We Can Savor Meat or Screams

by C. Rommial Butler

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Skrellorg plunged his tentacles into the holding vat and pulled out a humanoid specimen. 

Skrellorg’s sightless eye-sensors felt the intense buzzing of life from the specimen, though he sat silently, catatonic with shock. 

Skrellorg often wondered what, if anything, the specimens thought about. This was a male of a sexually dimorphic mammal species from a blue and green planet a couple galaxies back, so probably their strange mating rites. All the dimorphs seemed obsessed with that. 

One tentacle wandered off toward a nearby table to collect the eviscerator, an electric wand with a barbed, spinning shaft. 

Skrellorg turned it on, and slowly crept it into the specimen’s left ear, feeling the slight kick when it hit the bone, but satisfied as it pushed through and scrambled some of the brains into a delicate pâté.

Skrellorg carried the day’s meal to the feeding trough and plopped it on its side, the gory hole in the side of the head facing up so that the whole colony could squeeze their tentacles into the skull and pull out the tastiest bits for themselves.

Skrellorg found that the bone fragments and ear cartilage made for a complementary contrast with the soft, gooey brain matter.  

Skrellorg was a Cregarian. 

They lived in colonies of eleven on space stations they designed to escape their dying planet. 

They traveled the cosmos, sampling the flora and fauna of other planets like the universe was their buffet.

They especially enjoyed any creature with a developed brain. 

The Cregarians didn’t have brains. 

Their almond-shaped heads were hollow, their consciousness a hive mind which communicated using the bulbous, pupil-less eyes as receiver-transmitters.

The eyes would puff out when transmitting and suck into the face when receiving, so other species could tell when the Cregarians were having a dialogue, though it could not be heard, for it was telepathic and strictly channeled between the Cregarians’ unique musculoskeletal and nervous systems. 

Insofar as the specimen was still aware, he might have noticed that when the eleven Cregarians rounded the trough and sampled his brain, their eyes popped in and out excitedly in compliment to the chef.

Skrellorg’s secret was to use the eviscerator in such a way as to lobotomize the specimen but not entirely end its life, so that it was still breathing as its brain was removed, piece by piece.

The pink slime in the vats served not only to preserve the specimens alive, but also to anesthetize them. 

After tinkering with the formula for a couple centuries, Skrellorg and his compatriots were delighted to find that it also made a great marinade!

Skrellorg found that the anesthetic resulted in a lot less struggling. 

The struggling became a problem, as the specimens would knock things over, break things, run off, madly sliding into walls all over the space station. 

The slime made them slippery, so they were a pain to catch! 

Since switching to the pacification method, Skrellorg felt the meat was less tough, and sweeter, but had to admit the shenanigans, as messy as they were, also heightened the thrill of eating the humanoids.

We can savor meat or screams, but not both, it seems, Skrellorg thought, recalling a line from an old Cregarian brood rhyme.

According to Cregarian lore, a living meal transfers vital force which is otherwise not found in dead meat. 

Twitching slightly and staring blankly into the inside wall of a metal trough, the specimen was only barely aware he existed and could not have denied nor affirmed the theory.

The Cregarians stripped him bare to the bone, devouring every part of him methodically, from the gourmet appetizer inside his skull to the thin skin and grisly muscle around his toes.

His lips drooled until the probing tentacles peeled away the flesh.

The eyes watered until the eleven delicately severed them from the ganglia to share among themselves. 

The Cregarians relished the salty aftertaste of what might have been tears.

The colony excitedly melded minds in an orgiastic feeding frenzy.    

When only a skeleton remained, Skrellorg threw it into the Vlarg pit, where the slug-like entities cracked, splintered, and ultimately devoured every remaining piece of whoever the specimen once thought himself to be.