You get down in the hopper, and if you’re lucky they’re already mostly dead. Otherwise, it’s a lot of goddamn noise. No one needs that headache. You wade through until you find the bottleneck, and jam your broomstick down and swish it around in the meat, broken bones, and stretchy split skin until you find what’s caused the jam. You’re up to your knees in blood. Sometimes a rookie will get the bright idea to put his hand in and pull the clog out. I’m not Einstein, but I don’t have to be. It’s a bad fucking idea. The first thing that’s gonna happen is that the tension in the gears is going to snap your arm out of its socket, and you’re going to be down an arm, and the grinder is going to be clogged.

Again.

So don’t use your hand.

You use the stick end of your broom. We’re supposed to use the brushes to sweep down the hopper at the end of the day. If you have even one flickering brain cell in your head, what you do is you get a tin can, cut it apart, and wrap the tin around the broomstick end so you can clear the burs without your brush getting chewed up. A chewed-up brush is no good. They take that shit out of your pay.

The cause of a jam is usually a watch. False teeth. A pacemaker. There’s a form these assholes have to sign to say they don’t have any metal parts in them anywhere, like when you go for an X-ray or whatever, but they lie. The types we get through the door aren’t exactly known for being reliable. They come in for a job interview and we give them a shower, a haircut, and a clean set of clothes. The only thing we ask is they sign on the dotted fucking line that they’re just meat —and they can’t even do that right.

Sometimes the cause of the jam is because they’ve got a bullet or shrapnel from a bomb in their ass. A titanium shoulder or replacement hip. That bums me out. I’ve noticed the vets come in waves. I don’t want to think about the road that leads them from service to the grinder. It doesn’t matter. Once they’re through the door, I gotta get them through the hopper like everyone else.

There’s just too many fucking people is the thing. It’s easy to be philosophical about it when I’m the one who’s watching them walk through the door one by one and listening to the mechanical ker-chunk of the trapdoor release. But, it’s true. There’s too many people and some are just more valuable than others. Some are only worth the protein they can put in a can.

They hardly ever scream. It’s all soundproofed from the outside anyway —the pretty receptionist and the people in the waiting room have never seen my ugly face. I sit on a plastic chair in the inflow section. I sit in the dark and watch them walk in, and see the comical expression of surprise as the trapdoor releases. Sometimes they gasp. And they’re gone. The grinder is, when all things go smoothly, quiet and efficient.

When it’s clogged it’s a fucking shit show. Then it’s all heeelp me, what’s happening, I’m aliiive. Please don’t do this to meee. I can chaaaaange. Aaaargh.

Like I don’t have problems.

***

There’s no alarm when the grinder clogs. A red light comes on, and I haul myself to my feet and begin the descent into the hopper. There’s no point bitching about it —it’s just part of the job. I know other guys like to take their minds off what they’re doing by talking to each other over the two-way, trying to lighten the mood. Gallows humour. I heard one guy got a date with a girl in reception over the two-way while he was crotch-deep in blood and guts. It couldn’t be me. I get in and get out.

On this particular day, I was called in on short notice to cover someone else that didn’t show. No big deal, it happens. More money for me. I walked in to find the red light already on. That was a big deal. I didn’t even get to sit down. People would be stacking up in the waiting room outside. Management gets nervous if there’s a backlog. How did this happen if no one was even on shift?

I climbed down and began to push my way through the bodies to find the clog. The whole way down the ladder, I fumed. If this happened during the last guy’s shift, he should have been the last one to clean it. Sometimes you get a guy that has plans and thinks he can sneak out without radioing in a clog or a fault and let someone else handle his mess. Those guys get what’s coming to them. I can tell you that for free.

The hopper was a mess. The bodies were all torn up but not from the burs. They were fighting each other, trying to get out. You could see where they had bitten and scratched each other, torn their clothes, pulled out chunks of hair and taken scalp with it. There were streaked finger marks on the stainless steel of the hopper walls. A gouged eyeball sat unmoored from its body, like a pearl with a long red string attached.

The one that caused the jam, all jacked up at the bottom, was unrecognizable. When they go in head first like that, they always shit themselves and make the soup a hundred times worse. The stench was incredible. The one that went in immediately after was all tangled up with him. But there were two more on top that were just…

Floating.

I stopped for a moment and stared at the bodies. I considered radioing up, but they didn’t move. Still, they gave me the creeps. What the hell was going on? I’d never seen anything like it. The hopper was bathed in a red glow from the light above and it made my depth perception funky. It makes the blood look black. It makes corpses look possessed. I got desensitised to that shit a long time ago, but the two unexpected bodies had thrown me. My bullshit radar was going bananas. The back of my neck was screaming, Get out! Get the fuck out now.

I pushed on the deepest part of the hopper and angled my broomstick to dig in for the jam. A bloody hand darted out and clamped around my calf.

“What the fuck?” I whipped around and glared down at the woman through my fogged-up goggles. My breath was bellowing through my mask and into my ears. She had her mouth open, trying to speak to me but all she got was a mouthful of the filthy blood-soaked brush of my broom. I could see the smeared black hole in her face where she’d lost the eye.

“Fuck off,” I grunted as I ground the brush into her face, driving her down into the meat. Sometimes the only thing you can do with the stubborn ones is drown them. I could hear her choking, gurgling breaths as she struggled and I pushed down harder.

Her nails clawed through my waders and into my leg. I was hoping she would die before her nails punctured the rubber because they’d dock me for a new pair. These were already patched with duct tape and it’s frowned upon. It’s not considered hygienic. If they can use duct tape to patch an airplane, I can use it to patch my waders.

I had only just got her down when I realised there was a disturbance in the meat, and it was because the other body was moving. This big fucking guy was trying to stand up. He was struggling because there’s a lot of wet meat sludge and he wasn’t used to it. I was wearing treaded rubber boots and I’m in this shit all the time. I think about what I must look like to these poor bastards, a vision of pure hell, in my goggles and black rubber waders and gloves up past my elbows. I appear in the moment of their greatest torment when they are praying for a final reprieve, and all I do is get the great maw chewing again.

He was covered in blood and shit, and was understandably upset about how much of it was getting into his mouth and open wounds. He looked at me and made a sound like a wail that’s pain and fear and disgust at once. You hear it a lot if they don’t break their necks when they fall in. He reached for me. I jammed the stick of my broom into the muck and gave it a rough twist. There was a horrendous gurling sucking sound as whatever was clogging the burs dislodged and the massive machinery automatically started up. The red light shut off and the hopper plunged back into darkness. I knew from experience, there is no training for this, I had about thirty seconds to get back to the safety of the ladder or get sucked into the grinder myself.

The company would consider this to be a regrettable loss, but it would fall within an acceptable margin of operator error.

I turned and lunged for the ladder with the practised motion of someone who has done this a hundred, a thousand, times. There was the familiar sound behind me of the grinder engaging with a body —I could hear his horrified intake of breath. He had just enough time to recognise what was happening to him.

My hands grasped the ladder, and at the same moment I felt a rough grip on my legs. Both of his arms were around my calves. I kicked, uselessly, because he wasn’t letting go for anything, even as the grinder churned at his legs among the backlog of the other people it was sucking down. There was the wet tearing sound of flesh, the cracking sound of bones. He let out a furious growl of rage and agony. He was determined to take me with him.

“You stupid bastard, I didn’t do this to you,” I screamed at him and kicked, sacrificing the precious grip of one hand to release my broomstick from my armpit and used it to batter at him. I couldn’t see in the dark —I had to swat by feel, and could feel him dragging me off the ladder, not by his own strength, but the grinder pulling him down. He wasn’t letting go though.

“It’s dog food, shithead.” I spat over my shoulder, “This is your fucking interview. Congratulations. You got the fucking job.”

I felt the warmth of his vomit on my leg as he let go and left me hanging from the ladder. I needed someone to turn the grinder off. No matter how much I screamed or begged, no one answered the two-way.

I lied to that guy, a little bit. Dog food is a different division. The canned food division I work in is human grade, mostly marketed to single men, young professionals, and long-haul truck drivers. You know the type: canned chilli, beef stew, ragout. Hobo chow. I ate it myself. It was quick, easy, and cheap. Cheaper than beef, cheaper than tofu. The only thing cheaper was that experimental nutrillose that was made out of recycled paper. I tried it once and didn’t shit for a week.

I hung there until my arms gave up and I dropped onto the slick sides of the hopper. I slid, the descent sickening and unstoppable despite my rubber boots, towards the chewing mouth of the grinder and the flailing torso of the guy who’d just been grabbing at me. He should have been goop by now, but he wasn’t feeding through. There was a weird noise but I wasn’t thinking about that. I scrabbled against the metal, but my mind was curiously blank. I just shut down. I wasn’t thinking about the bodies I’d seen go in or the sludge I’d seen come out.

My heels knocked against the lip of the grinder and I lifted my legs, a reflex. Insane. Did I want to go in ass first? What did it matter? I was going in, regardless. I let my legs fall, and snatched them up again with a howl of agony as the grinder took a savage bite out of my foot and almost snagged me enough to drag me through. I felt the foot catch, the disappearance of the flesh. I went dark briefly and felt, perversely, a flicker of hope. Passing out before getting sucked through was really the best case scenario here.

Heart pounding, legs in the air like I was giving birth, bleeding like a fountain all over me and the dead guy —then the grinder ground to a stop.

It was 5 p.m.

Closing time.

I let out a laugh that bordered on hysterical. Now was the time that we would normally be climbing down into the emptied hoppers, scrubbing them down, and clearing out the debris. Larger bone fragments that tended to ricochet out could damage the grinder, like jaws with big teeth or ribs. Never seemed to have any trouble with big chunky bits like pelvises or femurs though. Go figure.

The lights came back on and I drew a ragged breath. Cold and hot at the same time, slick with sweat, I wasn’t even sure if what I was feeling could be described as pain. Vomit surged up my throat as the lights went out. Just for a minute. Maybe two. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again I was slumped forward with a lap full of sick and my goggles misty with flop sweat. I didn’t want to look down at my foot but there was no avoiding it. The sight of bone through shredded skin and muscle —my skin, my muscle —had me seeing stars again. I didn’t have anything left to puke. I was dizzy as shit though, and shaking so much I was making the blood pooled around me ripple. I had a handkerchief in my pocket I used to tie up the wound The blood soaked through immediately, but at least I couldn’t see the bone anymore.

I was thinking about how dirty it was in the hopper. I couldn’t put my bloody foot down anywhere. We always scrubbed the hoppers down with our brooms to remove the chunks of meat and bone, but as far as I knew, the hoppers had never been cleaned in any meaningful sense. I wrinkled my nose as I looked around me at the congealing blood everywhere, a good deal of which was now mine. All mixed together. Years’ worth. I’d never thought about it this way. I didn’t see how I’d ever be able to eat Hobo Chow after this.

The guy was looking pretty rough. He’d gone through up to his waist, so I was sitting in a hot soup of intestine, bone chunks, and shit. He was slumped back against the metal, his jaw slack like he was surprised. His glassy, blank eyes stared straight ahead like what the fuck just happened. I could see right up inside him. Big jiggling chunks of fat. Pillowy organs, still slick and glossy. There are stories, you know. Guys who know how to make a few bucks on the side by making the best of things down in the hopper skimming guts to sell. Other stories too. People get bored and they say shit like, I found a full bottom half totally intact, and I’m like, Don’t tell me that shit. I don’t want to know. But then they tell you anyway.

I felt a wave of irrational fury wash over me toward this man. My foot felt like it was being chewed on by radioactive piranhas and it was all this dumb bastard’s fault. I was going to get an infection for sure. I looked down at the boot with a massive hole in it. They were gonna dock me for the boots too.

The two-way in my ear crackled to life. “Dave, where are you? You’re supposed to be scrubbing out.”

“I’m in the hopper already,” I answered, unable to keep my voice from cracking. “I’ve had an accident. I’m injured.”

There was a long pause. I could hear the cogs in Judy, the team leader’s, head turning. Finally, her voice came back over the two-way. “You sure I heard you right, Davey? Cuz’ you know, I’d have to file an incident report, if you had an incident. And if HR decides the incident was your fault…”

My blood ran cold. “No, no. That’s not what I meant Jude. It’s just been a shit of a day. Don’t worry about it. I’m scrubbing out. Check the monitors. You’ll see me.”

“I see you sitting down.”

“I’m checking the burs. I had a clog.”

“Okay.” There was a long pause. “We’ll get a drink after work, blow off some steam.”

“Sounds good.” I cleared my throat. Judy was, as far as team leaders went, one of the good ones, but I knew there was still only so much she could do without risking her job. I caught a flash of gold out of the corner of my eye and leaned forward. In the slowly draining blood, among chunks of gristle and loose teeth, was what I assumed caused the jam in the first place. It must have just been swirling around in the hopper since I dislodged it.

Chewed up to shit, it was still recognisable. A wedding ring. Now, these we never saw. There weren’t that many married homeless. Divorced homeless, sure, but they usually pawned the ring before they got to us. They had to take off all their jewellery when they had their shower and got their new suit. The suit was a real gag —it felt just like the real thing, but it fell apart real quick when it went through the grinder. Nutrillose, I tell ya.

Down in the grinder, I could see the machinery was all gummed up to shit with chewed-up fabric. The reason why the mechanics hate that is that it might not cause a clog right away but it stops the burs from chewing the meat up properly and makes the engine overheat. The bodies that went through this afternoon weren’t wearing the right suits. They were wearing real clothes. They were wearing jewellery. They hadn’t had their haircuts. My mouth went dry when I thought maybe my eye snagged on the shining black of a regulation rubber boot way down in the throat of the chute.

Like I said, I’m not Einstein, but you don’t have to be. You can smell a corporate hit job a mile away. Why, oh why, couldn’t I have been a mile away? You get complacent in a job like this. You switch off, sweeping blood and guts for a living. Everyone looks the same on the inside.

The red light turned back on. The whirring of the grinder began. There was an appalling sucking, growling sound as the corpse hogging the funnel was slurped wetly down, his flaccid grey hands slapping at me as he went.

“Why are you turning on hopper three?” I demanded, “We’re done for the day.”

“We got reports of a clog.” Jude’s implacable voice crackled in my ear. “We’re just grinding out the muck.”

“I reported the clog, you know that, Jude,” I shouted into the two-way. “I’m still in here, Goddamnit.”

“Just grinding out the muck Davey. Nothing personal. It’s just business.”

There was nothing between me and the grinder this time, no other fleshy body to buy me time. No time to think. I threw the wedding ring down into the burs and listened as the metal jaws choked on it.

You can guess the rest. I lost my job, of course. No pay out for your old pal, Davey. My foot never healed right, but I couldn’t afford any fancy doctors to do it up good. The infection kept coming back, and they kept wanting to take more and more of the leg. Finally, I had enough. I didn’t go see any more doctors though. Instead, I went for one last job interview.

I walked into the air conditioned lobby of XXXXX Canning Enterprises and they recognised me right away.

“You’re not here to make trouble, are you, Mr. Pickett?” Babs, the pretty receptionist, asked me from behind a dazzling smile that concealed gritted teeth.

“Of course not, babe. I’m here for the interview.”

She looked at me and frowned. “Davey, no.”

“Sure, I am. What, you don’t think they’ll take me?” I gave her the hundred-watt smile and wiggled my fingers at her. “C’mon, gimme the form. I haven’t got all day.” She didn’t like the gallows humour, but she gave me the form.

I lied on that form a little, the part where you say if you have any metal on you. I figure if other assholes can lie, I can too. I took my shower and I let them cut my hair and I put on my nice new suit, smirking a little bit as I adjusted the fit.

When the time came, I stood in front of the last door I’d ever walk through, and I wondered who was sitting in the plastic chair I used to sit in. I wondered what he thought of all of this, of scrubbing out the hopper and the pieces of people he found when he unclogged the grinder. Maybe, like me, he really didn’t give a shit. He was about to have the worst fucking day.

The door opened and I hobbled through it, and when the trapdoor opened the last thought in my mind was of the hundreds of nuts and bolts that were in my pockets.

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About the Author:
Emma Rose Darcy emerged, fully formed, five years ago and slithered snakelike down from the mountains. She writes dark fantasy and horror. Emma suffers Basilar Migraine so sometimes real life is weirder than anything she could ever write. She stumbled upon horror, discovering authors like Joe Donnelly and G. M Hague among the Kings and Rices in charity shop books cases. It may be why she has a hunger for reading and writing body horror and transformation horror stories, hauntings and huntings.

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