At 12:57 AM, someone from a payphone dialed 911, spoke calmly into the receiver, speaking monotone, and telling the dispatcher on the other end that all but two of the house’s occupants had just been brutally murdered.

I got there at 2:35 AM, sleepy, cranky, irritated. A disco strobe of red lights outside the house told only a small part of the horror that lie inside. Already the police had strung the yellow tape around the house, like party streamers in the bath of red flashes and white headlights. The lights inside the house were not on, only flashlights shone in the windows like a team of burglars ransacking the place in full view of the cops. Only the burglars were the cops. I had received their call at about 2:15 AM. In my 15 years of being County Medical Examiner, I’ve never gotten a call to a crime scene so early in the morning (or so late at night, depending on how full your glass is). Our county is pretty rural, and the murder cases are outnumbered by the farming accidents and suicides. In fact, in 15 years, I’ve only been called on to examine bodies in three murder cases, all of which occurred here in the county seat.

Fifteen years, and nothing I’ve ever seen was like that which I saw in that house. I was still groggy at 2:35 AM when I got there, sipping rancid coffee I threw in the microwave that had been in the pot all day. My eyes opened wide when I ducked under the yellow tape and stepped into that house.

Splayed across the wall next to the staircase was a ragged path of crimson, speckled here and there with glistening hunks of human flesh. The smell of early-stage rot met my nose once I walked into the living room, the blood still wet in spots. A huge pool of blood had congealed in the middle of the room, underneath the rigid body of a boy, 15 years of age. His face wore a mask of utter terror, his eyes rolled back, his mouth gaped open like the maw opened in his hollow chest. Scattered around his body were the contents of his thoracic cavity, both lungs and heart, ripped, not cut, from his carcass. I was drawn back by the sight of the carnage. His hands were clawed into the soft pile carpet; I could see the ploughed furrows his fingers had made in the throes of death. His pain had been all consuming when he died, of that I could be sure. Turning my gaze from the boy to the couch opposite the television, I beheld the room’s other occupant, a girl of 14. Only her newly budding adolescent breasts gave away her gender at first glance, her body lying limp as a pile of clothes, and with a ragged torn stump of flesh where her head had once been. Turning further toward the TV I could see the dark lump of the head lying carelessly tossed aside.

“Too much violence on TV, huh, Jim?”

I spun to see Kevin Hallowell-Officer Hallowell-whom I’ve known all my life, practically. Sometime during high school he and I joked that we were in trouble with the law so much that we ought to become cops, seeing as how we were in the police station anyway. He had followed through with his part of the deal, while I went to medical school and returned to help out in my own macabre way. Seeing his face that night, bathed in the glow of the lights outside, comforted me in ways I could not describe. Especially after finding the two in the living room.

“That is not even funny, Kev,” I reprimanded, but his smile bore a hint of the shock that was hiding beneath, so I let it go.

“Ok, fine. You want the grand tour?”

I shrugged. “I’m gonna have to see the rest anyway. Does it get any better than this?”

His smile broadened and his eyes darkened. “Well, we’ll save the master bedroom for the grand finale. Won’t you accompany me to the kitchen?” He turned and I followed, knowing that all this was bothering him as much as it was me. In med school, I handled every one of the human organs, never swooning, never sickening at their camphor smell or the wet plaster of paris consistency I could feel through latex gloves. As medical examiner, I’ve blazed a trail of discovery through more than a few recently departed. But I had done the bulk of the cutting. This was butchery. This was not a domestic abode, but an abatoir.

The kitchen could have been a very nice place to gather in the morning, to partake of morning victuals, talk over the morning paper drinking coffee and orange juice. Tonight the island in the center of the kitchen was coated in a sea of sticky blackening ooze. There were three bodies in here, all sitting on stools around the island, all headless. Laid carefully in front of the bodies were their heads. One boy, 9 years old, two girls, 11 and 12. Also laying on the countertop, on either sides of the heads, were the hands belonging to the bodies, all removed from same. Again, the cuts were ragged, almost as if they’d been torn from the bodies. But the force required to do such a thing…

Kevin grunted as if he’d read my thoughts. “Nasty, ain’t it? Still, at least the killers were neat about it.”

“Killers?” I said, turning.

He looked back at me. “Can you imagine just one person doing all this? The neighbors said that their lights had gone out at about quarter to twelve. We got the call at about five to one, leaving the killers just one hour and ten minutes to do all this.”

I looked back at the bodies. “There’s a lot of rage there. A coordinated effort? And what the hell is with the place setting? At least, that’s what it looks like to me.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Like they were sitting down to dinner or something like that.”

“Anything else downstairs?”

“Yeah, in the laundry room. Follow me.”

Kevin led me through the kitchen, both of us picking our path carefully so as not to step in the rather large puddle of blood. The police photographer was right behind us, coughing and taking pictures of the scene as best he could. As we began to near the laundry room, I could feel a humid warmness to the air, and smelled a strong odor of charred flesh. The laundry room was simply soaked in blood, black-red streaks everywhere, as if pouring from veins on flailing limbs. Sticking out of the washing machine were two feet, but no other remains were visible. I stepped into the room, fighting the putrid smell of baked flesh, and turned to the dryer. Through the clear plastic window in the door I could see a bone, and suddenly realized where the rest of the body was.

“That’s six?”

“Yup, and five more upstairs.”

“God, how big was this family? The Stiles?”

“Yep, the Stiles. Big Catholic family. The couple had 11 kids.”

“Whoa, that’s not a family, that’s a football team! Eleven bodies…two survivors?”

“The two youngest were unharmed, although they were bound together in the front closet with duct tape. One boy, 6 years old, the other a girl, age 5.”

“Ok, take me upstairs.”

All the way back through the house, I kept thinking, eleven kids! And Marcy and I had debated for two years on whether to have just one more to make two! God bless the Stiles for being able to deal with 11.

God bless Mrs. Stiles for having them!

But even God’s mercy couldn’t have saved this family tonight. The staircase was clean except for a few spots here and there, and the wall which had been splattered as if someone had thrown a bucket of blood on it. In the bathroom was the naked body of a nineteen year old boy, sitting slouched on the toilet. His penis had been removed from his groin and stuffed into his mouth. The water in the toilet was less water than it was the contents of the kid’s venous structure. In the tub was the body of another boy, 18 years old, partially submerged in crimson liquid. The blood had begun to congeal in his hair and on his skin. Even in the faint light I could see the ragged tear across his throat, the puncture beneath his chin, and the puncture in the center of his chest. By now I felt as if I were floating through a nightmare of my own making. The carnage no longer seemed real. It was as if I were watching a Troma film, lots of thick red gore with no real pattern, just nasty and lots of it.

Further down the hall in a bedroom to the left was a 17 year old girl, her body curiously lying peacefully in the bed, only the large red stain under her revealing the true nature of this placid scene. I looked at her for a while, wondering why her body had been spared the brutality the others had undergone. I wondered what lie underneath, and pictured her back flesh removed and possibly discarded in the closet somewhere. I shouldn’t be surprised.

“Ok, Jim, you ready for the big show?”

I turned to Kevin. “I don’t even want to know what could possibly be worse than all this. How much worse can it be?”

I soon found out. The master bedroom had a large canopy bed in the center of the far wall. The canopy was dripping with human blood, and the carpet was completely soaked. On either side of the bed were the Stiles. Both of them had been nailed to the wall in crucifix fashion. Their heads hung down so that I couldn’t see that their eyes had been removed from their skulls, but I could see them also nailed to the wall on either side of their heads, as if guarding the bodies. Their chest cavities had been ripped open, the slabs of flesh also nailed to the wall to hold them open. Their genital areas had been carved away, and scattered around the room were their organs and what was left of their reproductive systems. All this I saw after the one thing that one’s attention was drawn to immediately upon looking into this room. On the white sheet of their bed was written a single word in what could be anyone’s blood, there having been such an abundance of it in the house. That word was “Breeders.”

“Breeders? Someone’s got a thing against large families?”

“Apparently. At least that’s the impression I got. What else could it be?”

I shrugged, and took another look around the room before turning back to Kevin. “This is pretty gristly. This is the kind of stuff nightmares are made of.”

Kevin laughed a little and looked back into the bedroom. “Well, sucks to be you, then.”

Next Day

I left the scene at 4:36 AM and started to go home, then thought better of it. There was no way I’d get any sleep thinking on all that I had seen at the house.