Junior ignored him, concentrating on the steer. He smoothed out his pompadour with both hands, rotating his hips ever so slightly, dancing in slow motion with the carcass, seducing it. He pulled off his shirt and tossed it into the back of the truck. The center of his chest was full of scars; the pattern almost looked like the design of a star or sun, but I couldn’t figure out what kind of injury could have caused them.

Bert wouldn’t give up. “You ever try with your left hand, Archie?” he asked, shoving his left hand down the front of his pants and trying it out.

I shoved the bathtub closer to the table.

Junior shuffled around the steer and caressed it. He said very evenly, almost quietly to his brother, “Quit fucking around and get those knives over here. It’s time to get down to business.” He patted the carcass one more time and bent down to grab the chainsaw. It started on the first pull.

I took a step back.

Junior looked up and grinned. “Wanna see something neat?” he shouted over the roar.

I shook my head.

Junior solidly planted his feet shoulder-width apart, one foot on the table, one foot on the back of the truck. He raised the saw, right hand on the handle, finger on the trigger. His left hand gripped on the cross bar and turned the saw sideways. He hit the trigger once. Twice.

I took another step backward.

Junior sank the screaming teeth into the steer’s neck, just above the ears. The high-pitched whine dropped into a growl. A fine mist of blood and tissue sprayed straight out from the saw. The steer’s head began to slowly separate from the neck, splitting a deep valley into the flesh.

The head hit the table at the exact same time Bert dumped the contents of a small cardboard box onto the table. Long butcher knives, hammers, chisels, and meat cleavers clattered across the dark wood as the steer’s head bounced off the table and landed on the floor next to the bathtub.

Junior nodded at the severed head and shouted at me, “Grab it. Toss it in the tub. We’ll boil it down later.” He squeezed the saw’s trigger, sending another spray of bloody mist into the air.

I kept a close eye on the chainsaw and scurried forward, grabbed the steer’s ear, and dragged the head back to a safe distance. The ear felt surprisingly soft and smooth. Without looking at the head, I tried to lift it, but was unprepared for the weight. It must have weighed at least thirty pounds, and the ear slipped through my fingers causing the head to land with a dull thud on the cement floor.

I got a better grip on the ear and dropped the whole thing into the bathtub. Another black explosion of flies burst out of the tub, but they quickly settled back, covering the head. I turned away, not wanting to watch the flies begin their feast.

Bert suddenly shouted, “Think fast, Archie,” and a meat cleaver came shooting across the table toward me.

I jumped out of the way as the cleaver sailed off the table and landed in the coils of barbed wire. Bert giggled. Junior stood back and eyed the steer’s stomach. He hollered at Bert, “Grab that push broom. When I open him up, we can just push all the innards off the table here into the tub.”

I bent down and carefully plucked the cleaver from the barbed wire, turning back just in time to see Junior splitting the steer’s abdomen open. The results were instantaneous.

An ocean of blood and miles of grayish-blue, ropy intestines spilled out onto the table. A surging flood of rotting meat and fluids washed over Junior’s cowboy boots. “Goddamnit,” Junior said. “Shouldn’t have worn my good boots.”

The stench of spoiled flesh and fecal matter slithered up into my nostrils and nested there. Jesus, I thought, trying not to gag. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse.

And then things got worse.

CHAPTER 12

In the swamp of blood and intestines, something moved.

Several somethings moved.

“What the hell!” Junior shouted, jerked his bloody cowboy boot out of the mess and brought it down hard, grinding meat into the table. Ripples in the blood caught my eye, flashes of a pale gray amidst the darker gray of the intestines.

The worms. They twisted and squirmed through the wet meat lying on the table. Flattened gray tubes almost a foot long, covered in a viscous white slime, slid across the table in an eruption of obscene movement. Six short tendrils, or barbels, looking like the fluid antennae of a slug, surrounded the mouth on the bottom of the worm and tested the air. It didn’t look like the worms had eyes, just round lighter patches on either side of their heads.

Junior kept screaming and stomping on the worms in a sort of deranged hillbilly tap dance with a dead steer for a dancing partner. His cowboy boots stuttered and pounded the table in a frantic rhythm. And still the worms kept coming, dozens of them, spilling, squirming, oozing out of the spilled guts.

I gripped the cleaver tightly in my right fist, raised it high, and rushed toward the table. Screaming, I brought it down in a slicing arc, twisting my upper body in the effort. The rusted cleaver easily split one of the closest worms in half and sank into the table.

The slimy gray flesh came apart like wet cardboard. Blood oozed out of the severed ends in slow motion. I yanked on the handle, but the blade stuck fast in the wood. Another worm slid closer and its barbels stretched out, tasted the blade.

“Oh, shit. Shit!” I breathed and yanked again, but the cleaver remained anchored in the table. Then, as if responding to the warmth of living flesh, the worm slid closer to the handle, closer to my hand.

“Shit,” I hissed, grabbed the handle with both hands and wrenched it free. I brought the cleaver down again and again, viciously chopping the worm into three ragged pieces. The severed chunks twitched and undulated slowly, dying reluctantly, like a lizard’s tail.

Bert brought his short-handled sledgehammer to the party and smashed at the worms. Every blow sent a moist cloud of blood into the air. The sounds of harsh grunts, wet thwacks, and the idling chain-saw echoed through the barn. I kept hacking away at the worms and the meat, bringing my cleaver down on anything that moved. Junior had taken to holding the chainsaw above his head and jumping on the worms with both feet.

Finally, after several frantic minutes of hacking, stomping, and pounding, it was over. I sucked in great ragged breaths while scanning the finely chopped meat in front of me for any signs of life. I couldn’t tell where the chunks of worms ended and the chunks of intestines began.

“C’mon you little fuckin’ wrigglers,” Bert said in a high, strangled voice and brought his hammer down at random. His pounding rhythm faltered, slowed, and stopped. Junior shut the saw off and in the sudden silence I could hear only the whispering rain hitting the tin roof. Junior nudged the dangling carcass with the tip of the chainsaw, making the steer sway slightly. Nothing else, no other worms, came out of the long, jagged slit. He shoved the steer again. Still nothing.

“See? See?” I asked, still breathing fast. “I told you there was something down there in that pit. I told you.”

Junior ignored me and gingerly pushed the sharp, blood-soaked toe of his cowboy boot through the crushed intestines. “Huh,” he said finally. It wasn’t a question, or even an acknowledgment of me.

“I told you,” I repeated.

“Shut up,” Junior said tiredly, and hawked a thick, wet ball of chewing tobacco into the tub. It didn’t bother the flies much. He dropped the chainsaw into the meat on the table and smoothed out his pompadour with both hands.

I turned my blade sideways, so it was parallel to the surface of the table, and gently slid the edge under a worm. It was dead, but wasn’t as severely sliced and diced as some of the other worms nearby. This one had only been cut in half. I eased the flat cleaver under the worm’s head but couldn’t find the other half. The elastic barbels had shrunk to short nubs in death.