You Are What You Eat

Content Warning: stalking, kidnapping, cannibalism

Produced by the CREEPY Podcast - Bonus episode air date: November 19, 2023

No one ever wants to wake up in the trunk of a car.

I don’t realize that’s where I am. Not at first. At first, I feel my body being jostled, my legs and shoulders bumping into a hard floor. It’s the smell, really, that tells me where I am. Scratchy carpet with a rubber smell, like tires in a hardware store, beneath the unmistakable reek of bodies that have been here before me—a fetid mix of blood and piss and sweat and fear. I wince because I recognize that smell too. I wish I didn’t. I wish I was anywhere else. Anywhere but here.

No one wants to wake up in the trunk of a car.

I try piecing together how this happened, as my body bounces and cracks with every bump in the road. It was my turn to bring dinner to my weekly support group, and I was under a lot of pressure to make it good. Of all the members of our group, I’m the most obsessed with food, the most enraptured by the pleasure of eating beyond simple nourishment and survival. Because of this, I need the most help controlling my appetite and making healthier choices. Tonight the city streets were bustling, ripe with possible meal options, as they usually were at ten o’clock on a Friday night. All around me couples stopped for nightcaps amid rowdy pub crawlers, businessmen downed whiskey in their suits, women in low-cut tops let loose while their kids slept at home with the sitter. Then there was me, alone. I didn’t have to try hard to blend in. Almost no one noticed my mousy brown hair, my slight frame, my beige peacoat. I’m pretty but not in a way that draws attention, and yet, somehow I attract his.

I notice him behind me a few blocks after I leave my support group in search of food. He looks like the kind of guy a woman avoids: dark winter cap pulled down over his ears, prominent stubble on his cheeks, his hands buried in the pockets of a dark jacket zipped up to his chin, intense, menacing eyes that might’ve been attractive in one of those smutty novels that romanticized danger, but actually were dangerous to a woman out alone at night.

The skin on the back of my neck prickles. He’s getting closer; I can sense his presence creeping up on me. I hope I’m imagining it, so I decide to test it. He’s followed me across three blocks, keeping just enough distance in the throngs of pedestrians that I can’t be sure it’s me he’s after, so on the fourth block I see a break in traffic and step off the curb in the middle of the block and hurry to the other side.

He does the same, skittering through traffic that approaches from both directions. I’m already across when the horns start blaring at him, and for a moment—when I dare to look him in the face—our eyes catch, and I feel my guts twist because now he knows that I know he’s following me, and this knowledge doesn’t deter him. If anything, he picks up speed. My heart leaps up my chest and chills ascend the entire length of my spine, and that’s when I look to my left and see it: a car with an UBER sticker.

The driver waves me into his car. I don’t dwell on his error, mistaking me for his fare. I just open the back door and slip inside, locking it behind me.

He asks if I’m okay and a strong whiff of Old Spice collects in my throat.

“Are you okay?” the driver asks. A strong whiff of Old Spice collects in my throat.

I peer out my window down the block, but I don’t see my pursuer. It’s as if he’s blended into the crowd or slipped into a building or alley.

“I think so,” I breathe. “I think I was being followed.”

“I saw that too.”

“What? You saw?”

“That’s why I waved you into my car. Let’s get you out of here.”

I thank the driver profusely and he waves it away like it’s nothing, like he hasn’t just saved a life, then hands me a bottle of water because I must be thirsty, and I am. He has no idea how much.  

I drink.

The last thing I remember is thinking that it’s strange that he doesn’t ask me where I want to go. He just drives. I’m about to say something and then…

And then…then I wake up here. In the trunk.

My stomach growls. It’s a strange thing to notice at a time like this, but I had been scouting dinner before my capture and the hunger pangs give me something else to focus on to stay calm so I can assess the situation. I swallow a few deep breaths of sour air, the stench of other bodies coating my tongue in a sickly sheen. I wonder how many others ended up in that trunk before me. I can move all of my limbs so I haven’t been bound, and because I can move my limbs I know that the trunk is empty. There are so many bumps in the road and it’s so quiet beyond the walls of the trunk that I figure us for somewhere in the country. Somewhere isolated. I haven’t eaten in days. I had been saving myself for the meal I was to share with my support group, and now the hunger in my guts is raw. Visceral. I shouldn’t be thinking about that as much as I am, but I can’t help it. It’s why I never miss a meeting.

I don’t know how long we’ve been driving. I reach into my pocket but my phone is gone, so I have no idea what time it is and no way to call for help. For a moment I panic and force a few more sour breaths down my gullet. I need to make a plan. This isn’t one of those trunks with a safety latch inside it. I won’t be getting out of here on my own. After what might’ve been a few minutes or an hour the car slows. I feel a hard turn to the left then the car creeps along down a heavily potted road. A few minutes later, the car stops and the engine quiets. I can hear crickets, then the opening and shutting of the car door, and muffled voices.

“This one was almost too easy.” I hear a man’s voice say. It sounds like the UBER driver, but I can’t be sure.

“It can never be too easy,” I think I hear another man say.

“Takes some of the fun out of it, doesn’t it?”

“Just get her out of the car, man.”

“Is everything ready?”

“Of course it’s ready. What do you think I’ve been doing out here, freezing my nuts off?”

“All right, all right. She should still be out for another hour or two.

“Not like it matters. It’s not like anyone will hear her scream.”

For a moment my blood runs slow and cold. I’ve clearly stumbled into something terrible, and it’s getting worse by the minute. I need a plan but I still don’t have one. Then I realize that if they still think I’m unconscious it’s probably why they didn’t bother tying me up. I can use this to my advantage until I see a way out. I try to steady my breathing, even though my body hums with a horrifying cocktail of fear and anticipation. I hear footsteps approaching the trunk, the click of the latch. I will my body to be still, my heart to slow, my eyes to remain heavy and closed. I feel the cold night air kiss my skin as the man leans down in a plume of Old Spice and forces his hands underneath my body to lift me from the trunk. I’m aware of things now I hadn’t noticed in my brief exchange with the UBER driver before he poisoned me. His skin is dry, his rough hands scraping along my clothes. He has trouble breathing, huffing and puffing as he pulls me free. His stomach is so rotund he braces me on it to carry me away from the trunk.

“You got her?” the other one asks. I know without opening my eyes that it is the man who stalked me down the road, the one with the jacket zipped up to his chin and hat pulled down over his ears. “Don’t drop her, man.”

“I’m not going to drop her,” the UBER driver huffs, but it sounds like he might. “This one’s heavier than she looks.”

This one. Confirmation of what I already knew—that I’m not the first person to be abducted, the first to be driven out to wherever we are. I hear more night sounds now. Chirping crickets, the chittering of squirrels and other small forest fauna. I know we’re in the woods without having to see the press of trees around us. I smell sap and bark and damp moss and hear the crunch of pine needles under the feet of the men who are bringing me somewhere deeper. Somewhere hidden.

How many women have they brought here before me? How many times have they gotten away with whatever it is they are planning to do to me? The thought turns my already fragile stomach. My empty stomach. I really, really shouldn’t be thinking about food right now. It seems so silly, this obsession. This need. What would the others in my support group say? They’d remind me there was a time and a place for everything, and this was not the time or the place. I should be thinking about the horrors that lie ahead and instead my mouth is watering at the thought of my next meal, my throat painfully dry because it’s been so long. Too long, really. Even the staunchest members of the group couldn’t fault me for it this time. Still, I can hear them muttering our mantra: you are what you eat.

You are what you eat.

It’s supposed to remind us to take care with our food choices. Last week’s dinner was lean, barely feeding the whole group. It encouraged us to chew slowly, savor every morsel, and allow satiation to settle in before going back for more. Tonight I was supposed to find something of similar quality, steering clear of the fatty, artery-clogging fare that most of us—especially me—crave so dearly.

Unfortunately for them, I’ll be bringing them an overweight UBER driver and his skinny sidekick.

I silently apologize to the group in my mind. They won’t be pleased, but they’ll be so hungry by the time I get back that they’ll eat any old thing I drop in front of them. I slowly slide my hand up the UBER driver’s neck. He jumps and almost drops me. When he tries calling out, I’m already sinking my teeth into the flesh on the other side of his neck. There’s a lot of meat and fat to get through to reach his artery, but my canines eventually pierce it. I barely get a draw of his hot, oily blood when he screams and tries throwing me from his arms. I fall away, taking a chunk of his neck with me. I grind my teeth through the gummy, fatty mess in my mouth. It’s slimy and gooey and unctuous…everything last week’s girl with the mousy brown hair and one-hundred-and-ten-pound body wasn’t. More importantly, it’s enough to start the change.

The UBER driver clutches the hole in his neck. Blood squirts through his pudgy fingers—stout little sausages that appear at the ends of my right and left hands before my palms expand to fit the girth of this new form. The other man—who I’ve almost forgotten about while my body started morphing—watches with wide eyes and a slack jaw. Frozen in fear. Sometimes they do that. Sometimes the process of change is too much for them to take.

There aren’t usually witnesses like this though, either.

I’m a foot taller suddenly and my waist is filling out to match the girth of the UBER driver when the other man starts stumbling through the woods away from me. This is the one time I will have trouble chasing him. It’s unbelievably hard to run when I’m not used to this form yet, and when my legs and feet are growing with every step, straining against the women’s pants and size seven shoes I’m currently wearing. I kick off the shoes and see the UBER driver’s toes are fat and hairy, much like the rest of him, his ankles almost non-existent with calves like stumps connecting to his feet. I plod after the other man. He’s screaming but it’s not like anyone will hear him; he's made sure of that. I whip off the trench coat before the UBER driver’s arms burst its seams, and shed the pants as well, until I’m nearly naked as I chase down the other man.

He stumbles and lands on his face, and doesn’t have time to get up before my puffy, bubbling mass of dry and cracking skin catches up to him. I see what he’s tripped over: a round metal door built into the ground. A secret hatch. I know without having to see what’s down there that this is where they were taking me. This is where they have taken others they think are small and weak, like the woman’s body I wore here tonight: to a pit in the middle of the woods.

It's perfect.

The man stares up at me and begs for his life. I think of the others who have begged him for the same. I should be disgusted, and I am. I don’t appreciate this kind of monster. But mostly I’m grateful because my group has been looking for a new place to meet. Somewhere safe and quiet. Like a pit in the ground in the middle of the woods.

I yank the man up by his neck. I imagine I’m quite a sight. By now I am fully in my new form. I have the UBER driver’s bushy eyebrows, balding head, big, purplish lips, and a giant belly stretching the tiny t-shirt I had already been wearing. Going for the artery, the concentrated blood there, usually does the trick. Knowing where to bite first and how much to take is what allows our group, all five of us, to share one body, one meal at a time.

The group won’t be pleased when they see what I’ve brought them, what we will all become for the next six days. But they might forgive me when I show them the pit in the ground in the middle of a forest. They might even congratulate me for finding us next week’s meal, the skinny man with the stubble on his chin and eyes that beg for his own life rather than threaten mine. He’ll be a healthier option to get us back on track after we gorge ourselves on the fat man bleeding out behind me.

After all, we really are what we eat.