The Big Reap by Chris F. Holm

fresh-plucked chicken and glistening cords of blood-red muscle streaked with purple. Its scent hit my nostrils, earthy and animal and tinged faintly with rot, and the loosed scraps fluttered black and withered to the ground, aging decades in the seconds after they were set free from this monster’s horrid form. But the bastard just laughed, and removed the protective sheath from the needle with his crooked, gray-black teeth. Vision growing spotty, I couldn’t help but note how long and sharp those teeth were, now that his cracked, parchment-colored lips were pulled back to display them in all their glory. Like an animal’s I realized – or maybe several animals’.
    A mouth full of stolen canines.
    â€œDo you see now how little chance you stand against me? You who cling to your petty human worldview, your myopic human sense of what is possible?”
    But I didn’t see. My eyes were clenched tight in concentration. My consciousness probing. Seeking. Reaching for another meat-suit.
    I brushed against Magnusson’s own consciousness, but recoiled as soon as I made contact. It was too foreign, too alien, too goddamn corrupted for me to work with. I’d barely grazed him, and I hope to God he didn’t notice, but God ain’t one to listen to me, I guess, because Magnusson roared in sudden rage and backhanded me twice in rapid succession.
    Made sense. He had backhands to spare.
    I reached my mind toward Gareth’s next. When I touched him, I realized the Welshman was frightened. I found him huddled, shaking in the far corner of the plastic-sheeted room, a toppled tray of bloodied surgical equipment scattered all around. The stainless steel mortuary slab was thankfully above his eye level, and harsh white light from the surgical light above cast a corona all around it, so my hazy, impressionistic remote-view afforded me blissfully little detail of its viscera-draped surface. But I saw one bare leg, female, dangling off the nearest edge. The dead woman’s toes were painted a glossy coral pink, and her calf was tanned and shapely. Well, the bit of it that was still whole. There was a scalpel-slice below her knee the circumference of her leg, and a perpendicular cut proceeding halfway down her shin. The skin below her knee was folded down over itself like an unzipped leather boot. Fluids dripped from the corners created by the vertical slice onto the floor, the tap-tap-tap echoing dully in the emptiness.
    I extended my consciousness toward him, the seconds stretching as I myself stretched across the hollow Nothingness between my waning vessel and the promise of a new one. Mere seconds passed as I thrashed beneath the patchwork madman’s grasp, but the flood of images that struck me painted a picture of a lifetime. A simple man, his mind laid bare before me on account of countless violations on the part of his sadistic employer, his whole world shattered by all that he had seen and felt and, yes, been forced to do, as if the front door to his mind had been ripped off its hinges, the path to it worn shiny from constant use – from heavy things both dragged in and removed.
    You know what’s funny? We all have thoughts, even the stupidest of us. Reams of them, all day long, from sunup to sundown. And yet most folks have no idea how those thoughts are structured, or what makes them tick. They’re not some kind of mental home movie, a series of vignettes that traipse from A to B to C with a handy-dandy voiceover narration making sense of the whole thing. They’re more like water droplets scattered across a spider web after a spring rain; little pockets of experience, caught at random it seems, each a lens through which distorted images of the world as we see it can be viewed, but never, ever as it truly is. Those moments that aren’t captured by memory’s web speak to character every bit as much as are the ones that stick, and the way they’re organized is dictated