Sitting around our virtual campfire does anyone know any scary Halloween Ghost Stories, preferably food related?!
Let me get the ball rolling…. 
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As I pull my white coat on it gets caught in the compound fracture jetting from my left elbow. I moan at the almost daily inconvenience of that stupid injury and push at the bone so less of it is exposed. It’s a drag, really, the number of times I have torn a good shirt on a shard or dropped something heavy because the joint couldn’t take the strain. Why couldn’t I have been injured in a more convenient way? There are plenty of us that were hurt or even killed with very convenient injuries. Susan lost a foot, but still gets around fine. Kyle in receiving is missing a few fingers from his hand. Dave? Shit, I don’t even want to talk about Dave. He took a steel rod to the chest after falling off a building. Bastard pulled the rod out after he died and now you can’t even tell he’s dead.
Some guys have all the luck.
I finally get my jacket on, then lay a hardhat on my head. It’s been five years since patient zero and the breakout of the zombie virus. They blamed it on FSMA – ironic that a law introduced to protect humans ultimately led to their demise. The whole world’s been dead for half a decade and I still have to wear a helmet in the factories. Figure that one out. Maybe I’ll talk to the union.
Two years ago we figured out a way to farm and harvest humans for meat. From the outside, that may sound cold, or a bit like some horror movie, but let’s face it: The world belongs to the dead. Humans are just crafty cattle at this point anyway, and to keep the zombie population from rotting away we need fresh food. Specifically, we need live humans. So some guy in Mason City, Iowa comes up with this idea to capture and breed people for meat. It seemed destined to fail for two reasons.
First, no one thought the bleeders would actually reproduce in captivity, but that was relatively easy to overcome. We offered them alcohol. The ones who drank it were given a private cage, and the females were with child in no time. If they refused, we still put them in a private cage and then instructed them not to breed. Some weeks it seemed like the two groups were competing to see which could copulate the most often.
The second problem was keeping shufflers from eating the inventory. For the first three years of the zombie age all we did was run around and try to eat as many humans as we could find. Once we started to get organized it was hard to keep the captive humans from being infected. In reality, keeping the humans from turning was just responsible asset management. And we modified HACCP to meet our needs - Human Analysis and Critical Cull Point. Why reinvent the wheel?
Everyone still talks about the big breakout in the Wisconsin farm. The company lost two hundred edible humans. Promising to never suffer another loss of that size, they called us auditors back to our old positions to keep track of the inventory. With the demand for fresh humans rising every day, ensuring that our stock was protected from infection became a serious endeavor.
I waddle out to the pen for the morning rounds, praying I don’t find Dave out there. Seeing him would kill the rest of my day. Maybe I’ll break one of his legs.
I pull open the door to the sounds of gasps and crying. Just another day at the office.
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Happy Halloween everybody 
