The Ethical Assassin

“Holy shit!” I shouted. “Stop shooting people.”

The smell of gunpowder danced in the air, only to be instantly subsumed by the foul, head-throbbing stench of my lagoon-covered body. Fifteen feet away from us, Doe lay on the ground once more, this time clutching his knee, from which blood flowed copiously.

“He was coming right at us,” Melford said. He was now standing- dark and wet and gelatinous as a swamp creature. I supposed I was too. “And don’t you want to ask if I’m okay?”

I was still staring at Doe, listening to his whimpers. “Yeah,” I said. “But I’m kind of getting the feeling you are.”

“I think so,” he said. Slow moving avalanches of pig waste rolled off his body and pooled around his feet. “The bullet just nicked my shoulder. I don’t even think it’s bleeding very much, but the surprise of it made me trip, and once I hit the lagoon, I got sucked in. Right now, I figure we have to worry more about things like dysentery and cholera.”

Cheerful thoughts. Doe, meanwhile, was trying to pull himself up into a one-kneed crawl, trying hard to pull himself away from us. “Jesus fuck,” he said. “Jesus fuck, Jesus fuck, Jesus fuck.”

“Remember when I told you being shot in the knee would hurt?” Melford asked me. “I wasn’t kidding, was I? I mean, look at that guy. Ouch.” He shook off his hands. “I could really use a shower.”

It would be wrong to say that I enjoyed seeing Doe laid low or that I was even used to this sort of thing by now. But he’d had it coming. There was no doubt about it, and my being covered in pig shit and piss because of his crimes tended to diminish whatever sympathy I might have had. Still, it was hard to say if what I felt was satisfaction or relief. I was as disgusting as a healthy human being could possibly hope to be, but I was alive and Melford was alive, and he had never betrayed me.

“You couldn’t have shot him in the hog lot?” I asked him. “You had to scare the shit out of me like that?”

“I was hoping to avoid shooting him at all,” Melford said. He inspected his wound with a probing finger. “Out of consideration for you, I was hoping to not have to shoot him because I know you frown on that sort of thing. Anyhow, I wanted to get him out of the lot since rescuing you is only part of what we’re doing here.” He looked over toward the hog warehouse. “I was pla

I didn’t even have time to look before Melford grabbed my arm and yanked me into a run. Enough had happened over the past couple of days that I had my feet moving and was following Melford’s lead before I glanced over toward the lot. And when I did, what I saw made me gasp.

Pigs. Dozens and dozens of pigs ru

His fingers dug deep into the soil as he tried to raise himself onto his one good leg, but the pain outmatched the fear, and he went down again. He turned to look at the waste lagoon, and for an instant I saw it in his eyes- he was thinking about crawling in there. He would try to swim through the pig shit to escape the pigs. And if he could do it, I thought, there would be some sort of redemption in that, surely.

Then he was gone from our sight. The pigs blocked our view before they descended on him, and for an eerie instant there was only galloping and grunting. And then there was Doe’s shrill scream, more surprised than afraid. The sound of his screams was nearly drowned out by the stampede sound of galloping pigs trying to make their way to Doe’s body. They oinked furiously. An oink oink here and an oink oink there.

Melford led me around in a wide loop, and we came back toward the lot in time to see the pigs clustered around the scream. The ones in the back were now still and disoriented, as though they’d just awoken. Then, after a minute, there was quiet. The pigs remained motionless, perhaps confused, and then began to wander away from the shores of the waste lagoon. As if waking up from a sleepwalk, they made their way from the lot and toward the trees.

Melford and I turned around to see Desiree coming out of the lot. She wore pink jeans and a green bikini top. Her body was slick with sweat, and her scar looked like a wound, raw and fresh. “Sorry,” she called. “I didn’t really mean for that to happen. They got away from me. Hey, what happened to you two?”

“We had an accident,” Melford shouted back to her.

“Okay. Look, I need a few more minutes. There’s a garden hose around the other side, near the car. Maybe you two could wash off?”

The various changes of clothes Melford kept in the back of his car now came in handy. It was too hot for sweats, but that was all he had that fit me, and once I was washed off and out of my waste-ruined clothes, I was willing to take the heat until I could get back to my room and have a proper shower with soap.

Melford rinsed himself off carefully. The bullet wound on his shoulder was about two inches long but hardly deep at all. Ideally he would have gone to the hospital, but he had antibiotic ointment in his car’s first-aid kit. He applied it liberally and then had me use duct tape to strap down a heavy dose of gauze. After that, he collected our clothes in a plastic garbage bag, grabbing them from the inside out so he wouldn’t have to touch them. He tied it tightly and then placed that in a second bag. To contain the smell, I assumed.

With all that done, there was nothing to do but wait for Desiree to finish up whatever she was doing. The two of us leaned against the car, me in the sweats, he in a spare set of black jeans, white button-down, and navy Chuck Taylors. If his hair hadn’t been wet, there would have been no way to know he’d just been through a staggeringly disgusting ordeal.

“They ate him?” I whispered at last, breaking what had been silence other than necessary procedural discussion.

He shrugged. “We didn’t plan it that way. If anything, we pla

I didn’t know why, but I thought it best to keep quiet about B.B. being dead. Maybe Melford knew and maybe he didn’t. “So was freeing the pigs part of the plan from the begi

Melford smiled. “You’ve been through a lot, but you’re still not ready to know. You’re not ready to hear it all.”

I bit my lip, half-full of pride and half-full of resentment that I had to present this information like an English schoolboy conjugating Latin verbs. “We have prisons,” I a

Melford looked at me. “I think I underestimated you. Go on.”

I thought of George Kingsley, the bright young teen Toms had shown me, the good kid who had turned into a hardened criminal. A promising mind once set on turning his energy to reform and change, now stripped of its promise and ambition, turned to a felon’s life.

“Criminals are people who, for the most part, come from the fringes of society, those who have the least to gain from our culture as it is. They have the most to gain from changing society or even destroying it and replacing it with a new order that favors them. Maybe a better order, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. So, because they are on the fringes they end up hanging out with those who break laws, who teach them to break laws. Maybe they go to prisons and learn how to break even more important laws. The next thing you know, these potential revolutionaries are now criminals. Society can absorb criminals fairly easily, revolutionaries less so. Criminals have a place in the system, revolutionaries do not. That’s why we have prisons. To turn misfits into murderers. It may harm society, make it less pleasant, but it doesn’t destroy it.”