Free Horror Stories: A Macabre Collection by Steve Wands

drop to the ground. The bucket wasn’t near big enough, and
according to the reaction of the bastards doing it I didn’t smell
too fresh on the inside. Am I thankful? –Yes. I’d certainly have
preferred a cleaner death, something more serene, and quick. But,
what’s done is done. I was just a bit confused as to why there was
no heavenly light shining down upon me, or why I didn’t float off
into the air—I was still here, watching them hack at my mortal
remains. Their names are fuzzy, and as I’ve told you before, they
don’t really matter, but I think the bastard that cleaved my head
was named Vic. He’d told me before that he’d eaten human flesh. He
sort of eventually became our group’s leader. He was a nice enough
guy, and if I could’ve thanked him for choosing me to be the
Thanksgiving bird, despite the fact that the bastard couldn’t do
the job swiftly, I would have. I guess he somehow convinced the
rest of the group that human meat was better than no meat. I guess
they agreed.
    They had turned pipes and branches into
skewers which they covered in my meat. I wondered if anyone would
eat my dick, and if they did I sure as shit didn’t want to watch,
but I wanted to know. I was almost all bone as they continued to
skewer large chunks from my body. The man with the cleaver started
making a stack for himself, cutting from my thighs, probably the
choicest of cuts, my legs were in great shape from all the walking
I’ve done over the years—probably the best they’d ever been in. I
used to be a couch potato with a desk job and a bad appetite, now I
was a slender stack of meat on Thanksgiving Day. Once someone had a
full skewer they walked it over to the fire. I could hear the
sizzle of my skin, but I couldn’t smell it—why I don’t know. I
watched them eating my body. I wish I could tell you it disgusted
me, but it didn’t. I didn’t care. The feral girl grabbed a skewer
of me and headed to the fire in her hunched over stagger of a
walk.
    A woman, I think her name was Emma, grabbed
the bucket that held my head. She pulled my head from the bucket by
my blood-soaked tendrils of hair and raised it to her eye level.
She looked at my face—which, to my surprise was moving its jaw and
flitting its eyes. Those were my eyes, and they were moving without
me behind them. I always thought if you removed the head from the
body there would be no coming back. I couldn’t tell if my body
still writhed, but my head sure did. It was strange, I must’ve cut
the heads off hundreds of deaders and never once did I stop to pick
up the head and say hello to it. Nor did I ever see a headless
corpse walking around. You’d figure that after so many years these
things would start to make sense, but no, they didn’t. None of it
made any damn sense. Not ever. My current situation didn’t make a
lick of sense either, but it was happening anyway, or not happening
in my case. The woman started talking to my head, but I didn’t
quite catch what she was saying. Then she walked my head over to
the fire and tossed it in. My face, my identity to the world, was
tossed like rubbish into the fire. It was one of the few things
that reminded me of who I was, the other…the other was the
photograph, which lay in a puddle of my innards and blood and torn
clothes. I walked over to it and knelt down. I tried to pick it up,
but I couldn’t. I wanted to wipe away my blood to see the faded
image of my wife, Lynne, and my son, Marley, and I couldn’t even do
that. All of this was to see them again, and what I got to see was
the butchering of my body and the feasting of my flesh. God, if
there is such a thing, had forsaken me.
    I left. I walked away and I didn’t turn back
in the slightest. I returned to the bridge and what I saw made me
laugh; the deaders were coming. They must’ve smelled my blood and
innards, and like flies to shit they came for it. There were more
than I had seen in a long time. I guess the city wasn’t as empty as
we