TW: Animal Abuse
In the morning, Duncan was gone. All was bright and clear outside, the sort of weather that made it easy to think you hallucinated the events of the night previous. Yet I knew I hadn’t; a quick tour around the property, over to the depressing flower patch I’d tilled last summer, revealed the crushed remains of dead flowers. Footprints, too large to be mine, confirmed what I’d already known: Duncan came for a visit.
I fed the dogs and paced around the kitchen, head aching. I put on a pot of coffee and flipped on the television, letting the late-morning news drone on about this and that. Thought the noise might help.
I still struggled to wrap my head around the past week. Everything seemed impossible, but then, as my mother would’ve said, impossible didn’t exist; only the highly improbable, and improbable implied an inherent possibility.
So, okay.
Here we were. A dead man wandered to my house for reasons unknown, although some form of supernatural revenge had occurred to me; my co-worker lured me into a two-man murder for yet more reasons unknown; and I had two very sweet dogs who didn’t belong to me and were likely traumatized by their owner’s brutal murder staring at me as if I were their only hope and savior.
Something had to be done.
I didn’t much fancy the idea of calling Samuel, but I’d run through everything I could think of within my mental inventory, and nothing offered itself up as a suggestion. Sure, I could go to the cops, turn myself in for aiding and abetting, or whatever the fuck it was they might charge me with—and then I’d be on the line for that warrant, too, and I’d have to make a miserable phone call to my mother and explain why I couldn’t help her afford the mélange of daily medications she took, all meant to keep her alive and in some semblance of good health—but they sure as fuck wouldn’t believe me about Duncan’s body, and even if they did, what could they do?
What could any of us do?
Samuel, murdering, duplicitous shit that he was, was the only person I could imagine having even the slightest concept of what was going on or how to handle it.
I called him and listened while it rang. Straight to voicemail. At this hour he was probably in the middle of a workday, I reasoned, and it was highly doubtful he’d bother to break the act on my account.
“It’s me,” I said, when the automated greeting finished it’s canned message, “some weird shit happened to me last night. Our friend came for a visit.” I doubted, should we come under suspicion, that referring to Duncan as “our friend” would shake the cops, but I was running on paranoia and caffeine and an absolute dearth of other ideas. “You’re the only person I could think to call, so … fuck, call me back when you can. Or come over. Fucking something.”
I almost tacked on a “please,” but hung up before polite temptation suckered me in. That bastard didn’t warrant a “please.”
In the living room, I heard the sound of a woman crying. On television, a blonde woman—frail-looking, bird-like, as if gravity itself were too much for her—sobbed to a reporter about her missing husband and dogs.
“And the police haven’t given you any information?” the reporter asked.
She shook her head. “I just want my Duncan to come home.”
One of the dogs peered over at me from the couch, head cocked.
A fresh wave of guilt washed over me.
“Fuck.”
Something would definitely have to be done.
***
Samuel never returned my call, but rather showed up at my house unannounced an hour after his shift ended. He’d brought a Starbucks cup and muffin—again, only enough for himself, which I found amusing and increasingly in character—and noted he lacked so much as a shred of self-consciousness as he waddled up to my door.
Curious, that. I remembered the days when I’d fallen for his carefully implemented image; when I’d been convinced my attention was a kindness.
Back when I thought he was … well, normal.
“You look nice this evening,” Sam said. He stepped up onto my porch and I cracked the door for him, the dogs yapping at my heels, eager to see who was there. “I see our guest hasn’t arrived yet. Unless, of course, you have him tucked away somewhere?”
“Hardly.” I nudged the dogs back with my foot and opened the door wider for him. “Haven’t seen him yet. Wipe your feet, if you would.”
“You hardly seemed that particular when we were burying a body.”
“You mean when you were?” I rolled my eyes. “Just get the fuck in here, man.”
“As you like.” He shuffled in, and I thought—not for the first time—how odd it was to hear him speak like this. Nothing like the Samuel I thought I knew. But, then, there was probably something to that, something about how one really never knows anyone, especially not their fucking coworker. “You’ve kept the dogs,” he said, sounding displeased.
“As opposed to what? Leaving them on the side of the road?”
He shrugged. “Amongst other ideas. Though you hardly seem like you’d be in the market for some of them.”
I stared at him, already tired of this interaction. I’d never had any plans to leave my job, but suddenly I couldn’t imagine working with Samuel much longer. A week, a month, a year. More? It seemed like an exhausting amount of time to spend with a man you couldn’t stand, let alone one you helped bury a body.
“Look, man, you’re here because I want to know what’s going on. If you can’t fill in some gaps for me, at the very least, then get the fuck out.”
Samuel smiled, obsequious. Made me want to punch him right in the goddamned face.
“I can do that,” he said. “Shall we sit?”
“Pretty sure that’s my line,” I mumbled, though we did in fact sit.
“I don’t suppose you know what time our friend left last night?” he asked.
“Not a clue. Took the dogs upstairs and went to sleep.”
“Of course. The most fascinating breakthrough of the century, and you’d prefer to sleep it off.”
“Is that what you’d call this?”
“What else? You don’t find a man rising from the dead, headless, to visit your very home to be something of a miracle?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of abject horror.”
“Your problem, Joel—do you want to know your problem?”
“Not especially.” I settled into a chair across from him—he’d sprawled along my couch, all arms and legs, as if unaware of the space he consumed—and one of the dogs hopped into my lap. “But I’m guessing you’ll elaborate all the same.”
“Correct. Your problem is that you think too small. You live in your tiny, contained world, where everything is order and simple routine. But your ignorance blinds you to reality.”
“That right?”
“What is it they say? ‘Outrage is simply the reaction to learning something new?’ Something like that. I mean, look at antivaxxers. We have all this information in the world, have had it for decades, and yet it’s new to them. And new, of course, is frightening. Throw in a moron with a string of letters behind their name, willing to validate their insanity, and there you go: outrage.”
“Great. Cool. I’m no an antivaxxer, though.”
“No, no, you’re a step above all that, I’ll give you that. All the same: your world is so dangerously, terrifyingly small. It’s heartbreaking to watch, honestly. You have my immense sympathy.”
“Thanks,” I said, flat. I was already getting tired of this conversation, letting my mind drift to the coffee I had in the kitchen, how quickly I could whip up an omelet and some bacon. Anything to get away from him.
“Anyway,” I said, eager to move on, “still waiting for you to clue me the fuck in.”
“In time, my friend, of that there’s no doubt. I thought we might wait for Duncan to show up, first.”
“Come on. You can’t be serious. Are we just supposed to sit here and stare at one another while we wait, thumbs firmly up our asses?”
Samuel stared at me, amiable and silent.
“Oh, Jesus,” I groaned. “Fine. But I’m getting coffee.”
I did not offer him some.
***
We didn’t have to wait long. Probably not a good sign when you’re relieved that your headless former employer finally shows up so you don’t have to sit around and talk to your possibly batshit insane coworker, but I’d given up having any sense of normalcy within my days at this point.
It was the dogs who alerted us, both immediately raising hackles and growling in the direction of the window. It was the first time Samuel looked at them with something other than disdain.
“Do you see him on the street?” he asked me?
We’d left the curtains open, our view into the neighborhood unobstructed. I didn’t move from the couch—stupidly, I felt safer there—but I peered into the dark, squinting, trying to make out a shape that might give our former manager away.
“Nothing yet.”
“Intriguing. The dogs can sense him before he’s within sight.”
“Dogs are pretty good at that,” I mumbled.
“Sometimes. Not always, I assure you. I’ve encountered entirely too many who were silent until it was too late.”
I opened my mouth, about to ask something stupid like “too late for what?” but then it occurred to me that I very likely did not want to know. At least not where Samuel was concerned. The last thing I needed was more details about his after-work activities. I’d had enough for a lifetime.
Finally, the first glimpse of baby blue—Duncan had worn a baby blue tracksuit the night we, uh, beheaded him—appeared in the street, followed by the rest of him, his arms out precariously as if seeking balance, unsure of his footing.
Samuel leaned forward, his doughy face sharp, a hawk hunting some small furry rodent.
“Fascinating,” he said, with all the awed rapture of a man who hadn’t committed a serious felony, but rather one who’d just watched the birth of his first child. “Look at the way it moves.”
“He,” I whispered, though it rang hollow. This body wasn’t Duncan anymore than the picture on his desk was. Now it was just something that moved without aim; an artifice of a person.
“Moves like a toddler, doesn’t it? Look at it,” he said, gesturing with a thick finger, drawing circles in the air. “Seems like it knows where it’s going, but of course it can’t see, so it’s just—moving. In the best direction it can.”
BUMP.
Duncan’s belly thumped up against my window, and I shuddered. Would never be getting used to that sound, that was for damn sure.
“But why is he coming here?”
“Perhaps he can smell you,” Samuel said. And then, for the first time in our brief and unfortunate friendship, he took in my appalled gaze and threw back his head and laughed. “My God, I’m joking! How would he smell? He doesn’t even have a nose.”
“How the Hell should I know what it can and can’t do?”
“I thought you said ‘he’ a moment ago? You seemed quite insistent.”
I rolled my eyes. “How the Hell does Duncan know where I live? Why come here, of all places? I’m not even the one who—” Samuel and I locked eyes, the moment hanging between us. But then I finished it: “—killed him.”
“An excellent question, though one I fear we won’t get an answer to.” Samuel stood, nudging one of the dogs out of the way, and walked up to the window. He tapped on it, once, twice, three times, as if pestering a fish at the aquarium. “Doesn’t seem overly responsive to sound. I don’t suppose you tested his other faculties?” He glanced at me, and something in my blank, dull, irritated expression must’ve made the answer clear. “Ah, no. Of course not. Well then, we really must do that, don’t you think?”
“Must we?”
“Would you rather leave him outside, Joel? Free to wander? To come back tomorrow evening?”
“I … no. Definitely not. But what exactly are you thinking?”
Samuel looked around, then shrugged. “Do you have a backyard?”
I did.
Unfortunately.
***
The best way to get Duncan into the backyard, we figured, was to rope him like a wound-up foal.Samuel suggested taking his hand and leading him, but for the life of me I couldn’t stand the idea of touching him. I didn’t particularly want to know if he was cold or warm, or what life—if you could call this life—had in store for him.
I’d had some rope in my garage, a remnant from an old project, and we turned it into a makeshift lasso, strung it around Duncan’s waist, and led him, show-pony style, through the house (whereupon he bumped into basically everything, knocking over my Mom’s old lamp, and terrorizing the dogs) and into the backyard.
Samuel was right: he really did walk like a toddler, arms splayed out for counter-balance.
Once we got him into the backyard, however, and removed the rope from his waist, I was out of ideas.
“Okay, we’re here. Now what?”
“Hm?” Samuel barely spared me a glance. “Oh, I don’t know. I simply thought it’d be better than the street.”
He was right about that, at least.
Up close, Samuel’s body was more horrifying than I could’ve imagined. Mostly it was the lack of rot.
Everything was still stable, pink, humming with something that resembled life, but couldn’t be.
“He’s fucking creepy,” I mumbled.
“I quite like it.” Samuel leaned in and poked Duncan in the chest. The skin gave with no more laxity than it would if he’d have poked me. “Just what I thought,” Sam mumbled. “Still very much alive.”
“Nothing about this looks alive to me, gotta say.”
“That’s because you’re not looking closely enough.” Samuel poked him again, this time in various places, watching the body closely. “See? He reacts to it. Not much, but it’s there.” He poked him again, and this time I did notice the body turn just a bit in the direction of the stimulus.
“So he can feel things?” I asked, horrified. If there was one thing Death had in its favor, it was the lack of corporeal sensation. Wandering around a headless corpse, somehow aware of my surroundings AND able to feel the various unpleasant sensations of life seemed too terrible to comprehend.
But Samuel, on the other hand, was delighted. “It does seem that way, doesn’t it? I wondered about that, when I first saw it in action. I even asked Jerome—have you met Jerome? He works over in the lab—about it, and he said the higher ups wanted to know if they could still feel, but the boys over in management have, generally, been hesitant to share their findings. Thus I’ve not really managed to get an answer, at least until now.”
My head spun. The lab? Jerome? None of this made any fucking sense to me.
“Sam, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. The Lab? What Lab?”
“The one at the Henderson’s, of course.” Finally, he turned his full attention away from Duncan and stared at me. “Do you really have no idea what it is we do there?”
“We pack meat,” I said, dumbly, though even as my mouth formed the words I believed it less and less. “And load it onto trucks, and they ship it—”
Sam waved me off. I realized he was irritated with me—irritated with something he thought should be obvious. “Do you remember last August when the team from overhead came in and gave us an award?”
“The thing about, like, waste-free product?”
“Precisely.”
“I mean, sure. But what about it?”
“You know many meat packing plants that manage to have zero waste? Have you heard of a single one that didn’t have tons of rotting meat to throw out each quarter?”
“I—”
“No. No, don’t just stupidly regurgitate whatever asinine thing your brain churns up. Think about it. Really think about it. How do we, a company that specializes in providing a product direct from a living, biological source, have zero waste? Do you have any idea how much meat is thrown out every year? And yet, somehow, we’ve managed to completely avoid that? Don’t you think that sounds just a tad odd?”
Duncan had glowed with pride the day we received that award. I’d been barely cognizant over it, never much for awards or company spirit. I just wanted to get in and get out, go home and sleep off the stink of the factory (although to be fair, it so seldom smelled like anything but Pine-Sol). But the department had been thrilled.
“So, what, this is something to do with the award? With our department?”
“Yes, Joel, that’s precisely what I’m saying. Do you know who owns the packing plant?” I shrugged. I did not. “Biosphere Inc. No, I’m sure you’ve never heard of them. Almost no one has, but let me assure you: they’re doing some interesting things. Take our little corner of the food production chain, for instance. What’s better than the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cows to meet demand, only to have to throw out wasted product?
“Cows that don’t die, of course. Flesh that remains very firmly attached to the mortal coil, even when separated from its original body.”
“I … that’s insane. If they wanted to cut down on waste, couldn’t they just, I don’t know, freeze it?”
“Sometimes they do. But what about the culinarians amongst us? My God, have you ever been to a decent market on an early Friday morning? The foodies, Joel, the chefs, the wealthy and demanding. They’re not going to consume or serve frozen meat. Changes the texture, you know, however slight, and these are people who make their living on knowing.
“No, they need a significantly finer product. One that doesn’t rot, or require freezing, because it’s been cut fresh from a living, breathing animal just four hours ago. Hell, it could be four months and it wouldn’t matter. Not with these animals.”
I stared at him, mouth agape. It was too horrible to comprehend. “That’s awful,” I said. “That’s inhumane, that’s—”
“I’d imagine there’s an argument there for ANY death being an act of inhumanity, though I confess it’s not one I have much of an interest in. Death is death, as far as I’m concerned. What I am interested in is the new avenues this particular development offers.”
I hadn’t eaten since the morning, but my stomach roiled in disgust. “So you’re telling me, what, that Duncan somehow—how is he like this? If it’s all meant for cows, why is he like this? Is it the company doing it?”
“The company?” Samuel barked a laugh. “Of course not. While I haven’t found my way in to see the cows, I did manage to get into one of the supply closets near the lab. I found a bag of powder I suspected might be what they were using. I had a working theory, if you will. And I decided to test it.”
I stared at him. “You … dosed Duncan?”
“Naturally.” He cocked his head at me. “And you too, of course. Should I need a backup plan. Why else would I bring you coffee?”
Every damn day for months. He toddled over with a lukewarm cup of coffee and stood there and watched me down it, made sure I’d swallowed every last fucking drop. And the entire time I’d been a fucking idiot, I’d just assumed he was some vaguely awkward, well-meaning doofus with poor social skills while in actuality he’d been drugging me with … whatever it was that made Duncan the way he was.
I felt the heat rush up into my cheeks, a throb starting in my temple. I balled my hands into fists and took a step towards him, wide-eyed.
“You’ve been dosing me with that poison?”
“It’s hardly poison,” Samuel said, but for the first time I noticed the flicker of something that gave me a vague sense of satisfaction: fear. His advantage, I realized, was only in his awareness of things others didn’t know about.
In a one-on-one, he was fucked.
He’d call that savagery, I imagined, but right now I was feeling pretty goddamn savage.
“So, what, if Duncan didn’t work out, you were going to kill me? Is that it? Test your fucking theory on me? Kill me like you killed him?”
“Duncan is hardly dead.” I turned and punched the wall, a hard stucco that meant my entire fist and hand would ache tomorrow, but I needed to do something with the angry energy running off. Samuel actually jumped, blinked and stepped back a bit, and I was grimly satisfied. “Don’t get overly excited, Joel.”
I whipped around and pointed at him, the tip of my finger just under his nose. “You. You need to do something about THIS.” I swung wide and pointed to Duncan’s headless body, wandering around aimlessly. It was like watching the saddest, solo round of bumper cars I’d ever seen.
“How would you like me to do that, exactly?”
“What would you have done to me in this situation?”
We stared at one another. His eyes narrowed and, after a long moment of silence, he shrugged. “As far as I can tell, the only way to really kill something once it’s been dosed is to burn it.”
I winced at the mental image. I looked at Duncan, his arms flailing, and thought about how much I wouldn’t want to be trapped in a similar existence.
“Will he feel it?” I asked.
“Hard to tell. But I’d imagine so, yes. At least to some degree.”
I shuddered. “Shit.”
“It appears to be the best option, if you insist on ‘doing something.’”
An idea dawned on me. “What about his head? You still have it, don’t you?”
He glanced at me, sly. I realized he didn’t want to give away more than he had to. “It doesn’t do much.Mostly just blinks and looks around.”
“It doesn’t talk?”
“I’d imagine the majority of the vocal cords are in the body.”
“Christ, Samuel.”
“You asked.”
I cast one more glance at poor Duncan’s body, then shook my head. If he was aware, he had to be miserable. There was nothing merciful about letting this continue.
“Let’s just get this over with. “
***
All I had for accelerant was rubbing alcohol. Samuel didn’t even want to use any, scoffed at the very idea, but I ignored him. Whatever it was Duncan could or couldn’t feel, I wanted it over with as quickly as possible.
It was lucky that my neighbors never really paid much attention to my comings and goings. Wasn’t that kind of neighborhood, thankfully, so odd as it was I wasn’t overly worried about burning Duncan’s body, though I did hiss at Samuel to stop poking him.
Samuel seemed almost distraught at the idea that we were putting an end to his favorite “creation,” but I didn’t have the emotional or mental energy to deal with his Dr. Frankenstein bullshit.
I doused Duncan with the alcohol—I’d read somewhere that was the best accelerant, although I couldn’t remember where, and I hoped to God it worked. And then there was the zippo; Samuel’s Zippo—he’d come prepared, and I realized that even though he was sad to see this form of Duncan go, he was excited, too. Excited to see what would happen given the right circumstances.
The look on his face was upsetting; practically gleeful. He was hungry; his eyes alight, his mouth set hard; he watched everything, eager for every detail. It sickened me.
Still. I mumbled my apologies and touched the zippo to the edge of Duncan’s clothes; the fire roared to life and swallowed him whole, until Duncan was nothing more than a flailing mass of limbs, wandering helplessly. A couple of times it seemed like his hands slapped at the fire, but I told myself that wasn’t possible, couldn’t be possible.
Told myself that and yet didn’t believe it, not really. I thought about the head Samuel had taken with him; briefly, I had a mental image of it screaming in agony, disembodied yet feeling everything, and I hated myself almost as much as I hated Samuel.
It took ten fucking minutes for the body to stop writhing. Ten minutes of watching it fumble around, slap at itself, a wordless expression of horror and agony if I’d ever seen it.
At the end we were left staring at the smoldering remains, the air thick with the scent of charred meat.
“God forgive me,” I whispered, staring at what I hoped was Duncan’s Actually Dead body.
“What’s to forgive?” Samuel asked.
“Get the fuck out,” I said.
***
We buried Duncan’s body in my backyard, right under the barren patch of earth that I’d once wanted to plant something in but never got around to. Tomatoes had been the goal, not a body, but in my darker moments I supposed planting anything in there was better than nothing.
I kept thinking about the goddamn head, and Duncan’s wife on the news, sobbing over the mysterious loss of her husband and her dogs, and how narrowly I’d avoided Duncan’s fate.
There had to be a way, somehow, to do something to make this situation right.
Or at least slightly less terrible.
I sprawled on the couch, exhausted, and one of the dogs hopped up next to me, laying his little head across my thigh with an exaggerated sigh.
I gave him a soft pat.
“Shit’s fucked, huh?”
***
There was, in fact, a way to make things Slightly Less Terrible.
Not Good, not Decent, not even Pretty All Right.
It came to me after an hour’s nap, the dogs curled up beside me.
It did not forgiveness make, but it was better than nothing.
***
I rolled up to Henderson’s at three in the morning. Merely last week that would’ve been mid-shift for me, but today it was an unexpected detour.
The night shift had always been quiet; the building lit up, bright and sterile, but security was low and personnel were down to a minimum.
Shelby saw me as soon as I walked in the doors, her face a mask of surprise.
“Joel! I thought you took the week off?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Oh … well, is there something I can help you with?”
“Nope.”
She was walking backwards in front of me, trying to obscure my way forward, but I wasn’t much in the mood to deal with it and I pushed past her forcefully. She stumbled a couple of steps over, out of my way, watching me go with wide eyes.
“Joel, that was rude—”
I rounded the corner and let her voice drift into the background. The muzak overhead, pumped out through building-wide speakers was obnoxiously, artificially cheery. Fucking hated it. Before, I’d been able to tune it out, focus on packing meat into boxes and calling it a day. But today everything irritated, grated. Even the lighting felt ominous.
I knew where I was headed. The packing department wasn’t far from the front door. I made the right turns and shoved through the double doors and for the second time in as many days, I had the pleasure of something like shock register on Samuel’s face.
His mouth made a small O when he saw me, and he stood, rising to his feet slowly, and I got the distinct impression he was preparing to handle me like I was an unpredictable—and thus dangerous—animal.
“Joel. I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
“Where’s the head?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re referring to.”
The impatience bubbled over, and I reared back and punched him. Right in the fucking face. My knuckles ache and I could feel a crack somewhere in my hand, but the throb was mingled with the relief of finally—finally—giving him something to fucking think about.
Samuel stumbled back, the doughy flesh of his face blooming pink. He tenderly touched his cheek, then peered up at me, anger and concern warring for prominence in his expression.
“Where’s the fucking head?”
“What you’re doing,” he said, slowly, carefully, “is not in your best interest, Joel.”
“You got rid of it, is that it?”
“Do you really think they’ll just tolerate this kind of breach? I know what you’re thinking—”
“You don’t know shit.”
“—and if you continue on this path, Henderson’s will not take this lightly. I’d hate to see you get hurt.”
“That right?” I took a step forward, muscles taut with intent. He could smell it on the air, of that I had no doubt, and he stepped away from me, pressing himself back into the desk. His face didn’t show fear but I knew he knew that, if it really came down to it, he wasn’t the one walking away from this. “Is that why you’ve been dosing me with whatever it is they have here? Because you don’t want to see me get hurt?”
“Joel, let’s sit down and talk about this calmly.”
“Fuck you.”
“I think you’re perhaps not feeling well, and we—”
I struck out and grabbed his throat, not hard enough to injure but to make a point.
“Fuck you, Samuel. Fuck this whole fucking place. If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you. You get me? You’ll end up right where I put Duncan.”
His eyes widened; the threat was legitimate, and he could tell. He said nothing, but nodded his head, nigh imperceptible.
I shoved him away from me, enjoying the clatter of pens and a coffee cup as he bumped back into the desk, and strode away from him.
I wanted to see the killing floor.
***
To their credit, they tried to stop me. Men in hazmat suits—I had vague memories of Shelby mentioning something about this, and at the time I’d thought it was a joke—came out of the abattoir just as I was pushing my way in. They tried to urge me backwards, but I was having none of it. I shoved through them and into the double doors before they could stop me, ignoring their cries of “Sir, wait! You can’t—”
I could, and I did.
I’d seen a killing floor, once, albeit only briefly. My father worked in one when I was a kid, shortly before he fucked off with his new girlfriend. He’d run in to get a check from his boss, and he’d taken me in with him, didn’t seem to think anything of dragging a seven year old into the middle of a live slaughter.
That was one hogs, not cows. Not that it made much of a difference. The nightmares lasted for months.
But this? This was unlike any killing floor I’d ever seen. It was … clean. Quiet. No smell of blood or shit, just a vague hay-like earthiness mixing with the bright chemical lemon of cleaning materials.
There were no sounds of mammalian panic. No sounds at all, actually, and when I looked around at the stalls where the animals were held, I finally understood why:
None of them had heads.
Oh, they moved, sure. Some wandered in their pens, bumping blindly into walls. Others sprawled out on the ground on a nest of way, the only sign of life a swishing tail.
But nearly all of them had a patch of flesh missing. The wounds were clean—sterilized, bandaged, even cauterized—and the animals themselves gave no signs of pain (though one might argue the lack of a head would be responsible for that), but there were noticeable chunks of flesh gone. Sometimes entire limbs.
I realized, with horror, that I could identify the cut, disembodied as it would be:
Flank, chuck, shoulder.
Wasteless meat. Meat that didn’t rot or change texture in a freezer, because you could simply cut away what you needed and package it up for shipment.
My stomach roiled and I leaned over and vomited all over the shiny, artificial lemon-smelling floor. It came in waves, hot and gushing out of my mouth, until my stomach cramped and my eyes watered and the back of my throat burned with the bile.
Briefly, I had the notion that the only way forward was to kill myself, penance, somehow, for what I’d seen, what I’d participated in. I thought about putting a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger, and then—
And then I realized I was the same as these poor things. I didn’t know if I could die, not really, not unless someone burned me until there was nothing left but bone, and that would take longer than any fire I had at home.
I thought of Duncan, back at the house. We’d only burned him until he stopped moving, until skin was charred and peeling. Maybe—
Maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe, on some level, the poor bastard was still alive. Maybe we’d just—
Someone knocked into me from behind, and as soon as the thick arms wrapped around me and the smell of stale breath hit me, I knew it was Samuel. Then he pushed his mouth to my ear and said:
“Subtlety truly isn’t your strong suit, is it?”
He hauled me out through the doors I’d entered from and I wanted to fight him but didn’t have the strength.
He dropped me on the ground, ass-first, and I skidded on the tiles, looking up at him, feeling defeated.
“You need to leave, Joel.”
“Or what?” I asked, weakly.
Samuel shook his head in disgust. “You really think they’ll let you live after what you’ve seen?”
“I don’t even know if I can die, considering what you’ve done to me.”
“That’s rather my point. I can’t imagine what they’d have in store for you would be … pleasant.Somewhere, an alarm was going on in the building. I heard rushing footsteps, yelling from a distance. Samuel turned in the direction of the noise, watched for a moment, and then turned back to me. “They’ll be here shortly.”
“Who?”
“Security. Whoever else it is they send when there’s a breach.”
I shook my head. “But you knew. You breached it long before I did.”
“I settled a curiosity I had, yes. Mother always said my curiosities were rather difficult for her to stomach. Different from the other children’s.”
“And let me guess. That’s why you killed her.”
It was a joke. A half-assed, meaningless joke. And yet he cocked his head at me, evaluating, and said nothing. Which was, I supposed, answer enough.
“Your mistake, Joel, is that you’re clumsy. You’re moral. You don’t care if you get caught. I do, and so I didn’t. And you, I think, should really take my advice and leave.”
I turned in the direction of the noise. They were rushing towards us, clanging and banging things, the alarm blaring, and I realized that whatever this was, whatever I wanted for myself, none of it mattered now. They were coming for me, and they would catch me if I stayed, and I didn’t know if I could die, and that would very likely be worse.
Samuel and I stared at one another. A beat. And then I shook my head. “Someday I’ll be back. We’ll revisit this conversation.”
He simply nodded. “I suppose we’ll see.”
Just as the sounds of the security mob grew closer, I scrambled to my feet and fled out the door, pushing past a protesting Shelby a second time. I dove into my car and didn’t bother to look back as I sped away, the packing plant slowly growing into nothing more than a glow of artificial light in the background in my rearview mirror.
***
If you’re curious, I was right. By the time I got back to my place, the patch of dirt where we’d buried Duncan was writhing. He was still under there, aware on some level, however remote it may’ve been.
I pulled him out, mumbling apologies once again, promising to fix it. I tied him up as gently but thoroughly as I could, for both our sakes; I couldn’t have his arms wildly flaring out to and fro.
I managed to get him into the trunk, and pack the dogs up in my car. They seemed happy to be enjoying a car ride.
I packed a bag of my things too, just the essentials, and tossed it into the passenger’s seat.
Then I started the car and pulled out of my driveway, never to return.
***
If you happened to live in that nothing town, you would’ve seen it in the morning paper.
MISSING MAN’S DOGS REUNITED WITH OWNER, MYSTERIOUSLY LEFT IN YARD
And then, a couple of days later:
UNKNOWN REMAINS FOUND IN CREMATORIUM; POLICE SAY AN UNKNOWN MALE BROKE IN TO CREMATE BODY
But you don’t, I’m willing to bet, and that’s fortunate enough for you.
I won’t tell you where I am. Joel, if you haven’t figured it out, isn’t even my real name. I left that shit town and that shit company and all the bloody, horrific mess behind me. I’m elsewhere now, as far away as I could get, and I have a boring job in a different industry in another forgettable town where little of interest happens.
But I will tell you this: Henderson’s is expanding. You can’t have a product like that without devolving into absolute greed, never mind that it defies every good, natural law.
It will wreak havoc. Just give it enough time.
If you do happen to live in a nothing town, just like I did, be on the lookout for an influx of new jobs, or the construction of a bizarrely clean meat packing plant.
And if you see Henderson’s pop up in your town, move the fuck out.
I don’t think it’ll be that long until they’re everywhere, if you want the truth.
But I thought—
I don’t know. I suppose I thought I’d warn you while I could.
Enjoy this peace, in whatever form it takes, while you have it.
If I had to guess, I’d wager it won’t last much longer.