Kill Town, USA
by Joseph Love
This novella was made available to the public through funds raised on Kickstarter.com. The author would like to thank the following backers for their significant contributions:
Joey Barnard
Bradtv
Kevin Cumesty
Kade Goodspeed
Ben Handy
Jodi Heavner
George O. (Pete) Love
Allen Mooney
Gail Mooney
Cindy DeGeorge Nance
Adam Rains
Alyssa Riedy
Ashe Smith
JoAnn Smith
Sissy Story
For Anna and Willa
I KILLED MY FIRST BEAR WHEN I WAS EIGHT, killed maybe half the population in Quinn Valley by the time I was sixteen. I’ve trapped snapping turtles with little more than broken brooms and shoeboxes. I’ve handled snakes, raccoons, and an otter I found in the roots of a swamp oak once. Not much I’d say I was afraid of. But I never had such a fear as when I saw that half-dead bear in North Carolina.
I worked accounting for Major Meat, Inc., supplier of beef, poultry, pork, and all sorts of hybrids, byproducts, and synthetic meats to forty percent of all the restaurants, groceries, and fast food joints in the country.
I didn’t do payroll. I did beef. Pitted slaughterhouses against each other to drive down costs. Forged counter-offers to drive up prices. I’m the reason your crunchy taco costs twenty-nine cents, and why you pay twenty bucks for a New York Strip. You know what New York Strip costs? Twenty-nine cents. Taco meat? Free. Scraps from the slaughterhouse floor.
That said, you couldn’t catch me saying a word against Taco Toro’s tacos. A little chili powder, sour cream, and shredded lettuce and I still ate the things.
There are some people who would kill to get the information I handled. Or write a big check. Nick Tolchik was the man with the big check and a thousand questions. A year back I got an email from Tolchik asking to meet me and talk about meat. He was some sort of bestselling muckraker, but I’d never heard of him. He emailed me weekly. Then, daily. He called me on my direct line after only a month. I gave in when he said he was in town and could meet me on my lunch break. He never mentioned anything about money.
We met at The Big Ass Bar, where we sat dwarfed by the big ass bar made of hickory slabs. I showed him my work folder: the food bill for the largest mass-consumer in the world. Technically, that information was public knowledge. He gawked at the red scribbles, green plus signs, and the huge margins of blue ink detailing marketing minutiae. The thing that got him was the table for canned taco meat. By replacing half an ounce of meat with shredded tendons in every ten-ounce can, Major Meat got a six-figure bump in profits every month. Tolchik was so excited to read it he wrung his napkin through his waxy fingers until I thought they’d bleed. He wrote me a check and slid it under my nose. I looked at him like he’d shit all over the big ass bar.
The next week I had a voicemail played aloud in front of my supervisor. Tolchik called the wrong number. He left a message on the wrong phone. I was given a month of unpaid suspension. I didn’t argue. That’s what you do when you work for someone, you don’t argue. You don’t complain. You take their money twice a month and you keep your mouth shut. But a month is a long time. I cashed Tolchik’s check and sent him an email telling him about the suspension and asking about the book. He said my folder gave his book a brand new angle. Gave it the angle. Tolchik’s agent got him out of his first contract, put the book up in a last minute auction, and had the publishers scrambling to sign him. The book was going to destroy Major Meat, Inc.
When my suspension was up, I stayed with Major Meat almost another year. They took away my office and gave me catch-up work to do. Payroll. I expected to get canned any day. When the economy tanked, I knew it wouldn’t be long. Then, Tolchik’s book came out in September. Major Meat stock dropped every day. On October 1st, a security guard met me in the lobby with a small banker’s box full of my things. On top was a hardback edition of Tolchik’s book, Major Murder: How Big Meat is Killing America.
Good thing, though. On October 15th, Major Meat recalled two thousand tons of toxic beef. A week later, it was three thousand tons of pork. Nearly two million patrons of Taco Toro, Big Wiggly Burgers, and Venni Vetti Beefy were placed in intensive care. Millions of pounds of meat were recalled weekly. By the end of the month, Major Meat was bankrupt. About half the patrons died from the beef. The rest went comatose.
And I went on vacation.
Even though I grew up in Quinn Valley, Georgia, just a few miles from the Appalachian Trail, I never spent much time hiking. I loved hunting, fishing, and camping in the valley. I grew up hearing how the Trail was for hippies and how they were turning Quinn Valley into a tourist trap. Hikers clogged up parking lots while they stayed on the trail for days at a time. They came like birds in the spring and summer, and like birds they got out of there by the first frost.
For years, Dad could only find seasonal work. He hated the onset of winter. Bear and tourist seasons were over and his arthritis flared up pretty bad. He tried to make money by selling firewood. In a place like Quinn Valley, people don’t pay for firewood. Winters were the worst. By the time the first snowfall came, you could hardly get Dad to eat anything.
Worse, there was no way he’d leave the house to work. I went to work when I was old enough and I stayed away from the Trail. But the Appalachian Trail is an inspiring thing. Two thousand miles of the hardest terrain, isolated from simple conveniences. When Major Meat laid me off, I was happy to be out of work and to have free time. It meant I could finally hike the Trail. I was happy to see the winter. Happy to wake to snow and frost, to shit in the woods, to go without. To carry a knife and rations and sleep on hard ground.
I’ve been face to face with black bears, and black bears don’t bother me. But what I saw a month out on the trail was just the shell of a black bear. Inside that shell was something dark, depraved.
I met a lot of hikers once I started the Trail, and I didn’t believe their stories about recent bear sightings. After all, you might see a bear in winter if it had been a hard summer or fall. I thanked all the folks with long, dirty hair and bead necklaces and rolled my eyes as they walked away. A bear in winter is a weak, unthreatening thing.
Still, I slept naked to avoid casting the smell of food into the forest. In the mornings, I basked in the frost and drank my coffee before I dressed again. I only dressed when I was ready to carry on. That’s something you learn early. Always enjoy the stillness, the rest, even in winter.
But the bear came. At three-thirty one morning, sound asleep, I woke to the tortured silence of night. Bears whisper when they walk. Their huge paws gently shake the ground. I felt the shaking of the frozen dirt. I heard the screaming quiet of his stealthy gait.
I slept naked, but not without my hunting knife. The fourteen-inch Gerber All-Or-Nothing. With only the knife, I slipped out of my sleep sack and stood in the opening of the shelter. The frost and moon made the ground shine. That’s when I saw the bear. Its black body trudged toward the fire pit from the right side of the shelter. It turned to me, eyes silver like the frost. We were alien to each other.