Collected Kill: Volume 1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

later, I heard her scream.  I ran for the barn and that’s when my life changed forever.
    A pig’s innards were strung across the floor.  A pool of blood had spread beneath the tractor.  I looked to my mother and father who were both transfixed by the pig’s shuddering body.  
    It wasn’t the first time I had seen my father slaughter pigs.  He had let me watch, had taught me the ways in which a farmer must sacrifice an animal to feed the family.  And the blood didn’t bother me, or the pig’s body jerking as the last of the blood circulated out of its pale body and onto the hay beneath our feet.  But what did bother me was the thing that crawled out of that pig, pulling behind it a mass of fatty tissue.
    My father raised a pitchfork above his head and I flinched as the thing crawled closer to my father.
    “Kill it, Maynard!”  Ma screamed.
    But my father’s eyes were glazed.  Instead of fear, there were only tears as he threw the pitchfork away and knelt to receive it.
    Ma’s scream left my ears ringing, disturbing even the chaos that had already settled in my mind.  I didn’t know what was happening.  It felt like a terrible dream, one that made no sense, but hinted at a secret meaning which only frightened me even more.
    The thing slithered up my father’s arm and he stroked it like a baby, cradling it in his arms.  
    “Pa!” I yelled, “Kill it!”
    But nothing registered.  Tears continued to stream down his face.
    I thought about going for the pitchfork myself, then stopped to look at the thing.  It was pale, gelatinous.  It appeared as if it were just a lopped off piece of the pig’s fatty tissue, but it moved.  
    I looked for eyes or antenna, thinking it was some kind of parasitic worm, but saw nothing but fat.  I had seen cattle and chickens infected with tapeworms and such, but they were miniscule to the size of the thing on Pa’s arm.  From end to end, it stretched from Pa’s fingers to the side of his neck.
    The pitchfork came into view once again, and then my father spoke.
    “Oh Lord, we thank you for your presence…”
    It never said a word.  But somehow it was communicating with Pa. You could see some form of understanding light up Pa’s face, as if the thing was from Star Trek  and spoke through telepathy.  And my father understood every word.
    And somewhere in the moment, I swore it spoke to me.  It said : don’t be scared, my child.   And I immediately felt relieved and forgot about the pitchfork.

    2.

    In the beginning, I’m not sure if I believed it was the real Lord.
    My family was never religious, but the concept of Jesus and God were still pounded in my head by society, especially when I started school.  I kept asking myself if everyone else could be wrong.  There were hundreds of religions out there, but no one worshipped such an entity as The Lard.  In fact it was absurd to most.  
    But life had evolved for thousands and thousands of years.  Dinosaurs existed before humans.  And there were surely other species that preceeded the dinosaur.  So how could people assume that God was of the human essence?  And that Jesus would come back in human form?  What if the Lord and Savior appeared in a more primitive form, such as Lard?
    It spoke to Pa every day and I became proud of the man.  He was like Moses in the Bible—one of God’s first chosen ones.
    And Pa spoke of the Lard’s wishes.  How the key to heaven was in feeding oneself, to gain bulk (a piece of the substance that the Lord was made of) and how the Lard needed sacrifices each month.  The Lard also told father how he needed to spread the word.  The Lard had come to collect the chosen ones.  And it said that the end time was nearing.
    I never would have believed these things if it weren’t for the flood.
    It had rained for three days straight.  The creek had flooded its banks and washed into the field.  By the third day, the water was threatening our livestock.  Pa had moved the pigs