His arms trembled violently as he clawed at the lip of the ragged hole, damp earth crumbling under his grip and sending small cascades back down onto the splintered remains of the coffin below. Every muscle screamed, weakened from both his recent exertion and whatever long period of disuse had preceded his awakening. Gritting his teeth against the pain and lingering nausea, he hooked one arm over the edge, scraping his skin raw as he hauled himself upward with a final, desperate heave.
He collapsed onto the cold, damp ground beside the hole, gasping with chest heaving. The fresh, cool air—so welcome moments before—now carried a sickeningly sweet, metallic stench that made him gag. It hung thick and pervasive, clinging to the back of his throat. When he could finally control his breathing, he pushed himself shakily into a sitting position and looked around, trying to make sense of his surroundings.
He was in a field where rows upon rows of plants stretched out before him under an oppressive, flat grey sky. The layout seemed strangely familiar, like the farm from his vision, yet very wrong. The air hung heavy and still, thick with a low-lying mist that clung to the ground and swirled between the rows. No storm raged here now—only a silent, damp gloom permeated everything.
These weren't tobacco plants. They stood tall, higher than his head, bearing large, elaborate flowers with petals in disturbingly fleshy shades of pink and deep crimson that glistened wetly in the dim light. But the alien flowers weren't what made his blood run cold—it was the leaves.
He scrambled backward, a choked noise of revulsion catching in his throat. Dangling heavily from the thick stems where leaves should have been were... organs. Wet, pulsing shapes that looked hideously like livers, kidneys, even hearts grew obscenely from the stalks, connected by veiny, root-like tendrils. Some were small and budding while others had grown grossly swollen, dripping viscous fluid onto the dark soil below. The awful stench intensified the closer he looked—rot and iron and that cloying sweetness combining into the smell of a slaughterhouse disguised as a garden.
Horror seized him, cold and absolute. His eyes darted wildly around, searching desperately for anything normal or sane. Through the swirling mist in the distance, outlines moved—massive, hulking shapes, vaguely humanoid but far too large, their forms indistinct and distorted by the fog. They shambled slowly between the rows, apparently tending to the harvest. The sight sent a fresh wave of terror coursing through him.
What the hell are those things?
He couldn't stay here. Scrambling back on hands and knees, ignoring both the slick mud and horrifying proximity to the dripping plants, he half-fell back into the hole he'd just escaped. The broken coffin offered no comfort but served as a shield—a hiding place from the reality above. His mind raced, grasping for any anchor amid the chaos. Who am I? Why am I here?
The coffin itself might hold a clue. Ignoring the pain in his muscles, he began clawing frantically at the dirt and mud caked onto the remaining sections of the wooden box. The damp earth clung stubbornly while digging with his bare, scraped hands proved agonizingly slow work. Tears of frustration welled in his eyes, but the desperate need for answers drove him onward.
After several minutes of painful, exhausting effort, his fingers brushed against something hard and uneven beneath the grime on a relatively intact side panel. He scraped harder, clearing away the mud to reveal letters carved deep into the wood. He traced them with trembling fingers, his heart pounding wildly against his ribs.
REST IN PEACE
His breath hitched as he uncovered more text below, another word carved larger and clearer:
HILLEL
And beneath that, a final inscription:
514 AA
Hillel. The name resonated strangely—a faint echo against the void in his mind. It felt not exactly familiar but somehow right in a way nothing else had since waking. "Rest in Peace" made a terrible kind of sense, but "514 AA" meant nothing to him—it sounded weird. Yet the name... Hillel... he clung to it like a drowning man to driftwood. It was significant in the chaos. It was his.
My name is Hillel.
Taking another shaky breath, Hillel hauled himself out of the grave once more. This time, the sight of the field didn't send him scrambling back. The horror remained potent, churning his stomach, but the faint anchor of his name gave him a sliver of resolve. He needed to escape.
He pushed himself to his feet, legs trembling, and peered through the swirling mist. Rows of those organ-bearing flowers stretched away in every direction. Keeping low, trying not to brush against the wet and girthy growths, he started moving perpendicular to the rows, hoping to find an edge, a wall, anything other than this hellscape.
The silence unnerved him, broken only by the wet, soft plink of fluid dripping from the organ-leaves onto the dark earth and the distant, indistinct shuffling sounds of the massive figures he'd glimpsed earlier. He walked, then jogged, then almost ran between the rows, panic rising again as the field seemed to stretch on infinitely. North, south, east, west—just more rows, more mist, more of that soul-sickening stench. It felt as if the entire world had become this farm.
Then, through a momentary thinning of the mist, he saw it—a structure. Looming in the distance, seemingly near where the shuffling sounds originated, stood a dilapidated farmhouse. Its silhouette warped and unsettled against the grey sky, roof sagging, wood dark and rotting. It was the only break in the uniform rows, but it was close to those massive figures.
Driven by the lack of any other landmark, Hillel found himself cautiously making his way toward it, using the tall and fleshy stalks of the nightmare plants for cover. As he drew nearer, the fog thinned further, and he finally got a clear view of the beings tending this horrific garden.
His breath caught in his throat. They were giants, easily three times his height, but quite malformed. Each possessed two heads perched unsettlingly close together atop a thick, wrinkled neck. Worse still, each head bore only a single, massive, milky-white eye planted squarely in the center of its forehead. Their skin was a pale, almost translucent white, weathered and deeply wrinkled like used paper. Their thick, powerful fingers, ending in dirty, cracked nails, were stained dark crimson, slick with blood and viscera.
They moved with slow, methodical purpose. Hillel watched, frozen behind a particularly large stalk bearing a liver-like growth, as one of the two-headed cyclops-giants carefully plucked a heart-shaped organ from a stem, its bloodstained fingers surprisingly gentle. It placed the organ into a large, wooden bucket at its feet before moving to another plant. Several buckets stood near each giant, seemingly designated for specific organs.
Then he saw the rest of the process. One giant reached up toward the large, fleshy disk at the center of one of the crimson flowers—a part Hillel hadn't been able to see clearly from his lower vantage point. As the giant leaned the tall stalk over, Hillel saw that the disk wasn't pollen or seeds. It was packed tight, glistening wetly, with dozens of human eyes staring blankly in all directions. The giant lightly tapped the back of the flower disk with its bloodstained knuckles. Several eyes dislodged, falling with soft, wet plops into another specialized bucket below.
The sight—the casual harvesting of eyes like berries—sent a wave of nausea so violent through Hillel that he couldn't suppress the sound. He gasped, a loud, sharp intake of breath that cut through the otherwise quiet field.
Instantly, the work stopped. Every giant within earshot—three of them near the farmhouse—froze. Six massive, single eyes swiveled, fixing unerringly on the area where the sound had originated. On Hillel's hiding spot.
He dropped flat to the muddy ground, pressing himself behind the thickest stalk he could find, heart hammering against his ribs so hard he felt it shake his whole body. Sweat beaded on his forehead, dripping cold into his eyes despite the cool air. He held his breath, praying the mist would conceal him, that they hadn't pinpointed his exact location.
Heavy footfalls, like small earthquakes, began to shake the ground near him. They were searching. Shadows stretched long and distorted over the rows as the giants moved closer, their massive heads scanning the area. Hillel squeezed his eyes shut for a second, then forced them open, needing to see the threat.
A huge, pale foot slammed down only yards away, splattering mud. The stench of rot and blood intensified. The shadow fell directly over him. He didn't dare move, didn't dare breathe. Slowly, agonizingly, he tilted his head back, peering up through the grotesque leaves of his hiding place.
Two pale, wrinkled faces peered down from height, their expressions blank. And two massive, milky-white eyes—one set impossibly high above the other on the giant's twin heads—stared directly down at him, seeming to fill his entire vision, cold and appraising. He was found.