The Meat Wagon Man
by Kris Triana
Their bald, webbed feet sloshed through the locust-riddled marsh, catapulting their nubile bodies through the remaining thickets that separated the holes they called home from the metallic sheen of the corporate owned interstate. The children cooed with rabid drool as they frolicked through the charred remains of the forest’s ashen carrion, springing closer to the interstate with every froggish lunge. Mustard, the oldest of the group, addressed his siblings with the authoritative snarl he had inherited from his father; a brute tone which, in the absence of the family patriarch, he now felt was his to utilize.
“Pittance!” he bellowed in a joyous croak, causing his younger brothers and sisters to reach up with their wart-riddled fists, brandishing the recycled coins which bore the image of one of history’s greatest mechanics: The Great Bureaucrat Bediahal. Mustard knew full well that his siblings, despite their odious ignorance, had not forgotten to bring along their tokens. He had merely demanded to see them to coax more feverish excitability from them, thereby making the delicious first day of summer all the more lustrous.
“I’m gonna gnaw the bumpa!” cackled Blogger, the oldest of the girls, spitting as she spoke to force the dangling, brittle hairs of her head away from her swollen lips.
“I’s wanna get some carbonized innards,” barked Turd, the flabby, scabbed little brother to Mustard and Blogger. The only one Turd held supremacy over was the itty-bitty, wee girl-child they called Coil, which was an abbreviated slang version of her birth name: Tactical Carbine. Coil was a sweet little mud-pie, her eyes black as skull rot and wide open as she gazed about at the overheated, bubbling world around her. Her mute mouth hung slightly open, the pulled back lips spasmodically pulsating with her surgically enhanced suction feelers. She was luckiest of all, being able to taste the dead swamp’s fumes rather than just breathe them in, her mouth’s nerve endings nicely exposed.
Mustard was most excited for Coil, for she was but five years old and had never been able to tag along with them for the summer equinox before. In her earlier years, her flesh had been too sensitive in its translucent, tissue like state. But now, with medical advances that had sent their parents into crippling debt, Coil was able to bare the brutality of the curdling globe above the surface of their quaint tar pit. This was Coil’s first experience with the welcoming of a fresh season, and the titillating rituals that come with such a festivity, and Mustard was bent on seeing her have a most memorable event.
As the branches thinned they crossed beneath the singed corpses of the copper birch and marched above the charcoal colored bone fragments that had long ago fused with the toxic spillage to become the new earth. The four children noticed the change in the light that trickled down from the sky-orb; a dramatically psychedelic effect of bending crystallization, marking the beginning of summer, the shorter of the two seasons. Summer always burned gloriously with a dead-white radiance, forcing away the haunting cyanosis of the ten month long, arctic winters which cursed the hinterland annually.
The light not only shone down from the sky-orb now, but surged upward from the ground ahead, reflecting off of an enormous slab of silvery magnificence; an oil-slicked, monolithic testament to the supremacy of the upper one percent. It was the interstate: the one vast shrine that stretched across the shattered hemisphere into fathomless reaches of undreamed vistas. The sheen that it cast out was skull-shattering, an illumination that brought sweet agony to the children’s sensitive, dark eyes. They stared directly at it nonetheless, hypnotized by its religious cleanliness and indestructible beauty. Turd was so in awe of the mighty highway of brilliant steel that he soiled his burlap loin covering with pinkish piss. He was grateful that his siblings were too preoccupied with the zeal of the interstate not to notice his folly.
“Ize hear, ize hear?” Blogger asked in an impatient bleat, her nose holes leaking bile through her facial carburetor’s bronze flaps. Her face, augmented by outdated mechanical excellence, twitched in cybernetic delight.
“Wait fer it, loved one,” Mustard advised as he cracked the knuckles first on his good hand and then on his paralyzed one, using the good fingers to snap their lifeless counterparts. “Life tis ‘bout waitin’.”
It seemed like eons that they waited there in the putrid bog, staring mindlessly at the magnificence of the interstate, their heads filling with concatenated daydreams of what it might be like to somehow escape the poverty of their upbringing and perhaps graduate to the status of a driver one day. They dared not even fantasize of ever being noteworthy enough to become a Great Bureaucrat of the Corporate Deities, one of the divine race of leaders which lived in the mobile cities that spun ever-onward in domination of the new earth sphere, perfecting life in the squalid remains for everyone, even the lowly pit dwellers. To fantasize of such majesty was beyond the capacity for them to even imagine, it being far too radical a notion to ever spew across their fragile minds. But with proper obedience, servitude and loyalty, the children knew, like all children of the remains knew, that they just might be eligible for driver’s licenses one day, and this alone kept them toiling.
A thunderous clamor snapped the children back into reality like the twist of a reptile's neck before supper. It was a horrendous ruckus that annihilated the quietude; a godless clamor of grinding tallow, tearing sinew, and slamming concrete blocks. Beneath this abominable roar there was the unmistakable sound of steam emitting from stressed gaps in a monstrous form, and of well-lubricated gears shifting beneath thick walls of forgotten flesh.
Turd was the first to spot it, and he lifted his arm to point with his nub. The raw celluloid of his arm swayed in the breeze, dancing on the rolls of itself beneath the cooking, blinding light of the blessed day.
“Thar he be!” he babbled repetitively, his siblings having spasms of delight as they too now saw the meat wagon barfing over the heat-hazed horizon. They marveled at its automotive magnetism, and stared without a trace of shyness.
They watched it churn closer, its feces-encrusted wheels spinning in their sheathes of crocodile hide, carrying the hulking vehicle across the silvery road in an elevated slant that defied physics and sanity. On a drifting tilt the fleshy machine rammed forth, its smoldering grill an interwoven mixture of unearthed burial remains and road-kill carrion, some so new to the wagon that it still dripped its own gore. As it drew closer the children, frothing now, could make out the meat-hooked slabs which jingle-jangled from the blubbery sides of the rolling edifice, their shaven bulks slathered in bittersweet ethanol and other chemical compounds, all peppered with horse flies. Its windshield was a massive screen of smudged, tangerine plastic covered in a protective cloak of worn fishnet, behind which, they could just make out the stocky frame of the driver: the beloved Meat Wagon Man.
They watched his muscular arm rise towards the ceiling of the vehicle and pull a black chain. As soon as he did this the shrill whistle came screeching from out of the loudspeaker which rested on the top of the elevated roof of the wagon, cozily nuzzled between the impaled vultures which always got snagged by the machete-like poles which jutted from the front, protecting the wagon from the diseased, feathery scavengers which longed to peck it to bits.
The impressive tank of the meat wagon came to a halt before them and expelled a revolting bloat from its exhaust made up of old soda cans and the colons of expired, and hence, eviscerated slaves from the megaton, mobile cities. Brown fluid poured from the sickly tube, but because of the slant in the metallic slab, the bile rolled away from the interstate and unto the soft shoulder where the children stood, anxiously awaiting the emergence of the Meat Wagon Man.
The bus doors of dried skin and corrosive lead came sliding backward in a sparking grind, revealing the tall, hormone-charged hulk of the driver. He wore only leather gloves and a tattered butcher’s apron that was, like he, encrusted with old blood and damp with oil stains. His body was morbidly mastodonic; the arms explosive with steroidal size, the pecs bending the cloth of th
e apron, and the legs like fleshy redwoods waxed clean. His face was a contorted ball of scar tissue, set with two beady, black, olive eyes. He had a short snout dangling where his nose should have been, and a thin, piranha’s mouth hiding behind it, grinning wide with childish giddiness, reflecting the white light.
“Meat Wagon Man!” the children howled simultaneously, their utter delight beaming from off of their cute, mutated, little faces. They spun drunkenly about him, praising his presence as they held up their tokens to him. He knelt down to be at their level, and bent his bald head forward ritualistically. Mustard allowed Turd and Blogger to go first, and then escorted a skittish Coil up toward the legendary symbolism which was this living man. They had rehearsed this back in the home pit for three weeks before hand. He hoped now she would do it right.
Coil held her older brother's hand with one warty fist, and her shining token in the other. Mustard lead her to the Meat Wagon Man’s head, which was bent toward her, offering its vaginal slit. Upon his shaved cranium there was a sore, a pink and fleshy wound, that wiggled like a pothole puddle in the pissing of acid rain. She was cautious but curious, and the excitability of Turd and Blogger as they ferociously cheered her on gave her strange courage that was normally unlike her. She reached forward and forced her fist into the Meat Wagon Man’s head-hole, pushing the token in, making it glow golden with the beads of gasoline the transaction forced from his high-octane, seven-days-of-consciousness-to-the-gallon brain. She giggled as the Meat Wagon Man’s head-hole belched in acceptance of her token, which had been her Christmas present, six months ago.
The Meat Wagon Man rose and stomped his way toward the carcasses that hung from the hooks, wanting to save the best for last, of course, as the children knew was best for them. Pushing the slabs aside on the spinning oscillator that suspended them, he was proud to reveal the squirming wall of the meat wagon itself that writhed magnificently in the unrelenting, blinding light of the summertime bliss. It was a vast wall of oozing skin and body parts kept alive through modern technology, keeping the limbs still pumping blood for circulation through mainlines to the wagon’s paramount engine, keeping the limbs from rapid decay. Rawhide cables and slings held these flailing limbs that pulsed deliciously before the children’s squinty gaze, teasing them by sprinkling them with blood in their wild gesticulations. Beneath these living elbows, necks, and knees lay the older wall of flesh, tendons, and bone. It was the base of the wagon: a maggot-riddled slab of nourishment that screamed summer fun.
Blogger and Turd, having paid in full, instantly assaulted the wall in a carnivorous frenzy, ripping the oil-slathered arms as they gyrated. Hungrily they began sprinkling the pieces with the supplementation of dead skin cells and trapped insects. Their crooked, jagged teeth gnarled the wagon as they farted with a happiness they seldom knew.
Mustard was eager to dig in too, not just to welcome the season but to at long last feast on a real treat rather than just reptilian gruel and buzzard residue. But his need to escort his sister’s right of passage was stronger than his desire to gorge and binge. Holding her little, pulpy hand, he brought her over to the side of the glistening wagon so her tiny feelers could absorb the flavor of the particles that blasted about from their siblings feeding frenzy. She breathed in deep and he knew she was savoring the taste of the hot death spray. He grew excited not just for himself, but for her as well. To show her it was all right, and how to go about dealing with the overbearing flesh-wall, he lunged forward with a crooked smile and sunk his boney face into the swarming array of raw tendons and tallow, ripping huge pieces from the great automobile’s side.
Coil watched her brother, wanting to join as he looked back at her smiling with his red, stained face, waving her in with his many pockmarked arms. Still timid as she approached, she looked upward at the colossus of the Meat Wagon Man, as if for further permission. He looked down at her and smiled wide, revealing the rows of cracked razors that served as his teeth. She returned the smile, her tentacles twisting in adorable friendliness before she rocketed towards the slat-wall of sweet, sweet gore.
As he watched the neighborhood children dine upon his vehicle’s side, the Meat Wagon Man could not help but feel nostalgic, being as sentimental as he was. The side of his scabby mouth curled up in a wider smile that was so genuine and fuzzy that it almost triggered an extra thought per gallon. A foggy recollection of his own distant youth blasted into his cranium like a double barrel buckshot, and he delighted in its vivid shimmers. He flashed back upon his own distant childhood, where he had chased another wagon down a sunny street in summer. He could never quite remember what the man behind the wheel had offered him and the other kids of the neighborhood, but surely it must have been some sort of meat, like what he now offered these young ones, for its sweet flavor was what had made his body go goose flesh with the recollection. From his eye that flapped from blepherospasms, a single tear of gas trickled down the crater-covered side of his face, sentimental as he was.
“Aaahhh,” Turd bellowed as he pulled back from a skinned toe he was chomping through, his face a mess of oil and gore. Behind him, the interstate began to burn red like a grill-top, the blistering heat marking summer’s official launch as the surrounding forest began to burn once again.
“Yup,” his brother agreed through a mouthful of carnage. “It just tain’t summer till ya’s eaten from the meat wagon.”
About the author:
Kris Triana is a horror, splatterpunk, and dark fiction author. His disturbing Christmas story, “Giving from the Broken-Down Bottom” was recently picked up by Spinetingler Magazine. Influenced as a child by the b-movie box cover art he saw in the video store when he’d wander over to the dusty horror shelf, Kris has been writing since his youth. While raised in the hillbilly swamps of Florida, Kris currently resides in Massachusetts with his future wife and their pet rabbit.
2013: The Aftermath Page 40