The Disappearances

[novapsyche]

What happened to all of them?

"Last year in the US alone more than 900,000 people were reported missing and not found.... That's out of three hundred million total population. That breaks down to about one person in 325 missing. Every year. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators." -- Jim Butcher, Dead Beat

Is it some kind of otherworldly predator? A secret clan of mutant ninjas? Aliens?

Come up with an explanation for these disappearances.

This could be written as sci-fi or fantasy, as a child's book report, or make it sound like creative non-fiction, or anything else.

---

The Disappearances

The crabapple-shaped head of the female before me lolled and bobbed as her nimble hands inserted the IV into a vein near the crook of my elbow. No soothing words of comfort came, like those I remembered nurses at my local clinic intoning. No, this procedure was more businesslike and mechanical, like the ticking of a metronome.

As my blood flowed into the translucent tube, I peered down the row of other participants in this ritual. The assembly line of people reminded me of the dejected atmosphere and scenery of the plasma center back home, the flat faces like that of pennies rubbed blank by countless fingers. The dull gray walls reflected each one's inner life. No one besides myself looked around but rather straight ahead into their own imagined nothingness.

The crabapple-headed female emitted a series of clicks, whines and whistles. An assistant, a crouched, scale-skinned figure, scuttled up the aisle with a cylinder of gas and attendant mask. Again, without any assurances offered, spindle-fingered hands outfitted me with this device. The gas itself was invisible, but the scent reminded me of clove, licorice, and wet dirt.

I watched as my blood turned purple.

It was like this every day.

At first, I fought against my captors: I struggled, I screamed. I went two full days without eating; they unceremoniously implanted a feeding tube. I recoiled from the sight and sensation of those scaly hands scratching along my tender abdomen for the most optimal site.

After that, the inevitability of the situation pressed upon me. I would sit up in my cell and gaze through the porthole at the unfamiliar landscape, full of indigos, greens and fuschias swirled like topographical paisley. I wondered if I would ever see my family or friends again.

Twice a day my captors marched my sector to the feeding station. Rows and rows of defeated people filed obediently through the maze of corridors to the metal window, where a male with his own misshapen figure and face would push us each a cup filled with custard and a jar of water. The custard tasted as bland as its beige color but had the texture of the most sublime filet mignon. The water, as far as I could tell, was good old H₂O. Despite this paltry amount of "food" as well as being bled every day, few of my fellow captives withered or wasted away.

Our jailors, too, had a vested interest in keeping us alive and nourished.

After a month (as far as I was able to estimate), I managed to glimpse what happened to the several vials of violet ichor that they siphoned from my body immediately upon waking. As the guard marched me toward the corridor that led to my cell, I passed a door that normally had been kept shut. I had become curious about this windowless door before but I could not read the sign with its utterly foreign tongue. This would prove to be the only time I ever encountered the door ajar, but once was enough.

The liquid was being piped into a long bottle that resembled an Erlenmeyer flask. Row after row of similar bottles had already been treated. The image on the label of one of these showed two outlines of the scale-skinned beings merging together. At first, the diagram seemed inscrutable. Was that a sign for poison? Was it something like a brand-name logo? That night, as I lay on my cot trying to find sleep, the answer came to me.

Our altered blood was the equivalent of powdered rhino horn, shark penis, Spanish fly.

I initially cringed to think my own blood was being used to fire up that of those crag-faced hunchbacks, but after a while I came to a sense of acceptance, even to a bit of vicarious excitement. It was something of an honor, in a strange, alternate-universe sort of way.