I blame Barbra.
We never would have been in the damn cemetery if it wasn’t for her. Mother insisted we put flowers on our father’s grave, even though we did it every year. It seemed like a waste of good money, if you asked me, not to mention the three-hour drive all the way out to the middle of nowhere. The dead knew no better. I was content just to tell the old lady that we’d done it and stay home that day. She never left her house in Pittsburg anyway, and would have never known. But Barbra insisted, and you can see what that got us.
She was always trying to do good, my sister. Unlike me, she didn’t think it was some kind of weakness to give everyone what they wanted. Even after I stopped going to church, she wouldn’t let up on me. Like she thought I was letting God down if I didn’t go sit in some stuffy building for a few hours every week. It’s hard to say who was right, and I guess it probably doesn’t matter now anyway.
At least the drive out there was decent. There was a storm coming, knocking the radio stations out, and the sky was rumbling off in the distance. But it all held together until we made it to the countryside. Barbra was in a good mood and we didn’t bicker any more than usual. She didn’t need to argue, of course, because she’d already gotten her way. I can admit it now, but that one thing always really bothered me about her.
Sometimes I wished something really bad would happen to her.
*
Mama said they weren’t monsters.
People just wanted things to be the same for everybody, she said, and that’s why everybody was angry. Daddy told her to shut up, like he always did. He said he was tired of hearing about the damn hippies, and, besides, this wasn’t that anyway. Daddy said this was something else. He said something was going seriously wrong.
That’s why we were in the car. We were gonna stay in a motel that night, and then we were going to somewhere in New York. Daddy knew a guy there who had one of those bomb shelters. It was a place you could go when things got really bad, he said. I asked if somebody was gonna drop a bomb on us, but Mama said no. Daddy was just really worried, she said, and he wanted to do what was best.
But I saw the look on his face, and he still looked mad to me.
I didn’t want to tell him how bad I missed my teddy bear. It was all of a sudden when we left home, so I wasn’t able to find him. Mama said don’t worry, because we’d be going back soon. But I still wanted to cry when I thought of him out there all alone. So I was just looking out the window, watching the houses and then the fields go by, while Mama and Daddy argued.
When I saw those people attacking those other people, it looked like they were biting them. But Mama said there wasn’t any monsters, and Daddy didn’t want to hear about no hippies, so I just didn’t say anything about that either.
*
I probably shouldn’t have given Barbra such a hard time, but she had to bring up church again. Yeah, we used to go when we were kids, but we didn’t have a choice then. Since I’d been away to college, I started thinking differently about a lot of things. Going to church was a waste of time, kind of like putting flowers on the grave of someone who’d been dead for over ten years. Once you were dead, you were just gone, and that’s all there was to it. The rest of this was just about trying to make ourselves feel better.
But Barb was a good person, much better than me. If there was even the slightest chance that somebody might go on, or be looking down from somewhere above . . . well, she didn’t want their feelings to be hurt. Me, I guess I didn’t want hers to be hurt, so that’s why I still went along with her. But she didn’t have to start holy rolling right there in the cemetery.
“Come on, now,” I said, “Prayin’s for church.”
“I haven’t seen you in church lately, Johnny . . .”
I reminded her about the time I jumped out and scared her, just over the hill, so many years ago. Grandpa shook his fist at me and told me I was going to hell. It was a joke to me, but Barbra was really scared. At first I thought it was the graveyard that scared her, or Grandpas talk of hell, but then I figured out that it was the dead. My sister was afraid of the dead. Apparently, she still was . . . so, to get her back for all that church stuff, I let her have it.
“They’re coming to get you, Barbra,” I said, in my creepiest voice.
She told me to knock it off, told me I was ignorant, but naturally I kept at it. There was an old man lurking toward the far end of the cemetery, probably one of the groundskeepers. I’d seen him almost as soon as we arrived, and he had slowly started getting closer. He was moving our way ever more rapidly, so I said, “Here comes one of them now . . .”
Of course, I was just fooling around. But, as it turned out, he was one of them.
*
Daddy said he should just plow through them. But Mama, she grabbed his arm and said they were people, like us. He raised his hand like he was gonna hit her, but he didn’t. He stopped the car instead. But when he stopped the car, they started climbing all over it.
They were scratching and biting at the windows, like it was really us they wanted to get to. Like those people I saw in the field. I started crying now, I couldn’t help it. Mama screamed and Daddy started cursing. He couldn’t get the car to back up and he said it was dead . . .
I thought the people looked dead too.
There was blood on some of them, on their faces, and one of them didn’t have any clothes. Another one didn’t have any skin. But the way they looked at us, it was like that time when the Roberts dog got sick and was biting all those kids. They said that if you looked in his eyes he didn’t look like the same dog. Well, these people . . . they didn’t look like people in the eyes anymore.
Then they flipped the car over.
Everything went upside down. Mama was crying and then screaming and Daddy was yelling and those people were growling like they were angrier or hungrier than they’d ever been. There was broken glass and hands were reaching into the car, even when the glass was sticking in them. Mama was saying my name, Karen, Karen, and then Harry, get her, get her out of there, and Daddy was climbing back into the car.
Hands and arms were coming in through the window. There were smaller arms, then a face, and it was a little girl. “Hey”, I said, and I wasn’t so scared for a minute. “Hey, what’s your name? I’m Karen . . .” I reached out to her, like we could hold hands or something. Because maybe she was scared too.
But then she smiled, and she didn’t look like a little girl anymore. She just looked hungry.
That must be why she bit me . . .
*
The old man went after Barbra right away.
At first I thought he was some kind of pervert, but his hands were too close to her neck. That, and it looked like he was trying to bite her. She started hollering my name. Naturally, I went running to her defense, without even thinking about it. Had I thought about it, or known how it was all going to turn out, I would have run the other way.
But it all happened really fast.
I pushed the old man off of her and he decided that I looked like a lot more fun. We wrestled back and forth for a few minutes. He knocked me down, I knocked him down. For an old fellow, he certainly was strong, even though he looked like hell. As a matter of fact, up close he didn’t really look alive at all . . .
Then he knocked me over, slammed me right down to the ground. My head smashed into something. It was a tombstone, which is really funny, if you think about it. There was pain, for just a moment. Then everything went black.
Somewhere, Barbra was screaming. The sky was still rumbling.
I couldn’t see anything, but . . . somewhere in my brain . . . there was a sensation, like hiding in a cave, deep down in the dark. There were slithery things, things with little mouths, everywhere. They wanted to get inside of me.
And I thought, run Barbra, they really are coming to get you.
*
I wasn’t feeling so good.
It was like that one time when I got really, really sick and Mama said I had the flu. Everything was kinda far away and everybody looked like a shadow. It was like that, but it hurt more. I was itchy all over too, especially where that little girl bit me. Mama and Daddy were starting to look like shadows now, and they smelled funny.
They smelled like meat.
All I wanted to do was sleep, but they kept making me move. Mama was carrying me, and then Daddy was, and we were running in a field. I remembered those people I saw in a field, biting those other people. I tried to tell Daddy about them now, but nobody was listening. It was like they couldn’t even hear me.
Then we were in a house, but it wasn’t our house. I wondered if we were in New York. Maybe Mama lied, and they really did drop bombs on us.
There sure was a lot of noise . . .
And those shadows had faces now.
*
It was like going to sleep and waking up in a strange place. Somewhere between here and there. Everything was kind of numb at first. It was like alcohol or a drug that pushes the pain away. I didn’t feel the air on my skin, nor the rain on my face. I sat up from where I had been knocked down, looking out across the cemetery grounds. There was no one here but the dead. I looked at the blood and hair on the edge of the tombstone, felt for the dent in my skull.
Wow, that was pretty bad . . but I just didn’t feel it.
Barbra, where was Barbra?
I sat there a while longer, until I forgot about her. Then I pushed myself back up to my feet. Standing still was difficult, so I wobbled back and forth like I was drunk. That seemed to help a little. Now, what was I . . .
Barbra. That was it.
Somewhere, Barbra needed my help.
So I started moving, staggering really. It was kind of miraculous that I could walk at all, with that hole in my head. Maybe that was why I couldn’t figure out what to do. I wasn’t even sure how I had gotten here, or where I was supposed to be. I slapped at the pockets of my pants. Felt the car keys. Thought about Barbra again.
Something crashed in the distance, exploded maybe.
I felt a vibration, like something thrumming. It was coming up from the ground. My sister, the keys, kind of scattered in my brain. This feeling from the ground, it was pulling at me and making me less numb.
Making me hungry . . .
As I lurched from the graveyard, I looked down at the flowers I had stomped on, wondering what they were supposed to mean.
*
Mama and Daddy were hiding in the dark with me. Mama talked to me sweetly, telling me everything would be okay. Daddy was angry and kept swearing at her, but he looked at me worried too. He kept saying that we would be safe down here. Safe, but I didn’t know where we were.
The shadows kept coming and going. There were more faces in them, some that looked like people and some that didn’t. There was a girl who talked to me nice, like Mama. She was with me for a while until Mama came back.
There was another man too. I heard Daddy yelling at him from somewhere above. Then Daddy was closer, arguing with Mama again. He used the n-word and a bunch of other words that Mama said were bad. He was always angry, but I never heard him as angry as he was then. I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to worry so much.
What I wanted most, though, was to sleep.
I wanted to sleep even more than I wanted my teddy bear, or Mama to hug me, or food. I just wanted to sleep, but the shadows wouldn’t let me.
*
I followed the humming, thrumming more than I followed anything. The sun had gone down, there were scents on the wind . . . but it was this that pulled me. Silent and invisible, coming up from the ground. Like the pulse of the earth itself, or something else that was speaking through it.
Across the cemetery, through brambles and woods.
Into a clearing, where a fire blazed outside of a farmhouse.
That’s when I saw them. Coming from here and there . . . stumbling from between the trees, dragging themselves across the field. Drawn not to the fire, but to what was burning inside of it. To the charred pieces and chunks they snatched from the flames and dragged back into the dark. Glistening ropes of intestine, haphazard shards of meat. Shoving parts both raw and cooked into their gaping mouths.
A shirtless man gnawing on a ragged liver, a nun chewing the gristle from a femur.
They came from everywhere, but they were all the same. They were the same and I knew that I was like them.
It was this that was humming, it was them . . .
Like a single voice with many parts. It was only saying one thing, and it was speaking inside of me too, though I could give it no words.
But what it said was hunger.
*
When I woke up, Daddy was with me.
He wasn’t yelling anymore and he wasn’t angry. Something had happened upstairs, and he was hurt. He came over and put his hand on me. He looked very sad, and I had never heard him be so quiet. Then he laid down on the ground and stopped moving.
I wanted to sleep too, but I was hungry.
I had never been so hungry before.
So I climbed down off the table and laid down next to Daddy. It was nice that he wasn’t yelling and he wasn’t angry. I wished he would be like this more. Mama said he loved us but he didn’t know how to give that love.
But I knew a way he could give me love.
Because Daddy had never smelled so good before . . .
*
The humming, thrumming didn’t make a sound, but it vibrated through me from my head to my feet. It got louder inside as I got closer to them. Louder, and other thoughts were less. Closer, and the hunger was more. I looked at a woman near a tree, eating bugs, then at a man sitting on the ground with blood on his face. They made sounds, but the sounds meant nothing to them or to me.
There was just the humming, thrumming. And the hunger.
All of it, louder and louder, the closer we all got. Bumping and brushing against each other, humming louder, but it wasn’t us we wanted. Thrumming faster as we pushed in together, pushing past the dying fire, toward the farmhouse. Humming, thrumming in unison now, one need becoming many different voices.
The wood and the glass, just barriers to overcome. A shell to protect the meat inside, so we pushed and pressed and moaned and grabbed . . .
For a moment, a thought. Not quite an emotion. I see what we want, what we are trying to get to, and it has a face. That face has a name and it comes to me. Barbra, Barbra . . .
But there’s this humming, thrumming hunger . . .
*
I was eating Daddy’s insides when Mama came back.
She shook her head and said, no, baby, no. She looked so sad, like how I felt when I thought about my teddy bear. But she smelled even better than Daddy did. I dropped the piece of him and held out my arms. I was too big to be picked up like a baby anymore, but sometimes I still wished I could be.
Mama was crying. She was laying down on the ground, and I knew she would be my Mama forever. I grabbed the pointed thing I saw hanging on the wall, I think they called it a trowel. Then I turned back to Mama, my sweet Mama . . .
I knew her insides would be the sweetest of all.
*
Her name was Barbra, she was my sister.
That meant something and I tried to think about it. The humming and thrumming was so loud now, even louder than our wordless moans and groans. Maybe if we satisfied the hunger, the humming thrumming would stop too. So we tore at the wood and the glass, trying to get to the meat.
She was Barbra, she was my sister. I saw her clearly now and she saw me. She said my name, the last time that I would ever hear it. For a moment, I saw things that weren’t in front of me, what the living call memories. I saw our mother and father and I saw us both as children playing in the cemetery, jumping out at my sister to scare her. They’re coming to get you, Barbra. Then I saw her kneeling, crying, praying over a grave . . .
And she was good, she was always so good.
Even as we broke apart the wood and shattered the glass, dragging her outside with the rest of us, I was thinking about it. She was good, Barbra was good. Then, as I reached into her, brought her warm and slippery sweetness into my mouth . . . while she screamed and wriggled away the last moments of her life . . . our tongues swiped at her, our teeth ripped into her . . . and the thought came one more time . . .
Barbra was good.
*
Feeling much better, I climbed up from the cellar.
The man Daddy fought with tried to fight with me too. There were people chasing him into the house and down the hall. They looked like the people from the field. He pushed me and went into the cellar, shutting the door behind him. That wasn’t a very good way to treat a little girl. Maybe Mama was wrong and there really were monsters in the world.
But the people weren’t bothering me at all, not like before.
I stayed with them for a while, hoping to see Mama again, maybe even Daddy. But most of them got tired scratching at the cellar door. They just made a lot of noise and walked around, and I got tired of waiting. There was something like a wasp in my head, buzzing and humming. I wished it would stop.
Men came in the morning and they had guns. They were hollering and laughing. They shot the people and then burned them in the field. I sat by a tree and watched them for a long time. Somebody said something about everyone being safe now, and then they put more people on the fire. When the man came back out of the cellar, they shot him too.
One of them almost shot me, but then he put his gun down.
Get the hell outta here little girl, he said. It’s not safe here.
So I started walking back home. I didn’t know exactly where it was, but I knew the fields and the houses that we passed in the car last night. I wished Mama was here with me. But I was kinda glad Daddy wasn’t, because I really missed my teddy bear.
Maybe I could find him, if I walked far enough.
I was getting kinda hungry again too.
– j. meredith
Read more work by John E. Meredith on Instagram and in PDI Press anthologies, NOIRLATHOTEP and AMERICAN CARNAGE.