Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

by Micah Dean Hicks

  The workers stared openly, mirroring the faces of the ghosts leering up from the fog. Henry didn’t need Jane to tell him that no one wanted Henry or the pig man there.

  Hogboss put his arm around Henry and continued the tour, not sensing the animosity. He identified workers by name and told Henry what they did. He showed Henry the deep vents where cold air blew through the plant, and rattled off a list of numbers—pounds of meat, boxes shipped, stores serviced—completely oblivious to the tension building around them.

  While they walked the hallways, ghosts moved thickly past. They hurried with screwdrivers or cleavers in their hands, off on some errand decades done. Occasionally, workers tracked dark chains of blood over the tile, lines leading to violence happening just out of sight.

  “Does it bother you? Slaughtering pigs?” Henry kept his voice low, not wanting anyone to overhear.

  Hogboss furrowed his brow. “I don’t know. Do you think it should?”

  “I don’t want it to bother you. Maybe I made you so that you don’t care.”

  “I care about everything I do here, Henry. This is my livelihood.”

  As Hogboss led him from room to room, talking about every stage of the production process, Henry’s eyes lingered over the mangled bodies of the workers and the shattered ghosts they had left behind. Everyone had scars. Some were missing limbs. People were exhausted, their clothes worn thin. Through the parade of ghosts and their descendants, Henry saw the brutality of the plant stretching back for generations.

  The problem assembled itself piece by piece in Henry’s mind with every horrible thing he saw. Tired people made mistakes. Unhappy people lashed out, destroyed property, committed violence on one another. Poor people got sick and stayed sick. Everyone here was one unlucky moment away from a life-changing mistake. One sleepless night from losing their temper and taking it out on someone they loved. The place was explosive, a volcano of misery, but it was the best game in town. Worker satisfaction was what he’d been sent to work on. People were unhappy here. So he solved the problem.

  He made pigs to work here instead.

  Henry slumped against the wall and sat down.

  “The floor isn’t for sitting,” Hogboss told him. “Someone could trip. We have rigorous safety codes.”

  “People are right to be afraid. It’s exactly what they think.”

  The pig man looked at him blankly, twitching his ears.

  “There have to be more of you somewhere. It wouldn’t change anything to make just one.”

  Hogboss extended a massive hand.

  Henry studied the scars covering it, how he had surgically reshaped and grafted together this new limb. Why create something so amazing just to make it bleed?

  “Come with me,” Hogboss said. “I’ll show you the others.”

  Hogboss led him down a long stairwell into a storage basement. Here, relics of Pig City’s long past lay heaped against the wall. There were wooden butcher blocks, iron hooks, whetstones. Porcelain basins sat heavily in the middle of the room, the dry dust of blood still crusting their rims. The broad mouth of a fireplace, long bricked up, gaped from the back wall.

  They passed through a long tunnel, the lights out in most places, before climbing another set of stairs. Henry stepped carefully around the old equipment, the rusty teeth of bone saw blades catching on his jeans.

  “I hadn’t planned on showing them to you today,” Hogboss said. “They aren’t ready yet.”

  Hogboss took Henry to an iron door, so dusty and soot-covered that it was almost invisible against the wall. He unlocked it, carefully holding the key in his big hand, hesitating before opening the door.

  “They aren’t as disciplined as I am,” Hogboss said. “But I’m working with them. They’ll be ready when the time comes.”

  Henry wondered how many pig people there were, if it would be possible to somehow undo what he had done. “Show me.”

  Hogboss opened the door and ushered Henry inside, locking it behind them.

  They came out in one of the pig houses, a tin warehouse honeycombed with pens. The doors to the pens had been removed, and inside them, the pigs sat at desks or lay on twin beds. Most were dressed in army surplus brown shirts and camo pants cut into shorts. Some already wore the uniform of the plant. On the walls, there were posters of superheroes, Hollywood actors, musicians. Clusters of pigs grouped around televisions, singing along with educational videos. On the screens, cartoon letters and numbers bounced: ABC. 123.

  In one corner, a group of them sat on the floor and watched an instructor pig show them how to cut up meat, pack it in plastic, and prepare it for shipping. He passed the knife around, and the pigs held their quivering snouts over the blade.

  “There are hundreds of them,” Henry said. “How could I have made so many?”

  “You only made me,” Hogboss said. “I was the prototype. Once I had been built and Corporate saw what was possible, they sent you a full lab and team. These other pigs were modified before they were ever born. Gene-splicing, engineered viruses that affected their development in the womb, growth hormones and steroids. You did something marvelous, Henry. And soon we’ll be able to show the world.”

  “When?”

  “There are a few pig families in town already. I had them move into abandoned neighborhoods. I’ve been buying groceries for them, but they’re getting restless. If people in the town haven’t noticed yet, they will soon.”

  Henry looked around the space. “What happened to the lab equipment? The team? There must be files or notes.”

  “Corporate moved all of that off-site. They’re waiting to see how things develop here before any more modified pigs are made.”

  There would be no taking it back, no stopping it. His work, the creation of his own hands, would spread over every little pig-raising town in the country. In a few years, there would be pig people running farms globally. He had always wanted to make a big change in the world. Now he had.

  What would happen to all the people working here? Their lives, already so hard, were about to get worse. They would be angry, and they would find someone to blame.

  Henry had an idea where they might start.

  And the pig people, owned body and blood by the company they worked for, just corporate property, high-tech slaves. What would their lives be like—the pork plant their shelter, trade, and temple? What would it mean for the pigs themselves, fully aware that the factory owned them, able to see themselves in the faces of the animals they killed? He felt sick, lightheaded with the implications.

  “Eventually,” said Hogboss, “our goal is for all pigs to be self-slaughtering pigs.”

  This was bigger than him or his family, bigger than the shattered little town curling around the plateau where the factory stood. The town would fold. Once the plant stopped hiring, Swine Hill would finally die. But all Henry could think of was his mother, so full of need that she scorched anyone she touched. What would she do when there was no longer a job for her at the plant? When she couldn’t make payments on the house, where would they go? Their extended family out of state wouldn’t take them in. They blamed his mother for what had happened to Henry’s father, were afraid that she would ruin their lives too. He imagined the doomed town as still as a cemetery and on fire with its ghosts, his father walking through the ruins, the only living person left.

  A young pig boy in a black hoodie and jeans walked over to them. “Hey, Dad,” he said to Hogboss. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Dennis, this is Henry. He’s the one who made us.”

  Dennis tilted his snout up, sniffing, taking Henry in. The pig boy had freckles running down his snout and breaking over his cheeks. He was the same height as Henry, looked to be about the same age. Henry reminded himself that the pig boy could only be, at most, a couple of months old. Had he ever even been outside?

  “Do you think there might be other things pigs can do?” Dennis asked. “I don’t want to be a butcher.”

  Hogboss snorted and flick
ed his head to the side. “Dennis spends too much time on the Internet. Thinks he’s a vegetarian.” He pronounced the word slowly, tripping over the many syllables, as if it was an alien spore that had landed on his tongue.

  “I want to go to school,” Dennis said.

  Hogboss gestured to the walls surrounding them. “There’s nothing I can’t teach you right here.”

  “Is your mom here too?” Henry asked.

  The two pig men were quiet, looking at each other and considering their answer.

  “My mate was slaughtered shortly after Dennis was born,” Hogboss said. “She wasn’t a modified pig, just the regular kind.”

  Henry felt small and stupid, not knowing what to say. “I’m sorry.”

  Hogboss waved him off, closing his eyes. “It’s nothing. That’s what she was born for, and I like to think she did a good job. I’m not upset over it.”

  If only Jane had been there. Her ghost could see past his big-toothed smile, past his furrowed brow and dark eyes, through the keyhole of his mind. Did Hogboss remember his slaughtered mate, her scent, the feel of her bulk against his? Was he really okay that she had been killed? Had someone else butchered her, or had the pig man been made to do it himself ?

  “I’m ready to go home,” Henry said.

  * * *

  When they left the building and came into the parking lot, it was almost light out. The ghosts were fading with the coming of the sun, only the smallest wisps of them left clinging to the ground. Cars streamed into the compound, workers in rumpled blue jumpsuits rushing to clock in. The morning shift gave Hogboss and Henry a lot of space, gathering in their knots and whispering.

  Parked next to them, Trigger and his father leaned against their truck, pulling off their masks and stripping off their heavy suits. They had rolls of hoses in the truck bed and bulky canister backpacks filled with a cleaning agent. White foam clung to their suits and oozed out of the mouth of the sprayer nozzle. It was cold near them, the asphalt salted with ice.

  Trigger’s father rested an arm on the side of his truck bed, his hand missing two fingers. He coughed hard and stretched the straps of his mask, complaining that it didn’t fit. Trigger smoked a cigarette, coughing a little himself, the stream of smoke coming from his mouth thick and white in the chill air.

  “Henry?” Trigger asked. “What are you doing here?”

  “Nothing. I’m leaving.” He didn’t want to get in the truck with the pig man, not with Trigger, his father, and a cluster of workers staring. But there was nowhere else to go. Henry stepped into the cab and buckled his seatbelt.

  Trigger knocked on his window, his breath painting the glass white.

  Henry rolled it down, and Trigger handed him something wrapped in paper.

  “Can you give this to Jane? Tell her that it didn’t work.”

  Henry unfolded the paper and found a CD, the paper annotated with songs and artists. “Aren’t you going to see her again soon?”

  “I thought you could just give it to her now.”

  Trigger went back to help his father finish taking off his suit, leaving Henry with the CD.

  Hogboss yawned, two short tusks almost protruding from his mouth. “Let’s get you home.”

  He drove them down from the plant. There was no traffic in their lane, every car climbing up to start the day’s work at Pig City. The trail of cars stretched on and on, as far as Henry could see, like everyone in the world worked there.

  “Did you figure out what you needed to?” Hogboss asked.

  “What if a person did something really bad, but they didn’t mean to? What if they didn’t even know they were doing it, but then it’s too late? It happened. And it’s going to hurt a lot of people. Is it really their fault?”

  Hogboss awkwardly patted his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Henry. I can’t be a father to you. You made me, remember?”

  * * *

  When Hogboss dropped him off at his house, it was almost eight in the morning. Jane’s car and his mother’s were both gone. The house stood quiet, lights off, yolk-yellow sunlight running over its shingles.

  Bethany stood on the sidewalk in front of his house, staring up at the laser array dimly lacerating the sky.

  Henry crossed the street to stand next to her. He was so tired he could barely stand. The implications of what he had done looped in his head, repercussions and fears colliding like asteroids circling the sun. His ghost lay deep at the bottom of him, satisfied and silent.

  “You were with the pig man,” Bethany said. “That’s what you were doing for the last few months? Are you the reason he’s here?”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “I think so.”

  The curtains moved in the living room, and the robot looked out at them, its eyes telescoping wide. It stared at the driveway, waiting for Henry’s mother to come home.

  “Don’t worry,” Bethany said. “Your inventions never work all that well anyway.”

  “You running before school?” Henry asked. “I didn’t know you came this far.”

  “If I get up early enough I can make it all the way across town and back. I saw the red lights and wanted to see what it was. What does it do?” She seemed mesmerized by it, the light reflected in her eyes.

  “I’m not sure yet. I should probably take it apart, just to be safe. Especially after the pig man.”

  “It doesn’t look dangerous.”

  That was the problem, Henry thought. The most dangerous things never did.

  “Aren’t you worried about running across town so early? There are still a lot of ghosts out. Especially around here.”

  “I’m always picking up a few more.” She shrugged. “Usually I don’t even notice. Not unless I try to leave.”

  People still talked about the last time Bethany got on a bus to go to an away game. At the edge of Swine Hill, an army of spirits had come boiling out of the girl and started tearing the engine apart. It looked like a car accident: pieces of rent steel and broken car parts littering the asphalt. And when Bethany walked out of the mess and down the road, ready to leave it all behind, those long, airy hands stretched out and gathered her back.

  Henry pointed to the garage. “I’ve got a flat basketball and a trash can. Want to lose some games to me? You might be able to get rid of all of them.”

  She laughed. “I’m not throwing a game. Not even trash basketball. Not even for you.”

  “Have your ghosts ever made you do something that you regretted?”

  She shook her head. “Everyone worries that a ghost will get inside them and make them do something awful. But ghosts can’t haunt you unless they see themselves in you. Whatever happens when you’re haunted, you wanted it. At the end of the day, you’re still you.”

  Henry sighed. Bethany wasn’t always the easiest person to talk to. She saw the world in black and white, wins and losses. How to explain to her his strange relationship with his ghost? It made him do things he didn’t even know he wanted to do yet. It was amazing. But his ghost didn’t understand the difference between should and shouldn’t. It changed the world without concern for consequences, leaving Henry to deal with the fallout.

  “I should go to sleep,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been awake for months.”

  Bethany nodded, but she kept staring at the light. Henry went inside.

  He stumbled upstairs and fell into bed. His body was lead, sinking into the mattress, and his head hurt from exhaustion. But his mind spun and spun, couldn’t shut down, couldn’t stop analyzing everything that was wrong. Guilt and consequence. Right and wrong. Exactly the kind of problem his ghost wasn’t interested in helping him solve.

  He still had Jane’s CD in his hand. He rolled over and dropped it into the tray of a CD player and switched it on. The music was mournful, complicated, the perfect soundtrack for the pain he would soon bring to Swine Hill and his family. The density of it, layer on layer of instruments weaving together, stacked like variables in an equation.

  This problem couldn’t be smashed
with a hammer or taken apart with a screwdriver. The pig people were here now. He was responsible for them, just like he was responsible for the hurt they would cause.

  The drums laid down walls inside walls, a maze of sound. Vocals scraped over the back-and-forth gunfight of the guitars. The world collapsed into a knot. The music flooded into his body, not distracting him from his pain, but submerging him in it. He felt like Jane had made the CD just for him, just for this moment. He fell asleep listening to it, all the space in his head taken up by one harsh song, this bloody-voiced herald of some new day to come.

  All morning at the grocery store, people had been thinking about the pigs. Night-crew workers from the plant came in wearing their jumpsuits, dark with pig blood or bleached pale from cleaning agents. That boy was there again, they thought. The one who made the robot. Why is he at the plant?

  A lawn crew came down Jane’s lane, their hair sweat-damp under faded ball caps. They smelled of cut grass and gasoline, buying bottles of Gatorade and packaged sandwiches from the deli. Pigs trimming hedges, they thought. Pigs planting flowers. Pigs checking the mail.

  All the secret things they believed about people who were different they believed about the pigs, too. In the minds of her customers, the one or two pigs they had seen multiplied. People imagined houses full of them, lounging on dirty mattresses on the floor, sleeping six to a room. Pigs stealing gas cans or bicycles right off the porch. Pigs crowding the line at the unemployment office or, worse, asking for jobs at the plant. Pigs closing in around the town and all it had left, pushing everyone back into their dim houses where only television newscasters came to speak to them, the news never good.