Curdled Cuisine: The Corpse-Eater Saga, #3

By Leod Fitz

Winter has come to Collinswood Colorado, and it's brought something terrible with it.Walter Keppler is doing his best to live as ordinary of a life as a ghoul living among humans can, but the very fact that he's alive is damaging the reputation of an elder vampire. That means that it's only a matter of time before the blood sucking monster makes another attempt on Walter's life.If that's all that was going on, it would be bad enough, but there's a serial killer in town, and a murdered vampire in the morgue, and bodies are starting to pile up. What's a ghoul to do?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leod Fitz
• Release date: May 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9798201029685

Book preview

Completed books in The Corpse-Eater Saga:

Awfully Appetizing

Bloody Banquet

Curdled Cuisine

Delectable Detritus

Chapter 1

I could hear Tricia cursing as she walked into the building.

Listening to her curse always made me smile, not because I enjoyed it when she suffered, but because when Tricia gets really mad, it’s adorable.

Mother fucking piece of gol’ durned crapola! Darn you to fuckin’ hell on a pile of shit soaked... shit soaked... buttholes, you ass-licking son of a turd muncher!

She does fine when she’s cursing casually, just throwing fuck and shit into conversations, but when the time comes to really cut loose, she sounds like she learned swearing on a very special episode of Cuddle and Friends.

She spent almost a minute stomping the snow off her boots and stripping out of her winter clothes, then I heard her stomping down the stairs, muttering poorly combined curses under her breath.

Morning, sunshine, I purred as she entered the prep room. Sleep well?

I fucking hate that car, Walter! I HATE it! It took me forever to get it started this morning! And then I almost crashed twice on the way over here because of the stupid ice on the roads, and when I tried to park? I almost slammed into the building!

Uh-huh. Did you get those snow tires we talked about?

Jesus, Walter, you pay me minimum wage, remember? By the time I pay for insurance and utilities and gas and food, I don’t exactly have enough left over for snow tires!

Technically speaking, that was not accurate. Tricia’s mother had left her a bank account with a few thousand dollars in it. But Tricia had consulted with an economics professor she met from Colorado Range University, and he’d suggested that, barring real emergencies, she pretend as though that money didn’t exist and live on her wages. The idea was that, as soon as she was making more than she needed to live on, she would begin adding to the small account which she would hopefully be able to grow into a decent nest egg to maybe someday retire off of.

I was of the opinion that things like snow tires were real emergencies and should be more important than retirement goals, especially since she wasn’t even out of her teens yet. Whenever I made that argument, however, Tricia would counter by bringing up her wages, and that was something I didn’t particularly want to discuss with her at the moment. My financial situation was a bit complicated, and I had no reason to think that it would be getting any simpler anytime soon.

I currently owed money to the bank for my truck, the trailer I lived in, my mortuary and the van that my mortuary used to transport bodies. I didn't even own my own hearse, which is pretty basic in the funeral home business. I also owed an impressive six figure sum to a supernatural loan shark called ‘The Pig.’ If I had been human, I would have been selling plasma three times a week to help make ends meet. As a ghoul, however, any attempt to sell my blood would probably result in some freaked out phlebotomists, a trip to the hospital, and a lot of confusion. Instead, I focused on avoiding any expenses I could find any way around, and paying my two employees as little as I could legally manage.

What about chains? I asked, trying steer the conversation away from her paycheck. Wasn’t there that guy on craigslist who had some you thought might work?

Yeah, I went to see him, and I almost died getting there, by the way. Turned out his ‘like new’ chains were broken. Like, three of the four had at least one broken chain. It’d cost me more to get it repaired than I’d save buying them from him.

Oh. It occurred to me that I could probably twist closed the broken chain links. Then it occurred to me that if I couldn’t, or if one of the ‘fixed’ chains punctured her tire, she’d be even worse off than she already was, and she’d blame me for it. Tell you what, I’ll ask around, see if I can find somebody who can get you a decent set on the cheap.

Thanks, Mr. Walter. Patricia sighed and sank into one of the chairs. Give me a minute to calm down and warm up, then I’ll get started cleaning.

Uh-huh.

Tricia stood in the doorway, shivering slightly and stamping her feet every couple of seconds. In most situations, she’s quite a bit tougher than the average human, but when it comes to dealing with the cold, her petite, athletic frame put her at a distinct disadvantage.

So, she said after a few seconds, did you and Sherry get together last night?

I sighed. We did.

That’s good. That’s good. Her tone belied her words. Did you have a nice time?

Not really.

Oh. Sorry.

I shrugged.

Things between Sherry and me had been good just a couple of months earlier. We’d settled into a pleasant routine, and she’d finally gotten relaxed enough about our relationship that we were able to meet at my place, which had been nice, and much cheaper than renting rooms whenever we wanted some time together. Then, all of the sudden she started acting squirrely and paranoid. I tried to figure out what was wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me, she just declared that we couldn’t meet at the trailer park anymore, we had to go back to shady motels.

Ever since then, our relationship had been on the decline. Our encounter the night before was no exception. She showed up late, as usual, drank the blood I brought for her, told me it wasn’t warm enough, and when I told her that it had been the perfect temperature at 1:00 a.m., the time she said she wanted to meet me, she told me that I was an asshole loser and that I should be thankful that she showed up at all. Then she threw the bottle at my head.

Mr. Walter?

Yes Tricia?

Can I ask you a personal question?

I grimaced. You’re going to ask me no matter what I say, aren’t you?

Are you in love with Sherry?

Why do you ask?

She hesitated. It’s just... I don’t think she’s in love with you.

I would have liked to tell Tricia that Sherry and I had a complicated relationship, but that would not have been accurate. We had a simple relationship. She called, and I came running.

All we did when we were together, all we'd ever really done, was fuck and argue. And eat. If I brought her blood, she’d drink that then find a reason to complain about it. If I didn’t, she’d drink my blood, then tell me how disgusting it tasted and how disgusting I was and how much better in bed everyone she’d ever slept with was. She’d tell me about all the other people she was sleeping with, then compare my performance and genitalia to theirs, in detail and always to my detriment. I might start to tell her a bit about what had been going on in my life since the last time we spoke, but she was never interested. About that time, we’d go to bed and fuck like animals until we were exhausted. Then she’d make fun of my technique and stamina and penis size. Eventually she’d remind me not to tell anyone about our relationship, and indicate, with very little subtlety, that this would probably be the last time we met like this. Unless she got really, really bored. Then she’d leave so that I could clean up the mess we’d made.

And that had been when things were going well. These days, instead of fucking and arguing, we just argued. It was like she called me up just so she could yell at me. I was pretty sure she was hiding something from me, too. More than once, in the middle of one of our fights she’d gotten quiet for a minute and stared at me with this sad, guilty look, but when I asked what it was, she’d get mad and we’d fight some more.

And then, like an idiot, I’d confided all of this in Tricia. It was stupid and I knew it when I did it, but I’d spent the day sampling my latest batch of rotgut while teaching her a couple funeral home duties. When she asked me about my personal life, I’d just started talking. It was because Sherry had insisted that we keep it a secret for so long, everything had been bottling up inside of me, and when the cork finally popped, I just spilled everything. The rotgut hadn't helped.

I should have told Simon instead. He’d make fun of me for it, endlessly, but he’d be discreet, and he wouldn’t ask me about things like love.

I sighed. No, I would imagine that she probably doesn’t love me. What’s your point?

I don’t know. I was just wondering why people stay in relationships that aren’t good for them.

I bit my tongue before I could make some smartass comment about her relationships. She’d been going through partners like tissue recently, and as best as I could tell, all of them had been losers. And if I really wanted to go for the nerve, I could talk about people in unhealthy non-romantic relationships. Patricia’s late mother had not been a very kind woman. She had, however, been quite a tasty meal.

But bringing all of that up wouldn’t do Tricia any good. She was young, impressionable, and kind of fucked up.

I contemplated the question for a bit. A lot of things affect it. Sometimes it’s because they think they’re in love. Sometimes it’s because they think they can fix the other person. But with regards to my own life, I would have to say that I stay with her because the alternative is loneliness.

I thought you said ghouls don’t get lonely?

Oh, right, I had told her that. As a rule, no. But you’ve got to keep in mind that I was raised by humans. I’ve become... used to having people around.

Oh. She looked thoughtful for a few seconds. Speaking of having people around, is Percy coming in today?

I felt my expression sour slightly. It usually did when talk turned to Percy. No. He’s taking a few more days off.

Huh. He’s been doing that a lot, Tricia replied.

He had indeed. In fact, I was starting to get worried. Generally, I'm happy when Tricia is covering for Percy. When they’re both out, which is rare, I have to deal with the customers myself, which is about as much fun as having someone sharpen an axe against my shin bone, but if I can choose, I prefer Tricia, so when Percy calls in and asks for time off, he usually gets it.

For the past several months, however, I’d seen Percy less than half as often as I used to, and that was causing me some alarm. Percy is very much like a toddler with a box full of crayons, in so much as he is incredibly boring to watch, and incredibly terrifying when you can’t see him. Wherever he was, there was very little doubt that he was getting up to some kind of mischief, the only real question was, when the time came, would I be the one who had to clean it up?

Well, enough chatting for now. I’m guessing you spread some snow around upstairs when you came in, why don’t you head up and take care of that?

Okay. But remember, you’re supposed to let me do a supervised body prep today.

Sure, sure. But first things first. I want the hallway mopped, the upstairs bathrooms cleaned, and I want the viewing room vacuumed.

I’ll take care of it. Oh! And before I forget, you also said that we could spar today!

I groaned and gave the girl a look of longsuffering. You can do the prep, or we can spar. I’ve got too much going on to deal with both today.

Ummm.

Well?

I’m thinking!

Can you think about it while you work?

Tricia rolled her eyes at me and stomped back upstairs.

I shook my head and went back to my work. This particular body was providing me with an inordinate amount of stress. Bodies rarely gave me stress, but then, most of the bodies I dealt with were human. This one wasn't.

That, in and of itself, wasn't especially rare at Elysium Mortuary. About a quarter of my business comes from the supernatural community, in one way or another. But this particular corpse presented something of a conundrum for me.

When I discover that a human who is presumed to have died of natural causes was, in fact, murdered, I keep my mouth shut. It’s not that I don’t care about them. I mean, I don’t, but that isn’t why I keep my lips locked. Sharing my insights into a death is a risky proposition; it makes people take a second look at me. It makes them think about me as more than just some random person who happens to be acting in the social role of 'undertaker,' which is potentially dangerous. Plus, just because somebody was murdered, doesn’t necessarily mean anyone did anything wrong.

I had one elderly woman come in who had been identified as having passed from a heart condition. It took me about three seconds to realize that she had, in fact, been smothered to death. There was a part of me that considered calling in the authorities. The woman was so old and frail, and the thought that somebody had attacked her bothered me a great deal. And then I spoke with her daughter, who, sobbing uncontrollably, told me about the pain her mother had been going through in her last months, and how her mind had been quickly slipping away.

It didn’t take a genius to realize that it had been a mercy killing.

In another instance, I buried an old man with a long and distinguished army career. Nobody realized that it wasn’t the damage he’d taken back in the war that had done him in, so much as the poison someone had been slipping to him for years.

Come to find out, his wife had been suffering terrible abuses ever since he came back from overseas, right up until she managed to work up the courage to remove him from her life.

I’m sure that some of the people I’ve buried were murdered by people with much less worthy reasons than those, but seeking out truth and meting out justice are neither my right, nor my responsibility. After all, I’m a mortician, not a detective.

But the dead vampire on my table was another story all together. For one thing, she was one of my people. I mean, not my people. My people are ghouls. But she was supernatural, and that made her part of my community. In a very general sense.

Much more importantly, I had a certain grudging allegiance that I owed to Aldred, the province master of the local neckbiter community. It wasn’t a sizeable debt; he’d made it clear on more than one occasion that he would let me die in a heartbeat if it served his purposes.

I lowered my nose to her lips and took a long slow sniff again, just to be certain.

And certain I was. The neckbiters thought that she had been killed by some form of poison. The wretch hadn’t been that lucky. No, the scents that came from her insides were much more troubling. There was blood, of course, and a faint hint of the sea, which was mildly odd, as seafood isn't something most vampires mix with their blood. Underneath that, though, was something subtle, but acrid. It made me think of flesh that had been burned by acid, but with a smoky undertone.

I pulled out a scalpel and cut her open, pelvis to throat to confirm my suspicions.

She’d been consumed; at least, most of her organs had been consumed. Neckbiters had unusual innards. Once they were turned, their kidneys, liver, spleen and bowels would wither into these hard, little sacks, while their intestines, stomach, and lungs would kind of contract, and their heart would swell up a bit. It was odd to look at, almost as odd as the three new organs they grew. But I saw none of that in this woman. Something had liquefied all of her organs, the new and the old, then extracted the liquid. All without leaving a mark on the outside of her body.

The neckbiters didn’t give a shit about her being poisoned. That was one of the approved methods of assassinating a vampiric rival. If she’d been too stupid or blind to protect herself, nobody would give her death a second glance, unless they had some kind of personal relationship and felt the need to seek vengeance.

But something had eaten her, and those assholes would care about that.

Well, sort of. If another neckbiter had somehow arranged for her to be eaten, that would be immediately forgiven, even praised by the community. Except that the creature that had done the actual eating had a good chance of being chopped into pieces. On general principle.

That was how the bloodsucking bastards worked.

It would serve them right if I let this be, if I allowed whatever had devoured this one to continue feasting on them.

But if I did that, it might get Sherry.

For that matter, who was to say that it only ate neckbiters? It might go after me. Or Simon. Or mother. Or Tricia. Wow, I'd never expected to have so many people in my life that I actually cared about. When had I become such a social butterfly?

Anyway, I also needed to keep this killer away from Aldred, if possible. That stupid debt. Debt wasn’t even the right word for it. It wasn’t that I owed him, so much as that I knew where I stood with him.

Neckbiters are, as a rule, giant pieces of shit. They’re kind of like a racial supremacy group, except that they’re able to convert new people into their race. And they can potentially live forever. And they have superpowers. But like a racial supremacy group, they treat everyone who isn’t one of them like scum.

And, as it happened, they considered me to be one of the lowest forms of scum around.

They were hardly unique in that. Most of the supernatural community looks at me with what can really only be described as disgust.

If I could press a button and wipe them off the face of the planet I—well, shit, that would be extreme. I’d have to think about that a bit. But if I could press a button and... I don’t know, given them all heartburn, or turned them all human, I’d do that without hesitation.

But since I didn't have that magical button to press, I had to ask myself the more realistic question of what I wanted the blood sucking tick that I knew, or a brand-new blood sucking tick.

As much as I hated Aldred, and I did hate him, he accepted me as useful. Valuable. I had a place in his world. My place was at the bottom, of course, below all the neckbiters, below all the crotchsniffers, beneath the boneheads and maries. Probably even beneath humans. But I had a place, nonetheless.

If he were to be replaced, my position would become tenuous again. Depending on who ran the city, I might be driven out of the territory, or even hunted down and killed. I wouldn’t die as easily as they expected, but there were enough bloodsuckers in town to rid the world of me eventually.

I knew that at least one potential replacement for Aldred would certainly order my death. As for the rest... they'd never exactly deigned to speak to me about their designs or intentions.

So, my best-case scenario was for Aldred to remain in power.

And that meant that I needed more information; I needed to know if a neckbiter was behind what had happened, and if so, which one. It wouldn’t do to uncover someone’s secret weapon if it turned out that the someone behind it was Aldred himself.

I began by examining the liquefied organs. Whatever had supped on the woman had not left any holes outside of her body, but I found some tears through her internal tissue that must've been used to inject whatever it was that broke down her organs. Then her killer must've sucked those juices back through that same hole. But between the miniscule size of the tears, and the amount of damage I'd done cutting her up to find them, I couldn't sort out exactly where they'd originated.

I drank a bit of what used to be liver. Mostly what I got, besides the liver itself, was a bit of saltiness. Briny water, specifically. Interesting. There was a hint of the substance that had been used to melt the organ, but all I could tell was that it was biological in origin. Probably.

I collected some of the liquefied remains from each organ, putting them in small Tupperware containers that I usually used to take snacks home.

I couldn’t do much with the samples, but Simon had a lot of friends around the university, and even more lovers, and I was willing to bet that he knew somebody who could run some kind of analysis.

Chapter 2

The mostly naked woman who answered the pounding on the door gave me a dirty look. This had better be important, asshole.

I blinked and stared at her for a few moments. You’re not wearing a top.

She pursed her lips. And did you come all the way over here and wake me up just to tell me that?

No, I conceded, but I thought it would be more polite to tell you now than to surprise you with it at the end of the conversation.

She narrowed her eyes.

I sighed. Any chance my brother is in?

Without taking her eyes off me, the topless woman leaned backwards slightly. Hey, Sinbad, you got a brother?

Sinbad?

Simon hopped around the corner, pulling his pants on as he came. Jesus, yes, I told you I was expecting him, remember?

Whatever. I’m going back to sleep. She stomped back towards his bedroom.

I gave Simon a look. Sinbad?

Yeah, she’s not great with names. But she makes up for it in other ways. Come on in, and close the door behind you, it’s cold as fuck out there.

I stared at the retreating back of my brother’s latest conquest. She’s not your usual type. I mean, not that you haven’t had a plethora of types over the years, but she’s... a little more aggressive than most of the women you hook up with.

Simon grinned. Yeah, she’s a hunter.

I blinked. She is?

Yep. They have courses at the university that cater to hunters, so we always have a couple of them around. For years, I’ve been avoiding them, but when I found out you had one working for you, I figured, you know, why not give them a chance?

Uh-huh. And aren’t you worried that when she finds out you’re sleeping with half of campus she’ll do... hunter-y things to you?

That’s the best part, she doesn’t believe in monogamy! She doesn’t care who else I’m with!

I opened my mouth to argue that what someone says and how they act in real life aren’t always the same, then thought better of it. My brother was going to be my brother no matter what. If this went sideways on him, he’d find a way to handle it. Besides, with his luck it was entirely possible that the woman was every bit as unconcerned with his sexual behavior as she claimed.

I nodded down towards the containers in my hand. Any chance you could get someone to run an analysis on these things? They used to be organs and I’d like to know what turned them into mush.

Simon raised an eyebrow. You can’t just sniff them and figure it out?

I did sniff them. Hell, I tasted them. If you want, I can describe the flavor of whatever did the deed, but since it isn’t like anything else I’ve ever eaten or smelled. I can’t tell you what those flavors mean.

So, you don’t just need a chemical breakdown, you need an in-depth analysis.

If possible. Can you do it?

Sure, sure. I know a girl working on her PhD in... uh, forensic something. Can't remember, anyway, this is right up her alley.

Great. Any idea how long it’ll take?

I don’t even know how long it’ll take me to get the samples to her. Hey! You want to stick around and smoke a bowl? I’ve got a new batch that I think will actually get you high.

Not today. Tell your new girlfriend that I’m sorry for waking her up.

Okay. Love you, man.

You too.

The drive home only took a few minutes extra. It wasn’t the ice on the roads that slowed things down so much as the people who weren’t prepared to deal with the ice on the roads. I got stuck behind a tiny Ford Ranger that was doing half the legal limit and slamming his brakes every-time the wind blew a few flakes in front of him. I wanted to hate the guy, but I was pretty sure he was trying to do the world a favor by taking the backroads instead of subjecting the major thoroughfares to his anxiety.