Condiment Carnage
The first splatter was accidental. Or at least, that’s what they all thought.
At 12:04 PM, in the fluorescent-lit abyss of Harrington Middle School’s cafeteria, Jimmy Krenz leaned across the table to grab the last chocolate milk. He didn’t notice that his elbow nudged the nearly full ketchup bottle, perched precariously on its end like a rocket ready to launch. One squeeze too much and—pssshhht!—a jet stream of red exploded from the nozzle and painted Suzie Grover’s white hoodie with a crimson arc worthy of a crime scene.
There was a moment of stunned silence. Forks froze mid-air. Juice boxes paused mid-sip.
Then Suzie screamed.
“You little turd!” she howled, grabbing a scoop of mashed potatoes with her bare hand. Before Jimmy could raise his tray as a shield, the lumpy white goo smacked him square in the face.
That was the spark.
In the next ten seconds, the cafeteria devolved into an all-out war zone. The air filled with flying food—peas, spaghetti, half-eaten corndogs. A meatball whizzed past Principal Denner’s head like a meteor. Someone overturned the salad bar. A milk carton exploded against the “Healthy Choices” banner.
I ducked under my table, clutching my tray like a riot shield. Name’s Ezra. Seventh grader. Nobody important, really. I kept to myself, did my homework, survived middle school with minimal social damage. Until today.
The weird part? This wasn’t just a chaotic prank. Something…wrong…was in the air.
It started with the lunch ladies.
They didn’t try to stop it. No—Mrs. Keene, head of the kitchen staff for over twenty years, let out a chilling cackle and hurled a ladle of hot tomato soup toward the teachers’ table. Miss Bramble, the history teacher, slipped in pudding and cracked her head on a tray rail.
Then Mrs. Keene climbed onto the counter, apron stained and hair wild, wielding a carving knife like it was Excalibur. Her eyes were glassy. Too glassy.
“Let the feast begin!” she bellowed.
What. The. Hell.
I crouch-walked through the madness, my shoes squelching through pools of gravy and dropped jello. Meatballs ricocheted off the walls. Spaghetti coated the floor like vines. I saw someone wipe out hard in a puddle of applesauce.
I was aiming for the far exit near the teacher’s lounge, figuring I could bolt and call for help. But the door was chained shut—from the outside. Not with a fire chain or emergency bar, either. This was a thick, rusted loop, padlocked tight.
Who the hell chains shut a school cafeteria during lunch?
I turned and saw Martin Delacruz, king of the eighth-grade hallways, charge through a cluster of sixth graders like a linebacker. He was laughing. Or screaming. Hard to tell.
I had to get out.
Instead, I ran straight into Sasha Kim, student council president and the only person in school who still wore a tie every Wednesday.
“You okay?” I shouted.
Her glasses were askew, and there was a smear of mustard across her cheek. “This is not okay! Someone dumped spaghetti into the Wi-Fi router. I was in the middle of uploading my Cornell essay draft!”
“Sasha, we’re twelve.”
“Ambition has no age limit!”
She ducked as a flying banana spun past like a boomerang. We dove behind the overturned soup station.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “This isn’t just a food fight. The lunch ladies are…possessed?”
She nodded, frowning. “I noticed it this morning. When I came in early for Model U.N. practice, Mrs. Keene was in the walk-in freezer. Talking. To something. But there was no one there.”
“Like…on the phone?”
“No. Just muttering. Like a chant.”
I didn’t like that. Not one bit.
We needed a plan. Something bigger was happening. The food was the chaos, sure, but the source of the madness? It was deeper. Darker.
I peeked over the soup station. The cafeteria was a war zone. A kid from homeroom was pelting others with tater tots using a homemade slingshot made from cafeteria trays. A huge ketchup sigil had been painted on the tile floor—how? And more importantly…why?
That’s when I saw it.
Under the salad bar, glowing faintly red, was a crack in the tile. A thin, jagged fracture that wasn’t there yesterday. Something shimmered beneath it—almost like liquid heat.
“Sasha,” I said, pointing. “Do you see that?”
She squinted. “Oh my god…is that glowing?”
“I think it’s…spreading.”
Even as we watched, the crack pulsed faintly. And suddenly I knew. The food fight was just a symptom. Something had been released. Something ancient. And we were standing in the middle of its buffet.
ONE HOUR EARLIER
They’d delivered new stock to the cafeteria that morning—canned goods, industrial-sized bags of noodles, and one unmarked wooden crate.
Janitor Joe had wheeled it in himself, grumbling about “weird vibes” and how the thing practically radiated heat despite being sealed in thick timber.
“What is it?” Mrs. Keene asked.
Joe shrugged. “Didn’t order it. No shipping label. Could be a prank.”
But it wasn’t a prank.
The crate contained a large ceramic urn, black as burnt toast, covered in etched symbols that no one could read.
And when Mrs. Keene cracked the lid open, something slithered out.
Something invisible. Something hungry.
BACK TO NOW
“Sasha, we have to stop whatever that is,” I said.
“And how exactly do we do that?” she asked, ducking a flying tray.
“Find that urn. Destroy it.”
“How do you know about the urn?”
“I don’t know! I—I think I saw it. In a dream. This morning.”
“Convenient.”
A girl with macaroni in her hair ran past, screaming.
“Look, do you have a better idea?”
She sighed. “Fine. But we’re gonna need backup.”
We crawled our way to the supply closet by the janitor’s office, narrowly dodging what appeared to be a pie catapult rigged by the robotics club. Once inside, I locked the door behind us and flicked on the light.
That’s when we found Janitor Joe.
He was slumped against the shelves, pale, his eyes open but unseeing. A smear of dried ketchup trailed from the corner of his mouth.
Sasha screamed. I grabbed a broom, ready to defend us.
Then Joe blinked.
He looked up slowly, face slack. “It’s awake,” he whispered. “And it’s hungry.”
“What is?” I asked.
He shuddered. “The spirit of endless gluttony. Trapped in the urn for centuries. Someone opened it.”
“Mrs. Keene.”
He nodded slowly. “She’s its vessel now.”
Sasha and I looked at each other, both thinking the same thing: we had to destroy that urn. Or this school would become a permanent food battleground.
MISSION: URN DESTRUCTION
We needed tools. Weapons. Reinforcements.
We found Andre, the AV club wizard, hiding in the media cart storage. He had a modified Nerf gun that fired packets of salt. He claimed it disrupted “aura flows.”
Then there was Kara, the lunch monitor, who had locked herself in the vending machine room. She was armed with a mop and righteous fury.
Together, we made our move.
Back in the cafeteria, the floor had begun to bubble in places. The crack under the salad bar had widened, glowing a furious orange. The air smelled of sulfur and spaghetti sauce.
Mrs. Keene stood atop a stack of lunch trays like a throne, eyes black, mouth dripping gravy.
“You dare challenge the Feast Eternal?” she roared.
“Yeah!” I shouted. “We’re on a diet!”
Andre fired his salt packet launcher. The first hit her in the chest—and she screamed, smoke rising from the impact.
“Cover me!” I yelled, bolting for the salad bar.
As I reached it, the floor cracked open fully. A geyser of mashed potatoes shot into the air, followed by a shriek that was not entirely human.
And there it was: the urn.
Nestled in a cradle of slime, pulsing like a heart.
I grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall and raised it high.
Mrs. Keene screamed behind me. “NO! You cannot deny the Hunger!”
“Watch me!”
I brought the extinguisher down on the urn.
The ceramic split with a horrific crunch. Red vapor shot upward like a reverse firework. The room went dark.
And then—
Silence.
AFTERMATH
The lights flickered back on.
Students groaned and sat up, blinking in confusion. Spaghetti rained from the ceiling vents. Someone burped.
Mrs. Keene lay unconscious atop the tray stack, the darkness gone from her eyes.
I sat on the floor, covered in pudding, holding the cracked remains of the urn. Sasha leaned beside me, her glasses broken, her tie drenched in milk.
“Did we win?” she asked.
“I think so.”
Janitor Joe emerged from the closet, blinking like a man reborn.
“The spirit’s sealed,” he said. “But this place is still marked.”
“What does that mean?” Sasha asked.
“It might come back.”
“Awesome,” I muttered.
But we had survived. For now.
And as we looked around at the devastation—food-stained walls, unconscious students, and a half-melted meatloaf sculpture—I knew one thing:
Middle school would never be the same.
Three days.
That’s how long the school stayed closed after the incident.
They said it was due to a “major plumbing malfunction,” though I’ve never seen plumbing that oozes barbecue sauce and hisses when you get too close. The janitors wore hazmat suits. Every entrance was sealed with yellow tape and hand-written warnings like “DO NOT TASTE THE FLOORS” and “ABANDON ALL LUNCH YE WHO ENTER HERE.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about the urn. About the scream when it broke. About how Mrs. Keene’s eyes went from bottomless pits of gravy-filled void to just…tired cafeteria lady in a stained apron.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Sasha said as we walked back into the school that Monday morning. “And no, I don’t think it’s over.”
I wanted to believe she was wrong. But the lunch menu posted outside the cafeteria had an entry scrawled in red marker:
TODAY’S SPECIAL: THE HUNGER RETURNS.
“Oh come on,” I muttered.
We pushed through the double doors—and stopped dead.
The cafeteria was pristine.
No gravy puddles. No spaghetti vines. No suspicious ketchup sigils. It looked almost…too clean. Sanitized. Rebooted.
Then we saw him.
A tall man in a tailored black suit stood beside the milk cooler, checking a clipboard and sipping from a thermos labeled “NUTRITION IS SACRIFICE.” He wore white gloves and had a name tag that simply read:
Mr. Morgrave – Consultant, Federal Nutritional Oversight
His eyes scanned the room like he was measuring each wall for fresh carnage.
“Who is that?” I whispered.
“No clue,” Sasha replied, already typing furiously on her phone. “He’s not listed on any district board. No LinkedIn. No paper trail.”
Mr. Morgrave’s eyes locked onto us.
“You must be Ezra and Sasha.”
Chills. Full-body goosebumps.
“Um… yeah?” I said. “And you are?”
“I’ve been assigned to oversee the containment of this school’s recent…culinary irregularities.”
“Irregularities?” Sasha asked. “You mean the ancient food demon that tried to turn our classmates into gravy puppets?”
He blinked once, very slowly. “That would be the one, yes.”
He motioned us toward the walk-in freezer, which now had a biometric keypad and a steel-reinforced door.
Inside, the cracked remains of the urn sat in a glass box, under fluorescent lights and wrapped in salt lines. It pulsed faintly, like it still had a heartbeat.
“Why keep it?” I asked. “Why not destroy it completely?”
Mr. Morgrave didn’t answer right away. He stared at the urn, eyes distant. “This isn’t the only one,” he said finally. “There are others.”
He handed us a sealed file. Inside: photographs of identical urns. In gymnasiums. Kitchens. Summer camps. One in the boiler room of a Chuck E. Cheese.
Each one labeled with the same ominous red stamp:
“STATUS: UNSEALED.”
“We’ve contained most,” Morgrave said. “But something has changed. Your school was the first to awaken one since 1979.”
“What changed?” Sasha asked.
He looked at us like we were the only two humans on a planet of fools.
“Appetite,” he said.
THE HUNGER NEVER DIES
That night, I dreamed of a dinner table that stretched for miles. Children sat in silence, chewing and chewing and chewing. Their jaws unhinged. Their eyes hollow.
At the head of the table was Mrs. Keene, her apron still stained, feeding the urn scraps of food and whispering lullabies in Latin.
I woke up sweating, my sheets twisted like licorice ropes.
And I knew it wasn’t over.
TUESDAY
The school installed a new vending machine in the cafeteria. Black steel. No brand. No visible power cord.
Just a glowing red panel and the words:
FEED ME.
Andre from AV Club swore it appeared overnight.
By second period, kids had started using it. You didn’t need money—just a thumbprint. It gave out snacks that weren’t on any known nutritional label: Tartar Taffy, Sinister Stix, and something called Crimson Crunchers.
“Do not eat that,” I warned Emma, a fifth grader unwrapping something that looked like beef jerky dipped in candle wax.
“It’s free!” she said. “And it tastes like steak and sugar!”
She took a bite—and her pupils dilated instantly.
“Oh crap,” I muttered.
DAY TWO OF THE HUNGER
By lunchtime, students were no longer eating with trays. They were devouring food with their hands, shoveling it in like animals. Napkins? Forgotten. Utensils? Extinct.
Sasha and I stood near the vending machine and watched in horror as a seventh grader tried to hug it and got a static shock that fried the hallway lights.
“It’s feeding off them,” she whispered. “The more they eat, the stronger it gets.”
“Just like the urn.”
“Exactly.”
We needed to shut it down.
OPERATION: STARVE THE MACHINE
Andre, Kara, and even Martin (yes, that Martin) joined us for a late-night mission to disable the demonic vending machine.
We wore headlamps and brought sledgehammers, crowbars, and a gallon of holy water Sasha got from a weird Reddit priest.
At 11:59 PM, we broke into the cafeteria.
The machine was waiting.
Its screen glowed blood-red. The words had changed:
MIDNIGHT SPECIAL: HUMAN SOULS.
“Cool,” Martin muttered. “Definitely gonna die tonight.”
We circled it.
Andre plugged in his EMF scanner. The needle bent 90 degrees and snapped clean off.
Kara doused it with holy water.
Nothing.
Then Sasha stepped forward and whispered something in Latin. The same phrase Mrs. Keene had muttered in the freezer.
The machine screamed.
I didn’t know vending machines could scream. The sound shattered two lights and cracked the dessert display case.
Then it opened.
Not the snack drawer. The entire front face split open, revealing gears, wires—and behind them, a writhing black throat made of teeth.
I froze.
Sasha hurled the salt canister inside and slammed the door shut.
The lights went out.
Silence.
Then: a long, rattling sigh. And the machine spat out one final snack:
“Leftover Regret Bites.”
“Gross,” Andre said.
THE FALLOUT
The next morning, the vending machine was gone.
No trace it had ever been there.
Kids seemed…groggy. Like they’d woken from a fever dream.
But I saw the signs.
Their eyes still flickered red when they passed the salad bar.
Their footsteps paused near the crack in the tile that had almost sealed.
The urn, even shattered, was whispering again. Morgrave said they’d move it to a secure facility, but I didn’t trust that for a second.
The truth?
We were living on borrowed time.
EPILOGUE: A LETTER FROM MR. MORGRAVE
Sasha and I received a letter two weeks later. Typed. No return address.
To the Defenders of Harrington Middle School,
You have done well to stave off the first awakening. But the Hunger is not gone. Merely sleeping.
Each generation must face it. The Feast Eternal waits at the edge of awareness. When children crave, when discipline fades, when ketchup flows like wine—the spirit will rise again.
Be vigilant. Be prepared.
And whatever you do—don’t eat the meatloaf.
Sincerely,
Mr. Morgrave
POSTSCRIPT: THE HALL MONITOR REPORTS
Two weeks after everything calmed down, Kara came to us with a Polaroid.
It showed a new crack in the gymnasium floor. A small, dark line. Barely visible.
But Sasha and I knew.
It had begun again.
And this time… it wouldn’t just be the cafeteria.
Submitted By – Silvana Briones