The skillet was still smoking when Harlan brought the axe down on Darlene's swollen belly.
She didn't scream. She laughed—a thick, gurgling sound that bubbled up through the blood filling her throat. The blade split her skin with a wet rip, like tearing overripe melon. Black fluid and yellow pus sprayed across the trailer walls, painting the faded floral wallpaper in long, glistening streaks.
Inside her, the cancer hadn't just eaten her womb. Something else had grown there.
A second fetus—twice the size of the one in the chest—lay curled in a nest of rotting tissue and tumor. Its skin was translucent, veins pulsing dark blue. It had six arms. Two heads. Both heads opened their eyes at the same time and looked straight at Harlan.
"Jesus Christ," Billy whispered, but he was already reaching in with both hands.
Sadie clapped, lice falling from her hair like black snow. "It's our brother! Can we eat him too?"
Harlan dropped the axe and plunged his arms elbow-deep into the cavity. The heat inside Darlene was feverish. Her organs slipped between his fingers like warm pudding. He gripped one of the extra arms and yanked. It tore free with a sound like wet Velcro. The new fetus hissed—actually hissed—its twin mouths opening to reveal rows of needle-sharp baby teeth.
Darlene's eyes were wide and shining with something close to love. "Feed it to your daddy first… he's been waiting longest."
Harlan carried the twitching arm to Old Jeb's bed. The old man's paralyzed body was trembling with anticipation. Harlan shoved the raw limb between Jeb's cracked lips. Jeb bit down hard. His throat worked, swallowing chunks without chewing. Black juice ran down his chin and pooled in the yellowed sheets.
With every bite, Jeb's dead legs twitched. Then his toes curled. Then his knees bent for the first time in six years.
"He's waking up," Sadie sang, dancing in the blood-slick floor.
The thing in the chest was humming so loud now the trailer windows rattled. Harlan went back and lifted the original fetus out. It was heavier, warmer, almost the size of a newborn calf. Its extra limbs wrapped around his forearm like a lover's embrace. He carried it to the table and laid it beside the skillet.
Billy had already started carving Darlene's exposed uterus into thin strips. He fried them next to the first pieces of meat. The smell in the trailer had changed—sweet, metallic, sexual. It made Harlan's mouth water so badly his jaw ached.
They ate together at the table like a real family for the first time anyone could remember.
Darlene, still alive and breathing through the gaping hole in her torso, chewed on her own fallopian tube. "Tastes like home," she mumbled happily.
Old Jeb sat up in bed, spine cracking like dry branches. He was gnawing on the second head of the new fetus. One of the tiny skulls crunched between his teeth. "Been so long since we had fresh kin," he growled, voice strong again.
Sadie fed the chest-fetus tiny bites of her mother's liver, cooing, "Eat up, little brother. Grow big and strong so you can eat us later."
Harlan ate last. He saved the heart for himself—Darlene's real heart, still beating weakly in his palm. When he bit into it, warm blood flooded his mouth and something ancient slid into his mind like oil. Memories that weren't his: cousin-fucking in the hollers, grandfathers eating their own children during the Great Depression, great-great-grandmothers birthing things with too many mouths in coal-black caves.
He understood now.
The rot wasn't a curse.
It was the family.
Outside, the floodwaters rose higher, carrying more bodies past the trailer. But inside, the McCoys were laughing, chewing, swallowing, growing stronger with every bite of their own flesh and blood.
Darlene's exposed intestines twitched on the floor like pale snakes. She looked at Harlan with glassy, adoring eyes.
"Tomorrow," she whispered, "we go get the neighbors. The chest is still hungry… and so are the kids."
Billy and Sadie grinned, their teeth stained black, faces smeared with grease and gore.
Old Jeb stood up on shaky legs for the first time in years and walked to the chest. He stroked the fetus's cheek with one gnarled finger.
"Welcome home, boy," he said.
The fetus smiled with both mouths.
And somewhere deep in the flooded hollers of Black Hollow, every grave, every meth shack, every abandoned mine shaft seemed to answer with a low, wet chuckle.
The family supper had only just begun.
(End of Chapter 3)