by John Locke
He laughs again, thinking about how Bobby claimed he’d never see the outdoors again. Well, maybe it’s dark, and maybe his hands and legs are hurting like holy hell…
…But Bobby’s wrong.
Because Jack’s definitely outdoors, and that means he finally beat Bobby DiPiese.
He laughs again.
“What the fuck’s he laughin’ about?” one of Bobby’s goons says from somewhere behind him.
“They all laugh,” the other one says. “But that’ll end as soon as I let the hogs out.”
Jack’s mind drifts to a time when a beautiful woman told him her husband kept hogs penned up on the Blood River. He wonders if these are the hogs she was talking about, or if they’re descendants.
He can’t remember the woman’s name…but remembers he loved her.
Jack had no idea what it would feel like to be eaten by wild hogs, but he certainly didn’t think it would feel like this.
Like he’s hanging by his feet, swinging in the air.
He expected the high-pitched squealing and deep-throated grunting he’s hearing, but…
Wait.
He is hanging by his feet, swinging in the air.
The hogs are making furious noises, like they’re in the midst of a feeding frenzy…
…But they’re below him.
Is he dead? Floating to heaven?
No. Jack’s head is fogged with drugs, but he’s gradually becoming lucid enough to realize he’s hanging upside down, above the hog pen. His ankles are bound with a rope, and there’s a hook attached to it, like the kind you’d find at the end of a hoist. The sound of a motor tells Jack he is, in fact, being lifted by a hoist, and it’s swinging him up and over the hog fence.
Is he being rescued?
No. Just the opposite. He’s being placed in harm’s way.
The hoist is lowering him into the penned area where the hogs are feeding with wild abandon.
Feeding on what?
Marcus Wisby, Bobby’s former driver.
Jack remembers part of it now. In fact, he remembers a lot more than he did a few minutes ago. Like the woman’s name. The one he loved.
Jill DiPiese.
He and Jill planned to run off together, start a new life. They were on the highway, heading to the Baton Rouge airport. Had they followed the plan, stayed on the highway, they might’ve made it. But like an idiot, Jack deviated from the plan. He let himself get sidetracked by a few live bodies in the trunk of his car. He got off track, off the highway, off the plan…
…And now this.
More recently, he remembers riding in a tow truck with two goons and Marcus Wisby. More accurately, the goons were riding, as he and Wisby had been crammed into the space behind the two seats occupied by the goons. Goon number one, Ray, was driving and telling Gib, the other goon, what to expect, since this was Gib’s first trip to the Blood River. At some point they pulled off the road, drove several minutes, came to a stop. The goons dragged Jack and Wisby from the truck, dumped them beside the hog pen.
Jack blacked out.
When he regained consciousness, he assumed they’d already put him in the pen. But the violent hissing he now hears beneath him confirms the goons lowered Wisby into the pen first. And Wisby’s arrival in the pen did not go unnoticed by the wild hogs. They’re ripping him apart a few feet beneath Jack’s head right now, despite Wisby’s hisses of protest.
Suddenly the hissing stops, and is replaced by a malignant intestinal odor so vile, so horrific, it exceeds his ability to comprehend.
Perhaps the drugs are helping him cope.
The first-timer goon, the one named Gib, must not be on the same drugs, because when the stench hits his nostrils, Gib vomits like he means it. Vomits so hard, Ray stops operating the hoist, leaving Jack dangling above the chaos in the pen.
“Jesus, Gib!” Ray says. “You’re going to hurt the hogs’ feelings!”
Between spasms Gib cries, “Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh God!”
Ray says, “Call on someone you know.”
“I can’t do this, Ray. I’ve got to get out of here!”
Ray laughs and says, “You owe me a beer. No, make that two beers.”
“I’ll buy you ten beers if you get me out of here!”
Gib throws up everything he had in his stomach, then starts puking bile. When that’s gone he starts coughing up his spleen.
Ray says, “You never get used to the smell of raw, human intestines, but you adapt. After the third or fourth time your body learns how to control the puke reflex.”
“Seriously,” Gib says. “I can’t do this twice tonight. If they rip the second guy open like that—”
“They will,” Ray says, “and when it happens, you’ll deal with it.”
He goes back to operating the hoist.
Jack remembers hearing them crush Wisby’s ankles with a sledge hammer, but for some reason, his ankles were spared. Maybe they got so involved with Wisby they forgot to hobble Jack. Or maybe they each thought the other did it.
Not that it matters much. He’s in the pen now, with a half-dozen killer hogs and a life expectancy shorter than Robin Williams’s attention span.
Jack feels his head touch dirt, then his shoulders, then his body, as he’s lowered to the mucky ground. The hook disengages, then retracts upward.
Ray says, “Wait. You busted his legs, right?”
Gib says, “Who, the second guy?”
“Yeah.”
Gib retches again, then says, “Yeah, sure. I busted them while you were opening the gate to let the hogs in. Can we get the fuck out of here now?”
“If you’re going to puke all night I’d rather stay here.”
“This is the only place I’ll puke. I swear!”
Ray says, “Think you can handle a titty bar?”
“Oh, hell yeah!”
Jack wants to yell, “Titty bar? Count me in, fellas!” But he can’t yell, he can only hiss, and if he did that, the hogs would be on him in seconds. He counts his blessings. For the moment, he’s been spared. The hogs are so preoccupied with Wisby, they haven’t even noticed him. Yet.
Ray says, “We’ll come back in a couple hours, put the pigs back in the other pen, burn the skeletons.”
“Why can’t they stay in this pen?”
“The pigs?”
“Yeah, why not? It’s ten times bigger.”
“They’d dig their way out, eventually. The other one’s got a six-foot-deep concrete footer around it.”
Gib dry heaves one last time. Then says, “Can we fucking go now?”
Jack’s lying in the muck, six feet from the action. One of the hogs pulls a length of intestine from Wisby’s torso and slams into Jack’s body while trying to make off with it. Another hog clamps his jaws on the other end of the intestine, and the center gives way with a snapping sound that reminds Jack of when he was a senior in high school, snapping wet towels on unsuspecting freshmen’s asses in the shower.
Except that snapping asses with towels never caused an explosion of half-digested bowels to fly over a wide area like shit shrapnel.
One of the hogs notices Jack, comes over to check him out. It ruts its snout into Jack’s side, bites him savagely, then takes a step back. Whatever reaction it was expecting didn’t occur, and its pea-sized brain works overtime to process the result. The hog dives into Jack’s torso a second time, rips a baseball-sized hunk of flesh from it, and steps back again, to survey the result. He swallows Jack’s flesh nugget, then comes back to lap up the wound.
As excruciating as the pain is, the pig’s breath is worse. But Jack forces himself to remain quiet. It’s not easy, but he knows his life depends on it.
A flashlight beam suddenly highlights the action.
Ray says, “They found the second guy. He’s so drugged up he can’t feel a thing.”
Gib says, “I almost envy him.”
The flashlight hovers on Jack another minute as the hog pushes its snout deeper into the wound, as if se
eking a hidden treasure of some sort. An organ, perhaps? A capillary-rich section of subcutaneous fat? Jack has no idea what the human equivalent of a truffle might be, but hopes the hog doesn’t find it.
But if it does, Jack’s determined not to kick and hiss because he believes his best hope for survival is to employ the same tactic his ex-wife used whenever he felt amorous late at night. He’ll remain quiet, refuse to make a sound, or move a muscle. Refuse to give the hog any movement whatsoever. Whatever the hog wishes to do, it can, but there’ll be no participation from Jack. And hopefully, the hog will eventually lose interest.
Will it work?
He doesn’t know, but it certainly worked for his ex-wife.
When the flashlight moves to Wisby, Gib finds a way to puke again.
Unfortunately for Jack, his rogue hog hasn’t lost interest. It gets Jack by the ankle and drags him ten feet further away from the others, licks the wound again, then sneezes into it, and licks it again. Then, just as Jack’s about to give up hope, the hog seems to decide that since none of the others are interested in Jack, perhaps it shouldn’t be, either. While the others are joyously feasting on the steaming, odorous, open wound that used to be Marcus Wisby’s body, Jack’s hog is missing out.
The hog pauses another moment, then races to claim its rightful share of the Wisby spoils.
Jack waits till he hears the goons climb into the truck and drive away…
Then he starts rolling toward the far fence.
Jack’s at the fence, but has to find a way to get to his feet and work his hog-bitten body over the top. It would be easier if his ankles weren’t bound.
And if he wasn’t bleeding profusely.
And if the chain-link fence didn’t have two rows of barbed wire above it.
While two strands are better than three, these are pretty high up, and likely to play havoc with Jack’s nude, wounded body. Still, the discomfort of the fence pales in comparison to what the hogs have in store for him.
Jack works his way to his feet, puts his left hand on one of the posts, and tries to pull his body upward…
And falls to the ground.
He tries again with the same result, and comes to the conclusion he won’t be able to climb the fence with his feet tied. So he sits on the ground and feels around for the knot. Finds it, allows his fingers to explore it in the dark, then hears the unmistakable sound of hoofs coming toward him at a fast clip.
His new friend, the rogue hog, latches onto Jack’s ankle and starts pulling him back toward the others. He drags Jack a dozen feet, then stops to get a better grip, and discovers the rope around Jack’s ankles. The hog makes quick work of the rope, and Jack’s feet are suddenly free. Thinking it’s gotten a bit of intestine, the hog runs off to enjoy its prize.
Jack regards this news with mixed emotions. He’s happy to be free, but hoped to keep the rope for the new plan he’s formulating.
He tells himself not to get distracted by the rope. After all, survival’s the first order of business. Jack gets to his wobbly feet and staggers back toward the fence. In an ideal world, he’d try to climb the fence by working his toes into the linked sections and pulling himself up.
But this isn’t an ideal world. It’s a hog pen filled with wild hogs who suddenly notice Jack trying to climb out of the pen.
They come at him like starving civil war soldiers attacking a stray turkey.
Jack panics and grabs the top section of barbed wire and pulls himself up as fast as he can, scraping long, deep ropes of skin and flesh from his chest in the process.
Though he feels little pain at the moment, he’s aware he left a lot of meat on the barbs, and the deep gullies he carved are going to hurt like hell when his adrenalin subsides.
But at least he’s still alive.
For the moment.
What he needs to do is get his legs up before the hogs drag him back down.
Although the wire shudders and shakes and affords him very little stability, the hogs snapping at his feet provide all the motivation he needs to swing his right leg up and over the top strand.
Of course, barbed wire’s a funny thing. It freely gives, twists, and bends, but when it snaps back in place, it does so with a vengeance. The same springing action that saved him from the hogs moments earlier has now trapped him. His body’s hung on the top strand of barbed wire, and his legs are hopelessly entwined in the second strand, and after some pain-filled moments and heartfelt hissing, Jack comes to the realization that regardless of how hard he kicks, or how much he rocks, he’s not getting off this fence without help.
With nothing else to do at the moment, he takes inventory as best he can and judges his wounds aren’t severe enough to kill him before the goons come back. He also figures if they’re sober enough to make it back from the bar, they’ll be sober enough to realize there’s only one skeleton in the hog pen. Within minutes they’ll find him and feed him to the hogs.
So here he remains, stranded atop a barbed-wire fence, stuck between getting away and getting eaten alive. If not for the determination of the hogs, Jack would have about two hours to contemplate how this would be a fitting end, a metaphor for his entire life.
But the hogs are, in fact, determined to get him, and as a result, they begin crashing their bodies into the fence, hoping to dislodge their prey.
And it works.
Jack loses a significant amount of thigh flesh, and his arms and shoulders are raked by the barbed wire, but he crashes to the ground on the safe side of the fence.
He lies there a few minutes, gathering his strength.
As the drugs begin losing their effect, the pain receptors kick in, and Jack begins hissing worse than Marcus Wisby did when his torso was being torn to shreds.
Jack either passes out for a few minutes or thinks he did. It’s hard to tell for sure, but the result is the same. He’s still in pain, still losing blood, and the hogs are still slamming into the fence, trying to get him.
And Jack still needs to go back in the pen to get one of the ropes. His or Wisby’s, whichever one has sustained less damage.
Because his escape plan depends on that rope.
On the bright side, he has an idea how to do it safely, if only the hogs will cooperate.
Walking on swollen, hog-bitten, barbed wire-scratched legs with gaping wounds in his chest, thigh, side, back, and shoulders, proves more difficult now than before he passed out, thanks to the brief passage of time and the steady erosion of drugs in Jack’s system. Not to mention it’s practically pitch dark, he’s naked, and the terrain on the far side of the pen is littered with roots, pinecones, and the occasional sharp rock.
Jack feels his way around the pen till he gets to the approximate point where the goons parked their truck a few minutes ago. The hogs track him step for step from inside the pen. They’re angry now, having been denied a golden feeding opportunity.
Jack’s happy the hogs are staying close. He knows there’s a smaller pen attached to this one, and when he finds the gate, he can lure them in it. Then he’ll be able to enter the large pen unmolested, and search for the rope he needs.
It takes ten minutes to find the gates, two more to figure out how they work. Luring the hogs proves easier than expected. Jack opens the gate, the hogs run in. Jack closes it and enters the large pen. He figures his best chance of finding rope is to check the area near Wisby’s corpse. Maybe his rope-covered ankles will still be there, or close by.
As it turns out, he’s right. Jack finds the rope, and it’s still coiled, but weighty. By feeling around, he can tell the feet, ankles and a partial leg bone are still attached to it. He drags the bundle a few yards away from Wisby’s remains, hoping to lessen the stink emanating from the kill site, but it all stinks, so he sits in the muck in the dark and starts working on the knot.
As he works, he thinks about how lucky he’s been. Bobby didn’t cut his balls off. The goons didn’t smash his ankles. They didn’t put him in the pen first. The barbed wire never cut
his face or private area.
A sudden sound tells him he’s not alone.
What the fuck?
Jack jumps to his feet, but the hog attacks and rams into him hard enough to send him reeling. When it turns back to come after him again, Jack hears something that gives him hope.
A choking sound.
The hog’s choking on something.
A bone?
The hog crashes into Jack again, then stumbles and falls to the ground. It writhes around making gurgling sounds. Its breathing is labored. Just before dying, it squeals a fearsome death cry that sets off a thunderous response from the hogs in the small pen.
Good job, Wisby, Jack thinks. You choked it to death!
He unties the rope, drapes it around his shoulders, exits the pen, opens the other gate so the pigs can come back in and eat their former friend. Then he walks to the ditch behind the clearing where the goons will park their truck after returning from the bar.
He lies flat in the ditch and hopes to live long enough to carry out his plan.
Jack sees the approaching headlights before hearing the truck. As expected, the goons park in the same place, only this time they face the large pen and train their headlights on it. They exit the truck, leaving the lights on, doors open, engine running, so they can hear the country music blasting from the speakers. Before they get ten feet, Jack climbs in the truck, throws it in gear, and mows them down. Then he backs the truck up, gets out, staggers toward the bodies.
Both men are alive, but unable to put up a fight, or mount a defense. Jack finds Gib’s gun, stands over him, fires a shot point blank into his forehead. Ray’s in decent shape, meaning he’s not likely to die anytime soon, but his back appears broken, and he might be paralyzed from the waist down. Jack strips him naked, removes the money and wallet from his pockets, and ties his ankles together with Wisby’s rope. Then he gets back in the truck and angles it beside the fence so he can hoist Ray up and over it like Ray hoisted Jack and Wisby a couple hours ago.
