You hear a distant echoing dripping and you think underneath that you can make out a deep breathing noise. The breaths are wet and laboured, but cavernous as if the very room itself is struggling for air. Beneath your feet the floor is a well worn dark stone, wet with some kind of foul smelling moisture. The room is poorly lit and you have no idea what the space around you is like. There are others with you. Your colleagues shamble on blindly, with arms outstretched hoping desperately to feel out something in the dark that will help guide them or at last indicate where they might be. The sounds you had heard when you first entered the space recede to be replaced with the shuffling and concerned murmurings of your fellow coworkers.
Your instructions were to take the service elevator down to the subbasement along with, what feels like, the rest of the entire company. No one in the elevator was allowed to talk. That instruction had been implicit in the email. No senior staff had been present in the elevator to enforce this. But this building, it knows. It knows when you disobey.
“HAULT”
The voice booms out from the darkness. You hear a mass shuffle as hundreds of feet in the dark struggle to come to abrupt stop on the slime covered floor. The singe word was like a thunder clap in the gloom compared to to the relative quiet that preceded it.
The atmosphere tightens. It feels as if every person in that room has sucked in a lung full of stale air and that releasing it might be an action that would earn them a one way ticket to the grinder room.
Your vision explodes with white light. You snap your eye lids shut and the brightness is blinding even then. Slowly you open them again, shielding your vision with the back of your hand. Ever so slowly the scene in front of you begins to come into vision. The source of the blinding light is a suspended lighting rig, covered in hundreds of massive spot lights. The lights are now illuminating the space you and your coworkers are inhabiting. It’s vast. A huge chamber deep below the foundations of the office building. It’s lined with monstrous stone columns repeating along both sides of the immense hall that look to have been carved from the very rock walls themselves. The cavernous room continues far into the distance to a point where the powerful light from the spotlights no longer can reach it. There is no telling how far the space actually stretches. The stone seems to be a rough obsidian, with the columns intricately decorated with images of writhing human figures each with featureless faces. Their heads seem to resemble giant meatballs, proportionally much too large for their bodies.
You notice something clinging to the walls, like a moss or fungus or is it roots? Yes roots, working their way down through cracks in the vast arching ceiling, travelling down the walls to the floor of the catacombs. But these aren’t ordinary roots. They seem to be the colour of flesh and they’re leaking, they seem to be the source of the moisture collecting on the floor. The twist and weave their way along the floor, criss crossing and threading over and under each other.
Your eyes travel along the roots until they stop to rest on the final object you had yet to notice. Centred below the vast lighting rig is sat a huge vat of liquid. Steam risings from its slowly bubbling contents. It isn’t water. It seems to be a large container of meaty discharge residue. Of course that’s exactly what you’d expect from this company.
Synth-wave music suddenly booms from, giant speaker stacks to the side of the vat. Choreographed lasers aim down from the lighting rig to the liquid below, with their beams playing on the steam emanating from the bubbling viscera.
A mound seems to begin to emerge from the centre of the giant container. Slowly it grows upwards, taller and taller. There's something rising from the sludge. Slime falls away to reveal eyes in the slowly rising object. Then a torso and legs. A figure stands atop the meaty jelly, which is now convulsing in time with the music.
The gore drenched figure outstretches their arms to the side in a welcoming gesture.
“WELCOME. TO THIS MONDAY MEATING. IT IS I, YOUR MEAT OVERLORD CHRIS CUTLETS.”
The lights shut off. Darkness. Writhing in the dark. A huge organic cracking sound in the darkness, like thousands of knee joints popping at once. Screams. My colleagues are screaming.
“TURN THE LIGHTS BACK ON!”
More screaming. The popping noises are all around, filling the giant space, echoing off of the walls.
The lights snap back on. You shield your eyes again. The screaming begins to fade. A few remaining screams become more distant. The popping recedes. You manage to catch a glimpse of a fellow worker drone being dragged off into the distance by something. An opening in the huge mass of flesh roots behind them appears as they are dragged inside. The opening snaps shut and their screams are abruptly silenced. The roots in the room twitch and as they settle the popping sound ceases.
You look around and there are now considerably less employees in the room with you than there was before the lights snapped off.
“Sorry about that drones. It would appear the building is a bit hungry, it was actually their suggestion to use this space to host the first in person Monday Meating. And now I’m starting to see why. I think the lights and noise may have woken up whatever part of their digestive system this is down here. However you’ll be okay if we keep the lights on. They don’t seem to like the light.
So now I’ve got you all down here last begin with the first order of business. I’d like to welcome worker drone P-987 to their first day at the Dubious Meat Company! I hope you enjoy your time here and that everyone sees to it that they receive a warm and moist Dubious Meat Company welcome! I know it might be a bit daunting but why not step forward and introduce yourself to your fellow drones?
Come on P-987, now don’t be shy…
Has anyone seen them…? Oh you did? Where are they now? Um… Have you seen them since the lights came back on?
Oh yes. I see. That is unfortunate. Well there are meat cakes in the communal coffee room today for everyone to… welcome P-987…
Okay, so this brings me on to the second order of business, the new hot meat drink dispenser in the communal coffee room must be used for hot meat drink only! So for those of you that don’t know how to use the machine, you take your choice of flavoured drink meats and drop them into the pulping maw in the top. The maw will chomp them down nicely into a fine paste that the machine then lightly digests and adds to some hot liquid which is then dispensed through its cute little nozzle. Firstly, you must remember to drop the meats in from a reasonable height, we’ve had a few recent instances of workers lowering the meats in and losing a finger or two to the maw. Then you’ll just be left with a hot cup of your missing finger liquid. And we have a zero waste policy here at the Dubious Meats Company, so drink up! But more importantly I have gotten wind of certain drones using the machine to try and make unapproved beverages such as tea and coffee! Don’t you know that if you feed a living drinks distribution machine caffeine then things can go very wrong very quickly!? Last Wednesday I received a call from the R & D wing saying that John Drippings was acting strange, apparently having locked himself in his office and refusing to come out, all the while screaming about hot liquid meat beverages and insisting that employees feed ground coffee under his door. We managed to gain entry to his office, once the head of security managed to successfully chew the door down. And as it turned out the old hot meat drink machine had actually devoured John Drippings, assumed his identity and distributed Drippings in drink form to his former team members. Lucky we found him when we did as he was mid way through ordering himself an army of various living meat drink and snack creating machines to devour and replace the entire company! So, in conclusion. Use the machine for meat drinks only!
Third order of business is to welcome another new employee to the Dubious Meat Company, the old hot meat drinks machine! Or as they’d like to be now called, John Drippings. They have promised to no longer attempt to overthrow the company in a meaty kitchen appliance coup in exchange for us all not mentioning that Drippings used to be a human and now is a small hot liquid dispenser wearing a tie, so we’re all good. Although I have yet to break the news to Dripping’s meat wife and meat children…
So there are no recommendations this week. I have decided that there is nothing in the world worth recommending at this time.
So in your limited allotted free time you must sit in silence and stare in adoration at the Mandatory Meat Overlord Portraits you should all have hanging in the centre of your living room walls.
The internal portrait compliance cameras will know you viewing time. So rather than the regulation minimum one hour of daily staring, I shall be upping the minimum to three hours for this week.
And finally I have a very special treat for you this week, an in person reading from my new novel The Flappening! This novel is really shaping up into something special and I don’t think it’s arrogant to say that this may well be the best book that anyone has ever written ever.
The Flappening
3.
And with that she turned and the small group left, leaving only Schmark stood opposite Schmelen.
Schmelen felt every flap in her body tense, why had she approached the handsome and juicy Schmark? He seemed remarkably calm. If anything this made things worse. Why didn’t simple interactions terrify him in the same way it did Schmelen?!
“So… did you have anything you’d like to do this afternoon?” He asked casually. “It seems those guys have other plans.”
“Yeah, they seemed in a rush to leave.” Schmelen replied, trying to keep the obvious hurt out of her voice. It was pretty clear, from their immediate reactions, how the others in the group had felt about her intrusion.
“Oh don’t mind them,” he tried to reassure her, “If I’m honest they CAN be a bit cliquey, they always have been like that. But I really wouldn’t let them bother you.”
“Oh I won’t.” She lied. And she knew that he was well aware her feelings were more than a little hurt.
“Well exactly…” he began, before being cutoff mid sentence. A violent rumbling shook the ground beneath them.
He span around, “The geyser!” He exclaimed.
“This way!”
He sprinted off in the opposite direct over the head of a particularly hairy flesh mound. She paused, stood half in shock and half in appreciation of the oscillation of his folds as he ran. She snapped back to reality and chased after him.
“Wait, Schamrk!”
He came to a halt a few meters away from a large fleshy sphincter in the ground, at the base of a cluster of hills. The valley was tremoring all around them and the sphincter itself seemed fit to burst, pulsating with the building pressure.
“I love watching these erupt!” He had to almost shout to Schmelen, to be heard over the roar.
“I’ve never seen one go off before!” She screamed. He smiled, in the way one does when they probably haven’t heard what you said, but are too needlessly polite to ask you to repeat yourself.
She was being truthful. She was actually quite unfamiliar with these hills and the geyser sphincters were often tucked away in hidden valleys, so she’d never actually come across one in person.
Bubbles started to emerge from the opening of the sphincter as it struggled to contain the immense pressure below.
“HERE IT COMES!” Schmark squawked excitedly. It was cute, Schmelen thought, how excited he was over this relatively normal geological process. She smiled.
GUSH.
The geyser erupted with a huge volley of steaming water. The hills stopped vibrating and Schmelen could swear she heard the landscape breath a sigh of relief.
Droplets of land liquid cascaded over their faces and Schmark was smiling widely from cheek flap to cheek flap. Schmelen looked down at his hand by her side and for a brief moment considered reaching out to touch it. But thought better of it.
The flow was thinning now and the sphincter was beginning to close and tighten. However just as it looked as if the ground was finishing releasing all of its underground juice, a final sharp burst of pressure issued from the hole, as if it was held back by some kind of blockage. The ground shook again, but this time with the force of pushing out the final gush. Schmelen noticed something in the jet, something other than liquid emerging with the spurt. It was thrown high into the air and landed to the wet ground with a squelchy thud.
Schmark was no longer by her side. He was off. He sprinted to the object that lay motionless on the ground, at the other side of the sphincter.
“It’s some kind of animal” He called back to her.
She gasped, her heart skipping a beat.
And so concludes another Monday Meating. I will leave you with an inspiration quote from yours truly.
Remember to always keep a meat in your pocket and if you don’t have a meat in your pocket then the next time you see a meat you should put it straight in your pocket.
And with that I shall leave you, I will be hoisted up to safety with my executive winch and harness via the Upper Management Escape hole. I trust you will have a productive and meaty week.
Go fourth and meat.
LIGHTS OUT!”
Darkness.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
Next time I see my meaty little hermster SPAM I will put him in my pocket.
All hail out meaty overlords!
RIP P-987. Despite most of the beginning being narrated in 2nd person (ie: you do x y and z), the line 'my colleagues are screaming' is presented in first person, creating slight dissonance when reading. Hm.... very good, but needs a bit more meat. Meat/10, would recommend.