These rows go far far back, almost endless. We close in about 20 minutes but they’re still people picking berries. I’ll keep myself busy before telling them to leave. It was slow today, about only 20 people came for pick up, mostly families of various sizes. I don’t mind waiting a few minutes after close for people to leave but it’s strangely hot out despite the breeze, so I’d like to get home as quick as I could. I do anything I can to keep my mind occupied, read, listen to music, etc., but it doesn’t work. The minutes drag by like hours and it feels like I’m boiling inside of my skin. Eventually, 10 minutes go by so I finally decide to go and let people know that we’re closed. People flood out fast, whoever was left quickly head to their cars and leave the farm. And now I’m alone, it’s a strange feeling, I’m so used to having people crawling all over this place so when it’s closing time and it’s just me I always get this uneasy feeling, like something is not right. After I watch the last car leave I start packing the baskets we let people pick with away, I bring them into the barn where we keep overstock nearby and once I’m done and heading back to the little hut where all my stuff is, I notice something. It’s a stroller, directly beside the hut. “Damnit,” I think so myself, “Someone must still be picking.” I remember this stroller too, it belongs to a lady, she couldn’t have been anything over 30. She was here with her son, who couldn’t have been anything over 5. I remember her vividly cause she was kind. She had dirty blonde hair and was wearing Ray Bans, her son was nice too.
I have this overwhelming sense of dread looming over me now, like something will, or possibly already has gone bad. I grab my walk-in talkie and say, “Hey, there’s still one person left at the raspberries. I’m gonna go let her know we’re closed and then am I good to come back?” I get no response. The feeling of dread I once had slowly faded into a feeling of abandonment. Someone always answers, so what happened? I repeat myself into the Walkie a few more times but I get the same answer; silence. But at least they know I’m here. I begin walking through the rows to hopefully catch sight of the lady and her son but there’s no one here. Even at the high point of one of the rows I can’t see anyone, there’s nothing here but berries. I explore the possibility that maybe she just left it here by accident but left her wallet, keys, and various items in that stroller, so I doubt she’d be anywhere but hopefully here. I also explore the possibility of just leaving, telling everyone that I found the last person and that she left, but if she is here and I leave her then chances are the farm would get either sued or robbed and I would lose my job, so I keep searching. After what feels like hours of walking and searching I reach the last row, I tell the Walkie-talkie that I’m still looking just to be sure they know where I am.
The sun feels even worse now. It’s begun to set but the heat still stays, only intensified by how long I’ve been out here. I’m about halfway through the last row when I start to notice the changes. The raspberries near the front were mainly picked clean but the few that were still there had been beautiful, the bushes were fully stood and perfectly green. Slowly though, they became mangled and dystopian. With the beautiful green the once was fading to a puke-like color, and the berries went from an amazing red hue to grey, nothing more than just a gross grey matter-looking substance. The bushes themselves look like that been trampled on, destroyed beyond belief. Then the smell kicked in, a sickeningly awful stench of death and decay fills my nose the farther I walk. I can’t escape it, I breathe through my nose and I can smell it, through my mouth I can taste it. Then I see the blood. It begins as just a few droplets I notice on the ground, then as I enter deeper into the bushes I see marks of it. Splatters of blood paint the surrounding bushes and what few “raspberries” are left. I can’t help but vomit slightly at the sight of the blood, which by now covers the grass I’m walking on. I then hear the sounds. Sounds of crushing and crunching fill my ears, they slowly get louder the more I walk. The faint outline of what looks like a person slowly begins to appear. Hunched over it seems, grabbing at something that’s on the ground.
My first instinct is that this is the woman I’ve been looking for, “Miss! Miss, is everything alright?” I call out, but I get no response, the figure stays crouched clawing at the ground. The closer I get the more I realize this isn’t who I’ve been looking for. It’s not human. I’m about five feet away when I fully see it. A complete reverse of the human body, completely inside out. I can see its veins pulsate on the outside of its body, all bloodied and blue. I watch as the blood pumps through the circulatory system and the lungs breathe in and out. I then look down, it’s been clawing at the last I’ve been looking for. Its hands digging into her stomach, ripping out intestines and other organs, leaving them scattered around her body, her face stuck with her mouth wide open with an endless screaming expression. I slowly back away, trudging through what I can only imagine is what’s left of the woman’s baby, trying my best not to alert the creature. As I’m backing away I hear a small sound, I’m not sure if it was me that made the noise or something else but that wouldn’t matter anyway, it knows I’m here.
The creature slowly turns and faces me, while still hunched over the corpse of the woman. The scariest thing is its face, which it lacks. No eyes, mouth, or nose. Instead, it’s just flesh, veins still run through it, but there is nothing that even suggests this thing had eyes or a mouth in the first place. I know it can see me though, it knows that I’m in front of it. I begin to run as fast as I can back towards the exit. “There’s something, someone maybe, here!” I yell into the walkie-talkie, no response. “Please, someone come in!” I make it back to the hut with my things. I stop for a breath and turn around, it’s not there anymore. It’s not following me at all. “Maybe it stayed behind in the bushes?” I think so myself. Regardless, after I’m done catching my breath I make my way back to the main building, a big market in the center of the farm. The market is hollow and desolate inside. Another lonely feeling washes over me as I search in fear for my co-workers, calling out their names. I’ve never seen this place so deserted before. I try the walkie again, “Is anyone there?” After a few minutes of silence out from the walkie comes an ear-piercing static sound. Even at the lowest volume, it burns itself into my ears. Almost deafening me. It stops after a few seconds and once I get my bearings together I see it again, the thing. Its faceless face is pressed up against the front door’s glass window. It begins to slide itself against the door, leaving bloody trail marks behind in the process.
I turn and run, reaching a broom closet in a dark corner of the store I hide hoping the creature won’t find me. I can’t help but cry, “They left me didn’t they?” I think to myself. “They forgot about me and left me here.” I start to silently cry to myself, holding the walkie close. I know what’s going to happen, I wish I could stop it but I can’t. I start to hear wet squishy footsteps descend the hall towards the closet I’m hiding in, eventually hitting a peak and stopping right in front of the door in hiding behind. From outside the door, blood starts to pool in from the bottom of the door, coating my feet. I know what comes next, I wish I could’ve stopped it but I can’t. I close my eyes and try the walkie-talkie one last time, “Please.” I whisper.
“John, Jesus Christ are you alright?” I open my eyes. The door is open and my manager stands in front of me with a concerned look, he helps me to my feet and outside of the closet, I look around to see my co-workers staring at me with looks similar to my managers, a mix of concern and horror. “John, what happened? We were looking everywhere for you.” My manager says, “I…I was trying to reach all of you, There’s something here, you must’ve seen it!” Their looks don’t change. “It was some kind of creature! It attacked me at raspberries! I ran here looking for help!” My coworkers slowly back away, desperately now, “Where were you all? I even tried my walkie-talkie! None of you answered!” “John, what walkie?” My manager asks. I look down and there’s nothing, no walkie-talkie at all on me, I look back inside the broom closet but there’s still nothing there. I try explaining myself more but I only end up stammering out words like But or And. “John I think it would be best if you went home.”
After that day I never returned to my job, I think they were ok with that. I never heard much from my co-workers either and soon enough it just became a bad memory of embarrassment. Despite what I looked into and tried to tell them afterwards they wouldn’t believe me and there wasn’t any evidence to back my claims. The decay I found in the berries had turned into beautiful fresh ones, the grass had gone from stained red to perfectly green, They did find my walkie-talkie in the same row, it was dead and supposedly taken a while to charge, which means it had been dead for awhile. I forgot the place in the next few years but when I looked into it it turns out that they were forced to close for a long time after one of the employees killed a customer, claiming they were a monster with no eyes. Eventually, they opened again and stayed successful. I pass by it every once in and while when I visit my parents, All I can picture is the creature though, and wonder if it’s still there. Waiting.