I stared at the monotonous spiral of my bedroom ceiling fan, its sombre ventilation doing nothing for the uncomfortable heat that encased my skin. I could feel my wife’s breath blowing calmly against my shoulder beneath the sheets, her unfamiliar presence adding to the confusion and insomnia that clouded my mind. What was I doing back home? I should be back in the city working the pet store, not here in the suburbs.

Then it hit me. Kevin.

I sat up in a start, my eyes scanning the odd shadows cast by the few pieces of furniture. My breath stifled to catch the discernible scratch of his claws against the floorboards.

Thankfully, I was met with nothing but the banal chirping of the midnight crickets. I breathed a sigh and leaned my head against the chilled surface of the bed’s wooden headboard. Slowly, my head cleared up, vaguely piecing together the events which had taken place just 3 months ago.

-

Part 1: Skinless meat baby

My name is Daniel Ryan and I am 29 years old. I work at a Pet co. retail store located within the city of Atlanta, Georgia. As the capital and most populous city across the state, it was there in which I had least expected for something extraordinary to impact my dreary existence.

As a young boy, I had always burned a passion for nurturing animals, but my inept capabilities and ADD had forcefully removed any chance of me getting into veterinarian work. Thus, I was left with a simple, decently waged managing job at a self – funded pet store, a small concrete stand callously overlooked amongst the epic skyscrapers and vast shopping malls. It was, however, a job which enabled me to work with a variety of animals – which I guess made it a tad worthwhile.

The parcel arrived sometime in the early recesses of dawn. I opened the store at 7 and noticed it sitting at the bottom of the steps. It had no address or stamp to be found, save a large tape that read ‘Fragile, Take Care’ running along its side. I had assumed it to be the chinchilla I had ordered and took it in without question. The only thought running through my mind as I snipped away at the binders was how efficient a company had to be to deliver a 550 mile distance in a single night.

What had slumbered within this box was, unfortunately, nothing to the likes of a hairy rodent.

Skinless meat baby. That’s how I remembered it: an indistinguishable sack of blood and veins about the size of a pig’s heart. It was wrapped in a layer of pink gelatine coat and could have easily been mistaken for raw refrigerated meat if not for its squirming. I tried to observe it in closer detail, but my thoughts were interrupted by a plethora of screams emanating from all corners of the room.

Apparently, its presence had caused the animals in my store to erupt in a fearful frenzy.

The birds were cracking themselves against their cages, the dogs chewed at their bars and the cats screamed a chorus of feral indignation. Dazed and confused, I yelled and shushed vehemently in an attempt to shut them up, but my panic only seemed to feed their combined chaos. Afraid of the beasts hurting themselves, I brought the creature up into my living quarters where only Lily resided.

Lily was an old, tired finch with a single blind eye. Unlike the others, she didn’t mind the alien presence of this strange being, prompting me to set it down on the coffee table across from her.

I then took this opportunity to ascertain what I was dealing with. Had the animal breeding company make some kind of mistake? I sent them a quick email and spent the rest of the day surfing the web, searching through Atlanta’s pet facilities and a variety of wildlife reports, finally entering into the endangered and extinct lists. Was it an egg of some sort? A species of sea slug? Even the animal company had replied stating that my chinchilla order hadn’t even been fully processed yet, much less having already been delivered.

So what exactly had been left on my doorstep?

Since attempting to identify this creature has been dealt with nothing but frustration, I began considering the more impending questions.

The practical solution would be to send it away to the local pound, or maybe even some kind of animal lab. Let others with the professional capabilities deal with the strange creature.

And yet I still persevered from the idea.

Curiosity had bitten me like a burr just out of reach and had kept me from doing what had to be done. What had sealed my intentions were a set of instructions printed on a paper booklet wedged inside the open package. They were simple and easy to follow, but had some questionable aspects I chose to temporarily ignore.

The paper began, stating that the creature had to be put in a dark and wet location where there was little to no wind. So I filled a plastic bowl full of wet cotton wool, placing it inside the linen closet. I then had to apply a vitamin powder which had been included with the booklet onto the cotton, which I assumed to be some form of fertilizer, spreading it in a circle formation that ended in a cut across the middle. It reminded me of some elementary school science project where we had to nurture the growth of a seedling, aside from the fact that the thing seemed to thrive on darkness instead of sunlight.

By then, I had become obsessed with tending to the strange creature’s needs, but as I heard the ring of the counter bell echo from down the stairs, I had to leave it to its own devices for my remaining 4 hour shift.

When I had come back, the creature had already changed in both shape and colour. It had burrowed into the damp layers of cotton, its breathing now rising and falling at a slower, but deeper and more pronounced cycle. The veins have indefinitely become more popped and were convulsing horridly with every squirm the creature made. It looked like an organ pumping blood in an entity’s body, except detached from any such entity.

A shudder ran down my spine as I continued to examine its gory form, imagining where something of such nature could have possibly originated from. I then reread the instructions and pondered over step 6 – ‘Apply a few droplets of blood onto skin every 24 hours until it grows approximately a foot in length.’

Blood.

It bothered me, but not as much as the step which followed:

“Step 7 – Obtain a live animal about the size of a large rat and subdue it near the package before leaving for a few minutes.”

Step 7 was the last step in the booklet.

Holding the small needle over a candle flame, I brought it to my thumb, breathing in deeply.The sooner I got used to it, the better.

I jabbed, grimacing at the stinging pain and feeling the warmth of my palm as it ran dark rivulets of blood down onto the pores of the creature below.

I pressed a towel against the small wound and brought it to my side, freeing my view of the bloody ritual I had just set into motion.

The reaction to the warm blood was instantaneous and swift, the redness quickly infusing with the pinkish skin of the creature. The squirming had halted abruptly, and the bulging veins had begun to converge, shifting into shapes that simultaneously appeared to assimilate form before breaking away into random squiggles. It looked like a fleshy rubix cube hopelessly attempting to assemble itself into its right colours.

Then the squeal came.

A gruesome, faint noise comparable to the choking of a small animal had screeched from the bowels of the faceless thing.It raised every hair on my body and mesmerized me into a state of both inquisitional awe and creeping terror.

I had hit the goldmine. I mean think about it. How many people in the world have observed a similar spectacle? How many dedicated animal scientists would give their lives to have the privilege of witnessing such a phenomenon? I was one in a million. I was one in a billion.

I sat rooted in my crouching position, my eyes transfixed at the miracle of life that had descended upon my doorstep.