissed her forehead, and told her she needs to be strong.

I walked to the broken window and looked up at the sky. There in the horizon I could see one of the Overlords’ ships looming over us. A relentless guard that never gets tired. I went over the ledge and took a deep breath.

Three left the camp. Only two returned.