MEAT : The Definitive Uncut Edition

by Michael Bray

  “Ray.”

  Garrett blinked, and looked at Donald, who had a concerned frown etched on his tired face.

  “Are you okay, son? You seem a little… lost.”

  It was a good observation. He felt lost. His mind swam and pulled in a thousand directions at once. He couldn’t concentrate and yet he knew what he needed to say, knew he would be able to articulate it if only he could overcome his own deep-seated fear. He shook his head.

  “Sorry, I— I lost my train of thought.”

  “You were about to tell us about what you said to Nicu when he asked you what you thought he was.”

  “Yeah.” Garrett nodded. “I guess I was.”

  “Are you okay, son? We can do this later if you don’t feel up to it.”

  “No.” Garrett shook his head. “No. It has to be now, or I don’t know if I’ll ever get it out in the open.”

  Donald nodded, and not for the first time, Garrett felt the pressure and all eyes were on him, waiting for him to go on.

  “Okay. So Nicu asked me what I thought he was…”

  “Are you afraid?” Nicu asked, the left side of his mouth turned up into a cruel smile.

  He considered lying, but knew that somehow, Nicu would know.

  “Yes,” he said simply. “Yes, I’m afraid.”

  “And yet you come to me alone to discuss the possibility of release.” Nicu leaned back and smiled, breaking the mesmerizing spell of observation. “Curious. Curious indeed.”

  “Look, I’m no hero. I don’t crave the praise of these people. They’re strangers that I don’t even know. All I want is to get home to my family.”

  “So you come to plead for your own freedom?”

  “Yes— No. Look, is there no way we can resolve this situation without people dying?”

  “People die all the time, Mr. Garrett. It’s the way life is. And how lucky we are that they do, for if not, the world would be a despicable, vastly overpopulated place.”

  “Look, forgive me if I don’t quite follow what’s happening here. Frankly, I don’t care what you are but—”

  “What we are, Mr. Garrett?” Nicu said with a questioning smile.

  Garrett didn’t like that smile. There was something sinister and predatory about it.

  “I mean…I don’t know,” he mumbled, lowering his eyes to the imitation wood of Nicu’s desk.

  “I think you know well enough what we are, Mr. Garrett, even if those you keep company with do not.”

  “So tell me. Confirm it,” Garrett fired back, risking looking directly into those bottomless eyes.

  “Ah, but that would be too easy. I would like to hear it from you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you fascinate me for reasons I don’t yet understand. Now, please, indulge me.”

  Garrett hesitated, hovering on the fine line between bravery and terror. He looked Nicu in the eye and said the word that had been plaguing him for some time.

  “Vampires. I think you and the rest of the people working here are vampires.”

  It didn’t sound as ridiculous as he’d expected now that it was out in the open. In fact, if anything, it made everything feel more real. He waited for a confession, for his slender host across the desk to plead his innocence or admit his guilt. Neither of those things happened. Instead, Nicu sat back in his chair, folded his hands neatly over his chest, and smiled.

  “That is quite a leap, my friend,” Nicu said, flicking his top lip with a tongue which looked a brilliant shade of red against his pale skin.

  “I’m not your friend,” Garrett whispered.

  “No.” Nicu shrugged. “I suppose not.”

  “So you’ve heard me say it. Now I want to know if I’m right.”

  Nicu smiled, and Garrett expected to see razor-sharp teeth, and for his host to launch himself across the desk and attack, but neither happened, and Garrett let his body relax a little.

  “Ah, the vampire,” Nicu said with a sigh. “The bane of our existence, the curse that has plagued us for centuries.”

  Garrett felt his stomach drop as if it was filled with stones. He had a bizarre urge to giggle.

  “So it’s true?”

  “Actually no, Mr. Garrett, at least not in the sense that I’m sure your underdeveloped brain has already decided at least.”

  Garrett said nothing. He was watching Nicu carefully, ready to move at a split seconds notice if he needed to, even if, as he suspected, such a gesture would prove futile after what had happened to the girl who tried to escape. Nicu continued.

  “Ever since Bram Stoker penned that troublesome work of fiction, my kind has been plagued with inaccuracies. Indeed, before that even. Idle gossip and folklore, Mr. Garrett, have made the vampire into a romantic, brooding figure, a fictional thing which lives only within the darkness, a noble creature with raw sexuality with which they seduce large chested virgins. Sadly, the reality is very much different.”

  Garrett found his mind was swimming with the classic vampire references. Bela Lugosi’s count Dracula stalking around under cover of darkness in pursuit of Helen Chandler’s Mina, or of Vlad the Impaler and tales of his gruesome deeds written in history books, and even more modern versions of the myth. Wesley Snipes as the black half vampire, Blade, and those awful romanticized vamps, where the bloodsuckers sparkle under sunlight and are more interested in love triangles with werewolves than draining blood from their brooding victims. It was enough to make the mind boggle. More so because— according to Nicu— every idea Garrett thought he knew, everything he had prepared for when he came to this office was now redundant. Useless. Worth the grand sum of nothing. He felt sick and looked at Nicu through frightened eyes. Nicu smiled again, the twist of his lips both cruel and somehow elegant at the same time. He wanted to speak, but found his brain wouldn’t make the connection to his mouth, and so he looked on, waiting for his thoughts to unscramble.

  “Mr. Garrett, if it’s any consolation you are coping well. Many of your kind breakdown at this point and become gibbering, pleading shells.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  Nicu smiled and placed his long-fingered, pale hands on the desk. “Mr. Garrett, try to understand. This is by no means an isolated situation. The people you came here to bargain for, are not special. You are victims of circumstance. All over the world, there are operations much like this one, and almost always there is someone, not unlike yourself who will come forward to try and negotiate for freedom. Many are desperate, pleading beings, ones who quickly become tiresome to listen to. Others try to talk their way out, offering money or possessions, as if we couldn’t just take such things if we needed them. And then of course, occasionally there are people like you, Mr Garrett.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People who come to me with dignity, with self-respect, who listen calmly as they are told what is to become of them.”

  “We never had a chance, did we?” Garrett asked, unable to keep his voice steady.

  Nicu didn’t answer. Instead, he smiled.

  “What if I kill you?” Garrett heard himself say, unsure where the words were coming from. “What if I kill you right here, right now?”

  Nicu snorted, a thin smile spreading across his lips. “You can try, by all means, Mr Garrett. Many before you have, many after you will.”

  For a split second, Garrett thought about it. He thought about throwing himself over the desk at Nicu, then immediately decided against it. What would he do? He had no weapons, and it was obvious there was little he could do to physically harm Nicu. Worse than all of that was the image of his wife swimming into his mind, the sick feeling of how they parted, and that a stupid argument over nothing could well lead to him never seeing her again, or the birth of his child.

  He relaxed, leaning back in the chair. Nicu chuckled as if he had read Garrett’s thought process from start to finish.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Mr. Garrett! You weren’t to know escape was impossible and only we
nt by your human instincts. You made the same mistake as those who came before you. You relied on what you know, what culture, television, books, and fiction have told you. You could never have hoped to know the truth. Let me ask you this, if I may. If indeed, garlic was like poison to our kind, would we stock it in our store? If a stake through the heart would be our undoing, would we supply you with the tools to make them? No, no. What we are, what your perception of what we are and—more importantly— how to deal with us is, frankly…. laughable.”

  Nicu pursed his lips and looked at Garrett carefully, and then pointed at him with a long, bony finger.

  “I like you, Mr. Garrett. You don’t sob and cry and beg like so many before you have. If it puts your mind at ease, I can assure you what I said earlier is true. Even though we could kill everyone in this facility without effort, we will stand by our initial agreement. We do not wish to draw unnecessary attention to our operation. We only need to retain some of you in order to…restock.”

  “But blood… I mean you need to drink blood to live…” Garrett blurted before he could stop himself. Nicu shook his head slowly.

  “Folklore. Stories passed down through your human race, and like the game of Chinese whispers changed so that eventually the truth was lost. However, if you want to know what we are, in terms you can understand, then you can think of our species as a natural evolution of your own. We are stronger, faster, live longer. Impervious to disease. We are without limitations such as remorse. Conscience. We feed on humans not because we have to, but because we choose to. It is our religion. Our way of life. It is not just the drinking of the human blood, but also in the eating of the flesh. The sweet, human meat. That, Mr Garrett, is where we draw our strength. Our vitality. We are able to sustain ourselves on other foods, of course. We can, if required, survive indefinitely without feeding, but Mr. Garrett, who on earth would ever want to do such a thing? Why would we deny ourselves the right to dine on the meat of the inferior? To gorge in the hot bitter blood of those beneath us?”

  “So you’re… immortal?”

  “In terms as you would see it and compared to your lifespan, yes.”

  “But you said it was all legend. Stories.”

  “And so it was, or at least back in the dark times. Remember, Mr Garrett, they knew nothing of modern science. Our kind back then was best explained with witchcraft rather than science.”

  “Science?”

  “Of course,” Nicu said, seeming a little surprised that Garrett didn’t follow. “Evolution, Mr Garrett. Evolution is the key. Our species simply have a much longer lifespan than yours. Whereas you humans may have a life of around seventy or eighty years, the average for my kind is something nearer nine hundred. I will see my two hundred and ninth birthday later this year.”

  Nine hundred years.

  Garrett felt light headed, and was certain he was about to faint away, but somehow he regained his composure.

  “How did this happen, I mean, where did you come from?”

  Nicu smiled. “Nobody really knows, even amongst my people. It seems at some point in mankind’s past, something happened which created the first of our species, and all of my kind have grown from there. Sadly, if the first of our kind had the means to chronicle his life, then we are yet to find it. The reason for our being is still shrouded in mystery today as it always has been, and yet, here we are, living in the shadow of a species to which we are its complete superior.”

  “Why are you telling me all this? What good can it do?” Garrett asked.

  “Because I want you to understand. I want you to see that planning to fight, planning to fashion crude weapons with which to attack us is no good, and will result only in unnecessary bloodshed.”

  “What’s to say you won’t just kill us anyway?”

  Nicu sighed and shook his head. “Mr. Garrett, how many times do you need to be told? You are just a small part of something incomprehensibly large. My kind walk among yours and have infiltrated your human infrastructure from top to bottom. Almost forty percent of the planet is populated by our kind, and you humans are still oblivious. We are your friends, your enemies, your colleagues. Your wives, husbands, and lovers. We are celebrities; we are politicians. We are even world leaders. We walk beside you both by day and by night.”

  “By day?”

  Nicu grinned. “The aversion to sunlight is yet another falsehood, I’m afraid. A convenient addition to the story of our kind to put human minds at ease that their days will be safe. I actually enjoy the warmth of the sun. I own a beautiful home in Florida where I spend a lot of time when I am away from work.

  Nicu grinned even wider and lowered his voice to a whisper.

  “Believe me, Mr. Garrett. If we so desired it, we could eradicate your species from the face of this planet within a year. But we choose to live in harmony. Unlike you arrogant humans, we don’t crave war or bloodshed. We exist, instead, in peace, and— more importantly for your species—in secret. Like it or not, this is the best solution for everyone. Facilities like this one exist in order to supply my kind with their…dietary requirements and to stop the certain bloodbath that would occur if my kind had a free reign to feed as they wished.”

  “And this facility… what is it? Really?”

  “It’s exactly what it says on the door, Mr. Garrett. A supermarket. We collect and store our given quota of human flesh which we then sell to our own kind. We never stay in any one place for long. A few months at a time then we close and re open elsewhere.”

  “But surely someone would notice people going missing?”

  “People go missing all the time. Many are never found.”

  “And that’s you? Your people who are responsible?

  “Not for all of them, but I would expect many; the ones who disappear unexpectedly without a trace, those are likely down to my kind.”

  “Who keeps order? Who stops everything falling into chaos?”

  “Our kind have our own governments, our own social structures, our own rules, and moralistic guidelines. We make sure any investigations are diverted away from our facilities. Those who get too close are dealt with.”

  Garrett blinked, unable to process the information.

  Nicu chuckled. “Mr. Garrett, did you really think we stalked around in the shadows, drinking blood and snatching people from the streets? No, no. We are a business, an enterprise. And like you humans, we have an economy. A diverse mix of races that have uniquely varied personal tastes. We cater to those races. For over six hundred years, Grueber’s has been able to guarantee the freshest, best quality human flesh available. And like it or not, Mr. Garrett, some of you and those you came in here to save will be sacrificed for our cause before the doors are opened later tonight. There is nothing that can be done to change it.”

  “And what if we choose to fight?”

  Nicu grew serious, his brow furrowed.

  “It’s quite simple. If you fight, you die.”

  “What if you’re bluffing?” Garrett said, the tension in the room palpable.

  It was then Nicu’s face transformed. He grinned. His teeth were still normal; however, he appeared to have another layer of them pushing through the roof of his mouth from behind, and these ones were anything but normal. They were long and sharp. The word shark entered Garrett’s head and then wouldn’t go away as Nicu’s eyes rolled back to the whites. He was a vision of hell. He opened his mouth, and it was impossibly wide. His gullet was a deep shade of crimson as slick strands of drool hung from his chin.

  Terror.

  Garrett had always assumed he would be quick to react in a life-threatening situation. He had presumed he would be a man of action, the hero of the hour. As he sat there opposite the foul abomination that used to be Nicu, he realized it was all a lie. He was no hero. He couldn’t even bring himself to move. In fact, he could do no more than grip the armrests of the chair, as if he were holding on to his very sanity, which in a sense he was because his mind—already privy to so much data, so much
incomprehensible horror— was ready to shut down, ready to give up the fight and condemn Garrett to a future of mindlessly wandering the aisles of the market, oblivious to his horrific surroundings and festering in his own shit as he walked around, and around, and around. He could feel it coming, the numb feeling of inability to cope. As he watched Nicu, he felt the scream coming, travelling up from his stomach whilst his exhausted brain was still trying to process what was happening.

  Nicu’s mouth was still opening, that was an awful enough sight in itself, but now it was also opening sideways. Garrett had heard of snakes with jawbones that were two separate pieces, allowing it to swallow prey much larger than itself, and he thought this must be the same of Nicu and his kind. As Garrett watched, Nicu’s jaw was opening outwards, the skin of his chin pulling taut and then stretching and— yes, he could see more teeth at the bottom, twin rows at either side of his normal human ones. There would be no quelling it this time. No quenching for the guttural outburst of terror which was about to project itself, and he dimly thought if he allowed it to escape, then he would surely die. He brought his hand up to his mouth and bit down hard, hard enough to see white spots dance in front of his eyes. However, it served its purpose, and instead of a scream, he let out an anguished groan. Nicu seemed satisfied, and with agonizing leisure reverted back to his more normal self. He looked at Garrett with a teasing half-smile and leaned close. Garrett couldn’t help but flinch away.

  “I think now you understand the futility of any uprising, Mr. Garrett. Now go. Go and tell your people their fate is decided. Tell them you have until midnight to decide who will be given to us.”