The Ethical Assassin

I kept my eye on the lagoon, as though a monster might emerge to devour us. At first I had thought it was a trick of the sunlight, but the contents were not merely shaded, they were brown. It was a brown pond of viscous sludge that undulated its bloated waves against the slick shoreline. Pond is to waste lagoon, I thought, my mind lapsing into SAT analogy, as human being is to zombie. A seething nimbus of insects hovered above, buzzing with mutant menace.

Melford stopped outside the perimeter, marked by a series of metal rods around the pond, linked by string with Day-Glo plastic ribbons that fluttered sickly in the mild breeze. “They’re probably in there,” he said, gesturing toward the pond.

“So that’s a waste lagoon?”

Melford nodded.

“That is all pig shit and pig piss?”

Melford nodded again.

“They all this vile?”

“Probably. I’ve never seen one close up before.”

I stared at him. “You’ve never seen one?”

“Never. It’s worse than I thought it would be. Bigger. More impenetrable.”

“It looks like a good place to hide bodies,” I said. “So, how do we find them?”

Melford shrugged. “We don’t. This was a stupid idea.”

“I’m sorry about the waste lagoon business,” he said. “It seemed like a reasonable plan when I came up with it.”

I shrugged, not quite sure what to say when a thoughtful assassin apologizes for the fact that his scheme to exhume the one body he didn’t kill has ended up so badly.

Toward the far side of the warehouse, we approached a pair of large double doors, imposingly sturdy against the rest of the building, which close up looked as if it had been made from punched tin. A massive padlock held the doors together.

“Next stop,” Melford said. He took out a key chain and opened the lock.

“How do you get these keys?” I asked.

He shook his head without looking up from the lock. “Lemuel, Lemuel, Lemuel. Have you not yet learned that Melford is a man of wonders? All doors yield to Melford.”

He pulled open a door, hung the lock on the latch, and gestured for me to enter.

I didn’t want to go inside. It was dark- not pitch dark, but gloomy. The building had no windows, and the only lights came from four or five naked bulbs that dangled from the ceiling. They were interspersed with slow-moving fans, which created a disorienting strobe effect, turning the space into a nightmarish nightclub of the damned. It smelled far worse than anything outside, worse than the lagoon, worse than a hundred lagoons. It was a different smell- mustier and muskier, thicker and more alive. A blast of cool air wafted from inside- not cool, really, but cooler than the scorching temperature outside. And there was the noise.

It was a low chorus of moans and grunts. I had no idea how many pigs were in there, but it had to be a great deal- dozens, hundreds, I had no idea.

Then Melford took out his pocket flashlight and pointed it forward, looking suddenly like Virgil in a Gustave Doré illustration from The Inferno.

I still couldn’t see very well, but I could see enough. Dozens and dozens of small pens were staggered from the entrance to the far end of the warehouse. Each pen could hold four or five animals comfortably, contained fifteen, possibly twenty. I couldn’t be certain because of how tightly they were packed. I watched the pen where Melford pointed his light. One pig was trying to move from one end of the pen to the other. As it pushed its way forward, it created a space that another pig had to fill. It was like a Rubik’s Cube. Nothing went in or out, and if one was going to move, it had to trade spaces with another animal. The floor was slotted to let their urine and feces pass through to a drainage system that would flush it to the lagoon, but the slots were too big, and the pig’s hooves kept getting caught. I saw one animal squeal as it yanked its leg free, and then it squealed again. Even in the gloom the blood on its hoof was clearly visible.

I took the light from Melford’s hand and approached the nearest pen. The pigs, which had stood in a kind of trance of labored breathing, woke at my approach and squealed. They tried to push back, away from me, but there was nowhere for them go to, so they squealed more fervently, more shrilly. I hated to frighten them, but I needed to see.

What I thought I’d observed in the sporadic flashes of the strobing fans was now all too clear. Many of the pigs- most, perhaps- had heavy red growths erupting from under their short hair. Ugly, knotted, red tumorish things that jutted with malevolent force like misshapen rock formations. Some of the growths were along their backs or sides, and the pigs appeared to more or less ignore them. Others had them on their legs or near their hooves and so had trouble moving. Some had them on their faces, near their eyes or on their snouts, so they couldn’t close their mouths or open them fully.

I backed off. “What’s wrong with them?” I asked Melford. “I mean, holy shit. It looks like a medical experiment or something.”

“It is, in a way,” Melford said with the clinical calm I was coming to expect of him. “But they’re not the test subjects. We are. No animals, except maybe social insects, were meant to live in such close quarters, but the hog farmers pack them in because the closer you can get them, the more hogs you have to raise in a single space. It’s a matter of being cost-effective. But the pigs- and let’s forget about their pain and misery. Most of them are probably insane by this point anyhow. But on a purely physiological level, the pigs can’t stand it, their bodies can’t take the physical stress, and that makes them vulnerable to disease. So they get pumped full of medicines, not to make them healthy, you understand, but to allow them to survive their confinement and reach slaughter weight. I’m talking about mammoth quantities of antibiotics.”

“I don’t get it. Isn’t there like an inspector or something who will say they’re too diseased for human consumption?”

“That would be the USDA- the same agency that’s in charge of making sure that we don’t eat diseased animals is also in charge of promoting the consumption of American meat. It’s bad business to make meat safe and treat the animals humanely, because that costs money. If the meat costs too much, well, that makes voters unhappy. So if an inspector actually gets it in his head to try to stop this craziness, the farmers- the guys they are supposed to regulate- file complaints, and next thing you know, that inspector is reassigned or out of a job. The result: No one opens his mouth, and sick animals get sent to the slaughterhouse, where they are often dismembered while still alive, the visibly diseased bits are cut off, and their flesh, steeped in antibiotics and growth hormones, arrives on the di

“So, what are you saying? That our food supply is tainted and no one knows but you?”

“Lots of people know, but people don’t worry about it because they are told everything is fine. But the statistics are staggering. Seventy percent of the antibiotics we use go into livestock- meat and dairy animals that people end up consuming. Most of the population is walking around with low dosages of antibiotics in them, allowing bacteria to evolve into antibiotic-resistant strains. Even if I didn’t care how the animals are treated, I would still have to worry about the plague that’s coming to wipe us all out.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “If it were really that dangerous, then wouldn’t someone do something about it?”

“Things don’t work that way. Money greases the wheels. If there were a plague and it were linked back to factory farming, then someone would do something about it. Until that happens, too many people are making too much money. Our senators and representatives from farm states say that there’s no evidence that intensive farming hurts anyone. Meanwhile, they’re taking zillions of dollars of campaign contributions from these giant agribusinesses that destroy family farms and replace them with Nazi monstrosities.”