Fresh Roadkill

Jackie and Douglas Sloane had run the Filler Up for five or six years, although nobody quite understood how. 
The tiny gas station, poorly constructed with old, unpainted wood, was situated square in the middle of damn nowhere in rural Arizona. 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 of 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. 
If you asked one of them how they had even managed to get such a sloppy operation started out here near 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. 
One sunny mid-August day the two sat in another drunken stupor, Dougie half asleep while he listened to Jack mumble on about “some feller what did kill five gators” while they stared out at the road. A truck driver was too busy stuffing his face with a hoagie to notice a critter sprinting out from the bushes across the street from the gas station, and by a small chance of fate a rabbit and a truck collided. The two brothers hadn’t thought much of it in the moment despite how gruesome the event had ended up being. Jackie in particular 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, but less loudly, and he felt bad about it later, especially as he spent the next few hours watching it get run over by the occasional car.
The next morning, the carcass of the cottontail was on the side of the road. Douglas had been the one to bring that up, asking how it had moved to across the street, but Jackie’s explanation of some vultures tossing it around made sense enough so he said little more about it. Around midday flies had started to gather, the day old meat rotting and bubbling in the nearly hundred degree Arizona sun. It took a few hours, but soon enough the wind picked up just right and the boys smelled it, screwing their faces in utter disgust at practically the same moment.
Jackie slurred some words to his younger brother. 
“Ey, that rabbit stinks like shit. Go toss it on out further, wouldja, Dougie?”
Douglas looked hesitantly 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 after moving the thing just twenty feet or so further into the desert. 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. As he looked it in its one remaining eye, something ugly inside it shuddered his soul and he stumbled his way back to the porch.
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 even slept on the porch that night.
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, he put them on so he wouldn’t have to deal with the intense stink coming from across the road, somehow stronger than yesterday.
”Hey, ain’t you move this shit yesserday, Dougie? You bring it back jus’ ta fuck with me?”
As Jack wandered over to the body, he noticed the flies buzzing around it. He expected there to be more than there were yesterday but there wasn’t. The really unusual thing though was the way they 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.
“Where’s the eye 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 an there that was missin’ yesterday when I tossed the fucker. The other one looked at me, I know!” 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?”
”We been lookin’ at this rabbit for two days now, I know that eye were blown clean out when we watched that truck go by. How come the vultures aint eat it by this point? You know we got rabbit skulls back in the trailer, we never gotta wait this long.”
Jackie would have never admitted it, but he got goosebumps when Dougie said that. He remembered those sun-bleached bones a little ways up the road 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.
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 bother them too much.
They both slipped into a drooling slumber on the porch after the sun started going down, Dougie even somehow doing so with his eyes still open. Despite this, neither noticed the bloated vultures that crawled across the dust towards the creosotes, retching meat and viscera onto the leaves for minutes on end before trying to take off, many of them collapsing dead before they made it thirty feet.
By some chance, Douglas startled awake to the light of the full moon that evening, his glazed eyes blinking and his muscles jolting as he was stirred from a drunken dream.
Dougie soon found his nostrils 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 spilled out of his mouth onto the stoop, making the overweight Arizona hick’s vision go woozy as he raised the shotgun next to his chair at whomever might be bringing that foul smelling roadkill 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, he could see the roadkill across the street again, just where it had been the days before! His eyes watered as he squinted, but not finding anybody else around... until his unfocused pupils flitted back to the cottontail’s body. 
Douglas slowly worked himself up out of his chair, clumsily stumbling across the street as quiet as he could with shotgun in hand while Jackie snored loudly behind him. He gave the carcass a wide berth as he looked around for footprints in the pale blue moonlight, looking around the bushes and road for anything that might be out of the ordinary, finding only what rabbit prints in increasingly erratic patterns the closer one got to where Jackie had tossed the rabbit the day before. Had it even kept all its legs in the accident some days ago? Dougie furrowed his brow hard, trying to remember before a long, pained groan from nearby interrupted his sleuthing.
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 and turned his head towards the Filler Up, seeing his brother now lumbering down the porch steps. ”Jaysus, Dougie, fuck’s you doin’?!”
Despite that distraction Dougie suddenly remembered that something had definitely made a noise close to him, and swiveled his head and gun towards the roadkill pile again.
The rabbit was standing up.
The glassy eyed stare and the utter disrepair the once deceased creature was in made it clear it was not the same rabbit any more; a little extra flesh here or there, some chunks of bone probably still carried in vulture stomachs. It was poorly reconstructed, but reconstructed nonetheless. 
Before Douglas could react, there was a deafening screech that pierced the air and forced his hands to his ears and the gun out of his hands. The cottontail’s eyes rolled upwards as the pitch of the noise rose higher, the sound making Dougie’s head pound while his head visibly throbbed in agony. The smell was now enough to choke him, 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 hobbled faster to see all the commotion, flies of varying sizes bursting from the thing’s flesh and spiraling towards the heavens. 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 groped their way out of the reanimated cottontail’s maw, shoving rabbit teeth and gristle aside while forcing the suffering creature’s mouth impossibly wide.
The cottontail’s head cracked and spun towards Jack violently, revealing what looked like the 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 a sunken, wrinkled face, who smiled wide with blackened teeth as he watched Jackie begin to purge his stomach. 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. 
Category:Beings