Chapter Five: Slaughterhouse Lessons

When I was eleven, my dad took me to see the slaughterhouses in San Malinche. If there was a capital to Mala-Mundial, San Malinche would be it. That’s not saying much. San Malinche is also the Sin City of this hellhole and the bottomless pit of the solar system. Even the rangers avoided it if they could. Most of them, anyways.

The tall spires of the abattoirs rose over the hills like the towers of a giant cathedral. Around the abattoirs were the market, the spaceport, and government offices. Mixed within all this were the shacks and ghettoes of the down-trodden, low-lifes, and scumdogs who made up the majority of San Malinche’s population. Most of the town was built on stonework imported from offworld. The roads were brick and stonework, so rigs like my Dad’s could only drive on them if the spikes were retracted. However, about two years ago, the retraction mechanism broke, and fixing it just wasn’t a priority. For now, driving on the stones was illegal. But the main street where the cattle were driven to slaughter was a wide expanse of blood-soaked ice, and it was down this street that we drove. We had arrived at San Malinche.

As much as the town was a bastion of corruption, betrayal, and decadence, it was also a city of the dead. The stamp of death adorned the building doors in the forms of mammoth hides, skulls, and blood. Mostly mammoth, but human, too.

I sighed at the town. The best architectures of San Malinche were crude sand castles compared to the alphatropolises of other planets. Still, months had passed since I had seen anything more urban than a trade store. Suddenly, snapping fingers woke me from my thoughts.

“Hey, Neverland! You awake?”

“Sorry, Dad. It’s just that…”

“Shut it, kid. You are frustrating the hell outta me. I am trying to explain how things will work today.”

I had not heard him giving me a diatribe about the moth-raising industry. I let him ramble on about different kinds of meats and people he had to meet. I zoned out and let my mind wander. I dreamed about two-headed cybers and living offworld.

“First things first, we got to drop off some meat to pay back the doctor for that surgery he did on ole T-bone’s busted collarbone. It’s important to thank Dr. Seguín. He’s the only real doctor I’ve met and he doesn’t push for payment, so when I do, I want him to know it’s all good and we want him to do more work for us. Understand?”

The doctor lived on the outskirts of San Malinche in a small hacienda that was probably nothing like the one he would have owned if he lived on another world, but was still exceptional by Mala-Mundial standards. It was made of imported adobe. A high wall surrounded the entire hacienda, with a gate the only way in or out. I remember thinking it was a great way to keep out helados and curious sabers. The gate was open, so after we stopped the rig, we could walk up to his mansion. The house had enough rooms that I bet both his kids had their own bedrooms, none of which were the size of closets. Hell, the bedrooms probably had closets, too.

The garage was attached to the house. Dr. Seguín owned two hovercars. He never had to deal with the bouncing, jostling ride of a rig with spiked wheels that clawed its way across the ice. The doctor just glided.

“Remember, if he asks, tell him it’s prime steak,” Dad told me. Dad went to wait in the doctor’s office while I took the meats from the back of the rig (we didn’t bring the trailer with us that day) and opened the second gate to the doctor’s house and knocked on the door.

His cyber barked at me from somewhere on the other side. The dog had a deep sound, like Cerbie.

“Minuto,” I heard a voice say.

Then the door opened, and a tall woman answered the door. She had broad shoulders, a thin waist, and her hair was disheveled. Smudges lined her face. I wasn’t sure if it was ink or grease. The cyber was nowhere to be seen.

“Where did the cyber go?” I asked in my best Spanish, which wasn’t very good. My Spanish was usually broken and slow. My accents were all wrong. “Donde es el cyber?”

“We can speak in English,” she said. She had a strong accent, but at least I could understand her. I don’t think my Spanish was good enough for her. “Rey is penned up so that he won’t get at people,” she said. “He’s been trained to attack.”

“I never had an attack program for my dogs.”

“It isn’t a program,” she said as she closed the door behind me. “Mira.” She nodded towards a long corridor.

I glanced around the corner. There was a long hallway. Both sides of the hallway had four or five rooms, each of which was as large as our living room. In the corner of the hallway, in a pen, stood a medium-sized creature with four legs, black and tan fur, and a tail that wagged as he whined. It was a dog. A real dog. Not a plastic-encased cyber with wiring. The only dogs I had ever seen were dire dogs, and they were more like giant maniacal wolves, really. I nearly dropped the meat.

She laughed. “He’s more of a pain than you will ever imagine. Did you know he sheds year-round? Year round!”

“I have a cyber dog. Well, really he’s a Cerberus, but he only has one head. What I would give for a real dog,” I said in awe, not realizing I was speaking out loud.

“Dr. Seguín is working, but you can put the moth meat in the backyard if you like.” She pointed out back as she walked back towards the dog.

At least one thing was the same for doctors and ranchers, our freezers. Why own an electric freezer when the whole world was a freezer?

Remembering what my father told me, I said, “It’s prime steak.”

“Okay,” she said nonchalantly, the same way some people would say blue or black ink pen, then she went to take care of Rey, who was whining for attention.

“Backyard,” I said as I went out back. I passed a small fountain in the middle of the foyer. The water must have been heated, or maybe they used some other liquid.

For me and my dad, there was no yard to the back of the house, nothing sequestered off from the rest of the world. If a polar bear wanted to walk up to our door, it could.

The Seguín backyard took me by surprise. They owned their own dirt. The dirt clumped around the spikes in my boots, embarrassing me. I had to retract my grips. Rows of mosses grew in the dirt; they were groomed into intersecting geometric patterns. And the Seguíns owned a tree. It wasn’t a transgen tree engineered for the wildlife. It was purely decorative; something pretty to look at. A small tree with leaves on it. From behind the tree came a bright light. They owned a greenhouse. The Seguín family grew their own plants. I rubbed the ice off one of the window panes and looked inside. I saw all kinds of berries and bright-colored petals. There was so much color! I felt dizzy.

On the other side of the backyard stood the freezer. Unlike our homemade igloo back home, this one had a pressure-sealed stainless steel door with plastic handles that leaned backward into the ground. I opened the door, and there was a narrow brick staircase. I could barely fit with all the moth meat in my arms. I climbed down the staircase and entered the doctor’s freezer. It was full of moth meat. Not just hundreds, but thousands of pounds of moth meat. There was more moth meat than his family could eat in ten years. Some of it had gone bad from freezer burn. My foot hit a bowl as I squeezed into the freezer. “Rey” was printed on the bowl.

I realized that my family’s payment was nothing. Dr. Seguín didn’t need the meat. He asked for the meat so that my dad’s pride would not be wounded. I never felt further divided in class or morality than I did right then. No matter what we did, we would never be as good as the doctor. My father, who would sooner try to sell flank cuts as prime meat, was a pale comparison next to this man. I put the meat on an empty ice shelf, packed it with ice shavings, and left.

Back at the rig, Dad asked me how it went.

“Fine.”

“Did you give them the moth meat?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell them it was prime steak?”

“Yes.”

“You seem kind of distant. You okay?”

What was I to say? That I just realized how small and pathetic we were? That we just drove all the way out here for a pittance, that what the doctor did was charity work? I didn’t want to wound my father’s pride any more than the doctor would have, so I said, “He has a dog. A real dog, with black fur and a pink tongue and a tail.”

Dad said as we drove away, “Is that all? He’s a doctor. He’s rich. What’d you expect?”

“Not that.”

“Don’t be jealous of him, boy. Once you get past those fancy trappings, he’s just another man on the Far Colony. He doesn’t have nothing we don’t got.”

I wanted to beg to differ, but knew better.

Dad glanced at me and laughed.

“What?” I asked.

“That look in your eyes.”

“What look?”

“You want it. The big house, the hover cars. You want it all.”

“Is that wrong?”

“It’s not that it’s wrong, boy. It’s that you have to be realistic. You just looked on a palace of gold, and you’re you can get your own golden palace.”

“You need a college degree to be a doctor, right?”

“Sure, but you need a mammoth’s load of intelligence and talent, and boy, you’re good, but you ain’t that good.”

“Right.”

Dad exhaled. “You think I like saying these things? I didn’t wake up today thinking, ‘Man, I want to crush my son’s dreams today.’ But as a father, I have to look out for you. So I say you shouldn’t get your head full of those ideas. You are setting yourself up for failure.”

“You think I should be a mechanic.”

“There are two things that Mala-Mundial will never run out of a need for: mechanics and veterinarians, and Mateo, you’re not an animal person.” He started to say more, but something caught his eye. He dropped the subject, and me, like dead weight. Stopped the rig and got out of the cab.

I looked to the square where he was headed. There were tall cages on the side of the street. A small crowd had gathered around the cages. I followed Dad across the street of ice.

“What do you think they brought in this week?” Dad asked me. I shrugged. Weekly, a new shipment of ice age monsters arrived at the spaceport. They came aboard government transports and were first unloaded in San Malinche’s square for people to see.

A ranger stood in front of the cages, reminding people that harming or killing a protected animal for any reason was illegal. Violators would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Orale. La Regla Primera. Ranchers would lose their government-sponsored properties. Some cases could be punishable by death.

“What is it this time, Randy?”

A bedraggled man with facial shadow and drooping, red eyes (probably an addict) snorted as he said to Dad, “You gotta see this, Charles. Sabers.”

“Mother MaCree,” Dad said. We both pushed in closer, but couldn’t see anything.

Suddenly, a bellowing roar bounded over everyone, and the crowd jumped back. I saw the creatures. There were five of them. Two males and three females. They had golden hair and thick pads on their feet. Each stood as large as a small truck. They glared at the people surrounding them. They were fearless. Trapped though they may be, these creatures looked down on us from on top of the food chain. To them, we were another piece of meat.

“What do you think of that?” Dad asked me. “Want to operate on one of those bastards?”

One of the sabers, a young adult male, turned and bit at me. It happened so fast, I didn’t see it coming. The male’s large teeth clamped against the see-through plastic cage and deflected away, but they left their mark. I jumped.

Dad laughed. “Still think you could be a veterinarian?”

Dad handed me a credit card and pointed to a decrepit bar called the Broken Bear. “I want you to stay put until I come back. I have to pick up Boca’s prescription and take care of some other business, but later, I am going to show you how real people make their money.”

I knew Dad’s business had little to do with anything legal, but I shrugged and took the card while he went back to the rig.

Inside the Broken Bear, I tried to order a beer, but the bartender wouldn’t let me.

“You’re Charles’s son, ain’t you?”

I didn’t know what would happen, good or bad, if I said I was my father’s son. So I just sat on the barstool and said nothing.

When I didn’t answer, the bartender said, “Course you are. You got his nature in you. I could give you a beer. There is nobody here to stop me. That would be the kind thing to do.”

Uh-oh. I could hear the bitterness in his words. What did my Dad do? I started to get up and leave.

“No, sit down, boy. I got something for you, right here.” He reached under the bar and pulled out a bat. I jumped off the stool, but my boot caught in the stirrup. I dodged as I saw the metal bat swing at me.

Luckily, a strong hand reached out and grabbed the bat in mid-air. It ripped the bat away from the bartender and threw it to the ground.

I turned to see who my defender was. It was a ranger, Bull Burton. Stubble grew on his jaw line, and his eyes were red.

“Do you think that just cause you’re a ranger, you can do what you want? You’re drunk.”

“Maybe, but I still got this,” faster than a swift in a blizzard, the ranger’s pistol was in his hand and pointed at the bartender.

“Okay, okay!” the bartender said as he ducked his head to avoid the gun.

“One beer for mi amigo.”

The bartender poured me a clear liquid and walked away to the other side of the bar. The ranger put his gun up and followed me to a table. He plopped into the seat. I tried the liquid and spit it out. Soda water.

“I’ll go see about this,” the ranger growled as he tried to pull himself out of his chair.

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “Soda water is fine.”

“You shouldn’t be drinking beer anyways, kid. Why you here? In San Malinche. Did you run from your parents?”

“No. Dad has some business in town and he needed to stow me somewhere.”

“And he thought that a bar would make a good babysitting service?”

“Could be worse.”

“Maybe if sabers were put in charge of you.”

For a while, we sat in silence while everybody watched us. The whole bar had come to a stop once the ranger pulled his gun, and they hadn’t started back up. Maybe they were waiting for a sign? I didn’t have one. All I had was my soda water and my thoughts of college and everything Dad said about setting my bar too high. The ranger sat with me, pensive. I wondered if there was a reason he was here, and so inebriated. This wasn’t how I pictured a ranger would act.

“You think I am a cliché, don’t you?” he finally said. “A cop driven to drink.”

“No,” I started to protest, but he waved me off.

He leaned in close to me and said, “You see all those people behind me?”

I looked at them. Men and women in rags and torn suits, with redder eyes than the ranger’s and much crueler designs. All of them watching us.

“They want to rip me apart. If given the chance, they would kill me. They know about me. Know what I done.”

“What did you do?”

The pain in the ranger’s eyes faded. The crow’s feet around his eyes tightened their clutches on his temples.

The ranger leaned back in his chair and said, “How is your father, Mateo?”

Once he changed topics, the tension left the room like a burst balloon. The bar returned to its normal atmosphere, as if nothing had happened between the bartender, the ranger, and me.

“We get along.”

“Ain’t that right.” He said it in a way that even my eleven-year old butt knew something was up.

“What do you mean?”

He waved me off.

“Why can’t you tell me?”

“Because Mateo, I break up families every day. They break the law and I have to make a judgment. There’s no circuit court here on Mala-Mundial. It’s just me and my badge, so if I don’t have to break up a family, I won’t. It won’t be on me.”

He picked up his drink, said good-day, and walked out the door, leaving me to deal with the lack of information. I didn’t. Instead, I listened to the sounds of people in the bar.

First, I listened to two whores banter about their problems until I could tolerate it no more. Then I turned my attention to other conversations. Some people owed money, and that was a bad thing. There was talk of more rangers being reassigned to Mala-Mundial, and that was another bad thing. Only slightly worse were the conversations about the Ice People. A ranch family had been raided. The whole family was tortured. Helados loved doing things like setting people on fire just to watch them burn or dismembering them. Then they would kill them and eat them. For the women it was much worse.

On the other hand, nobody worried about the price of mammoth meat, and that was good. The price had increased as people elsewhere in the solar system craved meat. Cows and buffaloes had died out long ago, and so did the idea of eating emus and ostriches.

I would love to say something like “Mala-Mundial was a veritable melting pot of cultures,” but that sounds too favorable. The ice dwarf wasn’t a melting pot or a cornucopia. Mala-Mundial was a wadded up ball of snow and ice and dirt and grass, and if it hit you, it would probably break your nose. There were people in the Broken Bear from all over the galaxy. There were colonists from Caelus, miners from gas giants, and merchants from the techo-planet, Vulcan. The waitress was born on a station like me. The bartender came from Apollo. Some were even second and third generation Mala-Mundial. There were all kinds of peoples and colors. Four or five different languages streamed through the bar. Spanish was the most prolific.

Foreign language or not, drunken banter can entertain a child for only so long, so I left the Broken Bear and wandered around town. I felt certain Dad would be gone for hours while he committed his sins.

I meandered the dark streets of San Malinche, enjoying the sound of my boots clapping on stone and the reverberations of the hover cars flying down the street. Most of the buildings were plastics coated with ice sculptures for decoration. Many shops had lights embedded in the ice to attract people’s attention. The Broken Bear got its name from all the bears adorning the bar.Most of the bears were shot up. The large polar that stood above the door with an open mouth and one paw forward was missing that paw. The mechanic’s shop had a sculpture of a high-performance hover car. The building that housed the cyberseers was sculpted to look like a temple of domes and columns.

A new building came up before me. The roof sculptures showed ancient tools like a globe, compass, and pencil. A child sat at a desk with one of the ancient instruments in hand. I had found my school! I had never visited it, not once in my school career. It existed to me only in the VR world of my class console.

I wanted to walk inside the halls, to feel the soft cushions of the chairs and to smell the cafeteria, but the doors were locked. I circled back to the teachers’ parking lot. The doors were locked here, too.

“Hey,” a voice called out to me. I turned around. It was Mr. Ochoa, my teacher. He was shorter than I expected.

He looked perplexed, like he was trying to figure out who this kid was. Then a grin hugged his face and he said, “You’re taller than I expected, Mateo. I suppose that’s a casualty of VR classrooms. At first, I wasn’t sure it was you, but I wouldn’t mistake that look in your eyes. Always searching for something else, always trying to find something new.”

Okay, this is going to sound weird, but I was phased by his words. Here was a man who I saw most days, and whose face I never looked forward to seeing, and yet, I was awe-struck. I didn’t know what to do or say, so I pressed my finger into his chest. Yes, I am an idiot. Worse than an idiot. A country bumpkin in the “big town,” which was still the galactic version of the sticks.

Mr. Ochoa laughed, “Yes, I’m real. I know it may seem weird – this is odd for me, too, but it’s reality. We both really do exist. I don’t send grades off into the web because I’m suffering from some kind of educator’s dementia.” When I didn’t say anything, he said, “What brings you into town today, Mateo?”

“My father. He brought – I mean, I brought, uh, moth meat.” See? I was always an idiot.

“Sounds like your father has some bartering to do. It must be pretty important to come all the way in from the flats.”

“It’s payment for a surgery Dr. Seguín gave on T-bone Tom.”

“T-bone?”

“T-bone’s one our wranglers,” I said. “He was injured. We paid for the surgery in meat.”

“That’s very good, Mateo.”

“No, it isn’t.” I didn’t know why I was telling him, but it all started to come out. “The truth is, Dr. Seguín has tons of moth meat. He doesn’t use any of it. It just goes bad in his freezer. I think he feeds it to his dog.”

“Well, it is important for people to be able to reciprocate a service.”

“But it’s useless to the doctor. He just does it to ease my father’s inflated ego.”

“Well, maybe the doctor needs it and maybe he doesn’t.” He watched me pensively as an idea formed in his head, “But maybe you should also ask yourself is it your father whose pride is wounded, or is it yours?”

I hadn’t thought of that.

“You know, doctors make fine livings, Mateo. Have you thought of being a doctor some day?”

“Dad says I am setting myself up for failure.”

My teacher sighed. I could tell he was trying to think of the right answer.

“If you don’t try to accomplish anything, you know what happens?”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Ouch.

“You look back on your life and you realize you have nothing to show for it. Look at your father and all he has accomplished.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, I’m being honest here, Mateo. Your father was a gas miner, right? He could have stayed a gas miner for the rest of his life, and that would have probably been a very short life. But instead, he took a risk and brought you to Mala-Mundial. Now, instead of having just an apartment in a space station, he has a herd of wooly mammoths, land, and probably an inheritance for his children. None of these things would he have if he didn’t take the risk and try to accomplish something. So I want you to heed your father’s actions, and not his words.”

He clapped me on the shoulder. “I have to go home now, Mateo. Do you need a ride anywhere?”

Like after everything we just talked about I would ask my teacher to drop me off at a bar. No way.

“Thanks, but I’m good. I’m enjoying walking around San Malinche.”

“Be careful. San Malinche is a dangerous town. Nords. Doña Muertes. All kinds of bad. You know it wasn’t always this way.”

“I like to think of San Malinche as the yellow snow.”

“I know sometimes that can seem very apt, but there was a time when this was a peaceful community of terraformers.” In reaction to the doubting look I was giving him, he added, “This was before everyone was aligned under the Alliance. The rangers and the colonists came to Mala-Mundial and founded a city called ‘Nuevo San Antonio de las Estrellas.’”

“But I always heard that Niflheim was where the terraforming was done.”

“Ah, only one part. The heavy lifters lived in Nuevo San Antonio.”

“But then, how did all this happen?”

“The easy answer is that Nuevo San Antonio became San Malinche when the galaxy stopped caring. Mala-Mundial was forgotten until cows died and mammoths became the source of beef in the galaxy. The remains of Nuevo San Antonio are still around, though. Old houses buried in the ice, that sort of thing. When you go home, look for an old stone sign far off to the side of the entrance. Etched into the stone is the real name of this city.”

“If that’s the easy answer, what’s the hard answer?”

“You have to go to school and grow up to learn the hard answer. Where is your father? A child should not be wandering these streets alone.”

I lied. “I’m meeting Dad in a little bit.” I don’t know why I lied to Mr. Ochoa.

My school teacher waved as he got into his small hover car and drove away. I continued wandering through the streets of San Malinche.

I walked the market, which was like an outdoor mall with brightly colored arches tall enough for moths to walk under. The arches lined either side of the street, and the stores were between each arch. Dozens of people walked the street from shop to shop. The dim star was fading into the horizon, so I knew it was getting late. I ran back to the Broken Bear.

Outside the bar, I listened to a man with a scorched face preach about the end of the world.

“Are you an helado?” I asked him.

“I come all this way out to the edge of the galaxy, and I seen things and I learned things. I’ve been educated by the bowels of hell! I’m no helado.”

He told me that aliens would "claim their just inheritance" and destroy the planet, that they would make a heaven of hell. He told me it was true. He had seen them.

“What do they look like?” I asked. He pointed at a smiling man strutting towards us. My Dad’s smile belied his gratification. Dad smelled of sweet perfumes.

Dad asked me, “Did you learn much from the professor?”

“You have a good boy,” the crazy man said, “When the aliens take over, he will make a good slave.”

“Who? Him? You haven’t seen him work,” my dad responded playfully.

“You smell,” I told him as we walked back to the rig.

“Hmmm,” was all he said. Great defense.

“Dad, do you believe in aliens?”

“Don’t believe a rambling lunatic, son. He’s half-way to helado as it is. That’s dangerous. You shouldn’t be hanging out with men like that.”

I climbed back into Dad’s rig. “He said aliens were going to reclaim Mala-Mundial and wipe us all out.”

Dad chuckled. He circled the rig and pulled himself into the driver’s seat.

“If they had told your great-grandfather that one day there would be mammoths and saber-toothed tigers and all kinds of ice age monsters roaming Mala-Mundial, he’d a told you to go jump in a lake. He’d a said that mammoths were extinct and that man wasn’t meant to exist this far from out and that the Far Colony was doomed. So I’d never say there’s no chance of alien civilization. But I’ve never seen anything to prove it.”

If only my father’s mood had stayed so merry, but his joy was stamped out as we drove towards the slaughterhouse. His voice started to echo that dark lecturing tone of his, and his whole body curled into a frown.

As we neared the mammoth pens, the streets grew redder and redder until they were almost black with blood. The odor turned foul with the smell of death. The alarmed trumpeting of mammoths being slaughtered carried through the air.

Once at the slaughterhouse, Dad led me to the top of a tower where we could watch everything in the abattoir. "Now watch and listen, son. This is how we make our money. This is the sound of your inheritance."

From our position on a plank, we watched as wranglers maneuvered a herd into the slaughterhouse. This was the trickiest part of being a wrangler, and the most dangerous. The inattentive wrangler could get the bad side of a moth’s tusks or be trampled. Because of the high risk, robots helped the wranglers guide the moths single file into a chute. They were tucked in close behind each other so that the one in front wanted to push forward away from the others. At the end of the giant chute was a thick door. When the door opened, the front-most moth – a giant, old bull – moved forward. Then the door slammed behind it. A giant robot standing just inside the door, on top of the pen. The robot held a large glowing staff. He thumped the moth on the head with the staff. The moth screamed. I can still remember the scream of that old mammoth. It was electric and shrill, like a rabbit; the kind of scream that a Giant Woolly Mammoth should not make. The sound quivered in my bones. As the staff made contact, the moth’s eyes bulged with veins ready to burst, and he vomited instantaneously. Within seconds the moth was dead. Giant hooks from the side of the wall gored the bull’s carcass was gored as the body continued to convulse. The hooks hoisted the moth to the next station, where blood-stained robots brandishing serrated knives keenly removed the bull’s hide. At the next station, the tusks were viscerally chopped from the mammoth’s face. My gut gurgled as the tusks popped from their socket. I had witnessed, and participated in, the slaughter of moths on Mala-Mundial. I was no stranger to blood or guts. But the mercy killings of the ranch were nothing compared to the slaughter that was happening beneath my feet. Seeing them “processed” this way. There was no respect, no care. It was death in its most calculating cynicism. Nothing more to life but ground up meat and bones.

As I watched, the mammoth was reduced and minimized at each station, transforming from a hulking beast to separate slabs of meat. Trunk, tail, feet, and finally head were all removed. The head slid down a shaft to a different area, where its brains, tongue, and eyes would be prepared as delicacies. At the last station, the actual meat, the part of the mammoth that would be used for steaks, was stripped from the carcass.

From below me, a particularly bold cut of the blade sent a little splash of blood onto the plank I was standing on. I watched the blood drip. I was sick in my gut and in my head and in my heart. Soda water erupted over the side of the tower.

“Crap! What’s the matter with you?” My father really had a way with words. He handed me a towel. “Here, princess.”

“It’s just so…it’s like we’re helados and the moths are people.”

I couldn’t finish my sentence. I hunched over and emptied out the rest of my stomach.

Dad patted me on the back and said, “Good. Now you’re beginning to understand. You can’t learn this from a book or be taught it. This is the real world, boy. Where moths live entire lives just to be ground up as meat, and if we are unfortunate, the same can happen to us. One shot from an helado’s bullet, and we will be ground up by them crazies and turned into dinner.”

“Does anything matter, then?” I asked, once we were back at the rig.

“No. Hate. Love. Be a hero. Be a villain. All you can do is decide what’s important to you.”

I grabbed his arm as he was climbing into his seat in the rig’s cabin. “Who is she?” I asked weakly.

He looked at me queerly, as if I was asking him if Mala-Mundial’s moon was made of cheese. Realization and anger crept over his face. He growled, “How dare you? Your mother was the only woman in my life.”

“But you left me to…”

“Mother Ma-friggin-Cree. Is that what this is about? Me leaving you?” I couldn’t answer. I hoped my eyes would say everything.

He climbed in and reached behind the seat. Not knowing what to do, I sat down in the driver’s side bucket seat. He opened a box I couldn’t see. He pulled out a mechanical dog’s head with yellow eyes and white painting and put it on my lap like Herod delivering the head of John the Baptist to Salome. “I won’t lie to you,” he said.

Next Chapter: Chapter Six: Nothing Decays in the Land of the Dead