Chapter Six: In the Land of the Dead, Nothing Decays

So this is the crap part of the story. No, really. It is a story of three kinds of crap. The first kind is moth crap. Mammoth crap has an interesting story on Mala-Mundial. Since most of the planet is covered in ice, the back-end deposits actually will become the earth that the moths will walk on generations from now. And it helps spread the grasses that were engineered to thrive in this sub-Siberian weather. The real problem is, there’s no flies or dung beetles to assist in that final stage of decomp. There is a saying on Mala-Mundial. In the land of the dead, nothing decays, as the saying goes. So you have to wash the dung with enzymes that remove all the bacteria and leave only dirt and grass. Consider yourself educated.

Since on Mala-Mundial we measure a week as six 25-hour days, and since as a rancher (and small-time narcotics grower, though I did not know it) my dad believed in working ten days straight, that meant that every five days we went out onto the flats to hose down dung. Dad went one way, and I went the other. Rocket Girl, who was fifteen like me, and a Saldaña, came with me and Cerbie. I rode my old hover cycle while two-heads ran alongside. Cerbie had to come. Not just cause I liked having him around, but because he stored the government-subsidized enzymes.

Rocket Girl I’ve known since we were kids growing up on next-door ranches. See, the Saldañas lost their father long ago. Dad’s been taking me over as long as I can remember to fix their rig, and Rocket Girl was always helping along, wrench in hand. She has a knack for engines like I have a knack for robots, which is probably why we get along so well. We both share the same interests. I liked her a lot. Like she made my insides feel tingly kind of like.

So as I drove the hover bike to the first piles of dung, Rocket Girl’s hands were on my stomach, and her head was pressed against my back to shield her face from the stinging wind and blowing ice. Orale, I was very aware of her hands on me. It was confusing and it felt good and I wanted her to keep holding onto me all day, even if she was wearing the bulging belt with all her tools and the belt was starting to pinch me. I didn’t care. I was a kid riding a cycle with a beautiful girl wrapped around me and my dog at my side. It doesn’t get better than that.

The moths left piles that could be two feet tall and three feet wide. The piles were little pyramids of balls of dung the size of human skulls that, when pulled apart, were full of grass and seed. So the first thing we did was scatter the balls along the ground until they were like a giant patty. A real shit burger. Then we used rakes to pound the balls flat and break them open. Once the poop was scattered sufficiently, we took the hoses from Cerbie and sprayed the poop with enzymes. Now that I think of it, the two of us holding these giant hoses coming from the undercarriage of a robot dog was probably a very weirdly psychosexual image. But we didn’t know better.

“What’s that?” Rocket Girl asked me. She was pointing to a pile of burnt bricks that were starting to ice over. They used to be a shack.

I almost forgot to tell you about the shack! I will tell you what I told her. That there were these squatters who were living on our ranch. They started with a simple ice igloo, but then they found one of dad’s store houses and moved in. I think it was one of dad’s ranch-hand mothpokes who first saw the squatters. Boca probably, or maybe T-bone.

Dad got mad, real quick. See, the laws out in the corners of the solar system get pretty blurred. Those rangers were there to enforce the law, but they were preoccupied with smuggling, trafficking, drug trading, and that pesky Regla Primera. Besides, marshals were known for over-doing everything. They didn’t just take care of a problem. They took care of it with gañas. Gañas is a tricky word in Spanish. It means something else, but here it means with force, or with heart. To do something with gañas is to put your everything into it.

There was this theory that all you needed to do to set up a claim on some land was to stay on it for six weeks. “That’s just helado-headed talk,” Dad told me. “If it’s true, then why did I have to put my life’s savings into buying this land?”

But nobody was taking any chances. So when squatters showed up, Dad told his ranch hands it was time to man-up, and they got on their robot ponies and we got in his rig. We were fully loaded with the tranq rifles. It was very cowboy.

We drove up on them like a SWAT team, Dad blaring the horn on the rig as he came to a stop inches away from the brick shack. For a second, I thought he was just going to run over the shack and squash all the squatters under his tires. Maybe he had a change of heart, maybe he didn’t want to destroy his own shack, but he stopped less than an arm’s length from the shack, the brights aimed through the windows.

This was a small shack. It wasn’t an ice-fishing shack, but it wasn’t much bigger. The weird thing, though, was that suddenly fifteen squatters ran out the back. I didn’t think there was room for five people. I had no idea how fifteen got in there.

Dad fired his flare gun over their heads. It was a noise maker, too. Like a gun troll or a brontotherium storming along the ice. Not just loud, but penetrating. Boom! T-bone fell off his pony, and all of us ducked, even Dad.

Boca, ever Dad’s loyal second-hand, came around the far side and headed off about five of them. He put his boot into somebody’s jaw, and I remember seeing it come unhinged, like a robot’s jaw, like a bolt had been broken. The man fell down, gargling screams. Boca pointed his rifle at the squatters behind their fallen comrade. They raised their hands and backed up while the others fled.

Cerbie and I raced after the other squatters, but they were faster than us. Kind of like a rabbit has to be faster than the wolf. Cerbie jumped out of the back of the rig, though, and with me on top of him, we chased after the squatters.

“Stop!” I yelled, but Dad must have overridden my commands with a seek-and-destroy kind of algorithm. All I could do was hang on for my life.

Cerbie’s lambent eyes came up on one of the runners. His giant paw smacked him, and the guy went down easily. Cerbie circled him, both his heads snapping and snarling at the poor squatter. I didn’t know what to do. We were far enough away that nobody was going to come up to us any time soon. Dad and his posse were busy rounding up the five guys they caught.

This guy was tall, but stringy. Hard, like a mothpoke. His clothes were disheveled. He had that desperate look, the eyes that are starting to ice over, not literally, but figuratively. I thought for sure I was looking at an helado.

He charged me.

I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t been in a fight, like a fight-fight, with a grown-up before. He must have thought that I had more control of my Cerberus cause he was after ME. If he had known I was not in control, he probably would have stayed there till Dad or Boca or somebody showed up.

He pushed me off my dog, and I fell to the ground underneath him. He started wailing on me, one-two, left-right. I dropped my rifle and was now just holding my hands up in front of my face, trying to keep those fists of his, which felt like ice hammers, away from my face. I kicked up with my legs, but he stayed on top of me and did another left-to-right on my head.

Suddenly, his weight was gone. I lowered my arms. I don’t think he did as much damage as I believed he was doing. My arms had kept his fists away. He was on the ground, rolling. Cussing.

Is it possible to feel like a kid brother to a robot dog? Like he’s the one who has to bail you out, even though you are the one responsible for his upkeep?

So by the time we dragged the helado back to Dad, the other squatters had received their due beatings. I thought for a second that maybe what seemed like an accident was done with intent, like maybe Dad meant for me and Cerbie to chase that guy out onto the ice while he and the wranglers beat the freeze out of these wretched people.

I felt bad for them. What they did was wrong, but did they deserve to be beaten half to death? Was property rights worth so much? Two of them were younger than me. I wondered if it was Dad or Boca who gave them black eyes and bloody lips and cracked teeth. They were just kids, following parents or aunts or uncles who were themselves following the promise of something better on Mala-Mundial. And now they were being pulverized by moth herders who were threatening them with their lives if they ever returned to the one place they found they could call home. Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit. But it didn’t seem right, and I felt embarrassed that my dad was involved, and even more embarrassed that he had involved me.

I told all this digression to Rocket Girl as we walked through the shack.

“You’ve got a bigger problem than squatters,” Rocket Girl said. I followed her pointed finger off to a spot on the ice. There was no disbelieving the pure white stain, like a truckload of white paint had spilled. The second kind of crap. Penguin crap.

“There’s no getting around that,” she said.

I know what you’re thinking. Penguin crap is ludicrous. First of all, Mala-Mundial is for ice age beasts. And you’re right. But when a cold-weather animal needs a new home, where do you think they look? Que mala. Second, you’re thinking, who would find penguin poop anything but funny as hell? Well, you’ve never owned moths. Penguin poop is slick as icicles and twice as deadly cause its little jagged edges slice through your boot or you rupture a ligament cause your legs went askew. Now imagine a six-ton Woolly Mammoth doing that and you get an idea for just how dangerous it can be. Dad would just as soon shoot them, but you know, Regla Primera. The only thing you could do about penguins was clean up after them and hope you caught it all before a moth killed himself on the slick ice.

Hello, flamethrowers. Rocket Girl wanted to play with the fire, so I let her. I’d do anything to get her attention.

So she took out Cerbie’s flamethrower and went to town. Blazed a frozen hole in the ice. And once the methane in the ice lit, we had ourselves enough for a nice barbecue if we wanted. Blue flames went up like a tower into the sky.

That’s when we discovered ribs sticking out of the burnt-out ice where penguin crap used to be. I have to admit, I was a little freaked out. I had never seen a dead person’s ribcage sticking out of the ice. And worse, he had Sköll wolves teeth. Skölls were the lieutenants in the Nords. They were the Frost Giant’s best men. Skölls were known for tattooing themselves with wolf icons and even going so far as to have their teeth pulled and replaced with custom metal fangs. They did this so they could be identified even if a rival gang tried to destroy all other identity.

The lips of this man’s frozen face curled back like a wolf’s, revealing his sharp metal fangs. My stomach turned.

“This is bad,” I said. “Really bad.” I kept thinking, in the land of the dead, nothing decays. One of the squatters must have been a Sköll. Carrion eaters had done much of the work, but if we didn’t get rid of the evidence, the Frost Giant would bring Ragnarok down upon our ranch.

I started to call it in to my dad when Rocket Girl slapped the com out of my hand. “What are you doing? Don’t talk about it over your com. They could be listening.”

“Then what do I do?”

“You have to pull out his teeth.”

I wasn’t going to pull out his teeth, let me be upfront about that. No way was I handling a dead man’s dentures.

“Okay, well, then you have to cut off his head.”

“Cut off his head? Are you loco? I’m not touching it.”

Leave it to Rocket Girl to be the sensible one. She said, “Look, Mateo. I know you are freaked out, but you have to deal with this. That is a Sköll lying dead on your ranch. Either you get rid of the evidence, or one day you will reap the vengeance of the Nords. If they find out, they will kill you and yours and slaughter your moths just to prove a point, regardless of whether you are to blame. It’s all about respect and the perception of disrespect. So either you’re removing that dead man’s teeth, or you’re cutting off his head. There’s no way around that.”

I shook my head and looked for a knife. I didn’t have a knife. There isn’t much use for knives on Mala-Mundial. I had wire cutters, pipe cutters, even an old dehorner Dad never used. But no knife. Rocket Girl checked her pockets, too. Lots of hammers and such, but no knife.

“The dehorner might work,” Rocket Girl said. “Think of his head as a giant horn.”

I felt dizzy placing the large dehorner around his neck. I squeezed the handles together. It was hard to pop a dead man’s head from his neck. I moaned as I squeezed again. I thought of the slaughterhouse and the tusks popping out of the socket. I wiggled the dehorner back and forth, and this time, the head popped off. It rolled down to my feet and yes, I jumped and squealed like a baby. I picked up the head. It felt like straw and rock that was wrapped in oh-hell-that’s-gross.

Among other things, Cerbie has a storage compartment for storing things the size of say, a human head.

“Now what do we do?”

“Well, you have to feed the head to a short-faced bear.”

My day was getting worse. Short-faced bears looked like something out of your worst nightmare. They had short snouts and fat wrinkles on their faces that made their faces look like they were melting. Standing on their hind legs, they were two to three times as tall as a person. They were mean and they would kill a great elk, eat the good parts, then leave the rest. Nasty monsters.

So how do you feed a human head to a short-faced bear, you ask? Here is where the third kind of crap comes in. Short-faced bears will eat anything, but they love great elk. We couldn’t kill a great elk and bury the dead Sköll warrior’s head in its intestines. So we had to make a short-faced bear think it was eating great elk. And you do that by collecting a bunch of great elk feces and laying a trail near the monster. With a little luck, the bear doesn’t catch wind of you first and eat you alive.

You’d think that a short-faced bear would be wary of your scent all over the great elk, but short-faced bears are pretty fearless. And they’re gluttons. They are like giant eating machines that don’t care if you are a saber-toothed tiger, a polar bear, or a kid who stinks of penguin dung.

The short-faced bear tracked the head of the late gangbanger before we could set it down. He chased us off! Then he gnawed on the head, cutting it open, and eating the whole damn thing like it was a buffet. When he was done, there wasn’t even a blood stain on the ice.

I felt a little better because I thought I’d saved my dad and I from a vengeance killing. It turns out, none of this mattered cause the Sköll was this dude who was sent out on the ice to die for disobeying the Frost Giant. In that way it was not only a story of crap, but a crap-story. I was the same person (more or less) in the same predicament, with the same shit problems, pun unintended. Que mala mundial. We went back to the herd. Crap still needed to be cleaned. It was snowing.

Next Chapter: Chapter Seven: Spare the Brains, Spoil the Bladder