This is an excerpt from a femcan-themed ebook I've just published (
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FF6BNRZ) called "Cannibal Pep Squad!"
Enjoy!
Dawn stopped jumping up and down. Instead of answering my questions, Heather turned to her and they exploded in laughter. My face scrunched. “I’ve just never heard of…cannonball-ism? Is it some kind of exercise?”
After what seemed like an eternity they finally calmed down. She and Dawn were like two parents relieved that their kid hadn’t heard of “sex” yet.
Heather leaned in close and dropped her voice to a whisper as she laid a hand on my shoulder. “Angela…I’m going to tell you something that might surprise you, but don’t worry. Can-nibal-ism. What I said was cannibalism. ‘Cannibalism’ means eating meat. Human meat.”
I blinked at her, not really immediately grasping the implications. Half of me thought she was joking and this whole afternoon had been a put-on, what with her cavewoman costume and everything, and now this supposed revelation. But the other half of me wasn’t so sure.
She sounded pretty serious.
Eating human meat?
As in people?
I may not have known the scientific term, but a few images did come to mind as I stared back at her.
Hansel and Gretel. The witch and her gingerbread house.
Some old cartoon where a guy starving on a desert island imagines that another guy is a giant turkey leg.
And a few seconds of a scary movie, The Minnesota Woodchipper Bloodbath, that my parents were watching one night - I’d snuck out of bed and listened to a few minutes from the top of our living room stairway. Something about a family of inbred Midwesterners making casseroles out of terrorized teenagers, going Oh yah dis girl has got a lotta meat on her don’tcha know!
(I had nightmares for months!)
Seeing my confusion, Heather took the lead. Y’know, like a leader does.
“We eat human meat. All of us do, on the team.”
“We’re cannibal cheerleaders!” Dawn piped in. “Isn’t that just the coolest?!”
My eyes dropped to the floor as I rolled the concept around in my head.
“Human meat? Like…people? You must be joking, right?”
I looked at Heather’s hand on my shoulder, then at her face. She looked 200% sincere and I started to think maybe she and Dawn weren’t kidding.
Okay, time out.
Pop quiz, quiz kids.
Your new school’s Head Cheerleader has just informed you that she and the entire squad are eating human flesh. Do you…
(A) Have a good laugh ‘cause it’s obviously a sick joke.
(B) Take her at her word, and get outta there before she eats you next.
(C) Go along with the joke and see who cracks first.
Well if you answered (C) then consider this a Pick Your Own Adventure story, cuz that’s what this wannabe cheerleader decided to do!
I took a deep breath and got in character.
“How do you…I thought you can’t…do that?”
Heather gave my shoulder a friendly squeeze.
“You know the expression, ‘you are what you eat?’”
“Sure.”
“Well, if you’re a person eating another person, then you’re still a person, aren’t you? And you’ve heard of evolution, right? Survival of the fittest and stuff like that?”
“Yeah…?”
“What we do by eating other people is just like that. All of us on the team are the fittest and strongest girls in school. So, we’re just doing what comes naturally.”
“Totally” Dawn chimed in as she walked in front of us, eagerly joining the conversation. “It’s like predators and prey. The weak and the strong!”
Heather proceeded carefully. “Angela, when you go to see games at Packer you’re gonna see our guys taking down other teams, like those pussies at Southfield High or Westmore. And those other teams, well, they really suck. Don’t they, Dawn?”
“Totally” she confirmed. “Trust us, Angela.”
“Right, it’s just nature. The stronger pack of animals, that’s our guys. They’re thinning the herd. And we do the same thing, only when we do it, it’s for nutrition.”
“That…makes sense” I heard myself say.
I remembered some old nature show I watched with my dad (he loves them) that I hadn’t thought about in years, where a lion chased after a zebra, pounced on it and brought it to the ground. Kinda like a football tackle. Huh.
Then the lion ate the zebra.
Hey, wait a minute!
“Does that mean…you’ve been serving…is all that barbecue…?”
Dawn took a stick of jerky from the kitchen counter and waved it at me with a face that said, what do you think? Then with a sly smile, she took a bite, chewing extra slowly.
I looked down at my own tummy. Supposedly there are the remains of another human being inside, I thought. The salted, smoked and spiced remains of person.
Damn. They tasted pretty good, too, whoever they were.
(Supposedly.)
I looked around at the bloodstained cleavers and knives around the kitchen and wondered if it wouldn’t be better if this “human meat” joke were legit. At least then I wouldn’t have to kill any fuzzy lil’ animals.
Heather was observing me very closely, trying to see if I was squirming, freaking out, or getting ready to upchuck.
Okay, I get it. I’d have to keep playing along.
I stepped over to all the pieces of fresh meat.
“So I’ve actually been eating people this whole time?”
“Get over it or get into it” said Heather.
“And your barbecue fundraisers, all those people are eating human meat too?”
Dawn rolled her eyes. “Yeah but they don’t even know it and they sure don’t appreciate it.”
For the first time I thought, what if this isn’t a game that they’re playing? What if this is for real?
Well, I still knew I wanted to be a Packer High Cheerleader.
And Heather didn’t seem like a girl you said “no” to.
I’d already come this far, so ride or die, bitches!
All eyes on me, I oh-so-dramatically selected a big stick of jerky, brought it to my lips and took a big bite.
Heather and Dawn screamed.
In a good way, I mean.
And you know what? It still tasted pretty good. And they wanted to trick me into thinking this was a person? Rude!
Then Heather decided to test me. “Angela, does this mean you’re going to keep eating our jerky and barbecue, now that you know what’s in it?”
“Hey, when you’re in it, you’re in it to win it.”
Dawn gave me a congratulatory pat on the back. Heather seemed satisfied. I’ve always been a girl who can roll with the unexpected. You wanna play games? I’ll play you’re little make-believe game.
“You’re going to notice” said Heather, “That this is the reason us Packer High squad girls are so much hotter than the Southfield or Westmore High cheerleaders. Besides tasting great, human flesh is guilt free. Low fat, high protein and full of nutrients that keep our hair and skin silky smooth.”
“That’s the real reason they make it illegal. Nobody would buy beauty products anymore!” laughed Dawn.
“How’d you get the idea, anyway?” I asked, curious to hear what kind of story they’d cooked up for me.
“I’m so glad you asked! It’s crazy!” Heather said enthusiastically. “The whole thing started in freshman year, like my first month of freshman year, almost exactly four years ago. I was taking Ancient History with Mr. Casale, and he was telling us about the history of human sacrifice, like with Aztecs and Incas and stuff. Almost everybody thought it was so creepy. But the really interesting part was when he started telling us how those guys could get the strength from their enemies by eating them! I was like, whaaaaat! So when I became team captain, we added sacrifice and cannibalism to our squad goals and it was so spooky, the Pumas started winning more games than ever!”
The more details they added to this little fantasy, the more real it felt. Maybe it was too soon to ask what I wanted to hear next, but I just had to know. I love secrets. Even made-up ones! Sue me!
“So where…I mean, how do you get the meat?”
Heather leaned back against her kitchen countertop and gazed up at the ceiling.
“Weeeelllllll….it wasn’t easy, at first. We used to order from this one website on, like, a secret part of the Internet where you can get drugs and guns and stuff like that, but we just used it for meat. We’d have to a wait a long time for delivery, too. It was not ideal. That site got shut down, but we realized it’s better to hunt your own meat anyways. Have you ever gone hunting?”
I grimaced at the thought. Hunting? Moi? My parents got scared even thinking about guns. And pulling a trigger on some innocent little forest critter?
“Oh, no. Never!” I said, a little nervously.
Did they need me to have hunting experience?
“I have thought about it sometimes” I hedged. “But, it always seemed like it’s supposed to be a guy thing.”
“That’s true” sighed Heather. “Typical male chauvinism. Angela, the reason women don’t get encouraged to hunt is because guys want to hog all the fun.”
Dawn nodded vigorously. “Heather’s so right! Hunting your own food rules ‘cause very time you bite into a steak or a sausage or whatever meat you got yourself, you know you’ve earned it. You can prepare it any way you want! And, there’s so much you can do with what you’ve caught, besides eating it!”
“A good hunter uses every part of the animal” Heather agreed. “Nothing makes you feel more connected to nature than being smart and using the bones, the hide, even the hair from what you’ve caught after you’ve stripped the meat. Just eating the meat alone would be so wasteful. But using the whole animal? You really learn to appreciate how it’s all part of the circle of life.”
It struck me light a bolt of lightning. The animal skin clothes, the bone jewelry, the leather purses and handbags? This cannibal gimmick was Heather’s whole theme for the squad. The Packer High “Cannibal” Cheerleading Squad. They probably told this story to everyone at school who asked about their weird exclusive fashion accessories. And a freshman girl like me who was trying out for the team got the full treatment. They were actually going to try to convince me it was real! I reached out and stroked the end of one of Heather’s loincloth tassels.
“So this ‘animal skin’ you’re wearing right now, is this what I think it is?”
“Now you’re catching on!” she responded. “And it’s soooo comfortable, too. Nothing feels like a second skin, like a second skin! We make all kinds of things for the team from the trophies we take.”
“Yeah, I noticed the tooth earrings and bone bracelets and everything. Tres chic.”
Heather and Dawn smiled proudly.
“But what happens when your parents or whoever asks where you got the bones?”
“Oh, we just say it’s from chickens or something. Nobody really cares” said Dawn.
“Hmmm. So Heather, the guy you’re wearing right now, what was his name?”
Without missing a beat, she played along right back. Okay, this was fun!
“Oh, I think it was Mike McClaskey.”
“Uh-huh. And are girl skins any softer than boys?”
“Well actually, we don’t use girl skins.”
I was starting to get a little weirded out how prepared Heather and Dawn were for every question I could make up.
“Or girl parts, for that matter” she went on. “We don’t eat our own! Strictly boys. There’s more meat on them, they taste better…”
“And” added Dawn, “It’s like, the feminist thing to do. Girl power, baby!”
That was cute. When Heather came up with this little scenario, she must have thought eating another girl sounded kind of gay. But there were a million times when I looked at a hot guy and felt something like hunger in my stomach. She must have had the same thought. The idea of giving some payback to the guys in this man’s world by actually eating them? Hilarious. Love it!
Heather wasn’t done yet, either.
“Men are disposable. They go fight and die in wars, they get killed working in construction, or they crack their heads open on the football field. We’re just helping ourselves to an over-abundant supply.”
Boy, was she enjoying telling me this. I started to laugh, shaking my head in disbelief.
“Something funny about that?” she asked dryly.
This was almost too much, but it was so funny. These girls were so committed to this! I had been worried ever since meeting Kimberlee Baron that the rest of the squad might be a bunch of stuck-up bitches with no sense of humor.
I didn’t want it to end yet, though. I had to keep this going.
“Oh, you know, it’s just…you guys seemed so…so nice, during the pep rally!”
Heather smiled back.
“Oh, we are. We all take good care of each other and we really do love our school.”
“You never answered my question, though. How exactly do you get these guys? You said hunting, but how do you go hunting?”
Heather licked her lips and raised an eyebrow.
“How do you think?”
I was getting the feeling this joke was starting to move from merely twisted to really dark. But if I chickened out and called their bluff, told Heather that this joke had gone too far? Total wuss move.
This is their real test of my nerves, I thought. She wants to see how far I’ll go. It’s like hearing a scary story, or watching a scary movie like the one she had playing in the living room. You just have to prove you’re not chicken!
“I guess you, uh, go ‘hunting’ for the guys?” I answered myself. “Is it like a real hunting trip? Do you really go out and shoot them?”
Now it was Heather and Dawn’s turn to laugh.
“Um, no” Heather scoffed. “We don’t have to go all gangsta on them.”
“Yeah, our prep time might be, like, double if we had to pick bullets out of everyone” considered Dawn.
“And shooting up our hometown? Really? That is not something I’m about to ask my girls to do! Our methods are lot quieter than going blam-blam-blam-blam.”
“B’sides, I hate guns” Dawn pouted.
I thought back to her joke in the car about taking an axe to guys who were bothering her. Had she been setting me up for this prank the entire time?
“Then how do you do it?” I pressed.
Heather got a mischievous look.
“We have fun” she said, and started to shimmy from side to side, swaying her hips around. “We use what comes naturally. You were born with a nice body, Angela. Why do you think mother nature gave you that? To attract a man. Or men. Many, many men.”
“Before us, cannibals were, like, totally gross” said Dawn. “I looked it up. It’s always some old European dude, or like a fat kiddy-diddler in a clown costume. And those guys always got caught, because they were weirdos. But cannibalism can also be fabulous, and that’s us! We’re sexy, we’re cute, we’re cannibals to boot! The guys line up for us, and we knock ‘em down! It’s too easy.”
“Um, is that why you were asking about whether I was a virgin or not?
“Well, yeah. But like I said, it’s way okay if you are. You just have to be willing to use you’ve got to lure the meat, like a master hunter.”
“What we do is a little more like hunting plus fishing” Heather clarified. “You use yourself as bait. A lot of our best hunters are really just teases.”
That made me cringe a little. Seduce and destroy? Angela Dishner, the deadly femme fatale? I could imagine Kimberlee Baron pulling that off, or Heather, but it was hard to keep a straight face imagining a sweetheart like Dawn being a cold blooded assassin. Or even myself!
“You set a trap, promising a little of this…”
Heather traced a line down her neck, over her bone necklace and into the valley of her cleavage.
“The rest is easy. Guys are so simple, Angela. You know as well as I do that they only want one thing and it’s disgusting. Give a little hint that you might be giving them a little of what you’ve got, and you’ll have them right where you want them…”
Her finger continued down past her cleavage towards her stomach.
“For lunch” she concluded.
“Wow” I deadpanned. “That sounds easy.”
“You bet your buns it’s easy!” laughed Dawn, oblivious to my sarcasm. She placed one hand behind her head and the other on her hip, gyrating her butt in circles.
“All it takes is a little wiggle, and snap goes the trap!”
“So what, basically a typical week for you guys would just be, like…you go to class, you practice drills, you seduce some hunky guy, then you kill him and cook him, to eat over the weekend?”
“Well no, not exactly” said Heather. “We don’t go really after cute guys. You wouldn’t want to eat any kind of athlete, ‘cause their muscles would be too worked out. They’d cook up all dry and stringy and tough. Ick!”
“That’s why we wouldn’t expect you to, y’know, do anything, when you’re out hunting” Dawn said sheepishly. “Those skinny-fat guys, or the fatties who sit at home playing video games all day? That’s where the prime cuts are.”
I squinted at her. They really weren’t giving up on this elaborate horror story yet, were they? I gestured at the roll of stickers hanging near the kitchen sink.
“And these labels that all say ‘white meat’ and stuff? I guess these were all made for me, too? Great touch.”
“Angela” said Heather solemnly. “Those labels are not ‘for you.’ What do you mean, ‘great touch’?”
Fun was fun, but this had been a long day and I was starting to think enough was enough. If I didn’t call their bluff eventually, would Heather really respect me for letting this joke go on all night?
“Errgh, listen” I pleaded. “I’m so honored to be here today, really I am. And I get why you’re doing this whole ‘cannibalism’ act. It’s amusing. I’ll admit I was a little freaked out about this butchering our own meat stuff, but I can learn. Telling me it’s really people is a hilarious idea, but I can’t keep it up any more. So joke’s over, you got me. Okay? You got me! I don’t care if you think I’m being a wuss, I just want to learn more about them team, but for real. Please?”
Heather’s face turned to stone.
We’re talking Egyptian pyramid face.
Nervous, I looked back at Dawn.
OMG! She looked ready to cry!
Oh, shit.
“Angela” said Heather, the voice of doom. “It hurts me, and clearly it hurts Dawn as well, that you wouldn’t take this seriously. I thought from the fact Dawn brought you here this afternoon, that you were a potential candidate for a spot on the team.”
Fffffffffff.
Had I just utterly blown my chances at making the squad?
Was this whole “cannibal cheerleaders” game really so important to team spirit??
Dawn actually ran over to Heather’s side and, I swear this is true, buried her head in Heather’s chest like a baby. And then, Heather actually stroked Dawn’s hair like she was her lost little child.
“Heather, I’m - I’m sorry. Is Angela going to be okay?” she sniffled.
Heather stared at me, judging.
“I think so, Dawn. We can’t help it that our ways are beyond the times. Remember how you behaved when I told you about the secret? Angela’s a cool girl, I think. She’ll come around.”
(Um, Angela is right here, guys.)
“I thought you might feel this way, Angela. It’s always a possibility. I could tell you a lot of lame stuff about how you’re right, this was all a big joke, hah-hah-hah…”
(She actually said the words, Hah hah hah.)
“…But then I’d also have to tell you that the spot on the team is no longer available.”
My heart stopped and I think she took advantage of the moment to look into my soul a little bit. I guess I was worth saving, because she softly ushered Dawn aside, then took her phone from a nearby countertop and pulled up some kind of picture on it. Without saying a word she handed it over to me.
I looked at her, then to her screen.
And guess what? Are you ready?
I don’t know if you’re ready for this.
It was some scrawny guy, chained to the floor of some kind of basement. At first I thought it was a scene from The Minnesota Woodchipper Bloodbath Part II.
Except I could recognize the “star” and it sure wasn’t anybody famous.
No, it was a twerp.
The same twerp who’d tried to talk to me after the pep rally.
It was Melvin!
