A blend of Religious and Body Horror


He woke before the sun, the way he always did now.  With the echo of water where there wasn’t any.

Sheriff Daniel Mercer lay still in the narrow bed of the rented duplex, eyes open, breath shallow. The ceiling fan above him clicked once every rotation, a loose screw he kept meaning to tighten. The sound reminded him of rotor blades.  Distant and rhythmic. He counted his breaths until the room came back into focus: pale yellow walls, a dresser scarred with cigarette burns, and a pair of boots lined up with military precision at the foot of the bed.

No river. No jungle. Just Iowa mud and spring rain. Too much rain lately.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat there for a moment, rubbing the heel of his hand into his left eye. Forty-two wasn’t old, but it felt ancient some mornings. Vietnam had ended eight years ago, but it still slept with him. Still rode shotgun when he drove, still whispered when water moved too fast or the sky turned the wrong color.

He dressed slowly, buttoning the khaki shirt, pinning on the badge. The metal felt heavier lately. Everything did. 

Outside, the town of Briar Hollow was holding its breath. The river had crested and fallen, leaving behind a skin of silt and broken things. Fence posts snapped like matchsticks. Achild’s red sneaker tangled in reeds. As well as a carcass of a bloated and pale-eyed deer near the bend. Seven days since the flood. Seven days since Father Callahan vanished.

Mercer poured coffee that tasted like burnt rope and stood at the kitchen window, watching mist lift off the fields. Somewhere across town. He knew Eleanor would already be awake at the clinic. Animals didn’t wait for grief. Dogs still got hit by cars. Horses still colicked. Life didn't stop. 

He hadn’t spoken to his ex-wife in three weeks. Not since he’d dropped off the child support check and stood awkwardly in her doorway. Trying to say something, anything. But he couldn’t. Their daughter, Lucy, had smiled at him from the couch, her hair in braids, her crutches leaning nearby. She’d learned to move with the missing leg faster than he’d learned to forgive himself.

The crash replayed in his head. The sudden lack of control and turn into oncoming traffic. By the time he reached the station, the phone was already ringing.

Deputy Harlan stood by the desk, hat in hand, looking like a boy pretending at adulthood. “State boys are back,” he said. “Down by the Callahan place.”

The priest’s house sat crooked near the riverbank, a white clapboard thing that had once looked peaceful, now stripped raw. The roof was gone. Peeled away and never found. The living room ceiling gaped open to the sky like a wound that refused to clot. Mud coated the walls up to a man’s chest.

Mercer stepped carefully through the wreckage, boots sinking into damp carpet. The smell hit him the way death always did. sweet, sour, and unmistakable. Underneath it, was river rot and something else.  Like an old herbal smell. 

They’d found parts of the pastor’s wife on day two. An arm lodged in a sycamore. A section of torso caught on barbed wire downstream. Gnarly breaks and tears. Like she was forced through a small hole. The water made it difficult for a coroner to pinpoint a time of death. 

No head. No Father Callahan.

The state investigator droned on about currents and debris fields, about how bodies did strange things in floods. Mercer nodded where appropriate, but his eyes kept drifting to the crawl space beneath the house. The boards there were splintered outward, not in, but as if something had forced its way up instead of being washed down.

Seven days passed. Long enough for hope to rot into something else. Long enough for the town to start locking doors earlier, for the mayor to appoint new young inexperienced priest.

Mercer now knelt near the edge of the river and touched the mud. It was cold, even now. He closed his eyes, just for a second, and heard water again. Too loud and too fast. Men shouting in a language he never learned properly. The slap of boots in sucking ground.


It was a Sunday evening, the seventh night since the flood came out of nowhere and tore Briar Hollow open like a bad memory. The radio in Sheriff Daniel Mercer’s kitchen muttered low and polite. Old gospel music playing. The federal report lay folded on the table, already soft from being handled too many times.  Act of God. Catastrophic flooding. Human remains dispersed by current.

Mercer didn’t believe in acts of God the way the paperwork meant it. He barley believed in God at all anymore. 

He was rinsing a coffee mug when the sound started.

At first it was distant, thin, almost easy to mistake for wind. Then it sharpened. Rose in pitch, tore through the air like metal dragged across stone. Mercer froze, water running over his hands, heart already accelerating.

It wasn’t thunder.

It was screaming.

He dropped the mug. It shattered in the sink. Mercer was moving before he realized it, boots half-laced as he grabbed his hat and jacket, the old instinct snapping into place with brutal clarity. Outside, the sky was wrong. Clouds split apart by a white-hot streak descending fast, too fast, trailing fire and sound. Comet like. 

The whole town heard it.
Dogs went mad. Car alarms began howling. Somewhere, a woman screamed a prayer.

Mercer reached the square just as the thing hit.
The impact shook the ground. Not an explosion, not quite, but a wet, concussive thud. One that he felt in his teeth. Stone cracked. Wood splintered. The church steeple shuddered, bells ringing once in protest before falling silent.

Smoke and dust rolled outward.

Mercer raised his revolver out of reflex, though he had no idea what he was aiming at.

Then the screaming stopped.

What lay in the crater before the church doors was a crucifix. But not one made by any human hand. It was grown. The beams were pale and Ivory like.  They were also slick, veined like muscle. Flesh tethered a man to it, stretched and fused as if the cross itself had erupted from his back. His spine was the beam, vertebrae elongated and warped into a vertical column. Ribs flared outward, twisted into the crosspiece, skin pulled thin and translucent between bone.

Father Callahan was still alive.
His chest heaved with a sound like water bubbling through mud. Blood ran freely, but it didn’t pool the way it should. It soaked backward, absorbed by the thing holding him, as if feeding it.

Mercer’s boots stuck to the stone as he took a step closer.

“Jesus Christ…” someone whispered behind him.
Father Callahan’s eyes snapped open.

They were too clear. Too awake.
His jaw trembled, throat working against damage that should have killed him already. When he spoke, his voice came out layered—his own, and something deeper, older, echoing beneath it like a second throat moving in time.

“And the third angel sounded,” Callahan gurgled, blood spilling from the corners of his mouth. “Many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter,”  
Mercer felt cold all the way through.
Deputy Harlan staggered up beside him, pale as chalk. “Sheriff… I—”
“Don’t,” Mercer said quietly. His hands were shaking now, but he kept the gun steady. He had seen dying men before. This was different. This was a presentation.  Ritual embodied.

Callahan’s head lolled back, spine creaking audibly as the cruciform structure flexed, alive. The base of his neck was swollen open wound. His spine looked like a crooked Y due to the new spinal growth that pierced up and out of him.

“And there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp…” 

The church doors behind him groaned.
Mercer stepped forward, badge heavy, the weight of command settling on him the same way it had in the jungle when things stopped making sense and men still looked to him anyway. Rain began to fall again, soft at first, hissing against the still-warm flesh of the thing embedded in the stone. 

“Father,” Mercer said, voice steady through force of will alone. “Can you hear me?”

Callahan’s eyes rolled down to meet his. His barely intact neck swayed. The old vertebrae creaking in protest. 

“He that hath an ear, let him hear,” the thing said through the priest’s ruined mouth. The face contorted. The eyes returning to what could be considered normal. The pastor spoke again this time with panic and pain. 
“Sherrif?! Please help me. I… I didn’t mean too.. P… P…Please—”  He threw up thick dark blood and mucus. Then groaned in pain.
 “The mayor said if I did it, we would be fine. Dear god—” 

The crucifix pulsed once.

The thing on the church steps began to throb.
Not a twitch. Not a spasm. A deliberate, rhythmic contraction—slow at first, then faster—like a second heart had awakened. Mercer felt it through the soles of his boots before he understood what he was seeing. 

The structure flexed, vertebrae grinding softly, ribs creaking as if under strain.

The pastor continued, voice gaining strength where it shouldn’t have had any left. The second voice layering over his again

 “And the name of the star is called Wormwood.”

“Get back,” Mercer shouted, but the word came too late, swallowed by the sound.

A wet, hydraulic pumping noise rolled out of the thing. Thick liquid surged downward from the fused spine into the stone beneath the priest. The church steps darkened as the ground drank it in, cracks spidering outward, mortar hissing as if burned from within. The smell changed. Metallic rot layered with something sharp and bitter, like crushed leaves and old herbs. 

The crucifix swelled.

Father Callahan’s mouth opened in a silent scream, eyes wide now, not preaching anymore, not possessed with calm certainty. Just aware. The structure around him bulged grotesquely, flesh pulling tight, veins standing out like cables.
 
Then it ruptured.

The sound was not loud so much as total, a tearing, bursting wetness that erased all other noise for a single, eternal second. The crucifix exploded outward in a storm of bone shards, liquefied tissue, and blackened blood. 

It rained down in heavy, clotted sheets. People closest didn’t even have time to scream.

Mercer was thrown backward, hitting the pavement hard enough to knock the breath out of him. Something warm splashed across his sleeve, his cheek. He wiped at it instinctively, then froze when he saw his hand.

Blood. Too dark. Too thick. The same herbal dusty smell. 

Screams filled the square now. Deputy Harlan was on his knees, clutching his arm, gore soaking through his uniform where a bone shard had torn skin. One of the state boys had gone down hard, coughing, blood streaked across his face where it had splashed into his mouth.

Harlan screamed.

It wasn’t painful at first. It was pressure.
Mercer watched, helpless, as Harlan’s back arched violently, spine pushing outward beneath the skin as if something were inflating it from the inside. Flesh split with a sound Mercer had only heard before when shrapnel tore through muscle. Vertebrae forced their way out one by one, lengthening, fusing, *rearranging*. Harlan’s ribs spread and twisted, arms locking in place as bone extended laterally, pinning him in a grotesque parody of surrender.

His mouth opened wide, jaw cracking, teeth loosening as his throat reshaped. Splitting off at the junction point where neck met new spine. 

Another scream joined it. Then another.
Across the square, the state investigator collapsed, convulsing. A woman who’d knelt to pray clawed at her chest as something pushed outward from beneath her sternum, bones knitting and growing with obscene purpose.

 Everywhere the blood had found an open cut, a cracked lip, a scraped knee. It answered.

 Mercer backed away, heart hammering so hard it hurt. 

The ground beneath the church split with a deep, resonant crack.The people new growths forcing themselves downward, dragging flesh and muscle along as if pulled by invisible hands. The crucifix forms locked into place one by one, not random, not chaotic, but aligned toward the church doors like a congregation frozen mid-worship. All those that were sprayed and changed remained on their new posts. 

The rain intensified, hissing as it struck the altered ground, but it didn’t wash anything away. The blood-soaked in. The stone drank deeper. The new crucified started pumping a thick black ichor into the ground.

Mercer’s mind tried to flee. To the jungle, to the crash, to Lucy’s smile. This time there was nowhere else to go. He raised his revolver again, though he knew it was useless, his hands steady only because shock had burned everything else away.

Somewhere among the growing, creaking forest of human crosses, a voice began to speak again. No longer singular.

“The waters were made bitter,” it intoned, layered and resonant, as bone settled and flesh stilled. “And they shall be made bitter again.”
Mercer took one step back, then another, the badge on his chest even heavier than before. 

End of part 1

Still working on part 2 and more art. Any art in this is free for use. 

I usually write fantasy and DM campaigns. I wanted to creep my cast and try something new. 

*Microsoft spell check and grammer checker are the only editors and help I have. If you catch any errors or have suggestions for formatting or anything let me know. 





Bow To The Meat Prophet