I really shouldn’t be writing this, but since I’m under strict orders to not mention what it is I do, I’m left without anyone to talk to. This journal will hopefully suffice in helping me to make sense of what I’ve witnessed over the past dozen years of my life. I really do hope so. However, if someone is reading this, that means I’ve seen it fit to take the risk and disclose my job to the public. That being said, I’m going to not mention any names or real locations. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that would help my case, and I fear what will happen to me if I make this journal known. For my own sake, I’m going to write as if I’m telling my story to someone. If I choose to share it, I sure hope it’s worth it.
This is my situation. I’m 31 years old, and I have been legally recycling human corpses for 12 years. Yeah, typing it out like that reminds me of how disturbed my career is or was, I guess. As disturbing as it is, it’s also a bit confusing, but I’ll break it down.
There is a warehouse somewhere in eastern Tennessee that is a storage facility for human bodies. Every week, shipments of bodies are imported from all over the world through the medium of semi-trailer trucks. Everything about the process is so nondescript and generic that not a single civilian has ever tried coming onto the property in any way. The warehouse is just so boring no one cares to pay it any mind besides those associated with the company. The bodies are then taken from the semi trucks and are either stored for later use, and when ready are loaded into off-road transportation vehicles. The vehicles, usually white vans with off-road tires, follow a dirt path from the warehouse into a patch of forest.
If you were to imagine an aerial view of the layout there would be a highway running south to north, to the east of the highway about 170 yards (~160 m) would be the warehouse, and then to the east of the warehouse about three miles (~5 km) would be the forest. The forest is a strange sight since the surrounding area is without any forest at all. The forest, a little over a mile across (~2 m), is surrounded, well, by nothing at all really. The area is just miles of field, a mixture of wild grass and shrubbery. The forest is also perfectly circular. It looks like someone took a cookie-cutter and pressed it into a large forest and then lifted the section out and placed it in a large plain. I, along with my co-workers, call the forest “the mouth”.
Anyway, once the vans enter the Mouth, as I’ll refer to it from now, they stop halfway at a clearing. The clearing is still covered by the lengthy arms of the trees that encircle it, but the nature in the clearing lessens. The clearing is also almost a perfect circle. In the center of the clearing is a hole about the size of a kiddie pool. The hole is not straight down, it slopes gradually down into the mouth of what I presume to be some sort of cave. Its slope grade is similar to that of an opened cargo plane’s rear door. The bodies, always in triplets, are laid out naked at the entrance to the hole, feet first.
Afterwards, the van leaves, and the next day the bodies are gone.
In the following nights people start to wander out of the Mouth. The people essentially hidden under the moonlight, wander off in every direction but towards the highway. I’m not sure what is beyond the Mouth, but I have always assumed it just eventually leads back to civilization.
This is the process I have become familiar with the past dozen years of my life. The bodies are laid outside the hole, and in the following nights people emerge from the Mouth. Well, this was the cycle up until about a year ago, my last year of working with the company. In the last year of my work everything went to shit. The cycle was messed up and I lost someone close to me. However, to understand how it all went down, I have to start from the beginning.
My life has been rather lonely. I was born in a hick-town in Tennessee, and lost my mom and my dad as a teenager. Without any knowledge of extended family I was orphaned. I don’t really want to get into it, but I aged-out of the orphanage, and besides the programs set up for young adults like me, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
About a year and a half later, I found myself 19, living with two strangers for roommates, and working at a record store that doubled as a coffee shop. I had no friends and no love interests. I had no direction. I was vulnerable. Although I didn’t know it at the time, that vulnerability would be preyed on by a man that visited the coffee-record shop.
I was working at the register, people bought records and paid for their coffee at the same register, when a middle aged man walked in. He sort of stuck out amongst the usual crowd of teens and old-heads. He just looked kind of normal, like a dad or something. He walked up to me very calculatedly. He didn’t immediately speak, but instead seemed to size me up. He ordered a small black coffee, I delivered and the conversation ended there. He then made his way around the record boxes, coffee in hand. He was flipping through them slowly, occasionally nodding his head at certain records. Eventually, the man came back up to me. He leaned in close, looking passed me, but speaking softly into my ear.
He asked if I was satisfied with my work. I told him it was alright, and he snickered a little. He told me to call him if I wanted to do something worthwhile. He handed me his card.
Then he was gone. I kept the card. It was strange. I remember it had no information besides a phone number and the man’s name on it. I guess it’s obvious I ended up calling him from the events in recounting, but my younger self never could have imagined what his business consisted of.
Out of curiosity I called him and as I expected he offered me a job. The rest of the call was setting up a date and time for an interview. I asked myself what was appealing to him about me as a worker. Looking back on it, it must’ve been the fact that I was without anyone. I was expendable, a man that could fall through the cracks of life and no one would know the difference. I was useless to society, and that made me useful to him. I would keep my mouth shut. I knew at that time I was getting myself into some sketchy shit.
This is what I was told in the interview. The job was a government job. The business in total had no more than a hundred employees. This included all levels of workers. I would start loading and unloading the products, managing the products, and preparing the products. So far, it all seemed like normal warehouse work to me until I heard the pay. For just general warehouse work I would be paid up to 100k a year and offered paid housing in the nearest town so that I could live close to work (also a bunch of boring healthcare shit). After hearing that offer I knew there was about to be a massive catch.
“The products in question are human cadavers.”
I let out a little laugh, but immediately knew he wasn’t joking. I now knew why the pay and benefits were so good. I was being paid for silence.
I was disturbed, but not enough to turn down the offer. I idiotically agreed to work for him. A smile broke on his stony, aged face. I couldn’t tell if it was genuine or not, but I shook his hand, looked him in his dark-gray eyes, and stupidly thanked him.
A week later I found myself moved about a few hours north in a quiet town. I was driving to work in my 2005 Buick LeSabre. I was nervous, but on top of that I was doubly nervous about the content of the job. I pulled into the parking lot outside the warehouse, and went through what I assumed to be the main entrance. I was trying to feign confidence, but it was clear I had no clue where to go. Through the door was a receptionist. A tan woman smiled at me moving a strand of brown hair out of her face. The way she smiled you would’ve never thought behind her was a human meat locker. She knew my name and showed me how my time card worked, how I recorded my hours. The employees seemed to already know everything about me which was honestly kind of nice, if a little creepy.
I entered the warehouse which was freezing. A group of people were standing around the loading docks talking with each other. The group varied in ages but none seemed as young as me. When they saw me they waved me over, so I approached them. They all seemed disarming but I was being careful regardless. A woman in her late twenties greeted me and told me she would be walking me through my first two weeks of work until I was properly trained. She said that I would be trained in pretty much every job the warehouse had to offer. Her name for the sake of anonymity was, whatever, Sadie.
For the next hour or so we just all stood around making conversation. They could all tell I was on edge. I asked if they really handled corpses, and they all nodded in agreement flippantly. They must’ve been doing it for a while to be this light-hearted about it. Sadie, placed a hand on my shoulder and reassured me that what we were doing was not illegal, it was a government funded venture. Well, now I know that just cause the government approves that doesn’t mean what I was doing wasn’t fucked up.
Around noon I asked where the bodies went. That is when the group all kind of eyed each other in a “who wants to tell him” manner. Eventually, Sadie broke the silence telling me it was better if I just saw for myself.
An hour later two semi-trailer trucks arrived at the loading docks. I had been there for five hours already and hadn’t really done anything. As a large, bald man opened the back of the truck I waited in a morbid anticipation. I was expecting to see some visceral display of corpses piled on top of each other, but instead was pleasantly surprised to see that the truck was filled with neatly stacked coffin-sized freezers, which made a lot more sense. As if we were unloading frozen pizzas, we casually got to work.
We lifted the freezers onto carts and would roll them into a walk-in freezer with probably around a hundred other freezer coffins. The freezer coffins were an off-white color, with red medical-like trimming. The freezer coffins all had serial numbers in place of names of the bodies. They truly were just products to these people, not that I have room to talk, in the years following I became just as casual about it.
By the time we finished unloading the trucks, we moved on to loading three bodies into a van parked at the end of the warehouse facing away from the highway. The three chosen bodies would be taken from the freezer and left to thaw, stored in a refrigerator-like coffin, and put in the back of the van. Sadie offered me an overtime opportunity to drop off the bodies with her and the bald man, I’ll call him Jack. I had nothing else to do all day so I decided to ride along.
The ride out there was fairly normal. Jack was a kind guy even though his appearance was intimidating, and Sadie explained to me they called the drop off zone “the Mouth”. I still had yet to understand what they meant by drop off zone.
We followed a dirt road into the Mouth and arrived at the clearing. The three of us unloaded the coolers. Jack and Sadie unlatched the coolers, and looked at me to ask if I was ready to see the corpses. I nodded, wide-eyed with nervous anticipation. The lids popped off and a cool wind arose from the boxes. I didn’t know what to say. All three of the bodies were decayed beyond recognition. These were not fresh bodies. The skin had broken away and most features had been broken down into a threadbare jumble of bones. All three bodies were yellowish-brown, and looked delicate to the touch. I wondered why even use freezers at this point? I also wondered where they got these bodies.
The bodies were stolen. They were taken from graveyards and the empty grave was replaced with a mock-body. I eventually learned all this, and I still wonder whose loved ones I was looking at that day.
Sadie handed me a pair of gloves for handling the body. We carefully moved the bodies to the grass. The grass was yellow and very soft. Then one by one, we moved the bodies carefully to the mouth of the aforementioned hole in the ground. We left all three bodies feet first. The whole time I had been silent and didn’t ask any questions, but when they were all in position I asked Sadie why we were leaving them here. Were we feeding something? Sadie explained I would find out during my afternoon shift the next day.
I still remember that first night after my shift. I just laid in bed and looked up at the ceiling considering quitting while I could. However, in my less mature years I decided to keep at it for the money. The house was pretty nice. It was a comfortable one story brick house with a dated but endearing interior. Sadie lived across the road from me. It seemed all the employees had been corralled into one neighborhood, but no one was complaining.
The next day as I was walking to my car to leave for work, Sadie caught me. She was also leaving and offered to give me a ride. I obliged and we were off. The day was dreary and cold, fall had come and gone, and winter was upon Tennessee. As we were approaching the warehouse, Sadie, in a serious tone, warned me that I could never speak of what we did to anyone. She told me that if I did, I would be harshly punished. I knew what she meant. She even said that personal journals mentioning the job were dangerous.
The day went as usual. Tonight though, I was going to be trained on the night shift. The three of us drove out to the Mouth again to transport more bodies. After setting them up, Jack drove back and Sadie and I stayed. Past the hole in the ground behind the tree-line of the clearing was a watch tower of sorts. The building was a gray tower with an enclosed observation deck up top. The spire was tall, but did not breach the cover of the tree tops. At the base of the tower was a heavy, steel door. Sadie put in a code and the door unlocked. Inside was a tight, spiral staircase to the observation deck. Sadie and I climbed the stairs, locking the door behind us.
At the top was another employee from the day prior, who had helped me unload the freezer coffins. I’ll call him Erik. He was thin with short brown hair that hung just barely over his glasses. He was also in his late twenties. He greeted us with a “yo” and Sadie explained what we were doing. We were monitoring the bodies. I made myself comfortable watching the bodies laying in the grass from the large deck windows.
Interestingly enough though when the sun set, Sadie and Erik got quiet. They turned off the lights inside the observation deck. I couldn’t see anything out the window. Well, I couldn’t see anything clearly. I voiced my concern to the two of them in an instinctive whisper. Erik responded that it didn’t matter as long as the bodies were accepted. I started to feel cold, what the hell had I gotten myself into.
It was close to midnight. I never for an instance began to doze off, I was freaked out. No one was tired. All three of us were vigilantly watching and waiting. Right at midnight, Sadie and Erik both perked up. They told me to come closer to the window. I strained hard to see what they were seeing. With my face inches from the glass I saw it. I could only see the silhouettes of two bodies now there were no longer three. Then, the second body was quickly taken down into the hole. Only moments later the third body was gone. The movement was so sudden, we could’ve easily missed it. Sadie and Erik looked relieved while I sat there confused more than anything. Sadie noticed and told me to wait. I did, I didn’t know what else to do, and minutes later the silhouette of a body re-emerged from the hole. The body was moving on its own however. I must’ve looked pretty dumbfounded, probably because I was. I watched as the body used its arms to shimmy through the grass. It was not using its legs at all. The body then got up into a plank position and began sitting on its knees. It looked like an adult trying to learn how their limbs worked. The motions were jerky and awkward. The body sat on its knees for close to fifteen minutes. Erik motioned to me. On a computer monitor on the desk in front of him he had accessed a live-feed trail cam. One of the cameras was aimed directly at the hole opening where the body sat. Suddenly, the body twitched once, very violently. It was a man. It was hard to make out his features, but it was clear that it was a male. He then quickly rose to his feet, and took off walking at a brisk pace. His movement was perfect, and he seemed to be in a healthy condition. He walked out of view of the trail camera, and the rest of the night nothing happened.
The next morning Jack arrived to pick the three of us up in one of the vans. I was exhausted for good reason, and I hadn’t been able to form any real questions. When I got into Sadie’s car I asked her what I had just witnessed.
The bodies are taken into the hole, and then they are recycled and come out as brand new people. They aren’t people though, just cheap imitations of them. They always wander off in the opposite direction of the highway, but it isn’t known where they go to specifically. No one knew what was in the hole that recycled the bodies, and no one seemed to care to ask these questions as long as the hole was supplied with bodies.
Those were my first two days on the job. I’ll always remember them with amazing clarity. I was unnerved, disgusted, perplexed, but when the money came, it made it all seem worth it.
The next 11 or so years went practically as I explained. I have compiled a list of different occurrences I experienced throughout those years, so I’ll include that. The only other thing of note comes from my final year of work. It’s an experience I’m still working out in my head, and to put it plainly, it has fucked me up.
Here is a list of important details from my nearly 12 years of work:
The man who hired me owns the company that I worked for. He claims the company is one of the oldest companies in the United States, and the Mouth was even given bodies by certain Native American groups before the settlers arrived.
The semi-truck drivers also work for the company, and never make any deliveries other than to the warehouse. They come once on Monday and once on Wednesday.
Three bodies enter the hole every night, but only one comes out per night.
After two years of work I was allowed access to documents regarding the construction of the warehouse, and the origin of the Mouth. The depth of the hole in the Mouth has never been recorded, or better, the bottom has never been found.
After five years I was pretty quickly able to become entrusted with managing the logistics of the company’s orders. The promotional route seemed more relational than hierarchical.
One of the most popular celebrities in American pop culture today came from the hole. I remember her face. This leads me to believe that these “people” have no problem integrating with American society. I think I may have even interacted with some of these “people” in public. I wonder what percent of the population they make up?
One night while I was on night-watch two bodies came from the hole. Immediately after climbing out they began to awkwardly fight with each other. They were both badly deformed. One bit the other’s neck and wouldn’t let go until the other stopped moving. After the struggle both bodies lay still. The next morning they were gone.
In my years here it is clear that these “people” are custom ordered by anonymous buyers. I believe a group of wealthy people know about the Mouth and use our company as a medium to order custom people. The purchases are hella expensive, so that is why all of our wages can afford to be so high. The business is infinitely profitable because the product is much more expensive than the process of making it.
Those were the most significant details I have recorded from the past 11 years. This next year was when the operation fell through. It all began when one of the semi trucks crashed on the highway.
A year ago one of the truck drivers lost control of his semi. It jack-knifed and flipped, spilling its contents onto the road. Most of the bodies stayed inside the freezer, but a few popped up and the now backed up on-lookers in their cars were met with the horrid sight of multiple frozen corpses scattered across the highway.
The police blocked it off, and you would think the government would be able to cover it up, but word spread too quickly. Photos were shared and local news outlets were running the story. The warehouse came under so much flak, we had to lock the freezer up and put a hold on all trips to the Mouth. Reporters and people wanting to know what happened were camping outside the building. We were never ready for this kind of attention and we handled the situation like shit.
A day went by without bringing bodies to the Mouth. Sadie was freaking out, worried about what might happen if the consistent flow of bodies suddenly stopped. Our boss, the man who hired me, was nowhere to be seen. In fact all of the higher-ups had completely cut communication with us. They had left us to handle it ourselves. I thought about just fleeing, but Sadie reminded me that these were powerful people we were dealing with and if people learned what was happening here, we would be severely punished. The higher-ups must’ve been dealing with the digital evidence, while we were left to destroy the physical. The operation was doomed.
Sadie wanted to try to bring the bodies out to the Mouth but as soon as the garage door peered open people were all around it demanding to know what was going on. These were small town people we were dealing with, and as a small town person, you don’t fuck with small town people. We were trapped in the warehouse. Sadie and I hatched a plan to leave with a van that night to drive out to the Mouth. We couldn’t risk bringing bodies with us, so we planned to take an empty van. We could at least keep an eye on things out at the Mouth.
So we did. A little after nightfall. We managed to book it in a van without being stopped by a mob, and luckily we weren’t followed.
We sat in the observation tower completely overwhelmed. We stared out into the darkness not talking. There was no way out of this. We just hoped that we could leave the business without becoming equivalent to the product.
Midnight passed and no bodies were left at the hole. Sadie and I were falling in and out of sleep when we heard a sound. It was a knock. Sadie shushed me even though I hadn’t said anything. We listened. There was another soft knock on the door down the stairs. The soft knock echoed up the stairwell. There was a third knock. Then, the sound of the door opening. Was it Erik or Jack maybe? Whatever it was, it had the code to the door. Sadie turned a light on, and dimmed it low. We saw it.
Coming up the stairs was a singular hand. The hand was pale and bony, but somewhat proportional, but the forearm extended all the way down the stairwell.
“Holy shit.”
Sadie slammed the door to the observation deck shut. I turned the light off. Sadie locked the door right as the unnaturally long arm grabbed the knob. It didn’t even turn it, it just pulled. It pulled slowly but with force so great the lock snapped out from the knob and the door opened. The hand entered the room.
Sadie and I sat there stiff. The hand stopped. It was quiet. We were both holding our breath. The hand suddenly twisted directly upwards at the wrist and with impossible speed grabbed Sadie and pulled her towards the doorway. She was jolted so quickly and violently by the hand that she slammed her head into the table and went limp as she was dragged off without any struggle.
I followed her down the stairs manically but the hand was always pulling her out of my reach just a bit faster. She was pulled out of the tower and within seconds the hand retracted into the hole Sadie with it.
Then I watched as the hole closed up. The slope rose level with the ground and sealed itself shut. I then heard a rumbling underfoot, as if something large was tunneling below me. The sound of the tunneling grew distant. I stood there in shock. It felt as if someone had their hands on my throat. I felt crushed by a presence. My body was tense, it felt as if every muscle in my body was contracted at once.
The only thing I knew to do next was leave. I left the Mouth and made my way back to the warehouse. The crowd was basically gone except for some journalists in their cars. I made it back to my car and drove back home.
I hardly slept that night. When I finally fell asleep, I overslept, and got up the next day close to sunset. I drove to the warehouse. I parked and instead of going inside, I found my way to the dirt road. I walked along it until I came to the Mouth, or what was left of it. All of the trees were dead and rotting. Some had even fallen over exposing upturned roots. The sun was almost completely set and the sky was a dark purple. I came to the entrance of the Mouth and was met by one of the “people” from the hole.
It was the worst imitation I’d ever seen. The skin was too loose. It shifted as the imitation approached me. Its hair was thin, and its frame was distorted. On its face was an attempt at a smile. It was hobbling towards me slowly with the Mouth decaying around it. It opened its mouth as if to speak, but then it said nothing and kept on moving past me. I stood there and began to cry.
What followed does not matter to me. The story lost traction, and was covered up. The bodies on the highway are now in the realm of “conspiracy theories”, and not talked about anymore.
I just miss my good friend. That is all.
This is my life, lived without love.