26 Jun Meatfall

Part I

They said the factory smoke used to smell like bread, long before Lena Voss was old enough to remember. Now, Ashvale smelled mostly of rust, swamp water, and whatever chemical runoff trickled from the old rail yard into the river. The town hadn’t made anything in two decades, but it still bore the shape of productivity—long, sagging warehouse spines and busted conveyor belts poking through weeds. Silence reigned where sirens once signaled lunch breaks.

The highway curved past Ashvale without so much as a turnoff sign.

Lena hadn’t meant to come back. She had sworn she wouldn’t return ten years ago when she boarded a Greyhound with two duffel bags and a scholarship. But her editor had offered her a story—a local one about disappearances, a new street cult, and something about meat falling from the sky. It was too good to ignore.

That, and the email. It had arrived three days ago, unmarked and with no subject line. It contained only a blurred and grainy photograph, unmistakably of her brother. In it, Aaron, with his wiry frame and deadpan eyes, stared straight into the lens. He stood in front of what appeared to be an altar, wearing a robe stitched together from old clothes and stained bedsheets. The caption read, “He’s with the Church now. July 19th is nearly here.”

She hadn’t spoken to Aaron in four years. The last time they’d talked, he was already slipping—living out of his car, paranoid and convinced the shelters were “marking” people in their sleep. She had sent him money twice, then stopped. It always vanished, and he never answered or returned her calls.

The guilt hadn’t subsided, though. Not really.

Now she was back, windows down, pulling into town beneath an oppressive yellow sky. The air felt wrong—still and humid, as if the atmosphere itself had come to a standstill. Her tires crackled over loose gravel as she passed familiar landmarks: Tucker’s Pharmacy, closed and graffitied; the First United Church, burned out last spring; the high school, its sign missing so many letters that it had become illegible. These days, Ashvale felt more like a husk than a town.

She parked in front of the still-standing, but barely, police station. The flag outside hung limply in the dead air. Inside, she found a young deputy behind the desk, his nose deep in a crossword puzzle. He didn’t look up when she walked in.

“I’m looking for someone,” Lena said. “My brother, Aaron Voss. He’s been missing for a few weeks.”

The deputy chewed his gum thoughtfully. “Voss… You mean one of the tent crowd? The Hollows?”

“Hollows?” she replied, raising an eyebrow.

He finally looked up, squinting. “The encampment down past the rail spur. It used to be just a couple of tents. Now it’s… well, you’ll see.”

“I heard people have gone missing,” she said.

He shrugged. “People disappear all the time, especially those without an address.”

She narrowed her eyes. “And no one’s investigating?”

“Lady,” he said, “I am the investigation.”

As it turned out, the chief was on leave, and no one could reach him. Something about a fever. The hospital had been full for days. Lena didn’t push it—she didn’t trust herself not to yell. Without another word, she turned and left.

Back in her rental, she drove toward the old railyard, noticing how people stared at her car as if it didn’t belong. Most didn’t look homeless, just sunburned and vacant-eyed, as if waiting for something.

The Hollows, as it turned out, weren’t just tents. They were shrines. Dozens of makeshift shelters lined the dirt path, patched together with tarp, driftwood, and plastic. Interspersed among them were bizarre altars—bits of bone and string arranged like constellations, charred soup cans filled with congealed fat, and symbols drawn in ash and something darker. Dried, salted meat hung in garland-like strips, adorning the camp.

Behind it all, at the far edge of the treeline, loomed something taller, a structure of sorts. It was too far away to make out clearly, but even from her vantage point, Lena could tell it was grotesque, comprised of twisted beams and dangling parts.

She parked and got out, ignoring the sudden silence surrounding her. A dozen eyes tracked her movements as she approached the nearest tent.

“I’m looking for Aaron Voss,” she said aloud. “My brother. Has anyone seen him?”

A woman in her mid-forties, with a weather-worn face, stepped forward calmly. She wore a necklace made of rusted spoons and what appeared to be vertebrae.

“He walked the path,” she said. “We all did. Now he listens.”

“Listens to what?” Lena asked.

“The Deliverers.”

Before Lena could respond, a deeper, more commanding voice cut in. A man approached from between the tents, barefoot and robed in shimmering cloth.

Reverend Cale.

She recognized him instantly. Once a firebrand preacher, his fall from grace had made headlines in three counties. He had lost everything. And yet here he was, smiling as if the world made perfect sense.

“Lena!” he said warmly. “How nice to see you! Your brother told us you’d come.”

She froze. “Where is he, Cale?”

“He sees clearly now,” the Reverend replied with a grin. “The meat opened his ears.”

Instinctively, Lena took a step back, unsettled.

“We don’t worship the flesh,” Cale continued. “We revere what it reveals. The ones who sent it are not gods; they are Deliverers, and their covenant is nearly complete.”

He held up something wrapped in gauze—a sliver of meat, pink and faintly glistening in the gloom.

“Will you partake, child?” he asked.

Lena stared at it, and as she did, a slow, creeping certainty settled in: the flesh was steaming. It was still warm.

Part II

They said it started with the smell, which arrived just after dawn. It wasn’t rot, not exactly; it was something richer. Oily and copper-sweet, like overcooked bacon left too long in the sun. A scent that clung to the skin.

People stepped outside, blinking in the strange light. Dogs barked at nothing, and birds fell silent. Then it began. The first chunk struck the roof of Miller’s Auto Body with a wet thump. A man waiting for his bus stared down at his arm as a strip of raw flesh coiled around his wrist like a leech. A school janitor called 911 in tears, holding a fist-sized piece that had punched through the skylight and landed at her feet—pale and marbled, steaming faintly in the cool morning air.

By the time the first responders arrived, it was raining in earnest. Raining meat. Chunks of it, of all sizes. Most were lean and pinkish-red. Some were strips, some slabs. All of it was uncooked, glistening, and unmarked by any obvious wound or origin. Some had a translucent sheen, while others had a strange internal glint, like muscle threaded with silver wire.

It fell evenly across the town—and only there, no farther than the faded “Welcome to Ashvale” sign off Route 7—for exactly thirteen minutes. Then the sky cleared, and the meatfall stopped.

Those who hadn’t already taken shelter stood in the streets, stunned. Some wept. Others took photos. One man laughed hysterically for nearly two minutes straight before collapsing in a heap beside his bicycle.

By noon, the state police had cordoned off the area. Samples were gathered. Hazmat suits, roadblocks, quarantine orders. Lena found grainy footage from a local reporter who’d filmed a chunk landing on her windshield, spiraling end over end.

The video cut out when her car started shaking. No one knew why.

The official report—leaked weeks later—claimed the meat was “biological in origin, but genetically indeterminable.” Not bovine or swine, and certainly not human. The DNA degraded under observation, resisting sequencing as though it were rejecting Earth’s classification systems. One sample allegedly liquefied into clear jelly and then evaporated.

After three days, the government pulled out.  There were no warnings or explanations, and zero follow-up.

That’s when the stories began.

Some people claimed they saw figures in the sky, shapes hovering above the clouds during the fall. Others said the meat “twitched” when touched. That it hummed. That it whispered, if held close enough to the ear.

Most townspeople didn’t eat it—but not everyone had that luxury. Down in the Hollows, where the shelters were full and stomachs stayed empty, it didn’t take long before someone broke. A man named Bray, missing most of his teeth and half his toes, lit a fire in a trash barrel and roasted a thin strip on a broken grill grate. He ate it slowly, reverently.

He didn’t die. In fact, he said he’d never felt better. He told the others that it had healed the ache in his joints and that he could now see colors more brightly. That he’d heard a voice while chewing—soft, warm, and full of light. A voice that thanked him and promised him purpose.

By nightfall, others were following suit. They roasted, smoked, and boiled the meat in pots scavenged from the ruins. Some even ate it raw. There were no immediate side effects, only quiet moments after each bite, as if listening for something only they could hear.

And then they began to change. Not physically—at least, not yet. But something in their eyes, the way they moved, was different. A hush settled over them, and they quit begging. They stopped leaving camp and started praying—not to God, but to them. To the Deliverers.

That’s what they called the voices. They claimed they came from beyond the clouds, beyond “the veil of the ordinary.” They said the meat was a covenant offering—a token of things to come. Those who accepted the gift were now “chosen,” and it was their duty to prepare. For what, they wouldn’t say.

Only the date was mentioned, and always the same: July 19th.

Cale, once a fire-and-brimstone preacher who’d lost both his mind and his pulpit, naturally became the shepherd. He quickly adapted to the voices, claiming they had spoken to him in dreams even before the rain and that he had been prepared to receive them. He wrote sermons in charcoal on cardboard, quoting obscure scripture, and wore the meat—small dried strips sewn into his coat—like religious relics.

Those who followed him also donned these strips. Meanwhile, those who refused were marked, shunned, and excommunicated.

Lena tracked the shift in headlines and chatter like a slow, seeping infection. What began as a curiosity soon transformed into whispers of a movement. Ashvale wasn’t just cursed; it was preparing for something ominous.

She didn’t know what the meat was, where it came from, or why her brother would ever eat it, but she clearly recalled the photo. Aaron wasn’t merely standing near the altar—he was grinning ear-to-ear.

Part III

The fire crackled low in the barrel, and oily smoke curled through the still morning air. Around it, a semicircle of men stood in silence, watching the slab sizzle, hiss, and drip. They hadn’t spoken in ten minutes, not since Reverend Cale had laid the meat on the makeshift grate, still humming from whatever tune he’d been whistling when he carved it. He handled the raw flesh as if it were sacred, eyes closed and fingers trembling slightly. All the while, his mouth moved, though no one heard the words.

To Lena, watching from a nearby ridge with her telephoto lens, the ritual looked both rehearsed and improvised. There was something reverent about it, though not holy; it resembled a reenactment of a mass that they only half-remembered, guided more by feelings than by doctrine.

She clicked the shutter softly as Cale removed the slab from the fire and laid it onto a sheet of tin. The others stepped closer, kneeling one by one as he fed them.

Each man received a small piece of flesh, no bigger than a communion wafer, placed carefully in their hands, palm-up. They didn’t eat right away; instead, they listened.

Lena strained to hear, searching for any sound, but heard nothing. No wind, no birds, not a single insect. The entire scene unfolded under a blanket of impossible silence. Then the first man, whom Lena thought was named Griggs, lifted the meat to his mouth and took a bite. His body jerked once, then stilled, and his expression blanked for a moment before a wide smile slowly bloomed across his face.

The next man followed, and then the third. By the time the last had eaten, all of them wore smiles. They stood in unison, without instruction, and began to hum deep, chest-throbbing notes that rose and fell in waves. Cale stepped back and raised both arms.

“We are the path!” he declared.

“The gate opens in us!” the others answered. “We welcome the Coming!”

Lena lowered her camera. They weren’t pretending. This wasn’t a desperate game of survival masquerading as religion; they believed every word.
She turned to leave and nearly tripped when she saw the man watching her. He stood motionless, ten feet away, blending into the underbrush like an old scarecrow, his sunken cheeks and matted beard giving him a ghostly appearance. His skin, so pale it seemed powdered with ash, added to his unsettling presence.

When his eyes locked with hers—glassy and unblinking—Lena froze.

“I saw you,” he said softly. “Watching.”

“I’m just passing through,” she replied, trying to sound casual.

“You’re early,” he whispered. “But you’ll hear them, too.”

She backed away slowly, relieved when he didn’t follow.

* * * * * *

That night, Lena drove to the edge of town and parked under a broken streetlamp. She locked the doors and tried to sleep peacefully, but nightmares invaded her rest. In one dream, she stood in a field of steaming meat, the ground pulsing beneath her. Enormous, slow-moving shapes shifted just beneath the surface.

In another nightmare, Aaron knelt before her, his eyes white and his mouth filled with red silk. He tried to speak, but something writhed behind his teeth.

She woke before dawn, gagging.

The next day, she sought out an old friend who still worked at the Ashvale Gazette, Rachel Norwood. Rachel had the same tired eyes and coffee addiction. She didn’t recognize Lena at first, but after a few minutes, a mention of Aaron brought a look of recognition. Rachel sat Lena down and poured two stiff mugs.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Rachel said in a low voice.

“Because of the cult?” Lena asked.

“Because of the silence.” Rachel gestured toward the window. “This town’s been… muffled. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s as if we’re inside something’s mouth, waiting to be swallowed.”

“Have you seen the meat?” Lena inquired.

Rachel nodded. “I didn’t eat it, but my brother did. He was living on the streets and was in bad shape. One night, I found him outside my porch, sobbing. He claimed he’d seen angels. Not the kind from church—wrong ones, with too many wings and no faces. He said they revealed to him how the world really worked.” Her voice cracked. “He insisted everything here was… soil.”

“And now?” Lena pressed.

“He won’t talk. He just walks in circles, over and over.”

Lena wrote everything down. “Do you know what July 19th is?”

Rachel shook her head. “Some say it’s the Second Rain. Others believe that’s when the ‘gate’ opens. Whatever it is, the camp’s building something for it.”

“What kind of something?” Lena asked, her interest piqued.

Rachel’s voice dropped to a whisper. “They call it the Frame.”

* * * * * *

Lena left just before noon. She drove past the railyard, took a side road through the scrub pines, and parked near a drainage ditch. From there, she could barely see the edge of the quarry. Half-hidden by trees and tarps, it stood ominously before her.

The Frame was constructed from scavenged timber, lengths of rusted rebar, and what appeared to be animal ribs, all lashed together with wire. Its design defied any geometry she could name, with far too many angles and folds. Even in shadow, it shimmered faintly, as if it didn’t entirely belong to this world.

She watched as a group of men carried something wrapped in cloth, still moving, toward it on a stretcher. Just then, a voice called out from the trees behind her.

“Would you like to add your offering?”

She spun around, but no one was there. Still, a thick, metallic odor hung in the air, overwhelming her senses.

It smelled like cooked meat.

Part IV

They began with fire and song.

Every night after the first feast, a circle formed around the barrel fires. Cale led the chant, low and rhythmic, while his followers sat cross-legged on the ground, eyes closed, breathing in unison. When the time felt right—there were no clocks anymore—he would stand and begin his sermons.

He never read from Scripture. He maintained that the Bible belonged to an earlier age, a time when people still believed their maker loved them. The Deliverers, he claimed, were not gods in robes or angels with trumpets; instead, they were older than such concepts and had no need for parables or symbols. “They are the Word,” he declared, “and the meat is their gospel.”

Cale spoke in riddles. “We are the clay stretched across the eye of the Gate.” “The sky is pregnant with return.” “The marrow is memory, and memory must be consumed.” It didn’t matter whether any of it made sense; the words settled into people like seeds.

As time passed, more people came. They trickled in from the hills, the next town over, the underpasses, and forgotten bus stations. Some had seen videos online—grainy clips of Cale speaking in tongues or stills of the Frame lit up at night by strange pulsing light. Others just heard whispers. By midsummer, the camp had doubled in size, and shortly thereafter, it tripled.

The town of Ashvale watched from behind closed doors and shuttered blinds. At first, people dismissed the movement as a sideshow, a fringe group of unstable drifters searching for meaning. However, as July wore on, the boundaries between the cult and the town began to blur. The pastor at Ashvale Baptist disappeared, a beloved schoolteacher stopped coming to work, and the pharmacist boarded up his store from the inside. He was last seen walking barefoot down the train tracks at midnight, whispering, “All flesh will remember.”

The cops ceased patrolling the edge of the Hollows. The mayor stopped giving interviews, and the fires continued to burn.

Lena documented everything carefully, recording dates, sightings, names, and sermons from a distance. She maintained a growing file of converted townspeople. Her notes filled three legal pads, and she backed everything up twice a day. She slept in her car with the doors locked and a hammer under the seat.

Yet inside her, something was shifting. It started small. The persistent smell in the air—meaty and metallic—no longer made her nauseous. At night, when the chants echoed through the trees, she found herself leaning toward the sound instead of away from it. She justified her curiosity as professional interest, but a deeper part of her—the quiet part she didn’t trust—felt drawn to it.

Then she found the letter. It had been slipped under her windshield, written in careful block letters on the back of an old menu.

“Lena,
Aaron wanted you to see the Frame. I can take you there tonight. No tricks or coercion. You will understand.
Wait behind the red silo after dusk. Come alone.
—R”

She read it three times.

There were three red silos near the edge of the quarry. She chose the southernmost, parked a mile away, and walked the rest of the distance through the overgrown brush, her flashlight off. By the time she arrived, the sun was just beginning to set.

He was already there. A skinny, nervous boy, maybe sixteen, wearing a coat too large for his frame. His name was Rafe—one of the teens from the original group of runaways who had joined early. She remembered him from old police blotters.

“I can’t stay long,” he said. “If they catch me—”

“I understand,” she replied. “You said Aaron wanted me to see the Frame?”

Rafe nodded. “He’s different now, but he remembers you. He told me you’d come, that you’d still care. Most people don’t once someone’s left.”

“Left what?”

He looked up and said, “The inside of themselves.”

He led her along a narrow path that snaked behind the quarry ridge, hidden beneath fallen trees and woven brambles. When they emerged on the other side, Lena had to steady herself.

The Frame had grown. What had once been scaffolding was now something far more intricate—webbed, layered, and pulsating. Dried stretches of flesh had been lashed over rebar like canvas. Glistening threads looped through it like veins, and a dozen meat-ropes hung, swaying from its highest arch.

“It’s not finished yet,” Rafe said quietly. “It won’t be until the date.”

“July 19th,” Lena whispered.

Rafe nodded.

“What happens then?” she inquired.

He hesitated. “We don’t know, not exactly. The Deliverers told Cale it would be ‘The Arrival.’ Some believe the sky will open, while others think we’ll leave this place. But those who’ve heard the voice the longest don’t talk about it anymore.”

“Why not?” Lena asked.

“They’re afraid,” Rafe replied.

She stared at the structure. “Why are you helping me?”

Rafe’s eyes glistened. “Because I ate a piece, too. They said I’d be part of something bigger, but I don’t think they meant together.”

He pressed a wrinkled photograph into her hand. In it, years ago, she and Aaron sat on the front steps of their old house. It might have been a birthday; she held a candle, and he grinned, unaware of what was coming.

“He kept it,” Rafe said, “even after he stopped saying your name.”

They heard voices in the distance.

“I have to go,” he whispered.

“Will I see you again?” Lena asked, but he was already gone.

Lena stared at the Frame for a long time, until it began to hum—a single, low note that resonated not in her ears, but in her teeth and at the base of her skull, emanating from within her bones.

She stumbled backward, and in the silence that followed, she heard a whisper.

“You do not yet understand what you were made to hold.”

Part V

The meat began to rot, but only for the unbelievers.

That’s what they said in the Hollows. Cale called it “selective decay.” Those whose minds hadn’t opened, who hadn’t “cleared the clay of their skulls,” found their offerings spoiled. One man reportedly boiled a strip to eat in secret and woke the next day with his tongue fused to the roof of his mouth.

However, for the faithful, the flesh remained pure, dry to the touch yet still warm at its center, whispering.

That was how the next phase began. The whispers changed, growing louder and more insistent. Before, the voices had offered comfort with words of welcome and preparation, but now they gave instructions, and not to everyone—only to the “Anointed,” those who had eaten and listened long enough. Cale, of course, was first.

He stopped preaching for two days and spoke to no one, locking himself in the shipping container where he slept. He emerged only once to drag in a live goat that no one remembered seeing in town. When he finally reemerged, he wore a crown made of wire and gristle. His beard was streaked with something dark, and his right eye was clouded over. That night, he began walking barefoot through the camp, pressing strips of meat into the mouths of those who knelt.

The next morning, he spoke:

“The Deliverers have given us their shape. We are to build it. Their memory must be made visible. The Frame is only the shell; it needs the heart.”

Shortly thereafter, they began collecting bones.

The camp turned inward after that. Outsiders were no longer allowed near, and visitors who tried to approach were met with dead stares or turned away by masked figures who said nothing and carried long rods wrapped in cloth.

Lena watched from the outskirts as the Frame grew stranger and more complex. It wasn’t simply being built; it was changing. The angles shifted and the beams bent as if they had been softened or melted into new shapes. No one hammered, yet things moved and grew. More than once, structures she’d seen one night were gone the next, replaced by something entirely new.

Now there were lights deep within it—bursts of red and gold that throbbed in time with something she couldn’t feel, yet she sensed being watched.

Then came the dreams. She stopped sleeping through the night, and when she did drift off, she found herself standing at the center of the Frame, surrounded by walls of writhing muscle. When she reached out to touch them, she felt a sense of recognition, as if the meat knew her name and always had.

Sometimes, she woke to find her nails stained pink, even though her hands were clean. She told herself it was exhaustion, but she began wearing gloves, just in case.

Then came the “Missing Week,” when seven people vanished from town. Not just the homeless or the mentally ill disappeared, but also residents—workers, a firefighter, and a teenager from the high school. The local grocery clerk vanished, too. None of them had ever been involved with the cult, but all of them had attended the meatfall scene in some way; they had either stood in it, photographed it, or witnessed it.

The town panicked, but only briefly. The mayor issued a curfew and then disappeared. The remaining council members declared the investigation “under state review,” but no one came.

Now, even Lena’s phone was failing her. Entire chunks of call history vanished, and her recorder app sometimes played back things she hadn’t recorded. Once, she listened to a clip labeled “Interview: Rachel” and heard nothing but the sound of chewing.

No one answered her emails anymore. Her editor had stopped replying, leaving her with nothing but a lonely silence that echoed in her thoughts. The last text she received from anyone outside Ashvale came from her ex five days prior: “You okay? Heard something about a town going dark. You near that?” She never responded because she no longer knew what to say.

The only thing she had left was Aaron’s journal, which she found tucked inside a plastic bag beneath the floorboards of the trailer he had briefly stayed in near the quarry. His entries were frantic, written in sharp slashes of pen and pencil with many smeared. However, there was clarity in the madness.

“They lied,” one entry began. “They do not ‘give’ meat. They shed it.” Another stated, “We are not chosen. We are fed.” He wrote, “I heard the true voice under the voice. The teeth behind the song.” Then, he warned, “They are not coming. They are returning.”

One page contained only a rough, uneven diagram—a shape resembling the Frame, but mirrored. In the center, a single word was circled three times: WOMB.

Lena sat on the floor of the trailer for nearly an hour, turning that word over in her mind. The Frame wasn’t a monument or a temple; it was a vessel. The meat wasn’t a gift; it was afterbirth.

Whatever had delivered it was not finished.

Part VI

Lena had returned to Ashvale equipped with a notebook, a recorder, and a plan. Her objective was to find Aaron, document the cult, and write a story that would win awards—the kind of story that might justify everything she’d sacrificed in pursuit of headlines in towns like this.

However, that plan had faded away somewhere between the silos and the Frame.

Now, she found herself sleeping in three-hour increments, her boots still on and a switchblade tucked under her pillow. She kept her recorder off and had stopped trying to upload files days ago. The signal in town was so poor that it hardly registered. Even when it did, the few clips she managed to send were corrupted. Names seemed to rearrange themselves, and words occasionally vanished. One clip of Cale’s sermon returned to her phone completely blank—except for an endless loop of a low sound.

Her memory wasn’t much better.

She began misplacing time, experiencing gaps in her day, and awakening in unfamiliar places. Once, she opened her eyes to find herself sitting cross-legged near the quarry, just a few feet from the Frame, which loomed above her.

There were footprints in the dirt around her, and they did not belong to her alone.

And she still had no idea who had left the sliver of meat on her dashboard.

She hadn’t touched the piece, but she also hadn’t thrown it away. It now sat in a sealed mason jar wrapped in butcher paper, locked inside her glove compartment. She struggled to understand why she kept it. Perhaps it served as proof. Maybe it reminded her of what not to become. Or perhaps, in some unspoken corner of her mind, she was treating it like a keepsake—something personal.

That thought terrified her more than anything else.

The townspeople had begun to recognize her. Not by name, but by her very presence. She sensed it in the way shopkeepers paused mid-sentence as she entered. The woman behind the pharmacy counter never made eye contact, but always handed her the exact change. The old men at the diner fell silent when she walked in, as if the story they were telling could not afford to have a witness.

Even Rachel had stopped taking her calls.

Desperate, Lena tried visiting the Gazette office in person, but it was closed. There was no note on the door, and inside, darkness and the faint smell of burned ink greeted her.

She left a message on Rachel’s voicemail anyway.

“Call me. Please. Just… tell me you’re okay.”

That night, Lena dreamed of the lake.

It wasn’t real—not one she’d ever visited—but in the dream, she remembered it. Still water, thick and silver, rimmed with tall black reeds. Aaron stood silently on the far bank, wearing a softly glowing robe, and pointed toward the center of the lake.

Something was rising there, slowly and methodically, resembling a gigantic muscle-wrapped, faceless head, steaming in the night air. Around it orbited dozens of meat strips whispering her name, each one with its own voice.

She woke up crying, her hands clenched so tightly that her nails broke the skin.

That morning, the town square was empty. Stores were open, and lights shone brightly. Coffee steamed on diner counters, yet no one was inside. There were no cars on the roads and no footsteps to be heard. The only other signs of life were rows of blinking crosswalks and a single dog standing on the roof of the post office, staring straight into the sky.

Lena walked for five blocks without seeing a soul.

Then she heard a low, constant hum, like a chorus of tuning forks vibrating beneath the ground. It was the kind of sound that made her teeth itch and her stomach tighten.

She followed it and soon discovered that it led her to the church—not Ashvale Baptist, but to the one raised in its absence, in place of the one that had burned.

They had built it in less than a week, framing it from old scaffolding, tarps, bones, and melted glass. It looked as if it had been unearthed rather than constructed. The sign above the entrance read: CHURCH OF THE COMING.

People filled the church now. Not all of them had been homeless.

Lena slipped in through a side door and sat near the back. No one turned to look at her or acknowledged her presence. All eyes were fixed on the pulpit—if it could be called that. It was a platform made of welded shopping carts, flanked by floodlights and adorned with strips of cured meat fashioned into makeshift banners.

Cale stood center stage, arms outstretched.

He didn’t speak at first. Instead, he listened.

Then, slowly, he raised one hand and gestured to the ceiling.

The crowd followed his gaze and watched as a shape descended from the rafters. It was a cradle of bone and wire suspended on chains. Inside was a child—no older than ten—wrapped in linen. She remained silent, her eyes wide. Her mouth moved, but no sound emerged.

Cale leaned into the microphone and said, “Behold. She hears them.”

The crowd erupted in whispers.

Cale closed his eyes. “They have begun speaking through the young, the unformed, and the unspoiled. They are testing the vessel.”

Lena didn’t realize she had begun crying until the woman next to her reached out and gently took her hand.

“You feel it, too,” the woman said.

Lena quickly pulled away.

She fled before the offering began.

Back in her car, she didn’t start the engine. Instead, she sat there with the keys in her lap, hands trembling. Then, without thinking, she opened the glove compartment, took out the jar, and stared.

The sliver of meat inside looked different now. It had split open, and pressed against the glass… was a tooth.

Part VII

It took Lena two hours to convince herself that the tooth was real.

She tested the jar’s seal and tried to shake the meat back into a curl to hide it from sight. But every time she looked again, the tooth remained visible—small, human, and pristine. A baby molar nestled inside the split tissue as if it had always belonged there.

After wrapping the jar in two layers of flannel, she shoved it under the passenger seat and drove.

She headed out past the railyard and the gas station, where a boy in a meat-smeared apron watched her car with dead eyes. She continued along the old logging road that wound behind Ashvale’s western ridge, a place where she used to come as a teenager to scream into the woods, hoping that someone was listening.

Upon parking, she hiked a half mile up to an abandoned hunting shack, searching for solitude.

What she found was Aaron’s bag.

It sat on a rotted cot in the corner of the shack, zipped halfway open. She recognized it instantly: a military-surplus canvas duffel, stained with oil and duct-taped along one side. She had helped him patch it in their kitchen back in 2013, before he left for Spokane.

Staring at it, her hands trembled.

Inside were notebooks—dozens of them—some spiral-bound, others just stapled pages, with margins filled with looping arrows, cross-outs, and symbols she didn’t recognize. She opened the one labeled “Sequences – Bloodline Only.”

The first page read:

The Deliverers are not new.
They do not arrive; they return.
They have many names; ours is just the newest.
Others before us knew. Some served, while most were consumed.

The pages that followed were dense and erratic, featuring diagrams of human nervous systems overlaid with unfamiliar glyphs. Timelines were drawn in rough charcoal. Photos clipped from old newspapers displayed grainy black-and-white shots of smiling townsfolk standing in front of “blessings” that had fallen from the sky. One photo showed a frozen river, split down the center, with rows of teeth embedded in the ice.

He had compiled decades of incidents: weather anomalies, mass disappearances, and alleged miracles involving unnatural food sources. In each case, those who partook eventually heard voices, and nearly every community that followed those voices was erased.

These communities were wiped off the map and forgotten, except by a handful of survivors who described visions of impossible geometries, flesh that grew and retracted at will, and a being they could not name—only draw.

Aaron had drawn it, too.

Page after page depicted a figure coiled around itself, lined with thousands of eyes and mouths, most of them closed, some weeping meat. He labeled it: The Womb That Delivered Us.

Beneath it, in shaky handwriting, it read: “They do not want worship. They want compatibility.”

Lena flipped to the last notebook in the stack. Instead of a title, there was an unbroken scrawl of thoughts, a final burst of stream-of-consciousness.

She read:

“The cult calls the Frame a gateway; they’re only half right. It’s a cradle, a nest. We’re not building it for them to come through; we’re building it so it can gestate. I saw it, Lena, in the reflection of the meat. It’s already inside the Frame, growing and fed by our offerings. The voices aren’t instructions; they’re cravings. They told me July 19th is the birthday.”

She stopped reading, her ears ringing.

The sun had begun to fall behind the trees, but she hadn’t noticed. The sky had gone pale, streaked with green.

Stumbling outside and gasping, she felt a stream of cold sweat run down her spine. Then she saw it. Etched into the earth just outside the shack was the same symbol from the diagrams—a swirling spiral of teeth forming a closed loop. At its center, a small object protruded from the ground: a baby tooth, identical to the one in her jar.

Backing away, she didn’t stop moving until she was back in her car, the engine running and gravel spitting from the tires.

She drove with no plan, concerned only with putting distance between herself and what she’d witnessed.

As the town came back into view, she noticed something new—a haze above it. Not smoke or mist, but something shimmering, thin and colorless that warped the light around it. The sun above Ashvale looked as though it were being viewed through a thick pane of gelatin.

She gripped the wheel tightly.

That night, she locked herself in a motel two towns over. She didn’t turn on the TV or touch her phone. Instead, she sat on the bed with the notebooks spread around her, trying to remember when her investigation had morphed into a confession.

Because that’s how it felt now; she no longer wanted to write the story. She wanted to be heard before it was too late. She wanted someone—anyone—to believe her.

But no one would, because Ashvale was disappearing. Not in the literal sense—not yet—but in the way places die when the rest of the world quietly decides to forget them. Roads vanish from GPS, emails bounce back without reason, and towns fall between the cracks of maps that once included them.

Aaron’s final note, scrawled on the inside cover of his last book, read:

“If you’re reading this, it means you’ve begun to hear it too. That’s how it starts—not with words, but with hunger. They do not devour us. We are what they give birth to.”

Part VIII

By July 15th, Ashvale was no longer part of the world.

The radio went first. Every station—AM, FM, even NOAA—devolved into static. Then the power grid began to brown out, and streetlights flickered without pattern. Phones rebooted on their own, and when Lena tried to call Rachel again, just once, the screen displayed her contact before going dark—not off, but dark, as though the numbers behind the glass had been swallowed.

She tried to leave, driving west, past the quarry and up along the hills, aiming for the I-84 overpass. But when she passed mile marker 12, she saw the sign again, exactly where she had passed it an hour earlier.

WELCOME TO ASHVALE.

Lena turned around and drove in the opposite direction. Five minutes later, she encountered the same sign, the same bullet hole in the corner, the same spray paint tag across the bottom—MEAT BORN CLEAN.

The roads had folded. Ashvale hadn’t just been quarantined; it had been closed.

She abandoned the car and walked back into town. Everything moved more slowly—not just the people, but the air as well. The shadows shifted as if pulled by something deeper than the sun. Time felt unspooled, and a store clock ticked normally for minutes before leaping forward. A flock of crows flew in perfect circles over the courthouse, never breaking formation. No one noticed.

Or maybe no one could anymore.

Those who remained had given themselves over completely. Their skin appeared different now—thinner, almost translucent. Lena noticed veins pulsing faintly in shades of blue and violet along the forearms of those gathered near the Frame, waiting to be called. They moved in gentle, synchronized rhythms, like tides.

They no longer sang; instead, they hummed.

The Frame dominated the skyline. It had doubled in size and no longer resembled scaffolding. Now, it looked… grown. The metal had turned slick, dark, and almost wet. The meat was no longer decoration; it had spread across the beams, woven into a membrane that vibrated with each breeze.

Some claimed they saw shapes moving behind it, while others said it had begun to communicate, not with words, but through sonar-like pulses, as if counting down like a womb.

Every night, they lit fires around it and made new offerings. Each time, Lena watched from the edge of the treeline, feeling less like an observer and more like the last page of a book that no one wanted to finish.

On the morning of July 17th, she woke with a fresh set of bruises on her arms that she did not remember getting. Her clothes were damp, and the soles of her boots were covered in fine ash, even though she hadn’t been near fire.

The notebook she had fallen asleep beside was open to a page she hadn’t reached yet.

In it, Aaron had drawn a diagram of the Frame split open like a seed pod. Inside, he had written a single line:

The thing inside wants to be born, but it needs enough believers to know its own shape.

That afternoon, the rain returned.

This time, it was hair—fine, colorless strands drifting down from the overcast sky. It coated the streets, the cars, and the people. The cultists knelt and opened their mouths, letting it land on their tongues. Some wept while others whispered, “It’s knitting us together.”

Lena tried to collect a sample but found it melted on contact with her skin. It left no residue, only a brief tingling warmth and the faint sound—impossible but unmistakable—of a heartbeat.

On July 18th, Lena found Rafe again, or rather, he found her.

She had taken shelter beneath the library awning, watching people gather in a slow-moving spiral around the Frame. He sat beside her without saying a word.

When she looked over, she saw he was thinner and paler, his pupils unnaturally large and swallowing his irises.

“You shouldn’t be here tomorrow,” he said.

“I can’t leave.”

“No,” he agreed. “None of us can.”

“You’ve changed.”

He didn’t argue with her.

“Do you still hear them?”

“Not the voices. Just the one. The real one.”

He tapped his chest. “It’s inside now. That’s the final phase, when it stops whispering and starts remembering.”

“What happens when it remembers everything?”

Rafe smiled and said, “Then it’s ready.”

He pressed a photograph into her hand. It was weathered and smudged, but clear enough to show the Frame under moonlight, its structure opened wide like the petals of a flower. Standing inside, arms raised, was Cale. Behind him, visible only faintly, was a shape not entirely formed—a face without features, a body that looped around itself like a Möbius strip of tendon and tooth.

“That was last night,” Rafe said.

“It’s crowning.”

He left her there without so much as a goodbye; goodbyes were unnecessary.

The sky never fully darkened that night. Instead, it dimmed to a purplish film and glowed from behind, as though something enormous was pressing against it, waiting for a seam to split.

Lena returned to her motel and wrote a single sentence in her journal:

If I die tomorrow, I want it known: I did not believe until it believed in me.

She wrapped the meat jar in three layers of canvas and buried it behind the parking lot with the rest of Aaron’s notebooks, marking the spot with a flat stone.

Then she sat in her car and waited.

The countdown had ended, the birthday had come, and whatever waited behind the Frame was no longer asleep.

Part IX

The Frame bloomed at dawn.

Not with fanfare. Not with screams. Instead, there was silence—a total, suffocating, unnatural silence.

Birdsong stopped, and the wind ceased. Even the insects halted their endless hum. All of Ashvale stood still beneath a lavender sky that throbbed faintly with internal light, as if it had become translucent, revealing something massive pressing against the other side.

Lena stepped out of her motel room and felt the deep and low vibration beneath her feet, as if something had wrapped itself around the foundations of the world and begun to squeeze.

She didn’t walk to the Frame; she was drawn to it, just like everyone else.

People came from all directions—on foot, barefoot, and silent. Children, elders, those with torn clothes and glassy eyes converged on the quarry like veins feeding a heart.

Lena followed.

No one spoke, and no one wept. Instead, they gathered in concentric circles around the Frame, which now towered thirty to forty feet tall. The membrane covering it had turned translucent, revealing layers of writhing muscle and something darker beneath. Inside, it moved.

The Womb That Delivered Us.

No one had to say it; they all felt it.

Reverend Cale stood before the Frame, arms outstretched, his robes soaked with something that shimmered golden and red. The meat garlands draped across his chest fluttered despite the still air.

He looked out at the congregation, his eyes now devoid of whites.

“We welcome the crowning,” he proclaimed.

The crowd echoed, “We welcome the crowning.”

“The flesh is made ready.”

“The flesh is made ready.”

“The vessel remembers. The skin breaks open. The blood is a name, and the name is Coming.”

Then he turned and stepped into the Frame.

Lena’s breath caught as he did not vanish behind the curtain of tissue. Instead, he merged with it.

The moment he passed the threshold, the membrane drew back, ensuring him. He didn’t fight or cry out; he was taken into the structure like a drop absorbed into water—a ripple, and he was gone.

The Frame let out a sound that was not loud but unbearably intense, like a thousand children whispering into your ears at once.

People began to convulse; some dropped to their knees, clutching their heads, while others vomited. A few stood still, shaking, their eyes wide, bleeding softly from the nose and ears. Lena bit the inside of her cheek until blood ran down her chin to stay anchored.

Then the membrane peeled back, and something emerged. It didn’t come out all at once; it unfolded. First, a limb emerged—something like an arm, but boneless and glistening, composed of stitched-together tissue. Then the head—or what might have been a head—appeared, wide and flat, without eyes or mouth but covered in rows of subtle, throbbing indentations.
The creature dragged itself forward, not crawling but extruding and flowing through the air as if it were swimming.

Behind it came the others. They were not Deliverers—that had been a lie.

These were the offspring, each one different, each half-formed. One was nothing but a ring of hands bound by connective flesh, dragging itself in a loop. Another floated above the ground, its skin covered in twitching eyelids that never opened. They followed the First, trailing meat-slime and vocalizing in tones too deep to be heard properly; the sound was felt only in the bones.

The congregation stood in awe and rejoiced. They raised their hands and uplifted their faces. Some tore their clothes while others carved symbols into their cheeks. All chanted in unison, “We are the feeding womb. We are the echo of the birther’s cry. We are prepared.”

Then the harvest began.

It was gentle.

That was the worst part.

The creatures did not attack; they reached out and touched. One placed its limb against the chest of a woman kneeling in rapture, and she went limp, dissolving into filaments of light and tissue, pulled into the limb. Another passed through a group of men with bowed heads, and they crumpled as if their spines had unzipped. Their bodies folded inward, sucked into themselves. They were being collected.

Only the uninitiated were spared or, rather, ignored. Lena didn’t know why. She watched it all from the trees, frozen. Her feet refused to move, and her body locked in place. But her mind observed, and part of her—some distant, terrified, childlike part—understood. The meat hadn’t been food; it was memory, genetic scaffolding, and data carried across dimensional thresholds. It was a method of ensuring the environment would be compatible and preloaded with the right expectations, instincts, and pathways.

The Deliverers weren’t gods; they were terraformers. Ashvale wasn’t a town anymore; it had become a host.

The Frame split fully open. A final chorus rang out—a high, keening note that cracked the sky overhead. Through that rupture came the last of them—something bigger than the clouds and smiling without a face.

Its body was made of thought. Its flesh was not flesh. Its presence represented a reversal; everything Lena had ever known about time, place, and self was unwritten in a single moment of knowing.

Her knees gave out, and she didn’t cry or scream.

“Aaron,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

For a moment, she swore she heard his voice behind her, “I know. But we were already inside it.”

Then the world fell inward. The trees pulled themselves flat against the ground. The dirt turned to red mist. Lena felt her bones vibrate apart, molecule by molecule, until even her name seemed burdensome—something to be shed.

Then, there was darkness—not death. Instead, something worse.

Continuance.

Part X

Lena woke to silence.

She lay on her back, staring up at a sky that was black but far from empty. Behind it, shapes drifted—slow, pale figures lacking definition, like enormous seeds floating in thick oil. The stars here did not twinkle.

Sitting up slowly, she noticed she felt no pain, hunger, or cold. A wave of realization washed over her: she was no longer in Ashvale. Instead, she found herself somewhere beneath—or maybe outside—what had once been the world. The ground beneath her was not solid; it shifted gently, damp and fibrous, as if she were sitting atop a tongue the size of a field. In the distance, something enormous turned over in its sleep.

She did not move because she remembered. The Frame. The delivery. The faces folding inward. The children pulled apart. Aaron’s voice, resigned, echoed in her mind. She recalled the last image that came through—a thing too large to land, too real to bear: the smiling absence.

With great caution, Lena stood and peered into the distance. There was no horizon, only a wall of red tissue surrounding her, alive with twitching veins and embedded eyes that opened and closed in slow, unsynchronized blinks.

She began to walk. There was nowhere to escape, but she needed to find something—anything.

After an unknowable stretch of time—minutes or perhaps years—she saw him.

Aaron sat cross-legged in the center of a clearing, his back to her, a journal open on his lap as he wrote.

“Aaron,” she called.

He didn’t turn around. “I thought you’d come sooner.”

“I tried.”

“I know.”

“What is this place?” she asked.

“The placenta,” he replied softly. “We were inside it the whole time. We thought the meat came down, but it was us rising through it.”

She didn’t respond.

Finally, he glanced back at her.

His eyes now appeared dark—pupil only, devoid of iris. Yet his face retained its familiar features: tired, sharp, gentle.

“They told me you kept the meat.”

She nodded in acknowledgment.

“And you didn’t eat it.”

She admitted, “I wanted to. Some nights, I wanted to more than anything.”

“That’s why you’re still you.”

He stood up.

“Is there a way out?” she asked.

Aaron gestured upward, prompting Lena to follow his gaze. Through a translucent stretch of flesh, she could see another world above them. It was not Earth, but something like it—cities, roads, people. Faces blurred by distance.

“Not Ashvale, not yet,” she thought.

“It’s seeding,” Aaron explained. “New wombs. New meatfall. We’re just one cycle. There’ll be more.”

Her throat tightened. “Can we stop it?”

“No,” he replied. “But we can warn them.”

He placed something in her hand.

His journal. The final one.

“If you wake,” he urged, “write it down. As much as you can. Even if they call you crazy. Even if they never believe you.” He paused for a moment. “Especially then.”

The world around them quivered.

A low, wet sound echoed through the dark, like something stretching, a membrane parting, a tunnel opening.

“Go,” he insisted. “Before it closes.”

Lena stepped into the light.

* * * * * *

She woke up in a field two counties away, naked and bruised, with a journal clutched to her chest.

The next morning, a trucker found her staggering down the road, barefoot and bleeding. She didn’t speak for several days.

Ashvale had vanished. There were no records, maps, or road signs. When she told the authorities, they humored her, suggesting that she had experienced trauma and was probably delusional. However, they never found the town, the Frame, or anyone who could explain what had happened.

They ruled it an accident—a long-term psychological break—and released her after a month. Lena never went home.

Instead, she began to write. Not articles or exposés, but warnings.

She posted on fringe forums and anonymous message boards, scanning the skies for strange clouds and tracking rumors of meatfall in towns with declining populations. Sometimes, she found nothing, but other times, she saw garlands.

And always—always—she waited for July 19th.

Because she knew it would happen again.

And next time, it might not wait to be welcomed.

It might already be here.

And we might have already eaten.