Friday Fiction: Harvest Festival (Part 3 - Final Part!)

Chapters 7 to 9

Would you stay in this cottage?

Here is Part 3. Read Part 1 and Part 2. Paid subscribers only! Feel free to comment with your thoughts, or reply to my email if you’re enjoying (re)reading this novella.

Sometimes we need some escapism. I always find the horrors of alien invasions are mild relief compared to the horrors of politicians supporting genocide. I suspect our politicians were replaced by body snatchers long ago.

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Harvest Festival

Chapter 7: Maggie

The sky seemed to throb above the playing field, blue clouds swirling low with an electrical hum; the area was lit in the otherworldly blue of a gas flame, an idea reinforced by the sweltering heat, worse than working fields in summer sun.

The monsters had been piling bodies. Some were in bags, others the unresisting dead; and some were just parts, torn limbs and broken torsos. He’d watched for a few minutes from the bushes by the river. Drag, dump, return to the town for more. Meanwhile others placed bodies and parts into lines which seemed to rise, float, as if on some invisible mechanical slope which ran up into the oily clouds. He knew what was there now. The clouds had parted for a second in some shift of air current and he’d seen the craft drifting – or rather, a section of the craft, a curved black underbelly that glistened like slug skin. He’d only seen part of the whole. The ship was enormous, terrifyingly awesome, awful, giving the impression of a landmass above, flipping perceptions so it appeared below, something you fell towards, basalt rock that wanted to crush you. Everything was being sucked up into that mass.

Fewer and fewer bodies were lined up. The process was slowing. Ending. Time running out before the next stage, whatever that was.