When the blood shortage started, people laughed it off. The frenzied calls from the Red Cross soon changed that. Each subsequent call they offered more to get citizens to donate. It started small— gift cards to Chipotle & Sephora. Then it graduated to Apple products. Finally, they started promising investment strategies and tuition waivers for children. The higher the offers became, the less people refused, but the more suspicious they grew.

“Why do they need all this blood?”

“Where is it going?”

“Why don’t they offer no pulp orange juice with donations?”

The questions wouldn’t stop. But higher management employed smoke & mirror tactics to evade the public. As far as they were concerned, no one needed to know about the source of the shortage.

The problem is that secrets like that don’t stay hidden for long.

Soon, the demand began to slow down. The offers dropped and the calls returned to normal. Still, no word from leadership about the nature of the problem or how it was fixed.

An entire year passed— and on the eve of Halloween, a new moon rose in the sky. A blood red moon. It sat next to the original moon. The world erupted in chaos— two moons? Americans were irate— only two parties were allowed. But two moons? That’s treason. The rest of the world looked on with similar confusion and worry. What did it mean?

The blood moon glistened in the night sky— it rotated in slow motion. The frustrations slipped away as eyes became transfixed on the hypnotic movement.

The new moon began to spin faster— small points erupted on its surface— with each rotation they began to lengthen. Tendrils of red soon filled the sky and descended to the corralled masses below.

The red strips were pliant, semi-autonomous as they surged to attach themselves to the first human they could find.

Within a single day, the surface of earth played host to an unending mass of tethered bodies.

Within another day— they were lifted into the sky. The tendrils retreated to the blood moon with their humans attached.

Each body swallowed the flowing crimson surface made the moon imperceptibly bigger.

The moon soon dominated the sky— easily dwarfing the earth & its own frail lookalike.

An ominous silence fell over the earth— now vacated of human life. The machines had stopped— no calls, errands, chores, living being done.

Just an orb of Jupiter proportions slowly edging away from the planet it harvested.

No more donations needed.