Fresh Meat

By G.S. Bailey

The back roads of the Mallee scrub all look alike. Brad has a tractor part to deliver and a mud map to find the place. He finds more than expected in an attractive, free-spirited hitchhiker girl and a family with a strange appetite.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G.S. Bailey
• Release date: Jul 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005348588

G.S. Bailey

Aussie author of cold case crime, romance, erotica and light horror.

Book preview

Fresh Meat

G.S. Bailey

Edited by S.D. Chambers

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real life persons or situations is coincidental and unintended by the author. The places described in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

Copyright © 2014 G.S. Bailey

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, without the written consent of the copyright holder.

At twenty-four years of age, Boy stood nearly seven foot and weighed over 300 pounds. He ate anything his mother cooked for him but found the greatest enjoyment in the flavour and texture of human flesh. He preferred female, and young. It was almost all gone, though, and he was in the back shed mincing up the last of the stocks from the freezer -- the arm of a mature man, the father of his last female. He had cut the flesh from the bone and was feeding the strips into the meat grinder Papa had bought from a catalogue with his new credit card.

Boy chuckled slowly to himself. Soon there would be another female come to stay in the caravan with the $25 a night sign painted on it. He had made the sign much brighter by adding a fresh, lime-green outline to the letters earlier that day. He figured girls liked pink and green letters and numbers, and pretty dollar signs too.

*

Isabel checked her purse: a twenty dollar note and a few coins. She looked at the lip-gloss again: two dollars fifty. Her father’s Peter Jackson cigarettes were sixteen dollars ninety-five. She grabbed a cherry-bomb lip-gloss and put it on the scratched glass counter beside the smokes. And three snakes, she said to the fat service station attendant. The big jelly snakes were fifty-five cents each.

The guy smiled. His teeth were different shades of grey, and his puffy cheeks were red with burst blood capillaries. There was a nerve or something twitching his right temple, or maybe he was about to wink, a thought that made Isabel feel a little queasy.

She grabbed her lip-gloss, snakes and her dad’s smokes, and took off out the door, leaving behind the chilly air-conditioning and feeling the heat from the concrete driveway hit her like a nuclear powered spotlight. It was early afternoon of a scorching summer day.

The tiny roadside village of Kangaroo Flat consisted of the one service station, a post office-come-general store, and a pub. There were seven houses. The highway was bitumen for 300 feet either side of town then gravel for a couple of hours east and west beyond that. It wasn’t really a gazetted highway, but the number of road-trains carting cattle in recent years had forced an upgrade in the standard of the gravel surface.

There were no tourists of any description to be found at Kangaroo Flat. The pub catered to the few people in town and those from surrounding farms. Early afternoon, it was pretty quiet. Isabel found the bar empty and just two men playing pool. She sat at the bar. The two men looked over and smiled.

How ya goin’, honey? It was the taller of the two who had spoken. He would have been around thirty. He had dark eyes and a slightly pointy nose. The shorter guy was bald, or shaved bald. He had a familiar face. He had been in town the last time Isabel was there, she decided.

Buy you a drink, love? the tall man asked amicably enough.

The barman had approached. Isabel had only a few coins left, not enough for a drink, other than ice water, which she had hoped to get for free. She considered what accepting a drink from the two men would perhaps lead to.

Could I have a glass of ice water, please? she asked the barman. He was a grey-haired