by E A Comiskey
“Well, that’s true,” Stanley agreed. “They won’t slaughter it right now, but once it’s been caught it goes back with the other pigs.”
“So?” Burke asked.
“What do you think happened to the little piggy who went to the market fair, my dear?”
“So, we need to steal a pig and set it loose?” she asked.
Stanley nodded. “Precisely, but we need to be quick about it.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because, as I tried to tell you, the carnival is run by—”
“Forget it,” she said, holding up a hand to stop him. “Forget I asked. I seriously don’t want to know.”
“Great. We save the pig and then we head north to eat turkey,” Stanley said. “I can’t wait to meet your daughter, Dick.”
“Maybe we can just stay here, eating pork chops and bacon, until the gods come to kill us,” Richard said.
Stanley laughed. “I love that you’re developing a sense of humor, old boy.”
Richard harrumphed again. Who said he was joking?
Chapter Two
Burke
The greased pig contest was to be held in an arena of twelve-inch-deep black muck, ringed by a welded steel fence. Spectators gathered around the edges with their tub-size lemon shake-ups and fried food of every sort. Near the gate that led into the circle, two old farmers sat at a table. As each competitor arrived, the men signed him in and gestured for him to pass through the gate into the muddy mess. So far, six young men in cowboy boots, jeans, and tee-shirts with logos advertising beer, cigarettes, and conservative political candidates had progressed through the registration process. They laughed loudly and slapped each other on the back.
Burke crossed her arms. “Now what?”
“The pig is in that little white shed behind the registration table. They’ll let it into the ring once everyone is ready to begin,” Stanley said.
As if it heard him, the animal let out a snort that Burke felt in her bones. The little plywood shed shuddered.
“Whoever thought this was a good idea must have been nuttier than a squirrel turd,” Richard said.
“It’s usually a baby pig,” Stanley told them.
Burke eyed the shed. It must have been five feet long and four feet across. The structure shifted as another grunt emanated from within. “That’s no baby.”
Richard shuffled a step or two forward and faced Stanley with a scowl. “How’d you even know about this, anyway?”
“They announced it on the loudspeaker, Dick. Didn’t you hear?”
“That ain’t what I mean. How’d you know about this pig and all the trouble?”
Stanley nodded toward the registration table where one of the old farmers was now standing, saying something to the crowd around him. “Last call for registrants. Burke, you need to hurry.”
A laugh burst out of her before the sneaking suspicion that the old man was serious snuck in. “You’re kidding.”
“How else will we get the pig?” Stanley asked.
“We could wait until it’s over and the thing is tied up again.”
“And if it’s injured in the contest? Loaded onto the meat packing truck immediately after? Carted off to some unknown location? Then what?”
Burke looked to her grandfather for help but he just shrugged. I should have taken his sorry butt back to the nursing home when this all started.
“It won’t be so hard, my dear. You’ve faced far worse monsters than this.”
“Not… not…” She gestured vaguely toward the filth. “Not in the mud.”
Stanley smiled. “Mud is good for the complexion.”
Her nails bit into the flesh of her upper arms. “If it’s so fantastic, you go catch the pig.”
He laughed. “There is a reason the old men are sitting at the table while the young men compete. They’d never let me in, Burke. I’d be considered a liability.”
She glared at him.
“Time is of the essence, Burke.”
Perhaps her grandfather would take her side. “Don’t you have anything to say about this?”
“It would be a shame to see this pretty little town burned out of existence.”
She gritted her teeth and spun away from them. Crazy old men ought to be locked up for their own safety and the safety of others. She stalked to the table and told the men she wanted to catch the blasted pig.
They exchanged a look and burst into laughter.
Burke took a deep breath and fought for control of her rage. “Did I say something funny?”
The guy on the left knocked his John Deere hat askew as he wiped his eyes. “We just don’t get many participants of the female persuasion.”
The guy on the right mopped his face with a red and white bandana. “There’s a quilting bee tonight in the grange building.”
She slapped the $10 participation fee on the table. “Take my money. Write my name down. Don’t make this difficult.”
John Deere’s smile faded. “You could get hurt.”
“I’d say that’s my concern, not yours.”
They exchanged another look and a shrug.
“Okay, then,” bandana guy said. “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.” He asked her name and wrote it on his clipboard.
The other man leaned forward and whispered. “Watch out for Cletus in the white undershirt. He’s downright mean and too darned stupid to know better.”
Burke glanced toward the group of men inside the arena. They all stared at her.
The guy in the white shirt stood half a head taller than the rest. His long blond hair was tied back in a sloppy ponytail. He had a tattoo of a cross on his left bicep and a naked woman on his right. He grinned at her, revealing teeth that were at least three short of a full set.
She thanked the old man for the warning and proceeded through the rickety gate. Her feet, clad in boots she’d purchased less than a month earlier, sank into the bog. Each step produced a sucking sound loud enough to be heard above the noise of the crowd—an impressive feat, now that the entire group was hooting and whistling, jeering, and screaming both insults and encouragement.
Cletus jabbed the short, skinny cowboy next to him with his elbow. “Hey, pretty lady. I think maybe you took a wrong turn.”
Burke ignored him and took in the rest of the group. They were short and tall, slim and stout, but clearly bonded by a love of belt buckles the size of dessert plates.
“Did Mammy sent you in here to fetch something special for Massa’s dinner table?”
Her attention snapped back to the gap-toothed man.
He spit out a yellow glob of nastiness. “You’re in the wrong place, girl.”
Burke put on her prettiest smile and joined the group. “You boys all here trying to catch this pig because you’re unhappy with the sausage God gave you?” She winked at Cletus. “I guess that’s why you seem most desperate of all.”
His gap-toothed grin melted. “You best be careful, girl. A person could get hurt doing this kind of thing.”
She inched closer to him and lowered her voice. “I’ve felt the blood of monsters twice your size splash across my face. I know what it is to sink a knife into living flesh. You want to hurt me? Bring it, pencil dick.”
The little crowd of men backed away.
Cletus blinked at her as if trying to puzzle out the meaning of her threat.
A voice boomed over the loudspeaker, “A great big thank you to Coleum Corporation for sponsoring this here event and most everything else in the great forty-eight these days. Now, y’all ready to rastle some pork?”
Burke searched for her companions.
Her grandfather clung to the railing. He watched her with wide eyes. His wrinkled hands gripped the wire fence, and he pushed his dentures around the inside of his mouth.
Stanley stood with his feet shoulder-width apart and his hands in his pockets. The bright sun reflected on his polished shoes and twinkled in his eyes.
The man in the John Deere hat yanked
a cord that pulled the shed door open. A beast easily three times Burke’s weight and nearly as long as she was tall burst out in a blur of shiny pink skin and squealed at a pitch that reminded her of the metal-on-metal shriek of locomotive brakes.
The gate to the arena was slammed shut behind the animal and the men leapt into action. Two of them managed to land on the animal’s back. One slid straight across. The pig slipped out from under the other, squealing even louder.
Cletus put himself directly in the pig’s path and was knocked on his butt in the muck.
Burke watched the men grab, again and again, trying and failing to get a hold on the trunk-like neck. Each time, the pig shot out of their arms like a watermelon seed being spit out. The animal grew wilder and more frantic with each passing moment.
Cletus was tossed in the air and landed next to her.
She gazed down at him.
He glared up at her. “Girl like you belongs on her back.” His hand flashed toward her ankle, but before he could pull her down, she hopped and shuffled and felt the satisfying crunch of his hand under her foot. The earth was soft. She didn’t think it was broken, but his pained grunt was satisfying, nonetheless.
The pig always turned to the left. It watched over its left shoulder. It tilted its head to the left. Something was wrong with its right ear or eye. It had a weak spot.
“Excuse me.” She twisted her toe into the back of his hand as she stepped away.
A cowboy flew through the air past her and landed with a muffled thump on top of Cletus, who let out a grunt not entirely unlike those made by the angry beast.
Burke remembered that pigs’ bodies bore striking similarities to human bodies. She knew a fair number of tricks for fighting humans. If the gods wanted their bacon, they’d best grant her wish that her tricks would carry over.
She jogged around the arena, her feet making horrible, squelching, sucking noises with each step, and came up on the pig’s right side. Two men tried to leap on it from the left, but it saw them coming and danced out of their way, leaving them in a tangle of filth-covered limbs.
Now or never.
Honing in on the spot on the neck, between the shoulder and the ear, that would instantly incapacitate a human, she threw herself at the beast, arms outstretched like superman.
Bingo!
Her fist struck the exact location she’d been aiming for. The force of punching a five-hundred-pound creature jolted through her hand all the way up into her arm, into the middle of her back, and she landed on her back with a sickening splat.
The pig stopped squealing and thrashing and stared at her with surprisingly human eyes as if to say, “Really, that seemed rather uncalled for.” And then, with the slow grace of a Giant Redwood succumbing to a lumberjack’s axe, it toppled.
That was the general idea of what she had hoped to accomplish with the maneuver; however, she’d not planned on the creature falling in her direction. Scrambling away through the mud was a lost cause. She only managed a sad, sticky half-revolution before she found her legs pinned under enough pork to feed an entire village of heathens.
The crowd fell silent.
Burke turned her head, wincing at the sensation of slimy goo being rubbed into the back of her scalp. He grandfather’s mouth hung open. Stanley gave her a thumbs up.
If she had access to a gun, she might have shot him.
Contest officials, believing the animal had been killed, drove a tractor on tank-like treads into the arena and used chains and the tractor’s shovel to lift it and carry it away.
John Deere extended a hand to Burke and she allowed him to help her up. All her parts seemed to be in working order, if a bit numb from being squished so very thoroughly.
“Ain’t never seen anything like that in seventy-three years.”
She pushed a dirty, wet braid away from her face with a dirty, wet hand. “Life’s full of surprises.” Her attention stayed on the tractor and the two old men trotting in its wake. “I gotta go.”
“I reckon you get a prize,” he said, though he seemed unsure if that was true. Probably because she was supposed to catch the pig, not kill it.
Burke couldn’t help but ask, “What’s the prize?”
“Two free passes to the demolition derby.”
“What’s a demolition derby?”
He regarded her with the expression of someone gazing upon an oddity that was hard for the mind to accept. “‘s a race on a figure eight track. Means the drivers gotta get past each other in the cross.”
“People pay to see that?”
“Well, yeah. Runs ‘bout six bucks a person.”
No way she heard that right. “Six dollars?”
“Yes ma’am. Course, there’s a discount for veterans.”
She gestured at the mess around them. “People do this for twelve dollars’ worth of prizes?”
He scowled. “They’re good seats. Right up front.”
A yelp near the gate caught her attention. A medic was wrapping Cletus’s hand in white tape. Cletus barked obscenities at him.
Burke shook her head, trying to clear the clutter. “Yeah, well. Give them to that guy. He earned it for dealing with Cletus the Assclown.”
The tractor and both of her companions disappeared in the distance.
“I’ve got to go. It’s been real.”
As she passed, Cletus yelled an unimaginative racial slur at her and then yelped. “Careful!” he shouted.
She peeked over her shoulder in time to see the medic give an unapologetic shrug that made her happy he’d be receiving the free race tickets.
In a field behind the steer barn, Richard stood watching the tractor dump the pig into the back of a semi-trailer. “You weren’t supposed to kill it,” he said. “That was the whole point.”
“It’s not dead. I just knocked it out.”
“Knocked it out?” he repeated.
“That’s right.”
“But… You… It…” He blinked slowly. “How?”
She tried to brush some of the mud away. It smeared, giving better coverage than high-quality latex gloss. “Girl tricks.”
“Nobody likes a smart alec,” he muttered.
She rolled her eyes.
The trailer door slammed shut and the guy drove away on his tractor, passing a long red Cadillac on the way. Stanley parked the car and opened the trunk. “Think it’ll fit in here?”
Burke strolled over to size up the space. The false bottom that concealed their stash of illegal weapons and questionably acquired cash reduced the available storage, but it was still plentiful. Apparently, people in the 1950’s had expected to be able to travel with everything but the kitchen sink. Their duffels and a little bag of snacks from a convenience store were in there, but they’d fit in the back seat without a problem.
A muffled thump came from inside the trailer, the sound of a very large, very unhappy animal waking up.
Richard reached for the handle.
Burke’s heart leaped into her throat. “Grandpa, don’t!”
But it was too late.
The pig burst through the doors with a screech not unlike that made by a banshee in the moments before an untimely death. In three seconds flat, it had taken in its surroundings and pointed its snout in the direction of a distant patch of scraggly-looking trees.
Burke searched the trunk for something—a net, a hook, a dang lasso would do—but then her eyes fell upon the bag of snacks. She thrust her hand into the sack and snatched out the first thing she latched onto, which happened to be a half-full package of Oreo cookies. Ignoring the ache creeping through her muscles, she threw the treat so it landed in the pig’s path.
The animal almost passed it up before putting the brakes on and shifting its half-ton of bulk to sniff the cookie. In three quick crunches, the little chocolate and cream sandwich disappeared. Burke threw another, not quite as far this time.
Both men stood frozen as she lured the Saehrimnir ever closer. At last, she lay a cookie on the back
seat of the car and backed away.
Crunch, crunch. Gone.
Burke scrambled to the other side of the car, yanked open the rear door, and dropped a cookie in the middle of the seat.
The freakishly human eyes stared at her. Burke could have sworn the pig knew it was being tricked and was trying to decide whether or not the cookie was worth it.
Apparently, it was.
One surprisingly small hoof was lifted to the floorboard, and then another onto the seat, and in a flash of frantic motion, all three hunters and the gods’ livestock were tucked into the Caddy. The white wall tires tossed a cloud of dust into the air and the Peanut Festival became another story in their past.
Chapter Three
Albert
Albert Peters knew in his heart of hearts that he was special. His mother had told him so. When he attended second grade and the fourth grader with facial hair and his gang of ogres attacked him on the playground, his mother bandaged his wounds and told him not to mind those guys. They had brawn, but Albert had brains. Someday, he would rule the world and they would be his paltry little servants.
When he lost the Science and Math Olympiad in Jr. High to a team of girls from a nearby private school, his mother had explained that no one was more clever than her little Alby. Those girls came from rich families who probably bribed the judges.
When not a single one of the thirteen young ladies Albert invited to prom said yes, his mother promised him that women would be begging to be with him when he was a rich and famous computer scientist.
Some days, memories of his dear saint of a mother crept up on him like an intruder, bludgeoning him until he wept and begged them to stop. Life had been hard since she’d passed. He had to find time to work and cook his own meals and wash his own laundry. All the hardship of life was more than a man could bear alone. Men, as a rule, were not designed to handle domestic tasks and so could manage them in only the most basic terms of survival. Even worse than going to the grocery store for himself was the cold, cruel fact that his mother had never seen him live up to his potential. When she died, he was only a grunt at a superstore, driving around fixing computers for old ladies.