BY ALYCE WOOD
Copyright is held by the author.
“WHERE Y’FROM, kid?” Frank tossed a sideways glance across the humid cab, stub of pipe gritted in yellow teeth. He yanked at the wheel with tobacco splotched fingers, gnarled into talons over balding suede. Frank spoke like he was saving spare syllables for a rainy day. Only the necessary words, only the necessary sounds — if you couldn’t understand him, well now that was your problem.
“Oh, uh — Michigan.” Paul slapped at a mosquito on his arm, hanging out the window of the russet pickup. It hadn’t rained for weeks, months even, but he could still smell it on the air, like a memory of a dream, warm and rust and tight-packed wet sand.
Frank barked a laugh against the crackle of radio static. They’d passed the last tower ten miles ago, nothing left out on the waves but hum and hiss. “Don’t care where you’ from,” he said. “Where you work before now?”
“Labels.” Paul leaned into the desert air, closing his eyes. The AC was broke. He imagined the thousands of labels reeling off the huge thermal printer, taste of waxy heat in his mouth, ten hours a day of the same black type.
suitable for home freezing
maximum two servings per week
He knew he’d never forget the sound as they husked from the toothed mouth of the machine and piled on the concrete, mechanical whirring and papery fluttering against a steady factory clamour.
Frank grunted, turning the car off the road into brush and killing the engine with a splutter. “Change of pace worth a darn.” He spat the pipe into his hand and dropped it on the leather gearshift boot without emptying it.
Paul shunted the bowed door open and stepped out, mesquite bushes scratching his calves, bean pods and leaves caught and breaking off in the lip of his wool socks. Saguaros towered overhead, great arms holding up a clear blue sky, and he tugged the rim of his hat down. His sunglasses slipped to the tip of his nose, an immediate perspiration wetting his skin.
He’d seen the clouds early that morning, when he was getting dressed, but they’d vanished quick, wisped away and sizzled up by a vicious sun rising.
“Why don’t farmers come out earlier — or later?” Paul glanced across the corroded hood at Frank, who leaned over his right boot, yanking laces free to retie. He squinted up, giving an unintelligible mumble. “I mean, it’s so hot, y’know — why not come out at night?”
Frank straightened up, his plaid shirt stretched across a broad chest. The man was made of ropey muscle and his skin was like a basketball. He was tall, but stooped, and his mouth was twisted into a permanent leer. “Now I know y’got coyotes back in Michigan.”
Paul huffed and gave a nod, eyebrow quirked. “Which way we going first?”
Frank tipped his head towards a wide ridge carved from sand. The sun listed high over the horizon, afternoon gradually pulling it down.
As they walked, the sound of their footsteps and the buzz of insects filled Paul’s ears. “So how come they all move the same direction?”
Frank shrugged. “Tell ‘em to. Droppin’ at the 88’s most common.” He glanced to the crossroads ahead of them, where the track they’d been travelling intersected and passed beyond the northbound road. “Give ‘em a penny, drop in the temple well. Move that way.” Paul followed his crooked, pointed finger as it traced the sand towards the temple, route bisected by the towering sandbar.
Paul realized this meant the bodies couldn’t be seen from the 88. The temple was further up, on a steeper ridge, but the sandbar hid the stretch of corpses dried to leather.
There was no way any of them would ever make it to the temple, not from the road and not the way they left them. They’d probably make it just over the ridge, in most cases.
He suspected this was intentional.
“What’s the point of the penny?” he asked, canvas bag slapping his back as they walked.
Frank hoisted his own pack over his shoulder, stooping further as they trudged through the sand. Paul’s boots were filling up with it, in his socks and between his toes. They’d barely made it half a mile from the truck and his airways burned with the particulates he was insufflating. He was sure it’d be cutting him soon.
“For luck,” Frank muttered. “Else tradition.”
Tradition. Paul shuddered and dragged a canteen from the pocket of his cargo pants. He sipped a mouthful, the warm, metallic taste blooming on his tongue. It was small and second hand, dented with a frayed strap, but it was his. Mona had bought it for him. It was an olive branch after they’d fought about the career change.
He had told her he wanted something more stimulating than watching the thermal printer reel for ten hours a day. She had argued, “More stimulatin’? Go out farm the fossils for yourself?”
He didn’t have a counterpoint.
They trudged towards the stragglers — the weaker ones who hadn’t made it as far as average, or else strayed the wrong direction — and the smell of sun-baked skin and blood in the dust curled up Paul’s nostrils. His nose wrinkled and he pressed his lips together. They were already drying to cracked.
He lifted a hand to his mouth, running a thin fingernail between gapped front teeth to try and remove a grain of wind-blown grit from the space, but it persisted no matter how hard he tried. It hadn’t crossed his mind to bring tooth floss.
Wind piped between rock formations and dying cacti riddled with bullet holes dripped black desiccate into the sand and onto flat hot stones to rot.
Frank slowed, toeing the shoulder of a body in the dust. A rib loosened from the exposed cage, sliding from puckered red. It’d been picked clean from sternum to hip, but the face was undisturbed, aside from sun damage and wind drying. “Don’t want ‘em like this,” Frank imparted, at once the teacher, a learned mentor, showing Paul the lay of the land. “Picked over. Need ‘em more intact.”
Paul drew in a stuttering breath as they continued through the deluge of carcasses, the faintly sweet smell of decomposition rippling on wind. Some were much worse, bones greasy and white in the sun, striated with blood and sinew. Some were more or less unblemished, though, and Frank stopped to crouch by a small body dressed in khakis and a grey tank top. There were some experimental beak wounds around the space behind each earlobe and the eyes were dried to husks, so Paul couldn’t tell what colour they might have been — but it was generally whole.
He’d heard when they packaged them, they closed the eyelids, so folk couldn’t see the eyes weren’t there. “Freak people out,” his co-worker from procurement told him. “They’ already freaked out enough about the whole thing. No need to make it worse, huh? Besides — eyes ain’t good eatin’.”
“This one’ fine,” Frank said.
“Why do they shoot them in the leg?”
“Talkin’ thing, ain’t ye?” Frank said with a half-laugh. He was in good shape for his age, but he wheezed as he dumped his bag in the sand, pulling out the industrial roll of cling-wrap that had poked from the zipper. He tucked the loose end under the edge of an arm, holding it to the body.
“You don’t have to answer,” Paul said. “Curious. You’ve been out here longer than I have. Why shoot them in the leg? Why not just execute them?”
“They’ free range.” Frank gave a raucous laugh. He looked to Paul and raised an eyebrow, his mouth slightly open, waiting for Paul to ‘get it’. “Organic. Humane, huh? Y’know that. Y’did the labels.”
“Seriously?” Paul didn’t laugh — but he remembered that part of the label. Big and bold, printed front and centre. They wanted you to know they weren’t caged, but he’d bet all his credits they didn’t want you to know the intimate details of the supply chain.
“Give ‘em a chance to change they’ mind,” Frank added, his voice soft and humourless this time. He took his cap off to run a hand through thinning hair.
“Do they ever?”
Frank looked up and his dark, bloodshot eyes caught and held the glaring sunlight. He curled his lips over his teeth and pushed his hat back on. “Doubt it.” He shrugged. “More humane this way.”
Paul cut his gaze away, wiping at wind-tears with the back of his hand. He had said it twice already, but Paul was beginning to think Frank didn’t know all that well what ‘humane’ meant.
“Help roll it,” Frank said. He gestured for Paul to move to the same side of the body he was crouched on, his boots slipped into hot sand so the heels were fully sunk. “Tuck the plastic in, flip ‘em. Don’t worry ‘bout sand. They wash ‘em good.”
Paul hesitated as he squatted beside Frank. He reached out to touch the sun-dried arm, but flinched as his fingers made contact.
The scars were everywhere. There was hardly anything else left. Scars on the arms, fingers, even around the lips, eyelids and earlobes.
“You never seen a donor?” Frank’s voice held an ugly smugness. “You used to pack ‘em, nah?”
“No,” Paul said, almost defensive. Frank flipped the body himself, ropes of muscles anchored under hard-worked skin, like leather. “I just did labels.”
Frank huffed a laugh. “Sure you’ met one at least? They’ everywhere nowadays.”
“Just never seen the scars up close.” Paul followed Frank to the other side of the body, now face down in the sand, and another stretch of plastic wrap shrieked from the roll as Frank tugged it tight over skin, a bony spine mottled with scar tissue and sunburn.
Paul tried to steady his breathing, but as he reached under the body, his forefinger slid over the bullet hole in the thigh, dipping below the surface of the wound. He jumped back, landing to a seat in the sand, his fingertip pocked wet red, beads of blood catching the sunlight like dozens of insect eyes.
Frank stilled and cut his gaze to Paul. “Only get two a day,” he said, carefully, like he knew he ought to change the subject quick. “Stiff competition out here. Equal opportunity. Two bodies — two full pays.”
Paul nodded and wiped his finger on his pants, a red streak dark against waxed canvas. Blood stuck under his nail and roared in his ears.
“If pay’s reduced for damage,” Frank continued, tearing off the plastic wrap, “Longest servin’ gets bigger pay. Teachin’ y’all I know out here.”
Paul scoffed, shaking his head, but didn’t argue.
“We’ haul this back to the truck, come get another.” Frank dragged the wrapped body up by the feet. The socks were bitten to nothing by sand, riddled with holes and stained brown and red. It was like they’d walked right out of their shoes.
Frank nodded to the head and Paul swallowed hard before hefting the rest of the weight, hands hooked behind shoulder blades for leverage. Sand-matted blonde hair brushed his arms as they tracked back to the edge of the road where they’d parked, trampling sidewinding snake ripples in the sand. They swung the body into the bed of the truck and the head knocked the tailgate as Frank shoved it closed.
He leaned on the rusted chassis, tipping the peak of his cap down right over his eyes and mumbling, “Break. Five.”
Paul guessed he meant minutes. He sipped again from his canteen, water almost hot, and leaned on the truck beside Frank, who held out an arm, elbow locked, offering a torn-open green and pink package. Paul shook his head. “Not hungry.”
“Gotta eat, newbie,” Frank said. “Replace y’salts. Sweat ‘em off real quick out here.”
Paul reluctantly took the package and looked over it, then inside. It was underfilled with tree bark shards of jerky. “Never seen this brand before,” he said.
“New,” Frank muttered. “Eat.”
Paul chewed hard on the sinewy jerky, jaw aching, tongue and lips coated with salt and umami, and fragment sticking in his teeth. Frank dropped two dusty crackers into the packet and nodded as Paul looked up. Dry bites crawled down his throat, and he wiped his hands on his pants.
Another sip of water, and they headed back out towards the sandbar, sun glinting off broken glass littered in desert bloom by the road.
They’d made it almost a mile when the shot rang out.
It was so loud it sounded like a plate being smashed right by Paul’s ear, a window being broken with his own skull, what he imagined the detonation of a grenade jammed in his teeth might sound like — and he knew what it meant.
He jerked back a step and a half, boots slipping in the sand. “You said no-one’s out here round this time,” he hissed.
Frank laughed, now a few paces ahead of him. He turned back to Paul, and he was smiling, so Paul could see the blackened gap in his jaw from a missing tooth. “Expedited affair — one they wanna bin quick.” His eyes narrowed, sweat glistening on his bulbous, veiny nose. “What, you scared o’ bein’ shot?”
Paul laughed in spite of himself. “Yeah, I’m scared of being shot — you’re not?”
In the distance, at the edge of route 88, two figures told of the source of the sound. They were tiny, like miniature people you might see from a landing plane, but Paul had heard stories of what happened out there. It kept him in a job, after all.
The surgeon shoved the donor in the back and she stumbled, something gripped tight in her fist. He’d shot her in the left leg and she careened from side to side as she walked, almost tripping herself up, red running to her ankle and into the sand.
The surgeon called after her. Paul couldn’t hear what he said, but the twang of a thick southern drawl carried hot on the wind.
He and Frank watched for what felt like a long time — as she slowed, turning red under the sun and losing both shoes — until she finally collapsed, face down, at the top of the ridge.
Paul hesitated, calculating, then started towards the body. He made it half a step before Frank grabbed his arm and yanked him back, nearly lifting him right out of his shoes as they bedded in the sand. “Whatchu think you’ doin’, newbie? We don’t take fresh ones. That’s rules.”
Paul shook Frank’s hand off his forearm, white fingertip grip stains fading, and pushed his heels back into his boots.
He watched the girl in the sand. She looked young. Small. She wasn’t moving.
“It’s rules.” Frank’s voice was firm. “Let ‘em sit. Week, at least. An’ if they can’t use ‘em whole — it makes better jerky.”
***
Alyce Wood lives and creates in Leeds, U.K. She is a mother, business owner, visual artist, musician, paint maker and forensic anthropologist. Alyce has published short stories and microfiction and is currently polishing the final draft of a novel-length work.
