Work Text:
Statement of Emily Myers Regarding a Meat Van That Visited Her Neighborhood in the Summer of 2013, and the Subsequent Disappearance of her Housemate Cassidy White
Statement Begins.
Okay, so I just tell my story, right? I don’t really know where to start. Well, I guess this is as good a place as any… My name is Emily Myers, as it says on your form, and I came here to talk about… A meat van that came into my neighborhood. I live in a nondescript town smack in the middle of Texas. Everything you’re thinking is probably true - Miles upon miles of sprawling suburbia across the flat, boring earth. There wasn’t much around save for a few churches and parks that could barely be called more than an empty lot. Oh, and it was hot as all hell. You could trip and fall on the asphalt and get second degree burns, they say.
There was something… odd about it, though. We were so familiar with it that it was almost a constant, but we all still knew it was odd. A filthy white van, windowless and plain save for the words “meat van” spray painted across the side in sickly dark red. Never liked that red - My housemate Cass used to joke it was blood, hah… Sorry. Cassidy White. I’m not used to calling them by their full name, it feels too… distant? Well. Anyway, the van would drive through the neighborhood, and every now and then drop off a slab of meat on people’s doorsteps. There was no consistent time - sometimes it’d be late afternoon, sometimes 1:13 in the morning. The meat was… Rancid. I mean, any meat would be after sitting out in the baking Texas sun for more than an hour, but this was different. It was sickly gray, spongy and slick, and oozed a dark yellow liquid when poked. Reeked like hell too. One thing I always thought was odd is that, although it was always very clearly meat, it didn’t seem to be any recognizable cut, or from any animal I had seen before. The shape, color, and texture was different every time, but always just as weird. It was a sickly humid Tuesday when Cass came home from work to what vaguely resembled a ribeye staining our doormat and decided we ought to figure out once and for all where it came from.
“C’mon, Em!” They bubbled up in that ever-enthusiastic voice, their brown eyes sparkling with a feverish excitement. “There’s GOT to be some messed up stuff on the other end of this. We could be the ones to finally bring back the answers!”
I wasn’t so sure. I knew they were right about it being messed up, but that wasn’t the incentive they thought it was, and I did my best to get my worries across. “You sure you’re not gonna just get us both kidnapped and made into meat?” I smiled as I said it, but hoped my genuine concern got through to them. They didn’t seem to notice or care, eyes focused rather on whatever image was playing in their mind.
“It’ll be fun! I mean, hey, we’ve been looking for things to do lately, right? Top ten bonding activities for the besties, as it were.” With that they bumped my shoulder with theirs, and I couldn’t say no to that. I couldn’t say no to that smile. I should’ve said no to that smile.
That weekend, we sat in our car, waiting anxiously for the van to appear. It took hours, but we finally saw it around 6:40 PM, casting heavy shadows in the golden light of the not quite setting sun. Cass nearly slammed on the gas as it drove by, and we must’ve tailed it for hours. Well, it felt like hours. It couldn’t have been, as I don’t recall it getting any darker until I drove home that night. Finally getting a good look at the back, we noticed a few things for the first time. For one, the van had no license plate, no way of possibly identifying it. Just another white van. And two, while the entire van was discolored, the bottom was much more heavily stained than the rest, and oozed a steady drip of that rancid yellow liquid all throughout the drive. Gross.
Finally, we arrived at its destination. A warehouse, miles away from any human life. The parking lot outside it was almost too large, filled to capacity with identical plain white vans. The building itself looked like any other warehouse - but more dingy, run-down… and covered in smears of rotten brown. The area was swimming with people in stained gray clothes pushing large piles of meat out of the building on rusty metal carts and piling it into the vans. I had frozen in fear, but they didn’t seem to notice us. I turned to Cass, and their eyes were sparkling with awe. I grabbed their hand, ready to urge them to turn away, but they turned to me, trembling with excitement.
“We’re going in.” Their voice came out as a manic hiss of a whisper.
I was in shock, frozen and at a loss for words.
“Wh- No!” I choked out. “Cass, no. This is stupid. We saw what we saw, and now we need to turn back and leave before… Before anything happens!”
But they were already stepping out of the car, eyes fixed unwaveringly on the building before us. I got up after them, of course, but my footsteps halted as they entered right through the door alongside one of the many gray-clad strangers. I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t just go in after them, but I couldn’t just leave them there either. I’m not proud of it, but I sort of just… Stood there for a while, mind dimly buzzing with futile strings of thought that I knew wouldn’t go anywhere.
Finally, I mustered up the courage to go peek through the door, to check if they were… alive, or trapped, or… I don’t know. I crept up to the building, still unnoticed by the… people around me, and edged along the wall until I reached the entrance. Even then, it took me a few more moments before I could will myself to look in.
What I saw… wasn’t possible. I don’t know how to describe it, but the single room of the warehouse was occupied solely by a vast pile of meat, easily two hundred feet long and just as wide, and towering far higher than the building’s height should allow. Every time I thought I could see the top of the mound, it only seemed to stretch higher and higher, the ceiling somehow still visible despite impossibly accommodating a pile of seemingly infinite proportions. The chunks of meat were all diseased, much like the ones we had received on our doorstep, but they seemed to be in varying stages of sickness, some corpse-gray and oozing yellow fluid while others still weakly clung on to the pink tint of flesh. And it was… I don’t know how to describe it, but it was breathing. The mass of meat faintly pulsed in a languid, uneven rhythm, juxtaposed against the skittery movements of the workers in their stained gray aprons frantically taking slabs of meat away from the edges and piling them onto carts. And right there, gazing upon it all, was Cass.
They were still. Petrified, but not with horror. What I saw in them wasn’t horror, but rather fascination. Their eyes were vast and staring, drinking in the sight of the pile in its wholeness. I called out to them, shouted “Cass, what the hell are you doing!?”, but I knew the words wouldn’t reach them. And so I stood there, frozen to the spot, as the puddle of ooze that seeped from the pile licked their feet, and the meat pile slowly grew outwards. I’m not sure if the meat was multiplying or expanding somehow, but the edges of the pile were swelling, throbbing, reaching out farther and farther by the second.
Cass’ feet were caught. For a horrible moment, they seemed to finally realize the danger they were in, shuffling and struggling to free themself from the meat swamp growing higher, up to their shins, their knees… But the tide rose too fast, and as it receded, it pulled them back with it. I remember every moment of their struggle - thrashing, choking, battling for every movement, every chance they could get to pull themself free of the flesh swamp. Its pull was stronger, though. And so the last I saw of them was a screaming mouth and an outstretched arm that soon disappeared altogether into the mountain of fleshy pulp.
I left then. It was horrible, of course, I know that. It felt so deeply wrong to leave without Cass, but I knew in my heart of hearts that at that point there was nothing I could do. Maybe they were doomed from the second they entered the warehouse. I don’t remember much about the drive home, or the rest of the day… Until early that next morning, when I received a fresh slab of meat on my doorstep.
It wasn’t like the others. It wasn’t gray, or slimy, or stinking. It looked… Healthy. Tender and red, its only smell being that of fresh blood. Ironically, that terrified me more than any of the off-meat ever did, and my heart froze in my chest as I stared down at it, unsure of what to do. I buried it. It was difficult, sure, and certainly would’ve looked weird and probably suspicious to any passerby there might’ve been, but it felt right.
And that’s it. That’s all I have to say, really. I’ve been living on my own since then. The meat still shows up, and I toss it out just as I always have. I haven’t been eating meat lately, as you can probably guess. I haven’t been eating much at all. I should feel sad, or terrified, but it’s all just numb, like everything that happened was just a strange dream, or like Cass never existed in the first place. I know it happened, but… maybe it’s better to think of it as a dream. It makes it easier to get through the days, I guess. But I get violently jarred back into reality every time a slab of meat shows up on my doorstep. I think I'll move. It'll be easier to pretend that way.
Statement ends.