Two gray, Hudson Hornet 4-door sedans without license plates, streamlined as if they were about to spread wings in their next model year, pulled up in front of the Thurlston Meat- Packing Company's Processing Plant Number One. A gray Army 6X6 cargo truck with canvas sides stopped behind them. Six doors opened. Six men exited the vehicles, six men dressed in identical gray, double-breasted suits, gray ties and gray hats, all just like Ike. Six left hands covered six noses as they breathed their first six whiffs of Skunk River Junction's meat- processed air.

        The stink of cow-death wavered like leathery tinsel in the air.

        All six men scanned their surroundings from behind sunglasses, their right hands -- their gun hands -- hovering near obvious shoulder-holsters bulging under their left arms.

        The passenger from the lead car nodded to the driver, and then both began to climb the ten concrete steps up to the curved, molded-concrete, Art Deco doorway into Thurlston's. They ignored the doors; they ignored the glass etched with the word THURLSTON in a pleasing, frosted-white, eyebrow-shaped arch. The Depression and its architecture were both twenty years and two wars in the past, and neither man looked like the kind to be interested in decorations, architecture, or the past in general. They banged through the doors as if they were on a mission.

        Mr. Thurlston waited in the foyer, dressed like a ten-year- old in his Sunday-best brown suit. He smoothed his thinning gray hair with his right hand, then held it out to shake. "I'm -- "

        "I'm Special Agent Lincoln," said the lead man, removing his hat and sunglasses. He had short, jet-black hair, with a tuft of premature white drifting back from his widow's peak like a puff of cigarette smoke. His frame and face were as lean as an insomniac vegetarian ascetic, his cheekbones like rolls of Roosevelt dimes beneath his skin. He indicated his companion. "This is Special Agent Polk." Polk nodded almost imperceptibly, eyes invisible behind dark lenses. "And you're Thurlston," Lincoln concluded.

        "Merle Thurlston, yes," said Thurlston, and he let his unshaked hand sink to his side, but he didn't stop smiling.

        "We need your best butcher," said Lincoln. "A Mr. -- " His mouth hung open, but no words came out.

        "Wiener." Polk supplied the name.

        "A Mr. Wiener," said Lincoln.

        "Norbert Wiener," said Polk.

        "A Mr. Norbert Wiener," said Lincoln.

        "He's coming," said Thurlston. "I got your telegram." He smiled and held up a piece of unfolded paper. "He'll be here any second. And if you don't mind my saying, we're very proud that the government picked Thurlston"s Meat-Packing when they needed a butcher. Very proud. We don't have representatives of the federal government interested in meat every day, you know."

        "And you don't have any today," said Lincoln. "This meeting isn"t happening."

        "But -- I -- but --" Merle trailed off in perplexity.

        "National security," said Lincoln, as casually as if he were holding out his cup for a bottomless coffee refill.

        "Oh," said Thurlston, his smile stalling as he saw all the stories he was going to tell his brother-in-law over at the Elk"s Club disappear into a secret, black, national-security fog. "Oh, yes, of course, of course. A secret mission. You aren"t here. Yes, of course. I understand completely." He sighed. "Completely."

        Lincoln snatched the telegram from Thurlston"s hand with a faint crackle like a match being struck. He held the flame of a gray cigarette lighter beneath one corner. Thurlston stared at the fire as it rose, consuming the words like an editor whose wife had just left him for his best friend, leaving nothing behind but floating ash that drifted away like aimless commas.

        Norb Wiener pushed through the wooden swinging door that led onto the processing floor. The inside of the door was splattered with dark, dried blood. Partially disassembled cow-carcasses swung like pendulums as they lurched along overhead conveyor belts made of linked meat-hooks. Pneumatic-hammers screamed; steel rams smashed through cow skulls; the hooves of still- unprocessed cows scraped and trampled the wooden floor, and then all was quiet again as the soundproofed door swung closed, hushing back into the doorframe.

        "Ah, Norb, you"re here," said Thurlston, and he smiled as he indicated Lincoln. "This is -- "

        "Special Agent Lincoln," said Lincoln.

        Norb nodded. He looked like the Kodak snapshot of a man just returned from war -- a brief grim smile; hands steady, but matured beyond his years by the things he had seen and done; and perhaps he was not gazing into Lincoln"s eyes, but over his shoulder, on the lookout for lurking danger. He had a square jaw, brown hair combed back so precisely that the striations of individual hairs were clearly visible. His eyes were narrowed from years of squinting against the spurting blood of the meat floor. His hands dripped blood, but he made no move to wipe them on his leather apron to shake hands with Lincoln.

        "Norbert Herbert Wiener," said Polk as if he were reciting the label on a can of motor oil. "Winner of the Abattoir D"Or for 1953, "54, and "55. Six Gold Medals in the Slaughterhouse Olympics for 1954. World record-holder in the category of Timed Bovine Disarticulation -- "

        Norb didn"t look at Polk even once during the long recitation of his accomplishments.

        "If you could step outside, please, Mr. Wiener," said Lincoln when Polk had finished. "Your country needs you."

        Norb stared at Lincoln for five long seconds. The look on his face didn"t change, but the feral glare he had brought back from the war surfaced once in his eyes, before being forced under again. He finally nodded once and followed Lincoln and Thurlston through the door. Polk brought up the rear.

        Dark clouds had piled up along the western horizon, sending the first wisps of thunderheads across the blue sky. Lincoln glanced up, cupped the palm of his right hand up to check for rain, then slipped his hat back on his head. He folded his sunglasses into an inside pocket. He walked to the back of the cargo truck. "Open it," he said to the Agent guarding it.

        The Agent nodded and slid the cotter pins from the drop- gate, letting it fall with a chattering screech of rusty hinges and a steel clang. He climbed up to the bed and, balancing on the edge, threw the canvas flap up onto the roof of the truck with a flutter.

        Norb and Merle stared into darkness for ten long seconds. Norb squinted and cocked his head at the shape that loomed inside, as if it were reluctant to separate itself from the concealing darkness.

        "Damn fine work," he finally said with a grimace, "for a madman."

        A cow lay on the truck-bed, a dissected Guernsey, a thousand-pound lump of dead, black-and-white flesh crisscrossed along the flank and stomach with hundreds of precise cuts like graph paper; the intestines and internal organs were all gone, excised with the skill of a veterinarian; the udders were missing, as if scooped out whole by a gigantic melon-baller; ribs were sheared through as cleanly as flesh; the eye-sockets were empty of eyeballs and glaring wide and blank; the tongue was gone, mouth agape, lips pulled back from extracted teeth in silent bovine horror, its final scream frozen in rigor mortis. The carcass was redolent of charred meat, every wound cauterized black. There was not a drop of blood anywhere to be seen.

        Norb cocked his head the other way, and a quizzical look grew on his face. He reached out and gently lifted the cow"s tail.

        "Anally probed," said Lincoln. "While it was still alive, we think."

        Norb lowered the tail back onto the truck-bed, carefully covering the cow"s anus.

        "Everything there is to know about cow physiology," said Lincoln, "they now know."

        "Who?" said Merle. "The Communists?"

        Lincoln sniffed and ignored him.

        "But -- " started Merle. "But don't the Communists have their own cows?"

        "What do you need me for?" said Norb.

        "Maybe you can see something we missed," said Lincoln. "Maybe you can see subtleties and nuances we can"t. We"ve got hundreds of cows from all across the country, just like this one, but you"re an expert -- a different kind of expert, Mr. Wiener -- maybe with a different kind of perception. Sure, we already know who did this, but we thought -- " He ground to a halt.

        "You thought what?" said Norb.

        "We thought -- " said Lincoln, and he sighed. "Frankly, Mr. Wiener, we"ve struck out. We thought -- no, we hoped -- that maybe you could tell us why. Just that. Why?"

        Norb hauled himself up into the truck, his leather apron slapping against his thighs as he squatted next to the cow.

        "Her name was LuluBelle," said Lincoln.

        Norb inspected LuluBelle with his eyes; he smelled her; he lowered his ear down close to her side and listened. Everyone held their breath. Norb worked his way along the carcass from cored-out nostrils to reamed anus.

        "Maybe," said Norb, re-checking several details in quick succession. "Just maybe -- "

        "Maybe what, Mr. Wiener?" said Lincoln.

        A weird, quavery, electronic sound began to rise at the lower edge of their hearing, almost as if it were vibrating out of the ground around them.

        Lincoln and Polk jerked their eyes skyward, scanning the heavens. Black clouds had covered the sky. Merle looked behind himself for the source of the sound, stumbling around in a full circle before he noticed the Special Agents and looked up as well. His mouth dropped open, hardly less gaping than LuluBelle"s.

        The sound increased, like a gigantic oscilloscope gone feral on a censored episode of Beyond Science Fiction Theater.

        Merle covered his ears. Lincoln and Polk"s eyes locked onto something in the sky.

        The sky trembled, teeming with vibrato. The clouds roiled and flowed, braiding over and through one another, covering the Sun. Shadows draped themselves across Processing Plant Number One.

        "There," said Polk in a monotone, pointing into the sky. "They"ve found us." He drew his pistol, a liquid smooth motion more expressive than his voice. Lincoln slipped his sunglasses on again. The third Agent pulled a Thompson sub-machinegun from under a tarpaulin in the back of the truck and jumped to the ground, rocking the truck slightly.

        Norb knelt next to the cow, his eye caught by a detail he had missed before.

        "I'll be danged," said Merle, squinting into the sky. "It"s a bunch of danged UFO"s."

        "IFO"s," said Lincoln. "Identified Flying Objects. I already told you -- we know who they are."

        "I'll be danged," breathed Merle.

        A cold wind began to kick up.

        "We'll all be danged, Thurlston -- " snapped Lincoln.

        "I think I understand," Norb whispered to himself. "It"s diabolic. It means war. It means -- the survival of the human race."

        " -- danged straight to heck," Lincoln continued, still focused on Merle, poking him in the chest with the muzzle of his pistol, "if we don't figure out what they"re up to, and danged quick."

        "I think I understand," Norb said again, this time louder, standing up in the back of the truck, ducking his head beneath the arch of canvas.

        "What?" said Lincoln, and he snapped his eyes away from Merle to look at Norb. "You know?" His gun arm sagged. His face drew tight, even more emaciated, the look of an ascetic whose fasting had produced no visions. "You know what they"re after?"

        The sound increased.

        Norb hopped down from the truck and looked at the sky.

        Thirteen cigar-shaped IFO"s hovered above Processing Plant Number One, their upper halves as black as starless, moonless space; their lower halves pulsing from a deep bruised purple through blood red to a open-wound pink in rhythm to the wavering sounds. The largest was a thousand feet long, the smallest a hundred. Their sounds increased, tensing the air harder and harder, twisting it into Norb"s ears like corkscrews.

        "What do they want?" Lincoln screamed over the expanding shockwave of noise. "Tell me, man! What?"

        "Now what the danged heck is going on there?" said Merle, and he clapped a meaty hand on Lincoln"s shoulder, practically dragging his attention back to the sky.

        The ships began to deploy enormous, green-glowing Tesla coils; huge, sparking Van de Graff generators; stupendous Negovan Band generators shedding continuous sheets of ball lightning, and other even more esoteric, even more deadly devices made of massive rotating wheels of chrome spikes and glistening steel spider-webs radiating rainbows of fluorescent dazzle with a hideous, hypnotic beauty.

        The weird wailing sound seemed to reach down into Norb"s chest and seize his lungs. He stopped breathing. His teeth shook in his gums. The air pushed in on his eyeballs like a wrestler"s thumbs, and he squeezed his eyes shut, clutching his chest against a searing pain, as if all the molecules of his body were trying to fly apart from each other in a million, billion different directions.

        The world shook around him, like the once-familiar sound of twin radial engines thrumming through the aluminum skin of a C- 53"s fuselage as he stood in the plane"s hatchway, on the very edge of the sky, shivering to the rhythm of fire-walled engines, a parachute heavy on his back, straps digging into his shoulders. He saw clouds fly past him. He saw the disc of the port-side propeller shimmer. He saw black bursts of anti-aircraft fire. He felt the ship buck from the concussions, his knees flexing to absorb the chop.

        Then, in the distance, he saw swerving, swooping, winged shadows suddenly change aspect to black dots -- Messerschmitts and Focke Wulfs turning and racing directly towards him.

        He was going to jump into the fire of war and be consumed -- by the flak, by the machineguns, by the dark enemy ground itself. He should have died then -- should have died eight or ten or a dozen times in all -- and yet he was always the one who came through the fire unscathed, and it was always his friends who --

        He heard a popping sound. Gunfire. The Messerschmitt cannons had never been so close that he could hear them before. And he heard a wailing sound, too, a demented humming like the lumbering Skytrooper had been hit and was disintegrating all around him, overstressed metal resonating itself to pieces. He clenched his hands, his right index finger searching for the trigger of his M-1 carbine -- to fire back, to defend himself, to do something -- but he found nothing.

        "Inside!"

        He heard the single word shouted, in a voice not his own, as if from a great distance.

        He opened his eyes and looked down. He hands were empty, weaponless, but blood dripped from them anyway, as if he had been reduced to brutal murder with his bare fists. Hands gripped Norb"s shoulders and shook him. Norb looked up, and his mind snapped back to Processing Plant Number One.

        "Inside!" Lincoln screamed again, a snarl as much as a word, barely audible over the wailing. Spittle mixed with blood spattered across Norb"s lips and cheek. A frenzied grimace had plastered itself on Lincoln"s face. Blood streamed from his ears and nose, bright red against pale, almost ashen skin. He screamed again, and Norb read his exaggerated lips: "Damn you, man, get inside!"

        Norb shuddered beneath the rhythms of alien energy washing over him, smashing him to pieces at the bottom of a thundering Niagara of vibrations.

        Lincoln twisted Norb around and shoved him in the back to get him moving. The Agent still held his pistol, the bolt locked back after the last round had been fired. Norb felt its imprint sink into his back, warm from firing.

        Polk fired his pistol two-handed into the air. The other Agent swept short bursts across the sky with his tommy-gun, all with small popping sounds, as if heard from a great distance.

        Norb felt a rush of fear, but he let it flow into his arms and legs, as he"d done so many times before jumping into the fire. There were things in the sky that were trying to kill him, no different than Messerschmitts, and he did what was necessary. He saw Merle, doubled over, his hands clamped against his ears, his face a vibrating mattress of tics and twitches. Norb grabbed Merle by a crumpled fistful of brown lapel and headed for the door.

        The sounds impossibly re-doubled in intensity, their pitch on an asymptotic rise, as if the waves of sound had transformed themselves into space itself, pummeling and rippling through Norb"s body as he fought his way step by step towards the stairs. He felt his own blood drip cold from his ears, worming down the line of his jaw. He forced himself closer and closer to the door.

        The door.

        Norb stared at it.

        The door -- the whole building itself -- swirled as if it were becoming insubstantial in the swaying of heat-waves.

        He glanced back, saw the Agents drop to their knees one by one as they emptied their weapons, hands clamped against ears, blood bubbling up between their fingers, agony like streams of acid slashed across their faces. He stumbled up the stairs, bending further forward with each step, until, by the top step, he crawled, pulling himself forward on knees and one hand. He stopped, strained to lift himself, but couldn"t manage another inch. He turned his head.

        Merle had collapsed entirely, his suit coat half-pulled over his head, one arm cocked in the air, dangling and bouncing at the elbow like a broken pipe hanging out of a demolished brown wall. Norb had dragged him the last few steps, or all the way -- he didn"t know.

        Norb sucked in a breath and hauled himself to his feet, teetering on slack knees, Merle"s weight nearly yanking his arm from its socket, the hard waves of air dragging him down like meat-hooks. He twisted his head to take a last look at the sky as he lurched inch by inch toward the threshold.

        The sounds stopped, as if a soundproofed door had closed on them. In the gaping abyss of silence that opened around him, the world seemed to pause. Norb thought he saw -- could have sworn he saw -- that everything -- the flickering red clouds, the throbbing air, the pulsing alien lights, the writhing Agents, and even, it seemed, even the bullets in mid-flight -- everything paused -- not for a breath or a blink or even a heartbeat, but for barely a fraction of a fraction of a second, as if the entire Universe were gathering itself for a leap into the unknown.

        Norb heard a single piteous cow-scream rise from the meat floor, diminish and die away in despair.

        Then the spaceships opened fire.

        They fired atomic beams that glowed incandescent purple, as if they were solid spires of the latest Space Age plastic; they fired brilliant, sparkling-blue nuclear rays; they fired bio- molecular bazookas, lozenge-shaped packets of almost inconceivable energies that flashed sickly green wherever they struck, glowing through buildings and earth alike like a flashlight through a hand; they fired degenerate-matter implosion bombs, dark energy homing torpedoes, and devolutionary pulse cannons that sizzled like obsidian lightning wherever they touched flesh, whether human or cow, sparrow or butterfly.

        Norb knew none of the technical details of the weapons, but he knew that the world shook when the broadside hit, serrated waves of destruction crashing over him, then pounding back up through his body as the devastation was reflected from the earth, a big bang that radiated red-hot all around him.

        The concrete softened beneath his feet, his boots sinking into the steps. Processing Plant Number One collapsed like a bubble, its liquefied steel, cement and glass sloshing into a puddle of steaming gray goop in front of his eyes. The air itself flashed into howling superheated tornadoes. Norb felt Merle"s flesh melt and run like hot tears from his hand. He looked back: Merle"s skeleton shriveled black in the heat like origami in an oven, and the Agents" spare ammunition cooked off, an erratic pop-pop, pop, pop-pop, as if they were still fighting, defiant even in flash-cremation.

        Norb"s flesh sizzled like a grease fire, and he was enveloped in cold and darkness. The world around him grew pale, as if seen only in the bio-luminescence of deep-sea creatures. He felt pain like he"d never known. He had never been shot, never broken a bone, hardly even strained a muscle or scraped himself during the war, or after; but his body twisted and shrieked like the face of the man -- he"d never known his name -- a sergeant who had turned around one day on an airfield in England and walked into a spinning propeller.

        Norb"s brain began to expand as if his blood were turning to steam. He felt the pressure crack his skull. His eyes bulged. His flesh began to loosen, grow malleable, melt off his bones.

        And then his brain shrank, and grew again, and shrank, pulsing like a heart, shivering as if gripped by lightning, evolving and devolving in the grasp of vast feverish paranoid alien machines, his thoughts stretching simultaneously forward and backward in evolutionary time until his mind finally exploded like a grenade, the shrapnel of his memories piercing and shredding his perceptions.

        He felt as if his body was dissipating, as if he were no more substantial than a cloud; and something -- something he couldn"t identify, but something that was no part of himself -- something passed through his molecules and mind, as if he were a cloud falling up through other clouds.

        He felt -- letters, passing through his body one by one like Braille -- and then he knew what the something was: the oak tree that stood on the lawn in front of Processing Plant Number One. Somehow the tree was passing through his body, or vice versa, and he read -- he felt -- the initials that he had seen carved into the tree"s bark a thousand times or more, every morning on his way to work.

        MT and RH joined inside a heart. Merle Thurlston loves Rebecca Hartnett.

        And he felt Merle"s blood, from a cut opened on his finger while digging the letters into the tree. And he felt what Merle must have felt making those letters, years before he built Processing Plant Number One.

        And then it was gone, and fear began to pass through his molecules in its place, as if a heart the size of a football were thudding inside his chest, a cow"s heart measuring out the end of life to the mechanical banshee screams of pneumatic hammers.

        And then it too was gone, and something else took its place. Something -- strange, incomprehensible. Something utterly alien to him, a psychic residue from Lulubelle, like a fingerprint or a smell or an untwisted strand of DNA suspended in a vacuum bell- jar, and then it was all gone.

        And everything -- thoughts, memories, feelings -- everything --

        -- came --

        -- to --

        -- a stop.

        He felt disconnected.

        No. He didn"t feel it. He didn"t feel anything. He experienced it, though he didn"t know how, since he was certain he had no body to be, no heart to feel, and no world to experience.

        He thought it must be Death, and he was content. He was certain that he couldn"t possibly lose any part of himself that he would regret losing.

        And then -- nothing happened.

        He simply existed -- unfeeling, unmoving, un-alive -- until he finally decided that he couldn"t be dead. Like always, somehow he was being left alive.

        "I should be dead." The thought ran through his mind like a thousand other times in his life. "This time I really should be dead."

        And then a searing, barbed knife-thrust of rage jammed itself into him and twisted around like claws grinding his flesh. He felt something passing through him again, only this time not all the way. This time the rage wrenched itself barely halfway out, and he bled love and reason and gratitude around the blade of the anger. His body returned -- bones flowing into new shapes, muscles braiding into new strengths, rage saturating genes and nerves.

        The red memory of a lake flashed through his mind -- the water bright unbelievable blue, the far shore an even line of trees, sunlight spread over it all, every detail of which he hated for what it wasn"t. Tiny waves like the curled-up edges of old snapshots slid up the beach, filling a single footprint in the hard, wet-packed sand. He felt a ragged intake of breath, like his first breath ever, and he inhaled more rage with it, like fumes of acid, as if the rage were undiluted by love, duty, or friendship. The breath was like a compressed ball of anger released, unspooling unchecked to fill his entire being.

        He dragged in a second breath, loud and ragged, as if he were sucking a scream inside himself. His eyes snapped open. There was no blue lake, no trees, no sun.

        The land, as far as he could see, had been flattened, blackened, churned, charred, cauterized, sterilized, even devoured. He didn"t hear even one bird or insect, no dog barking in the sad distance, no cow moaning in abject injury.

        Mist fumed out of the burnt earth with the odor of wood- smoke. The Sun was hardly a pale smear, and a fitful wind spun devils in the mist like fleeting faces that leered at him for a moment and then disappeared -- Merle, Lincoln, the unknown Sergeant at the airfield.

        The sky hummed, like the tubes of a television set warming up, waiting for a picture to appear. He looked up and saw the spaceships circling as slowly as airships, appearing and disappearing through the folds of the fog, sometimes only one or two dully glowing portholes or a portion of a pronged weapon visible. The pitch of their infernal machinery was subdued, as if they were thrumming on idle in a deep, deep sub-basement while their Captains reviewed the damage they had done. Then the devices were retracted, and the ships began to rise, the rhythm of lights and sounds rising in tempo.

        He knew they had fired at him, that they had tried to destroy him, and had certainly destroyed everything else, but he couldn"t remember why. Just that. Why"

        But it didn"t matter. He was being left alive again. He wasn"t even worth finishing off, and the rage flashed through his mind again, hatred for the spaceships and all they had done, hatred for those who guided them, hatred for leaving their job undone. The rage flowed into his arm, and he reached for a gun, for a rock to throw, for something, but there was nothing.

        Nothing but sifted ashes, fog coiling and streaming like undersea plants after the hulls of the slowly departing spaceships, fog grasping and helplessly falling away, and the weird thrumming increased as the spaceships rose on uncoiling quavers like thirteen theremins the size of power stations, and then they were gone.

        Norb stood, breathing the cold fog in and out again.

        Alive.

        And the rage still lurked, squirming just beneath the thin, sickly-pale, feverish skin of his thoughts, so much like a living thing entirely separate from himself that he was certain he had been infected by some parasite, hosting some alien emotion in his own heart, feeding it with his energy, even as his own body and mind remained weak and frail, a slave to irrational and impenetrable desires.

        Alive.

        The Sun shed its gray, mist-filtered light, and cast Norb"s gray shadow on the gray, flat, still lake of still-molten concrete where Processing Plant Number One had been melted down.

        Alive.

        He studied his own faint shadow.

        He was covered in leather, heavy folds of raw cowhide dragging down on his head and shoulders, falling to the ground like a cape. The outline of his face was invisible inside the hood, but when he threw the stiff and bloodstained cape open, he saw the silhouette of his body.

        But not his body, because it had changed almost beyond recognition.

        His shadow fell on the flat concrete, but itself the shadow appeared to be a jumble of clumps, crags and humps. He was a lump of clay, squashed in disgust and discarded in failure, a misshapen pile of flesh shoveled together from tumors, deformities, shriveled limbs and stillborn fetuses, a human form only barely discernable deep inside the jumble of horrors, but with a human disgust overwhelming what remained of his heart.

        He knew he had been Norb.

        He knew he had lived by butchery. He knew he had been a monster, could see his monstrous outline drawn plainly on the concrete, a black silhouette of a body turned inside-out so that his soul was visible, the dark underside of his desires, his heart shrunken to insignificance.

        The fog raised itself from the ground like the skirt of a hovercraft, and rain began to fall. The drops flashed into hisses of steam where they struck the still-glowing piles of rubble, as well as where they struck Norb"s madly evolved flesh.

        His body tingled on the surface with the rain, but he was numb underneath. He pulled the cape closed, huddling in the smell of burned blood.

        He never pulled back his hood. He didn"t want to see his face. He had already seen enough. Norb Wiener was gone, lost in the wreckage of Processing Plant Number One. He was something else now -- an animal, a creature, a thing -- he didn"t know what.

        A single shard of his blasted memory returned, as if from another life.

        Janet and Chrissie. His wife and daughter.

        He had forgotten them somehow, completely and utterly forgotten his wife and daughter, as if they were strangers to him. He knew he should have died.

        He bellowed to the sky in a voice made of revving bone-saws and swallowed tongues, and then he half-loped, half-lurched, half-crawled across the scorched landscape towards his home, towards his family, barely a mile from Processing Plant Number One; driven by madness, driven by rage, driven by a single trickle of hope still cupped in the remains of his shattered heart.

       

TUNE IN NEXT TIME! NEXT PLACE! FOR THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF

THE CRAWLING ABATTOIR!

* * * * * * * *

The Amazing Origins of the Crawling Abattoir,
Episode One: The Super-Antihero Awakens
The first half of this story was read at
Twilight Tales in Chicago, Illinois.