Fit In: a post-apocalyptic survival thriller (180 Days and Counting... Series Book 9)

by B. R. Paulson

My aunt had called for him a couple times, then clamped her hand over her mouth as we ran to the barn. Any screaming would be heard by the neighbors fifty acres away.

  Walking in on his body lying on the ground by his workbench stunned me. To this day, as I’m sitting here writing this, I can smell the iron of his blood in the air and feel the grittiness of the dust as it settled from his fall.

  Maybe he loaded the revolver to try it out. We’ll never know.

  No matter what he’d done, he’d ultimately shot himself in the head – and not in a suicide way either. The bullet went up through the jaw and out his right temple. He didn’t die instantly. He bled out before we got to him. There was nothing we could’ve done anyway, if we’d gotten there before he was gone.

  I couldn’t breathe. I’m clutching my chest, just thinking about it.

  Aunt Josie's fear overrode her grief.

  She clamped her lips tight. While looking frantically around and out the large doors, she hastily shoved them shut.

  Spinning around, she shoved her back against the hard paneling. I'll never forget the look on her face. She stared at me, her eyes wide, her lips pressed together. “Cooper, grab a towel from the tack table. We have to stop the blood from spreading. We need to get rid of the evidence.”

  There was no way he was alive. The glassy angle to his eyes confirmed as much. One eye pointed to the right, while the other one stared straight up. Uncle Bob looked much different with half his face torn up.

  But I did what Aunt Josie said. I rushed and grabbed the towels, as many as I could. My hands were small, but I did as I was told. Her fear sparked some in me and I didn’t know what was going on, so I followed her lead. Plus, it wasn’t the first time I’d been around a dead body.

  Aunt Josie wrapped Uncle Bob's head in a towel, whispering as she worked. “We don't let nothin’ go to waste, and we don't involve others, if we can avoid it. Do you understand me?” She stopped her hasty movement and peered up into my face. She reached out and carefully took my chin in her grasp. Peering at me, she nodded while she spoke. “We take care of our own. Gotta get rid of the mess, too.” She dropped her hand and paused her dialogue as she wrapped the towel tight around his head.

  Reaching up as if for a lifeline, she clutched my fingers. “Cooper, this has to stay between us. As far as anyone else knows, your Uncle Bob is fine. He's just turned recluse.” She stared into the depths of my eyes, searching for something. “Not even your mama.”

  Absorbed by the panic in her gaze, I calmly nodded. No one knew about the things I saw at the funeral home. Who would believe me anyway?

  We sat down to dinner a few hours later. Pulled pork sandwiches with Aunt Josie’s special barbecue sauce. They were my favorite, and on the sourdough Poor Boy buns, nothing beat them.

  Aunt Josie said grace, spending a little bit more time asking a blessing over the meal. A tear in her eye when she said amen made me realize she was more affected by my uncle’s death than she’d let on.

  She stayed my hand as I picked up my sandwich. “Cooper, remember… this stays between us. We don't waste anything.”

  I nodded at her. I remember thinking maybe she'd gone a little crooked. But she had just lost her husband. Yet, as I took a bite of the most delicious sandwich I've ever had in my entire life, she didn't look like she'd lost anybody. The calm peaceful serenity on her face smoothed the wrinkles from her skin.

  She told me years after that, after I found out about all the secrets and asked her why she never grieved over losing her husband. She said, “Why cry? I was keeping a piece of him with me.”

  And that made sense. Not that much else does. But that, at least, made sense.

  I visited my Aunt Josie every summer after that. My parents still thought Uncle Bob was alive. Aunt Josie had taken on the farm work and the gunsmithing.

  She was a capable woman. Every summer she made her special pulled pork sandwiches. I raved about them so much one August when I went home, that my mom begged her for the recipe. She never could get the sandwiches to taste right.

  Aunt Josie had sworn me to secrecy. But then I found out my last summer there, that my dad knew more about cannibalism than Aunt Josie did.

  Not What I Ordered

  Chapter 2

  My last summer ended in disappointment, not just for me, but I think for Aunt Josie, too. She expected me to be something I just couldn't be. Or so I’d thought then.

  That was the summer I found out I was eating my uncle and others for the last nine years. So, yeah, that aged me at seventeen and I was a cocky know-it-all. I treated everyone with disdain, but I wasn’t mean or rude, I just “knew” more than anyone. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was the typical teenage boy.

  Seventeen, and I thought I knew it all. Wow. I want to go back and slap that kid.

  Anyway, that summer I’d switched my visit from August to June. I wanted to work with my dad at the office – I use the term “office” loosely, considering his office was filled with dead people. Regardless, there was something appealing about the place, the quiet solitude, the smell when Dad worked on the clients. The funeral home had become my safe place.

  Working for my dad was where I saw myself for the next fifty years.

  My first couple days with Aunt Josie were uneventful. Just went about my days, slipping into the chore schedule like usual. Every year she added more to my list, but I didn't mind it. I knew it meant she trusted me and with Uncle Bob gone, I didn’t mind helping her out with so much to do on her own for most of the year.

  The third day I was there, I walked into the kitchen to find out Josie staring inside the freezer. She was just standing there, one hand hanging limply by her side while the other one held the door open, knuckles white as she gripped the long bar-style handle.

  Staring inside the box.

  Maybe she had placed the TV inside, although that didn't make sense. Aunt Josie hated television.

  I scuttled around, trying to see inside the box. When I got closer though, I found an empty freezer with some built up ice. No, wait, that was a small white package shoved into the farthest corner. She seemed not to see it, so I reached in and tried to dislodge it from the ice overgrowing on its butcher-paper exterior.

  Angling my face in front of Josie's, I checked her eyes for connection. I’d heard of people having seizures while they stood there or maybe an aneurysm or a stroke. I wasn’t a doctor, but I watched my fair share of ER. Mom’s favorite was Clooney. I’m a guy. I don’t see the appeal. Reaching up, I tapped her shoulder. “Aunt Josie? Are you all right? What are you looking at?”

  Did I tell her it was empty? She had a glazed look in her eye like she wasn't quite sure what was going on.

  She blinked a couple times, and then focused on my face. “Cooper, I'm sorry, I was trying to figure out how to do this. Usually you don't come until July. I usually have this all done by then.” Her cryptic comment sent chills down my spine. What did she usually do before I went there? Staring at the ice box?

  “We’re out of meat, Cooper.” She said it as if it were a great tragedy and a single silent tear slid down her weathered cheek. Her hair had grayed more over the years and her bun had gotten tighter as if she fought the wrinkles with her own form of stretching.

  I glanced into the icebox again, then back to her. I nodded, my eyebrow arched. “Yes, ma’am. I’d be happy to help you get more.” What did she expect me to say? I’d never seen her cry. Not even when she should’ve with Uncle Bob’s death. The sight of that tear would haunt me for years to come.

  She turned, wiping her hands on her apron and letting the freezer door swing shut. “We need to go looking for poachers.” Wrapping her apron into a basket style hold, she added some knives and large white canvas flour bags to her makeshift bag.

  “Are we taking the meat from them?” I shuffled over to the sink and grabbed a glass for some of her famous raspberry lemonade. Maybe all those years alone had finally tipped Aunt Josie into the legitimate crazy zone.
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  The suppression of her grief could be finally getting to her.

  I'd find out why she had never cried over her late husband later that afternoon.

  She chuckled at my naïve comment. “No, we won't take the meat they’re poaching. We’ll make things right for everyone. Justice will be served and no one will be the wiser.”

  Her comment grabbed my attention enough that I stopped and looked at her, narrowing my eyes. “What do you mean? We can’t do that, isn’t that like being judge, jury, and bailiff, all in one?” I had just finished US History class and I had the memory of a sponge. I didn’t lose anything once I’d learned it. The law was set up to protect its citizens from vigilante justice and unjust decisions.

  I’ll never forget her words, like they were etched into my skin with the blade of an X-Acto knife. “We need to eat. They’re on my land. It's time to go hunting.” Her matter-of-fact tone chilled me to the bone and I wish so much that I could go back to who I was that morning, go back to bed, and choose not to know.

  Like reversing in that Matrix movie. Take the Blue Pill.

  I wished. But that wasn’t for me. It wasn’t in my cards

  She’d said it was time to go hunting.

  Time to go hunting.

  Time to go hunting.

  We’re out of meat.

  I dropped the glass to the floor. Its shards scattered across the ground, catching the afternoon light on the little triangular pieces around the faded linoleum. A chunk of the vinyl floor had torn up from the trauma and the dark hole in the floor glared up at me.

  Staring at Aunt Josie, I ignored the hole in the ground and the glass from when I dropped the cup. “Are you serious? Are you… Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Was she saying we would be killing someone? “I'm so confused.” That didn’t make sense when we were out of meat to eat, not feed to the dogs or something.

  The thought of someone dying didn’t bug me. Up in that area, poaching wasn’t accepted – at least on other people’s land. Aunt Josie owned a huge chunk of land and they had poachers more often than not. Poaching on someone’s land was worse than stealing.

  Aunt Josie sighed, folding her arms at her waist. “I'm sorry, Cooper, your father and I agreed not to tell anyone in the family until we saw signs that one a’you kids was going to be like us. And then, we weren’t gonna tell you until you were eighteen.” She looked around the kitchen like she just knew someone was watching us… her.

  “Tell me what?” I picked at the skin beside my thumb cuticle. That was not what I wanted to hear. That was not how I wanted my summer to go. I didn’t want big family secret reveals or tough truths that would make me a man. “Can you just be blunt with me, Aunt Josie? We’ve always been honest with each other.” I tried not to beg her for the truth. Partially because I didn't know if I could handle it.

  “Okay.” She nodded, resolute, tucking her hands into the band of her tightly tied apron. Narrowing her eyes, she pursed her lips. “You want blunt? How's this for blunt? We eat people. We’re the Northern Montana Cannibals. They don't even write stories about us because they don't know we exist. Sure, there’s suspicion, there always is. Your dad moved off to Spokane or thereabouts, to start his own funeral home, to have constant access to meat and to get away from here.”

  Wait. Was she talking about real cannibalism?

  I blinked at her. Just blinked. How was I supposed to deal with that influx of information? How was I supposed to cope with the fact that I supposedly came from a long line of cannibals and that I myself was supposedly one, and yet I never knew anything about it?

  Could you call yourself a cannibal, if you ate your peers without knowledge? “Are you saying, my dad eats the people he keeps in the meat lockers?”

  Maybe that was why he never let me in when he was supposedly embalming them. I had no idea what the man did in there, but being around the dead people had always fascinated me.

  I thought they smelled good.

  The concept of eating them wasn't even what irritated me. It was that I didn't know. What if I knew the people we ate? There had to be some considerations here. Why weren’t they thinking about how I felt?

  “Yes. We are all cannibals. Not your mother. She doesn't know. But you, me, and your father come from a long solid line of cannibals. Something you should be proud of.” She nodded like we spoke of some Scottish clan whose plaids had been worn in multiple wars.

  I considered that. Everybody always said Beau must have gotten Dad’s height. Lily got Mom's looks. Chance must've gotten Dad's broad chest. We don't want to get into the twins and which twin had what, but supposedly they were the geniuses of the family. If you ask me, they acted like complete idiots all the time.

  So for me, to be a part of something that none of the other siblings were a part of, I was more than a little flattered. Of course I ignored the fact that it had to do with me being a man eater. Or woman eater. I needed to be PC at a time like that.

  “I don't want to kill anyone, though.” I tried not to grimace, taking the life of someone else didn't appeal to me.

  Plus, I'm not sure who I'm eating. “I didn’t want to really eat anyone that I knew. You know that might feel kind of wrong.”

  Aunt Josie inclined her head. “I understand about not killing. But first of all you need to know that the very first one that you've ever eaten was Uncle Bob. I believe that when you eat someone you love, you are keeping a part of them with you as you absorb them. That's what I believe about that. Now if you don't learn how to kill people, are you going to learn how to harvest meat like your father does? If not, you need to do something else. You’ll come to find that you just don't like the other meat as much. Not that it won't do anything for you. You’ll realize nothing tastes as good. So chicken will be bland, but you'll be able to eat it just fine. Beef is fine, elk and deer - they're all fine. Hell, you could eat a frog if you wanted. And be fine.

  “This isn’t a condition or a sickness. You’re not going to get sick, if you don't eat people. But you’ll always want. The smell of human flesh is very, shall we say alluring. If you don't embrace it, you’ll hit a point where you're going to be weak and tempted and you can end up hurting someone that you don't want to hurt. Trust me on that one.” Aunt Josie loaded me with too much information.

  I’m not sure that I was ready for any of it. Plus, I had an insatiable desire to talk to my dad.

  After that, the rest of summer was pretty much a blur at least with Aunt Josie. I told her I couldn't kill a poacher. So she went ahead by herself. Knowing that she killed him, I couldn't eat any meat. I didn't want anything that was ruined like that.

  She laughed at me, at every meal I turned away the meat. Said I was the first pacifist cannibal she'd ever met.

  Which made me wonder – were there others out there like us?

  Not sure what that had to do with me.

  I needed to talk to my dad. I needed to know his side and to try to understand exactly what I was where I came from. Who did I tell? What did I do? Who knew?

  I waited for dreams to come, something, anything to tell me that she was lying and just trying to mess with my mind.

  But I didn't gag at the thought of eating human flesh. That right there should've been more than enough to tell me it was true.

  Working for Dad, he never denied it. He didn't even act surprised when I told him what Aunt Josie said. He jerked his head up and down as we sat in the cooler surrounded by meat. His jowls shook. He'd always been a portly guy. I never understood exactly why. “Cooper, let's keep this between us.”

  It wasn't the first time I'd been told to keep a secret. But over the next year, the last of high school, I learned that keeping secrets was more for my protection then to keep me in danger. Even if they both led to the same destination.

  Death Before Wine

  Chapter 3

  Senior year was going to suck. None of my friends were going to the alternative school which was located closer to my small town than the
big high school they all wanted to go to.

  I wasn't even going to the alternative school. My mom had chosen to have me go to the small high school there in town. There were a lot of driving laws being instated and the car insurance rates were going up. Which I honestly didn’t care about. What did that have to do with me going to high school with my friends?

  The entire senior class in town had eighteen people. Ridiculous.

  Interning for my dad at his company, learning his tricks and tips as he went around harvesting the meat, put a lot on my plate – literally and figuratively. I had a lot going on and those moments I could just be myself were more refreshing and rejuvenating than it should’ve been.

  When I ate with Dad, I was smarter, felt more alive.

  I had to pass my classes with great grades or I'd never get into the school I needed to, so I could get licensed as a mortician. Taking on the family business was priority Number One.

  I didn't have any other options. I had to be at my dad’s business. My choices ran out when Aunt Josie shared how my dad did it.

  How he became a successful pacifist cannibal.

  I wouldn't be going to visit Aunt Josie anymore.

  Senior year I had a girlfriend. Or, actually I had a girl I met online. We met up a couple times. I think I lost my virginity.

  No, let's be honest, I lost my virginity. I’m ashamed because I lost it to someone I killed and then ate.

  Something I should be ashamed of, but in a small town, who knows when you're supposed to do it. I was just excited a gorgeous girl looked at me more than once. I was even more ecstatic when I was allowed to touch her anywhere I wanted.

  I didn't have a lot of friends. But I tried to make sure I was charming. Charming Cooper. Charming Prince Cooper. They always had comments about me.

  The names. So annoying. But my girlfriend, her name was Beth, or something. She would be crowned as my first princess victim. Mine.

  My throat still gets tight today when I think about her.