Straw Man

The entire city had been dying of a cancer for quite some time now, living on borrowed time. Slowly as business relocated, cookie cutter families with their 2.5 children and mortgage payments retreated and the communities themselves washed away under the tide of urban blight, something more insidious took hold. Much like a man with a multi-pack a day habit, every denizen was aware on some level of a festering presence sequestered deep inside the bowels of the city but it was preferred to remain oblivious to such developments. That was until the metropolis started coughing up blood.

The discovery was made by random chance, as these things normally are. A cadre of adolescents choosing to forsake educational pursuits for the day had taken to breaking into abandoned buildings for a bit of anarchistic entertainment. Sliding past rotted plywood barricades and crumbling plaster they entered a long since dormant townhouse sandwiched between industrial buildings in various degrees of silent decay.

Adrenaline made its presence known among the three lads as dim flashlight beams traced across a cobweb interred mudroom and splintering doors to the main house. Strangely enough, the seemingly vacant residence teemed with tenants of rotund flies and roaches engaged in some kind of revolting banquet.

Filled with equal parts alarm and curiosity, they pushed farther into the hall, opening the doors what was once an expansive living room. A putrid mudslide of penetrating stench that could only be accurately compared to bottling a beached whale inside of roman bath house assaulted them as the threshold was crossed. Nausea and apprehension gripped stomachs still filled with the innocent sugar-laden cartoon character breakfast cereal.

Assuming a dead beast of some kind occupied the parlor, a instinctual flip of a crust covered light switch revealed the partial accuracy of the thought. The normally white plaster walls had a patina of a brown actively decaying cocktail of various vital fluids starting as impressionist like paint strokes and random splash near the ceiling and thickening to a heavy doughnut filling consistency syrup pooled over tile floor. The stewing pool of creme de la viscera was occasionally peppered with what the now very damaged young minds could only assume were artifacts of various pieces of the skeletal system; bones, teeth, ribs and a large serpentine chunk that was undoubtedly spinal cord. More curious still was the shock regularity such outlandish internal organs seemed to have disintegrated of their own free will, detaching from a still writhing body in a spurting act of self determination and traveling the requiste distance to declare independence from the tyranny of being oppressed by their kidney and large intestine overlords.

Still unable to process the full extent of the scene before them, the three youths stood for a second in absolute silence, save for the dull drone of flies and the steady drip of mucus-laden bile slowly sliding off what was once an opulent table cloth draped over a table in the defiled dining room. Taking a tender step onto the caked on linoleum of blood that now served as the room's floor, the more adventurous of the boys caught a glimpse of what where once assuredly legs, rammed through the plaster walls on either side of an outlet with the dexterity of an artful surgeon and the brute force normally associated plastic explosives.

Their courage finally faltering, the trio silently made their way for the exit avoiding nightmarish bits of rotting anatomy on the way out. Several yards out from the shore of lake psychological trauma, the aforementioned brave adolescent felt himself succumbing to the effects of the overpowering aroma now native to the foyer and lost his footing. Stumbling briefly, and dropping his light the unfortunate boy reached out in the darkness to something hanging from light fixture only briefly illuminated by his clattering light source. Much to his horror, the still slick length of digestive tract freed itself from its precarious perch, landing on the lad with a discernible noise, akin to dropping a still blood pound of hamburger onto a concrete floor.

Police reports would note the scream was heard nearly two blocks away.