Fresh Roadkill

Jackie and Douglas Sloane had run the Filler Up for five or six years at this point, although nobody had quite understood how.

The tiny gas station, mostly poorly constructed with old, unpainted wood, was situated square in the middle of damn nowhere in rural Arizona, with a heavy emphasis on rural. The closest town was almost forty miles away and had less than 500 people, most of whom never really drove anywhere outside of town unless they had to.

The brothers had little business sense, poor work ethic, and but a single rusty gas pump to refill or maintain every couple weeks. They had taken to spending most of their days sitting out on the front stoop of their ramshackle shop with a few dirty glasses and a big old jug of homemade ‘shine that they’d learned how to make back in the days where they drifted the states more often.

Neither of them were very bright, and if you asked one of them how they had even managed to get such a sloppy operation started out here near what must have been one of the most deserted towns in America, you’d get a shrug of the shoulders and some drawl about how life “tends to work out in myseerious ways ‘n sich,” probably accompanied by the sound of tobacco-laced spit hitting old wood. The people that did frequent the shop for unusual snacks or booze (no liquor license to be seen, of course,) often assumed that the two had either stolen their money or were buying cheap stolen product with what little money they did make.

Still, they enjoyed their days out on the stoop, uneventful as they usually were. That is, until one sunny mid-August day, where they saw a rabbit get run over by an eighteen wheeler. There were a few creosote bushes strewn about near the road that the cottontails sometimes ran through, the driver had been too busy stuffing his face with a hoagie to notice the critter try to make the sprint across the street, these things happen. The two hadn’t thought much of it in the moment despite how gruesome the event had ended up being, Jackie in particular having had a whooping good laugh at watching the little beast turn into a grisly lump of unrecognizable meat and broken limbs, chunks of rabbit bone being blasted across the dusty dirt road on impact. Douglas had laughed too then, but less loudly, and he felt bad about it some time later, especially as he and his brother stared at the bits of it getting run over by the occasional other cars that drove by for the next few hours.

The next morning, the carcass of the cottontail was on the side of the road. Douglas had been the one to bring that up, how it had moved from close to the gas station to across the street on the other side, but Jackie’s explanation of a car knocking it over there with a well placed bump seemed to make sense enough, so he said little more about it. Around midday flies had started to gather around it, the day old meat starting to rot and bubble in the nearly hundred degree Arizona sun. It took a few hours after the sun came out, but soon enough the wind picked up just right and the boys could just smell it, looks of utter disgust forming on their faces at practically the same moment.

Jackie, always the more direct of the two, slurred some words half-drunkenly to his younger brother.

“Ey, that rabbit stinks like shit. Go toss it on out further, wouldja, Dougie?”

Douglas gave a hesitant look towards his older, bigger twin but soon enough gave a sigh and stood up from his comfy position on the stoop, his heavy frame lumbering back inside to get some ruddy gloves before walking across the street. He retched as his pudgy fingers sank into rotten meat, having to swallow down a mouthful of his breakfast from this morning after moving the thing just twenty feet or so further into the desert from the Filler Up. Something seemed off to him, though. He’d smelled dead rabbit before, maybe not rotten, sun-baked dead rabbit but dead rabbit nonetheless, and he couldn’t really place his finger on why he thought this one had a different smell than he expected it to... but he was far more concerned about getting the hell away from it before he lost what was in his stomach than discerning the complexities of the odors involved.

Jack had another glass of ‘shine ready for him when he settled back into his chair on the stoop and Dougie practically forgot all about the peculiarity of that awful smell, the rest of the day going by rather uneventfully. The two brothers returned to their trailer behind the gas station after a few more customers came through and the sun went down.

When they woke up the rabbit was across the street again, most of its ribcage jutting out of what remained of the half-crushed and bloodied torso.

”Aw, what in the hell...” Jackie muttered, pinching his nose with one hand as he grabbed Douglas’ gloves that had been lazily tossed on the porch the day before, holding his breath as he put them on so he wouldn’t have to deal with the intense stink coming from across the road, a fair bit stronger than the already repulsive odor they’d been hit with yesterday.

”Hey, ain’t you move this shit yesserday, Dougie? You bring it back jus’ ta fuck with me?”

As he wandered over to the body, his brother looking quite confused about the rabbit’s second relocation in just as many days, he noticed the flies buzzing around it. He should have expected there to be more than there were yesterday, but this seemed a little strange, dozens of the tiny bastards swarming the carcass and feeding from it like greedy little leeches. The really unusual thing though was the way they swarmed. Jackie stood on the roadside about five feet from the cottontail’s mangled corpse, watching as the flies riled themselves up and turned into a noisy, buzzy feeding frenzy... before all of the insects collapsed to the sand below, sitting there for a few moments before picking themselves up and starting to flit and buzz around in increasingly aggressive spirals again.

The hick, shrugging off any complex thought about this strange behavior (what was he, a fly expert?) grabbed the closest approximation of a leg that he could and reared the rabbit’s corpse over his shoulder, preparing to launch it as far as he could into the desert beyond.

”Ey, ey, Jackie, wait up with that!” Douglas had stayed back when Jack went to dispose of the roadkill, but now that he had gotten a look of it from this angle, there was something he found off about it. He wouldn’t have mentioned it, but the fact that the carcass had somehow made its way back to where it had been before was alerting even his dim intelligence that something was quite wrong here.

”Where’s that there ribs that was gone yesserday?”

Jack looked perplexed at first, but Dougie was quick to remind him.

”When the truck done hit it it knocked a lotta the bones out, there’s two ribs there that was missin’ yesterday when I tossed the fucker.” The elder of the two brothers adjusted his grip, dangling the remains of the cottontail upside down by the leg as he examined the spot Dougie was talking about. Sure enough, one of the ribs he pointed at seemed half attached again from the day before, the other rib managing to hang onto the truck-shattered body by a thin, sinewy grip.

”Yer crazy Dougie, you sure ‘bout that?” Douglas’ expression showed that he was quite sure of himself, looking almost offended that his brother would ask.

”We been lookin’ at this rabbit for two days now, I know these here bones were blown clean off when we watched that truck go by.”

Jackie would have never admitted it, but he got goosebumps when Dougie said that. He seemed to at least vaguely remember those sun-bleached bones a little ways up the road before as well. Both brothers exchanged glances with each other, and then Jackie reared his arm back again, putting extra force into his toss as he hurled the rabbit’s body as far as he could, almost clearing fifty feet as it splatted on the sand and dirt with a sloppy thud, the pungent stench the rabbit was exuding flaring up intensely as it sailed through the air before fading out to a slightly more tolerable level once more.

Jackie and Douglas spoke briefly here and there through the rest of the day about what the reason behind the rabbit’s relocation and unusual regeneration might have been. Were they both stupid enough to have been mistaken? Was somebody pranking them somehow, out here in the middle of nowhere? Was Jack pranking Dougie again like he used to when they were kids and just being a real dick about it? Neither of the brothers dwelled on the topic too long, they’d grown far too comfortable in their quiet, ramshackle little lifestyle to let something like a strange dead rabbit make them pack up and move again.

Still, Douglas couldn’t help but be wary. He tried to shake Jackie awake for help in a nighttime mission, but upon failing in that,  ended up leaving their trailer alone with his brother’s shotgun. If somebody was harassing them by making the area around the gas station smell like disgusting rotted not-rabbit, he wanted to set the record straight about leaving them alone. If it was a wild animal moving it around or something, he wanted to get rid of it. Either way, he figured he’d have the problem solved by morning, whether he had help from Jackie or not.

Dougie took his usual seat on the porch of the Filler Up, holding the double barrel in his lap while scanning the area for any potential intruders. He believed himself to be staying as alert as could be given the circumstances, but he soon found his nostrils again filling with the stench of death, the stink several times more potent and stomach churning than it had been before.

As soon as it hit his lungs Douglas could do little else but cough and retch violently, everything he’d eaten that day from the boiled hot dogs to the heavy amounts of booze spilling out of his mouth onto the stoop, making the overweight Arizona hick’s vision go woozy as he raised his gun to whomever might be bringing that foul smelling animal back. The only movement he caught, though, was the rustling of the creosote bushes, their leaves shaking like they always did when the little critters went scampering through them.

”Gohhh, smelly little bastard...” Douglas’ breathing was heavy, his mouth tasted like bad ‘shine and vomit, and his stomach throbbed again as that ghastly aroma seemed to invade every fiber of his being. He lowered the shotgun after a few long moments of hard panting and the light whooshing of the desert wind.

By that time his vision had started to slowly go back to normal after his impromptu sickness, he could see the roadkill across the street again, just where it had been the days before! His eyes watered as he squinted, trying to make anything around it out, but not finding anybody else around... until his unfocused pupils flitted back to the cottontail’s body. It had lurched. Something in the stomach of the thing had just tried to push out!

Now knowing his plan to watch for this new phenomena in their lives was the right one, Douglas slowly worked himself up out of his chair, clumsily stumbling across the street as quiet as he was able with shotgun in hand. He made sure to give the carcass a wide berth as he looked around for footprints in the pale blue moonlight, going around the bushes, looking on the road for anything on the ground that might be out of the ordinary, and finding only what looked like rabbit prints, so many of them, in increasingly erratic patterns the closer one got to where Jackie had tossed the maggot-infested mush. Had the rabbit even kept all its legs in the accident some days ago? Dougie furrowed his brow hard, trying to remember before a long, painted groan from nearby interrupted his detective work.

Turning towards the pile of roadkill some ways away, Douglas raised his gun with some measure of bravado and clumsily fired off a shot into the night, missing the mush on the dirt by a mile. He heard a loud thunk from their trailer and turned his head towards the Filler Up, at first believing himself to have shot his brother before he heard the door to their trailer slam. ”Jaysus, Dougie, fuck’s you doin’ out here this tima night?!”

That mention of what the fuck he was doing out here during his brief moment of distraction suddenly made Douglas remember that something had definitely made a noise close to him, and swiveled both his head and his gun towards the roadkill pile again.

Only this time the rabbit was standing up.

It was by no means alive, to be sure, the glassy eyed stare and the utter disrepair the once deceased creature was in made that abundantly clear, but it was at the very least moving and put back together, as if clumsily assembled from what was left of it after the eighteen wheeler had plowed the poor thing over. A little extra flesh here or there, some chunks of bone probably still carried on some cars who knows where, poorly reconstructed, but reconstructed nonetheless.

Before Douglas could react, there was a deafening screech that pierced through the air that forced his hands to his ears and the gun out of his hands. The cottontail’s eyes rolled up and upwards as the pitch of the noise grew louder, the sound making Dougie’s head pound while his head started visibly throbbing in agony. The smell was now enough to drastically interrupt his breathing from how utterly choking it was, his lungs gasping for breath before he fell to the ground in a growing puddle of his own sick.

The rabbit raised its head to the sky and began to release choked groans and gurgles as Jackie ran through the door to the Filler Up to see all the commotion. The elder brother could only watch on, his ears ringing painfully from the fading squeal as a bouquet of gnarled, shuddering yellow fingers each measuring over a foot long slowly forced their way out of the reanimated cottontail’s maw, shoving rabbit teeth and gristle out of the way while forcing the suffering creature’s mouth wide.

The cottontail’s head cracked and spun towards Jack violently, revealing what looked like a many colored eye of a goat. As the reassembled roadkill suffered a second death at the hands of this horror now festering within its stomach, the otherworldly eye became attached to the face of an old, wrinkled man, who smiled wide with blackened teeth as he watched Jackie begin to purge his stomach just as Dougie did minutes ago. Before Jack’s world faded to an ugly slop, he watched the yellowed ghoul begin to pull his head out of the cottontail’s mouth, an almost aroused, shuddery voice piercing through his shattered eardrums and right into his skull.

”Ahhh... I knew I had found the right door...”

The meaning of the words were utterly lost to him.