Not Our Better Natures

She stripped the corpses with a startling insouciance, slicing muscle from bone, sucking the skin from fingers, spitting the knuckles with a ping ping into the metal ossuary beside the massive wooden table where we hordes of ravenous ghouls sat and sated our worst and urgent hungers. I was fascinated.

Sure, she looked like the rest of us – the wild hair, the shadowed eyes and the ceaseless crunch of cadaver in disordered teeth – but she was different too. She wasn’t surrounded by scattered limbs, half eaten heads in soups of blood, heaped torsos spilling wet guts on to the table. There were no divots of flesh in her hair, or blue viscera smeared across her ill-fitting frock.  The ghoul next to her played with his feed, setting up rows of grinning jawbones decorated with severed ears. He grunted and gobs of flesh shot from his mouth, and he laughed. But she did not.

I felt embarrassed for her. She was so much neater, and quicker, than the thug beside her. She was no less rapacious, but proficient, clean almost for what we do. She did not so much devour as sup. She supped upon her victims.

Her movements were … ‘just’ was the word that came to me. There was a justice in her movements. She had the same savagery as we did, but with a necessity, a truth as much as an addiction. She was the nature of things, and I wanted her.

I moved to where she sat. ‘May I?’

She paused as she cracked a patella from a shattered knee, then shoved aside the beast next to her to make room for me to sit. I wiped a sluice of offal from the bench and sat. She cracked the joint and sucked marrow from the femur. Her cheeks twisted as she savoured the taste, and she filleted the thigh meat with a razored fingernail.

I felt ashamed next to her. I was clumsy. When I ripped a body apart limbs flailed and blood spattered my clothes and when I ate I chewed louder than I belched. But she dissected, and elicited flesh from ligament with an almost insolent ease. She licked, sucked, and chewed with closed mouth, her eyes half shut as if the drugs of death had provoked her inner senses.

I tried to copy her.  I dug a finger into a forearm, but the ulna flitted awkwardly about and I heard her chuckle.  Her hand reached over and took the limb from me. With her fingernail she scored along the length of the muscle and adroitly flipped it from the bone, then handed it to me, a neat band of blue blood flesh. Then she snapped the ulna and radius like a chicken wishing bone, and handed me one, keeping the other as payment for her assistance. She cracked its tip in her rear teeth, and with a serpentine tongue seduced the marrow from its slender cavern.

The whole task – the slit, slice and suck – could not have taken more than five seconds. I was astounded. In fact, she was butchering and consuming more flesh than any of us in the chamber, and with far less mess and commotion. I paused and stared agog at her alacrity. I was in the presence of a true master of our gruesome trade.

‘Eat up,’ she said.

I bit into a heart, its blood spilt like peach juice down my arm. She grabbed my wrist and flicked her tongue along it.  I felt needles pick up the liquor, draw the moisture from my skin. My breath quickened.

‘Sweet madness,’ she said and lifted her open mouth to the ceiling. She let fall a train of entrails which bulged in her jowls as she swilled them about her palate. Then she swallowed. When she smiled her teeth were rimmed with red. I felt faint with admiration.

She leaned in close to me. I smelled the rancid debauchery in her breath, and a thrill ran through me.

‘The dead will always come,’ she said.

I picked at something indistinct in front of me. ‘I hear talks of peace in places.’

‘In some places,’ she said. ‘In many more not,’ and she stretched a haggard arm to a fresh pile of corpses on the table.  The body she selected bobbed across the detritus left by our colleagues. She snapped it up, scored along the shoulder and, with a luscious crack, ripped off an arm. Again, the strips of meat, again the gracile tongue in the marrow.

‘We aren’t their better natures,’ she said, as a biceps slid down her gullet. ‘It’s up to us to feed the furnace.’ The elbow snap, the soft rendering of ligaments, the slicing of muscle, all in a movement that I had floundered with a moment ago.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, as the humerus clattered into the steel bin, ‘supply has reduced these last decades, which some call progress’. She sat back momentarily and sucked on a piece of intestine, a half torn pelvis in her hands. A wistful smile cracked her features. ‘I remember, we seduced them to the great killings – Hiroshima, Dresden, Nanjing, the Cultural Revolution, Cambodia, you name it. We haven’t had those for a while. But the itch demands scratching, and scratch it we will.’

She spat knuckle bones rapid fire into the ossuary. ‘Like chickens’ feet at their yum cha,’ she said, and cackled.

I gazed at the pallor of her face as she chewed another morsel torn from the cadaver in her grasp. She was wonderful. She was exhilarating.

She flashed a torrid grin and said, ‘My dream, you know, is America. 300 million people, 400 million guns and a boil that screams for lancing.’ She dug a pointed nail into an eye socket. ‘We will prise open the past, and hey ho, the conflagration will be festive.’

I watched in awe as she devoured, in rapid succession, each piece of corpse she wielded, a lioness with petty prey.  She was a machine, a monster, a great and malevolent force within our souls, determined and unconstrained.

I committed there and then to join her cause.