Horror logo

The Feed Plant

Story Based on a Dream

By Dyl ElnerPublished 6 years ago 21 min read
1

I’ve stopped concealing what I’ve encountered.

Chicago, as I knew it as a youth, had plummeted far below its level of prosperity over the years, and it seemed that would only get worse. Ever since the economy made a dive that devastated nearly all of the world, the American population either tried to mend its damage or like the majority, ignored it while being completely hypnotized by everything that controlled the minds of the millions; fear, materialism, television, pharmaceutical drugs, religion, the idea of the ‘American Dream,’ political lies, and unceasing social conflict with other lesser nations.

The government had pierced the brains of the population with its tendrils and injected them with the venom of lies. As a result, the world as we knew it turned into a vague and horrific nightmare to behold, cities were burning while the governors fiddled, and one of them was my hometown that had become much like its predecessor, Detroit, and other great foreign cities that we often mocked for being so poor, and now the city I grew up in had become exactly what we mocked.

To begin, many great institutions that Chicago had become famous for were now gone; The Field Museum, closed for good, The Adler Planetarium, out of business due to loss of funding, the same with The Museum of Science and Industry and the Shedd Aquarium. The Art Institute remained open, but due to a rise of funding being cut and criminal vandalism and theft of various irreplaceable treasures, several pieces had to be returned to their countries of origin and replaced with prints and plastic statues.

Several of the great theatres were gone, including The Cadillac Palace, Symphony Hall, The Auditorium Theatre, Music Box Theatre, and The Lyric Opera. Marshall Fields was on the verge of closing down for good, several prestigious colleges were shut down, including Roosevelt University, Columbia College, and The School of the Art Institute, and many of Chicago’s prized restaurants were either closed or converted into McDonald's, Starbucks, or other chain restaurants, these included The Italian Village, Millar’s Pub, The Berghoff, Ada’s Deli, and Monk’s Pub.

Wrigley Field and Soldier Field were on the verge of closing, and Navy Pier had reverted to its original state as being only a pier on which sailors and fisherman worked as opposed to a massive tourist attraction filled with theatres, restaurants, shopping malls and carnival rides, yet the Ferris Wheel still remained as a massive inanimate piece of useless decorum. It seemed like the city had died and lay buried in its own decay, feeding the maggots with its charred remains.

On a Friday morning in later September, I got off the bus on State Street hoping to entertain myself for the day, since my classes only ran from Monday to Thursday. With many attractions shut down, including the museums, I decided to spend the remainder of the day at the library which was now my only option of entertainment.

Employment was also much scarcer than it had been before, so I had no chance of finding a part-time job to occupy myself other than my photography (which had been my major at the time, but I decided to make it my minor after being convinced to study photojournalism, it was where the money was at), partly due to the fact that no employer I sought to interview wanted an inexperienced worker, and many of the places where I applied rejected me because I was Caucasian.

After I exited the overcrowded bus, I immediately rushed into the nearest Subway, having not eaten since breakfast which consisted of toast and coffee. As I walked into the glass door that triggered the familiar electronic chime, I was greeted by two large posters proclaiming “This establishment proudly serves Cesar’s Pork Products,” which seemed to be plastered on every window, wall, and bathroom of every restaurant within miles of the Loop, on both the South and North side and as far as all neighboring cities such as Milwaukee, even delicatessens and supermarkets and what surprised me the most, vegan restaurants and health food stores sold their products.

Because of this strange phenomenon, I settled with a helping of turkey. Finishing my foot-long and chips, I walked down the dreary street which seemed to have gotten darker what with the unceasing chill and cloudy skies from the air pollution that triggered climate changes, which now decreased the usual summer and autumn temperature by twenty degrees Fahrenheit. It had always been cold and gray for the past two years and nobody seemed to take any measures to prevent the climate change, still refusing to understand that this theory is potentially a reality as opposed to a myth. I decided to do a little more research on the topic while at the library.

When I came close to Van Buren and Dearborn, I came across a large shipping truck that was parked just around the corner of the library where the driver sat asleep on the passenger seat, and inside the van I could hear a great rustling and pounding of the metal façade, which was painted with a green tint and the company logo in golden yellow letters, “Cesar’s Pork Products,” underneath which was an image of a family sitting down to a dinner of a pork loaf, harkening to the style of Norman Rockwell, employing a typical 1950s style judging by the way they all dressed and the Leave It To Beaver characteristics which were common in that era.

Sneaking past the sleeping driver to see what caused the rustling; I climbed onto the ledge of the vehicle and extended myself upward on tiptoe so I could see through one of the narrow slits on the top which served as ventilation. I could barely see into the dark interior of the van but somehow I witnessed what appeared to be a mass of hulking flesh that seemed neither human nor animal, lumbering around in a state of panic and trying to catch a breath of fresh air.

But before I could determine what these creatures were, be they pigs to be slaughtered or some other animal bred for meat, the truck gave a sudden lurch as the engine started and the truck shifted into reverse. I hopped onto the pavement as it pulled out of its parking space and drove onward northbound, still trying to determine what I had seen in the truck’s compartment, but I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly the company was to begin with, since it must be a very large corporation if its products are sold nearly all over the Chicago-land area.

This I continued to contemplate as I walked down Dearborn to the library’s entrance, but I stopped when I came across another sign painted on the wall of a building across the street on Clark, which was also shared in that eerie shadow cast by the ‘L’ tracks. Walking toward this establishment, I saw a doorway decorated with architectural ornamentation similar to that of the Monadnock Building, above which was a sign which read “Tourist’s Entrance” in bold lettering.

Eager to explore what was unknown, I entered through the door which donned the sign which was turned to open, and walked up a wooden staircase which led into a dimly lit hallway. This was equipped with electric lighting as old as the first light bulbs patented by Edison, and tile floors which gave me the impression that the building itself may have been built around the early 1900s.

Coming towards another flight of stairs, I came across a cube of glass on the landing, nearly the size of an average convenient store, which was lit from the inside with fluorescent lighting and the walls were decorated with displays of various pipes, bongs, hookahs and other smoking paraphernalia. Dismissing this as a mere smoke-shop, I decided to have a look at the small store which to my surprise was inhabited by a single clerk and four customers, who were all taking large puffs from glass pipes, smoking cigarettes, eating chips and drinking soda from large bottles.

As I stepped in, I was greeted by a short, middle-eastern gentleman dressed in a polo shirt and khaki pants, but not too cordially by one of the women in the group, all of whom seemed to be in their mid to late teens. Three of the customers were sitting on a leather couch in front of a coffee table where four pipes sat on brackets accompanied by an ash tray filled with a mountain of ash and a few half-full chip bags and liters of Pepsi and Mountain Dew.

As I was offered a leather chair to sit amongst the group, I decided to be chivalrous and join with the conversation, but I felt as if I had been talking to a brick wall. I couldn’t smell any trace of marijuana, nor did it occur that the black mass of herb in the pipes was either tobacco or charred weed. I was at first willing to have a few hits of the weed they were smoking, especially when I was handed a pipe by the clerk who nodded his head so that I would light up the pipe’s contents, but first I casually sipped the glass of soda placed in front of me by one of the patrons, knowing for sure that it wasn’t drugged since it wasn’t making me feel dizzy and hazed.

Before I could light up my own pipe, I looked over to one of the patrons who looked if he had just aged from his mid-teens to his early forties as he inhaled the plasma-like smoke from the smoldering mass in his bowl, as so did a few of the others including a scrawny blonde girl who slumped into the couch, and had a few noticeable needle wounds in her arm and a gash where a tourniquet must have been tied. I looked down at my own pipe and realized that I wasn’t being offered marijuana or tobacco in the first place, since the substance resembled crystalized plastic. Immediately I placed the pipe on the table and made my way out of the smoke-shop as the clerk shouted at me to come back with his thick accent.

Rushing up the stairs to a narrow wooden door, I now entered a vast lobby crowded with workers in matching blue and gray suits who hustled about without even noticing that I had walked into their hive. On the polished tile floor where I stood, there was a narrow pathway painted on the floor with the words “Tourist’s Line,” that led me to a desk where a short and enormously fat woman sat with a headset over her ears and to the left of her many files and documents stood an ashtray and a brass plaque marked ‘Receptionist’ in a round hand.

“What do you want?” she said in a bitter, horse tone due to the tracheostomy in her throat.

“Who do I see for the tour?” I asked a little shyly.

The receptionist stood up with a grumble and led me over to an area where several chairs and an old and outdated television set were placed. “Wait here and watch the tape, the guide will be down in a minute.”

She said with a cough as she placed a video-cassette in the attached VCR. After nearly five minutes of static, the video began with a picture flickering from black and white to colour of an American flag in mid-wave as the national anthem played.

“America, land of the free and home of the brave, and proud of its many institutions which we hold dearly; from our successful school system to our unbeatable military, no other country can outmatch our glory. But wait? What is it that keeps our country from falling into the dark ages, is it our wealth above all nations? No. Is it our religious moral uprising against communism and other evils? No. It is our proud industry, supplying the welfare of our greatest institutions; the most important of all being the American family, the most sacred thing on the face of the earth, nothing is more important than the welfare of family values.”

Here a motion picture of the same family I saw on the truck, the mother standing by with her arms crossed behind her back and the father sitting on a reclining chair as two children played on the carpet, staring at the camera with silvery bone-white grins that made me grimace with a chilling sense in my stomach.

“But there is one thing that is important to keep this family afloat, it is not the job which keeps money in the father’s pocket, it is not their love for God and ongoing church service, and it is not the school system which keeps the children educated, it is the family meal.”

From here on, the film went on for another five minutes, videos of workers at supermarkets, farms and factories processing packages of pork meat, varying from canned or wrapped ham, roast pork, bacon, pork rinds, sausages, deli meats, and pickled pig’s hoofs, all of which ended up on the table of the family, delivered by the mother who placed it on the table amongst other supposedly home cooked foods.

This was followed by the narration of the history and current welfare of Cesar’s Pork products, constantly praising how its impact on the country benefited the welfare of the American family. As this faded out, a cartoon pig dressed in the airs of a Marine Corps drill sergeant stared at me as it addressed me as if I were one of its troops.

“Alright you, I want all lines at the supermarket filled with carts full of Cesar’s Pork Products! Do you hear me? I want to see lines standing around the block and I want to see it now! So you better put down your maby-pamby vegetarian food and get busy buying and stuffin’ yer pie-holes with Cesar’s Pork Products, do it now, only for America! Do it for country, God and man, you lazy maggots! Without our products, you are weak, you are pathetic, and you are a dirty, scummy Commie!”

From here on, the pig continued to go on a rant about the superiority of Cesar’s Pork Products and then commanding four cartoon pigs to do pushups and march in place, preparing themselves to feed all of America. From here, the video ended as the camera zoomed out on the same family as they sat down and stuffed their faces ravenously with baked ham as the national anthem played again, fading to another image of the flag in mid-wave. This stopped as the television went off with from the touch of a remote control, and a man wearing a dull coloured waistcoat with his nametag pinned on the lapel.

“Good afternoon, I’m Dave and I’ll be your tour guide for the day, if you’ll please follow me I’ll show you through the factory,” he said with a toneless voice. “We must ask you to please stay in line and do not wander away from the tour group, and please reframe from taking any photographs or using any recording devices throughout the tour.”

With that, the guide led me to the rear of the building and up a flight of metal stairs to a room where a man sat behind a control panel, and in the center of the room there was a metal rollercoaster-like device on a track bolted to the wooden floor. After being escorted into the cart by the tour guide who sat in the front-most portion, the cart jerked itself forward through a metal doorway.

After running through a dimly lit tunnel, the cart ran directly over a long hallway, along which several pens stuffed with straw to a point where they looked like oversized bird’s nests, in the middle where these massive porkers, either quivering from the cold air that filled the room or just barely alive as they gnawed at the bars. The room did not smell of any particular odor, but when passing over these cramped pens I could scarcely make out a foul stench of pig shit mixed with other bodily fluids which was being masked with thousands of hidden air fresheners.

This room looked nothing like a slaughterhouse but rather a housing project or a veterinary clinic for pigs, dimly lit from incandescent lighting and air circulated only by ceiling fans and open windows. When the ride came to a halt on the opposite side of the hall, I was escorted to a hallway which had been cheaply made into a gallery of photos and records of Caesar’s Pork form it’s early days to the present.

Toward the end of this, I was met with no speech nor encouraged to ask any questions since the tour guide had abandoned his post, unnoticed. In my solitude, I was startled by an unearthly squeal that gave little reverberation throughout the hall.

Turning towards its direction, I saw two uniformed guards struggling with a walrus-sized porker who seemed to have gotten loose. Attempting to look forward in an attempt to get a better glance, I was accosted by an employee in a brown waistcoat and tie who shouted at me to take leave. Refusing to leave, I snuck toward the direction of the struggle under cover of the hustle and bustle of the office’s employees.

Continuing to follow this path, I ended up back in the hallway where I entered the building, this time opposite the area of the tourist’s entrance. I had ventured near a landing that loomed over another hallway, from which I heard the sound of the squealing which amplified even louder than before, as if the creature were in distress beyond measure. What baffled me even more was the grotesque shape resulting from the methods of genetic alteration, all for the purpose of creating enough pork to meet the company’s growing demand for this animal’s flesh.

As I attempted to get a closer look, the largest guard zapped the pig with his tazer, knocking it out cold on its back. Seeing the animal sprawled on its back before the guard’s feet, I nearly fainted out of shock seeing the human-like qualities of the beast. Before I could react any further, I was snapped into reality by the shouting of another guard who sent two hulking men toward my direction, both of whom baring pepper-spray and handcuffs.

Reacting quickly, I sprinted toward the nearest staircase that led up three floors, outrunning the guards by at least two yards, rushing along dimly lit halls and up three more flights of stairs until I was on the roof of the building.

After barricading the doorway to the hall below with a plank that lay nearby, I was now standing nearly eight stories above the Loop, peering over VanBauren at the cluster of pedestrians who took no notice of the madhouse nestled amongst their falling boomtown’s architecture.

Attempting to find a method of escape, I now realized that I was trapped; no fire escapes were present, and the only way out was through the barricaded door where the guards had ceased their pounding. To my surprise, there was another door which substituted an air vent just across the way, far from the doorway that would have led to my demise. Climbing down this metal shaft, I was submerged into complete darkness and silence broken by the hissing of steam and running hot water pipes that surrounded the shaft.

The darkness was then wafted aside by a dim, pale light that shone from a vent just inches above the area where I crawled. Attempting to peer through this vent, I was knocked back by yet another unearthly squeal and a blast of foul breath. Unlike the squeal of the younger pig I witnessed in the factory’s hallway, this one seemed to be far more aged and possibly sick.

Getting a closer look at the wretched animal, I was taken aback to see the unconceivable humanity of it. The facial features and its limbs looked nothing like that of a pig, but a human male, bread with the mentality and physiology of a pig bred for slaughter.

Beyond the animal that climbed up to the vent to catch my attention, I could see even more beasts of its likeness; all of whom crawled on their knees from their inability to walk upright, the rest were too morbidly obese to a point where they could only lay about.

Amongst them, I saw a worker in their midst, thrashing those who refused to move with a whip, shouting obscenities and flicking the ash from his cigarette upon them in all attempts to abuse and berate these animals.

Unable to stand the sight of this, I crawled even faster toward another vent that led onward toward a hall within the factory. Alone and shaken, I hid in the nearest closet to avoid the gaze of the workers who hustled about in white lab-coats.

When the sounds of their footsteps subsided, I exited the closet unseen, slipping into a leftover lab-coat and mask. By the time I came across the nearest staircase leading to the building’s rear exit, the hall reverberated with a more human scream, almost like that of a woman giving birth.

Following this, I peered through the crack of a door marked with a red cross where a cavalcade of doctors and midwives crowded about several birthing chairs, in which sat these subhuman women, pot-bellied and hoofed, few of whom spoke perfect English while the others merely squealed.

Every 10 seconds, a massive infant was born and dumped into a cart, elevating the fugue of human-pig squeals. Those who attempted to escape where strapped to the birthing chair as more litters of subhuman porkers were birthed, some of whom where slammed against the floor due to birth defect or attempting to escape the clutches of the doctors. “Hey, you, can you give me a hand, this fucker’s stuck!”

Hearing this, I was grabbed by the soldier by an obese midwife who was working away at a woman who screamed the loudest, a piglet stuck inside the womb as if it refused to be born into slaughter. “Come on, give me a hand with this one, if we lose another breeder, it’s out of our pay!”

Unable to think twice, I stood by as the midwife pushed on the woman’s girth and shouted at her, holding out my hands in order to catch the infant. Within half a minute, my lab-coat was stained with blood and birth-fluids that nearly provoked a fit of nausea.

After what seemed like hours, not one but two infant porkers, bearing the features of both men and hogs in a twisted anatomy matching that of Quasimodo. “Goddamnit, throw them away, I swear this bitch hasn’t given us a healthy one in weeks!”

With that, the midwife snatched the twitching apparatuses from my arms and slammed them against the floor. They were then disposed of by another one who swept them up with a mop and dumped the carcasses into a trash bin.

“Let’s get a delegate in here, this one’s had it!” The midwife called to her coworkers. With that, the woman was wheeled off by four guards into another room, thrashing and screaming until she was knocked out with an injection of euthanasia. Unable to bear any more of what I saw, I tossed off the lab coat and dashed down the stairs, running into the cold street where I was nearly blinded by the gray light of Chicago.

Looking toward the dark building that stood silent against the rumbling of the L train above, I was completely exhausted, bewildered and frozen, as if all reality had come to a crashing halt. Walking along State Street once again, and among its inhabitance, I saw before me now a hallucination of everyday life melt away into a surreal display of men, women and children, all growing fatter and fatter by the moment as they munched on their Chicago hotdogs, pizza topped with sausage and pepperoni, and the slabs of sugar and salt infested ribs from the vendor on Madison, whose truck now bore the logo for that infamous company, Cesar’s Pork Products.

All around, on every street, every restaurant, every cafe, that logo stood out against the bleakness of the city, making it apparent that this town and its neighbors had gone beyond eating mere farm animals bred for slaughter, but human beings, spliced with hogs, and soon with lowing bovine and foul, all being prepared for consumption, digestion and waste to overflow the sewage that rumbled beneath the earth, fire for combustion.

In the process, all of mankind had morphed into the meat-animals with every helping of their own kin, men into bulls and women into hogs, all in a grotesque paradigm of man devouring man.

fiction
1

About the Creator

Dyl Elner

Just a wanna-be writer, not much else.

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.