by Tim Curran
Lara blinked a couple of times, then swallowed. “No, come in.”
It sounded less like a request and more like an order. Regardless, Bria obeyed. She followed Lara into the house, sitting down at the dining room table. The first thing she noticed was that there was a cup sitting there. It was half-full with coffee, a dead fly floating in it. It was exactly the sort of thing she and Lara used to joke about. Presenting a new still life by Arnold Buzzby: “Fly in Cup,” or, “Adrift in the Caffeine Sea.” This made her smile, but when she looked up, Lara’s dour face had not changed.
Bria’s smile faded fast. “Um, you’re sure this isn’t a bad time?”
Lara shook her head. “It’s fine. I’m just waiting around for Grub to wake up.” She made a sort of chortling sound that was definitely not laughter. “Seems like I’ve spent half my life waiting for him.”
“Must be hard sometimes to have a kid.”
“It can be.”
“Lara, don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look real good. You just don’t seem like yourself.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
But Bria was convinced otherwise. Lara’s face was a very unhealthy hue, so pale that a tiny freckle on her nose seemed black as ink. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bulging, the sclera a sickly yellow, the pupils dilated as if she was tripping her brains out. She either stared holes through her guest or looked around the room as if she was following the progress of something Bria could not see.
“Neighborhood’s quiet today.”
Lara licked her lips slowly, sensually. “Is it?”
“Yeah. No one anywhere.”
“Maybe you’re not looking in the right places.”
Whatever that’s supposed to mean, Bria thought.
In a nervous voice, she began talking about how quiet it was, how even the kids and lawn-worshippers were inside on such a nice day. As she did so, Lara stared off into space, absently scratching her arms. When she saw Bria watching her, she said, “Mosquitoes. They were in my room last night, biting me. I didn’t get much sleep.”
The undersides of her forearms were streaked red from her nails. There were nasty-looking welts, ragged blisters, and smears of blood.
Bria immediately thought: It’s like some kind of phobic reaction, scratching manically at things that are not there.
“I hate mosquitoes,” Lara said. “I hate things that suck your blood…”
6
Lara’s life was like being buried alive, trapped in a box while the insects crawled in, biting and chewing and eating her alive. No room to movetight, enclosed, and dark. She’d spent so many years like that, writhing and squirming in her subterranean hole, gasping for breath, the confines making her scream inside until her throat bled. The uneven palpitations of her heart were her personal dirge as she quivered and quaked, suffocating slowly and terribly. And now…now the meat had made things either better or worse.
Her head was full of buzzing flies that were feeding on her gray matter, devouring her memories and her sanity and the very glue that had held her trembling mass together all these years. At the same time, it brought a sort of clarity that scared her, for she could see the future and it was a world of decay and putrescence that smelled of damp soil and open graves. This was, she knew, the future of Birch Street: green mold and coffin drainage, skeletons pecked clean by buzzards and armies of plump white maggots raining from empty eye sockets and death-grinning mouths.
7
Lara leaned closer, her eyes glistening. There was a fine, branching tracery of purple veins or capillaries just beneath her pale skin. The effect was oddly grotesque.
“I should go,” Bria said.
Lara put a hand on her wrist. “Why? I was just going to lay down. You could lay with me.”
Bria snatched her wrist away. “No, I’ve got…got errands to run.”
“But…I wouldn’t ask anyone else. Just you.”
Before Lara could stop her—and she was certain she would have tried—Bria was out the door. She made it to the sidewalk before she paused. Oh my God, was she coming on to me? Part of her mind said, Yes, that’s exactly what she was doing, but another part was certain it was something else, something of a much darker variety.
8
“I can’t eat it,” Roger Moody said. “I just can’t.”
“Try,” Gail told him with a rising note of desperation. “Just try.”
Unlike many others in the neighborhood, they did not submit easily to the meat. Yes, they had tasted it. In fact, they had stuffed themselves with it last evening and long into the night. But that was madness, it was sheer madness. They couldn’t let it own them.
Gail had made chicken and dumplings for lunch. It had always been Roger’s favorite. It took great willpower on her part to even make it: the preparation was painful. The feel of the chicken, the smell of it in the pan overwhelmed her again and again with waves of paralyzing nausea. She got through it by sheer force of will.
And now it was done.
Now the chicken and dumplings were ladled on plates, steaming and filling the kitchen with their particular aroma.
It fucking smells horrible, Roger kept thinking. Which was true. Before the meat, he would have finished a serving of it before Gail was even through her first plate…but now, now it made his stomach drop.
Gail had some chicken and sauce on her fork. She was eyeing it suspiciously. The idea of actually putting it in her mouth had drained all the color from her face.
It’s rotten meat, that’s what it is. Fly-specked, crawling with vermin, wormy offerings of spongy flesh and carrion feverish with grave worms.
“No,” he breathed so quietly that she could not hear, while in his skull a voice cried, NO! NO! NO! I CANNOT EAT THAT! I WILL NOT EAT THAT!
“Please try it,” Gail said in a pathetic voice.
She made it, Roger thought. She put herself through the pain of making it…at least you can try it. Because if you can’t eat this, that means—
He shook his head, not really sure if it was at the idea of eating this slop or at the idea of what it might mean if he couldn’t.
He steeled himself, trying to act like a big tough man even though he was green and shriveling inside. He forked a piece of chicken and part of a dumpling, dragged them through the bile-yellow sauce. His hand trembled as he brought the fork to his mouth.
Gail watched him expectantly, great brown circles under her eyes.
Do it.
He shoved it in his mouth, chewing it, trying not to taste, but the flavor filled his mouth—corpse meat that was crawling with plump white maggots.
He spit it out.
It wasn’t a conscious decision, more of a reflexive action. It sprayed over the table and he pushed away from the hot, foul offering of filth before him. He tried to walk away from the table, but his abdomen lurched with a gag reflex, putting him right down to his knees. The gagging continued until a thin, watery vomit spattered the tile floor.
“The meat,” he panted as the gagging was replaced by a hunger that drove needles into his stomach. “Get me the meat…oh Jesus, hurry…hurry…”
9
She’s the one. She must be the one.
Ronald DeYoung watched the girl out on the sidewalk, sweat streaming down his face. He had not seen her in a long time. For a few moments he could not remember her name or its associations for him. He only knew that she made him hungry. That watching her filled his mouth with sweet saliva that ran over his lips and down his chin.
She has meat. I know she has meat. She’s hoarding it.
He raised his head and peered out through the corner of the window. Bria. Her name was Bria. That much he knew for a fact. He had seen her before, oh yes, but not in a long time. Funny how she had come back now that the meat had fallen. He did not believe this was accidental.
She stood out there, looking confused, as i
f she was lost. He knew she was taunting him just as he knew there were only two ways to deal with it: either he turned away now and shut her from his mind…or he took a more drastic form of action.
Oh, Bria, choose me. Let me be the one to sit at your right hand…
Whatever else he was going to think was lost in the haze as the hunger erupted in him again. It felt like teeth worrying his stomach lining. It put him to the floor where he was doubled over, jaws clenched, hands pressed to his belly. Another spasm of hunger swept through him and he gasped, falling back, head thunking against the wall. His teeth sank through his lower lip, his mouth a blood blossom, his eyes rolling back white in his head.
When it passed, he was laying on the floor, dizzy with the lack of meat. His eyes blank, he laid there for some time.
10
Bria did not know what to do. Whatever was going on in the neighborhood, it was affecting everyone. She was near-certain of that. No, she hadn’t gone knocking on doors to find out, but she didn’t really think she had to. She knew Birch Street. This was not Birch Street. It was the neighborhood following an invasion of body snatchers.
The question was: what could she do about it?
Lara had been her best friend in the nabe. Despite the difference in their ages, they always clicked and had from the first time they met. But whatever it was, it had her, too. Who else was there she really trusted? Maybe Mr. Bagmore or the Geroys. But she did not trust them completely. She wished Autumn Geroy was home and not flitting about Europe. She needed her right now. She needed anyone.
Again, what could she do about it? Who’d believe her? Even if the cops came over and started poking around, what would they find? At most, just a bunch of withdrawn, antisocial people, but there was no law against that and people probably acted withdrawn and antisocial around the police anyway.
How about county mental health?
And when they ask for proof, what will you offer them?
Another good question.
She could tell them how weird Alice was acting. Same for Lara. Then there was Mrs. Standish running around naked in her yard. Surely, that was still against the law. But what did it all amount to? Odd behavior, psychological aberrations. The more proof she thought she had, the less she was sure she had any at all.
“Hey, Bria. What are you up to?”
Bria nearly came out of her skin. She turned and saw Mr. Hammerberg standing there. She hadn’t been paying attention to where she was going and now she was on the sidewalk outside his house.
“Just daydreaming, I guess.”
Mr. Hammerberg managed a thin smile. “You’re confused, aren’t you?”
“Confused?”
“Yes, by the neighborhood. Something funny is going on and you know it. You and I might be the only ones who have noticed.”
Bria just stood there. Mr. Hammerberg was a weirdo. He’d been a weirdo as a teacher and no less a weirdo as a neighbor. Yet…he knew. He had picked up on it, too.
“It’s just so quiet.”
“It is. And when is this neighborhood quiet at high summer?”
Exactly! “Everyone is acting strange.”
“Yes, they are. I’ve been noticing it all day.” He looked around conspiratorially. He motioned her to follow him. “Come on. Let’s sit out back and hammer this out, see what we come up with.”
Bria did not like the idea at all, but then, it wasn’t like she was going in his house with him. They’d be outside in broad daylight. If she needed to get away, she could easily run. One mention of his dead son and that’s exactly what she was going to do.
Feeling that it was a bad idea, she followed him around back and sat in a lawn chair. He stood there watching her for a moment or two that was far too long. She was instantly brought back to tenth grade lit. This was how he would look at his students—like a boy studying a bug under a magnifying glass, a bug he was thinking of crushing.
He sat across from her, arms folded, a skeletal man with a shock of thick white hair atop his head. “So how long have you been noticing that something is off?”
Bria swallowed. “I guess since yesterday. That’s when my mom…when Alice started wigging out. She wasn’t herself.”
He nodded. “Yes, yesterday is when the change occurred.”
“What change?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
Bria just sat there. It was like there was some big practical joke going on here and she had been left out of it, left trying to guess not only its nature but its punch line.
“No, I don’t.”
He leaned back, looking secretly pleased by her ignorance, the way he used to look when he was about to launch into a lecture about Faulkner and the Southern Renaissance. “It happened yesterday, as I said. No one expected it. I don’t think they even wanted it, but it came nonetheless. It came from the sky. Its origins are unknown. It fell like manna from Heaven and we praised it.”
What the hell was he talking about?
“What? What fell?”
His smile broadened. “The meat, my dear. The meat.”
Bria just stared at him. Was he out of his fucking mind? Meat? Meat? Okay, this had to be a joke, except that he did not look like he was joking at all. In fact, he looked deadly serious.
“Meat fell from the sky?” It sounded even more preposterous when she said it out loud, like some crazy conspiracy theory she’d read about on the internet. She had the worst desire to take her phone out of her pocket and get some video of him spilling his delusions. Serious YouTube clickbait.
“Why do you look so surprised?” he asked. “Of all people, you should understand.”
“I don’t know anything about meat falling from the sky.”
“Not just any meat, dear, but the meat. The meat. It makes all the difference in the world, you see. The meat was intended for us. It wished to make us into it.”
Bria was beginning to feel more than a little nervous. The entire neighborhood was losing its grip on reality, but Mr. Hammerberg was definitely leading the pack. She needed to leave. That was the important thing. Get out of there before he began ranting and raving.
“I see,” she said. “Meat will do that.”
The sarcasm went right over Mr. Hammerberg’s head. “It’s very simple, isn’t it? When you think about it? It’s pure and unsullied, the basis of all things and the very imperative we all seem to have forgotten in our greedy, self-indulgent scramble to the top of the heap—we are meat. We are all meat. We become meat by eating meat. That is our destiny. To eat and be eaten.”
“Yes,” Bria said, nodding. “Now it all makes sense. I think I better go tell my mom so she’s not so confused. Thanks for explaining it all.”
“I’m here when you need me, dear,” he said. Then, grinning, he added, “And you will need me. Sooner or later, you’ll need me. And I’ll need you.”
“Sure.”
“When the time is right.”
Bria stepped away lightly as if it all made sense. At least until she got around front, then she ran like hell because that man was a fucking lunatic.
11
He couldn’t take it anymore. He simply couldn’t.
He was starving. Everything reminded him of the meat. Every minute without it was agony. The day was loud, the sun too bright. The slightest noise was blaring and unpleasant. It all got into his head and echoed around in his skull.
Not so long ago, he’d been trying to think of Bria’s name, but now all that was gone. He had no memory of it. There were other priorities.
He stood before the window in the living room and watched the world, thinking, always thinking of the meat. The way it felt when his jaws clamped down on it, the hot rush of salty juice over his tongue, the way it took him to places he’d never been to before.
Somewhere, in the depths of his mind, a probing and painful voice kept asking, Your name…what is your name?
He clamped his hands over
his ears so he didn’t have to listen, his own voice struggling in his throat. “I know…I know what it is.”
Then say it before it’s too late. Say it now.
“I’m…I’m Ronald…Ronald DeYoung,” he finally managed.
At first, he did not even recognize the name. It didn’t belong to him; it was someone else’s. But then, yes, he knew he was Ronald DeYoung. He had lived on Birch Street nearly twenty years. He was an insurance adjustor for Mutual. He wasn’t married…but…but he nearly had been once. Her name had been Gabby, but she left him cold because of something he had in a box. Pictures of some girls from high school. Pictures taken while they were unaware, in somewhat compromising positions.
She left you because you’re a pervert and she found out before it was too late. That’s why. And since then you’ve become—
But he didn’t care about that.
There were always voices tormenting him.
He cared only about the meat.
He knew where it was. The others had it.
They had the meat, and they were keeping it from him.
Punishing you, that’s what they’re doing, he thought then. Punishing you the way Aunt Selma punished you because she was saddled with you after your mom and dad died. She did not want you. You were born a boy and you had a thing between your legs, a bad thing that made you evil as it made all boys evil. Remember…remember when she caught you pulling on it in the bushes while you watched the little girls playing in the alley? Remember how she took you in the kitchen to be punished? How she heated that steel fork over the gas range and pressed it against your thing until you screamed? Remember the pain and the searing, the smell like burnt pork?
Yes, of course he remembered.
There were still scars on his penis. Sometimes when he got excited watching Kalen Spriks jog by, he would trace them with his thumbnail.
But the meat…think only of the meat.