Meat District

One of my earliest splattterpunk stories

Photo by Sebastien LE DEROUT on Unsplash

Two things before the story: first, I want to shout out Shotgun Honey’s Ron Earl Phillips and his old journal Blight Digest, the first issue of which contained the story you are about to read; second, this is a splatterpunk tale, meaning that it is rather gory, so if that’s not your bag, you might want to click away.

As always, thanks for reading. If you’re new here, you know what to do.

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MEAT DISTRICT

Stacia dropped the dusty cardboard box on the floor of her bare apartment. The words, “Meat District,” were printed in capital letters on one side. Outside her window the city rumbled and roared, a beast that never slept. She surveyed the box’s peeling strips of packing tape and collapsed corners from decades of rough handling and tried to imagine what contents were sealed within.

She knew a little, but not everything. Her grandfather had published a comic in the late 1950s. It had a limited run before being banned, and most copies were lost, except for whatever remained in the box at her feet. After the funeral she’d taken on the responsibility of archiving the works. She knew next to nothing about him, except that he’d been an outsider. Like her. Maybe in him she’d find something to which she could connect. With his passing she’d realized how disconnected she actually was. She lived alone. She worked excessively, pouring her time into blogs and local newspaper articles.

He’d been dead a month, and it’d taken her that long to work up the will to gather what few items he had. The idea of reconnecting with anyone from her family, outsider like her or not, was a daunting thought. Now, she could hardly bring herself to take inventory of his things. Tension assaulted her body as she touched the lid.

She stepped away from the box and said, “Not yet.”

She pushed it into the corner, went to the kitchen, and made dinner. She ate alone, a single candle the only light on the table. Soft jazz played through a sound system in a separate room. When she finished, she smoked out on her balcony. The city lights shined like stars in a black night sky. She shut her eyes and let her other senses overtake her. There was a powerful stink in the air tonight, like algae or sewage, and humidity hung thickly around her. She let the cigarette burn down to the filter, tossed it over the balcony and watched it fall to the sidewalk seventeen stories below before reentering the apartment.

She’d scraped together the money from her freelance work to get the apartment three years ago. It was in the city in which she’d grown up. Even though her family still lived in the city and still played a huge part in the city’s affairs, she’d never quite been able to leave, despite wanting nothing to do with them. It was as if the city, the life force that pulsed within it, pulsed within her, and if she would leave, she’d wither away to a lifeless husk.

Ignoring the pull of the box, she sat down in front of the TV and aimlessly flipped through the stations before settling on an exposé documentary on the farming industry.

Sleep claimed her and when she woke, it was into darkness.

Almost instinctually, she looked at the box. It sat beside the couch, visibly unremarkable, but the promise of mysteries within demanded reverence. She pulled it out, set it on the floor, and knelt before it.

The first issue rested on top of several others, along with photos, a plastic baggie full of old coins, and other knick knacks. Upon opening to the first page of the issue on top, near-paralyzing horror gripped her. The first panel was a full page spread of a gutted pig hanging from a meat hook. The entrails sat in a steaming red pile on the floor below and within them human body parts were stuffed inside. Hands and feet that looked as if they’d been tenderized. A severed head with its eyeballs scooped out. A shattered ribcage.

She could see why the book had been challenged in its time. For the 1950s, this was graphic, groundbreaking stuff. Despite her repulsion, she was drawn to the craftsmanship of it. The colors, the shading, and the lines were all masterful. She’d done some painting while in college, and considered herself pretty good, but her grandfather had been a twisted genius. The pages, though old, were full of vivid energy, alive in their unflinching depiction of death.

Stacia read on.

The story followed two twin brothers, both of them butchers. Tony was the successful owner of a meat packing plant. Luciano was a serial killer. Luciano would deliver the remains of his victims to Tony’s meat plant to be loaded on the truck with the fat, bones, and entrails; byproducts to be disposed of.

The candle burned down beside her as she read. At the end of the first issue, the brothers’ operation took an even more sinister turn when it was revealed where the body parts were being dumped. In the river lived something otherworldly, something that lay dormant, waiting and needing to be fed. Its hold on Tony’s mind was so strong that Tony used Luciano’s dark urges to keep the beast satisfied.

The fifth issue ended with the brothers being gunned down by police, and a prophetic message that the creature would rise one day from the bottom of the river and lay siege to the city.

Stacia closed the fifth book, feeling that she now knew something that hadn’t been meant for her to know, and couldn’t be unknown.

She’d had good reasons for running out on her family, and the story within the pages of the comic served as a less than pleasant reminder. They were filthy rich, emphasis on filthy. She’d heard her grandfather was different, but as distant as he’d been, maybe he hadn’t been immune to their inherent ugliness. The contents of the comics had a gritty realism that made her wonder just how much of it had been imagined.

She’d once heard that one of her uncles had stood trial for a series of murders. He’d been acquitted, but people had had their doubts.

And hadn’t someone in her family run a meat-packing business back in the 1940s?

Of the memories that flooded back to her, the most vivid were of waking up in the middle of the night and hearing her parents chanting bizarre words that she didn’t know and couldn’t pronounce.

All of this was so overwhelming because she’d tried so long to forget about it. To live her life as her own person. To let the past stay where it belonged, buried in the dusty catacombs of forgotten history.

Now as the memories came back, she wondered if more would come as the hours ticked by. What was her family really up to? What had her grandfather’s role in it been? What was her role in it? Her father had always told her she was special.

Stacia started to put the books back in the box, but saw below the other items was a large folder. She debated whether to look inside of it or put the books back and stuff the box far into her closet. For a reason she couldn’t explain, she felt a forceful compulsion to pull the folder out and examine its contents. She set the books aside and grabbed it out from under the other items. On the front, in large black letters: “Meat District, The Final, Unpublished Issue.”

Her teeth sunk into her lip as she held the folder in front of her. She decided that she had to know where the story went. She thought that except for the notion of the beast’s return, everything had been resolved in the fifth issue. The brothers were dead after all.

Sheer curiosity propelled her forward.

From the first page, she could see that the setting was different from before. The full-paged panel showed the city street blanketed in the gray shadows of night. The cars and clothing were modern, more up with today’s trends than those of the 1950s. She turned the page, and her breath caught in her throat.

The woman in the next panel had dark hair, worn in a loose bun that hung off the side of her head. She knelt in front of a cardboard box, her face vaguely illuminated by a single candle on the floor.

Stacia was the woman in the picture.

She stared at the artist’s rendition. It was impossible, but it was unmistakably her. The next panel showed her face bathed in white and lightning flashed outside her apartment. Her heart beat furiously in her throat as the roar of thunder almost immediately followed.

A coincidence, she thought, this has to be.

She tensed as a foot appeared in frame just behind the image of her in the bottom panel. Spatters of blood clung to the toe of the boot. In the panel after that Tony wore a bloody apron and clutched a meat mallet in his fist. His skin was gray with the sickness of death.

Stacia threw the book down, a yelp bursting from her lips. She frantically glanced behind her, but no one was there.

“Hello?” she called, feeling instantly foolish.

The apartment was silent except for the soft pattering of rain on her balcony window.

She regained control of her breath. With the pages out of her hands, rationale reasserted itself.

It left as quickly as it came when she looked down at the floor and saw a bloody footprint.

She screamed and made her way to the kitchen. Her purse was in there with her cell phone and her mace.

Luciano, the knife-wielding maniac brother, was waiting. His eyes were different than in the comic book. Now enlarged and fish-like they stared at her with predatory intent. His plump lips jutted out in a bloody pucker. More footsteps crept up behind her, sticky with blood and heavy with inevitable doom.

Stacia turned to spring away, but a blunt impact struck the back of her head and knocked her to the floor. White stars exploded in her eyes. Darkness closed in and within the darkness, crimson, blood-splattered entrails fell from the bellies of gutted pigs.

The faces of her family regarded her with newly acquired amphibious features.

The twin butchers carved.

Pages tore and bled.

Dying animals squealed, and dying humans screamed.

Stacia screamed with them.

The darkness had been there all along, in the river and in the blood.

Her blood.

And it swallowed everything.

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Lots of new subscribers recently, so welcome. And to my ride-or-dies, thanks for being here! You’re all appreciated more than you know.

If you enjoyed “Meat District,” my ode to EC Comics, Lovecraft, and OG splatterpunk like Skipp and Spector, you’ll want to check out my books. You can grab signed copies of them from my store or pick them up at the usual book places.