The New Flesh

A deer lifts its head…factories loom over the treetops, spewing gallons of black smoke into the sky…birds fall en masse…corpses line the highways…the deer falls dead, its stomach bloats, pops…a chemical spill of intestines and maggots and blood.

A sudden explosion…all over the world smoke stacks sprout from the soil…they grow and swell like time-lapse mushrooms.

Septic tanks erupt…shit rain…dysentery…A vile black cloud stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. A man in military garb stands over a rotten moose carcass.

“This isn’t your father’s pollution,” he says as he runs a steel-toed work boot through a mass of putrescence.

Fish crawl from the black oceans trailing lungs…a new evolution…miasmas of gore…a man squats in the jungle shitting out a miles-long tapeworm…extreme chaos as Nuclear Reactors grow from the dirt, reaching for the sky like concrete tree trunks…chemical gardens filled to the brim with toxic death.

Some of this is unnecessary…we call it “setting the scene”. The viewer is made to feel as if all of this is in some way their fault.

Maggots make short work of our deer…face and personality are eaten away…an elongated skull is revealed to be the final product. A smoke stack belches a toxic plume of purple-grey smoke…a cloud is ripped to shreds…blood rains down…people race from vehicles to fast-food chains holding red soaked newspapers over their heads. “What’s black-and-white-and-red all over?”

Two nuns in a chainsaw fight.

A dirty Jesus character with mud-caked beard slumps under the heaviness of a shovel-load of dirt and debris…slow pan…pull back…the world comes into view…bodies being thrown into mass graves…high-definition bead of sweat rolls down an emaciated cheek…maggots pouring from rotten wounds and ribcages. Now the camera is falling down the mouth of a fathomless cavern…hundreds of broken bodies slumped under shovels.

Dirty Jesus looks off camera. A deer is grazing atop a mountain of garbage.

Fade to black.

"Final Scene Before End Credits"

Copyright: © 2011 Dustin Reade

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Dustin Reade has brown hair and a Ringleader mustache. He has written and sold many stories for several magazines and anthologies. He still believes in Bigfoot.