Notes: Warnings for animal cruelty (industrial farming practices) and graphic depictions of violence. This story is basically RPF of a PBS Frontline documentary on human trafficking in the poultry industry. So. It may be in poor taste. People die in this one.
Also, I didn't get anyone to help me on the Spanish parts, so they probably suck.

Guest-starring a character from the comic Zebragirl from Joe England.


Eli flipped Yegor's glass coffee table with his foot, shattering it into a thousand diamonds. The coke wasn't working and it was pissing him off. He couldn't think properly without it. He had jobs to do, problems to solve.

"Hey, you can't break the boss's furniture, Reyes, that's impolite." Oleg. Young, skinny, callow. Nosy. Why had he never killed Oleg? Well, he would do it now. The coffee table was the kind with a steel rim around the outside that the glass rested in; Eli stretched his thoughts out to it and the steel began to glow orange, a black portal opened where the shattered glass lay. He grabbed Oleg by the tie and flipped him over his shoulder into the void, then dove down after him.

They landed on his favorite bloodstained rock in the desert. The full moon cast the shadow of a saguaro on the altar, a pygmy owl stared down from one arm of the cactus. Eli pinned Oleg by the throat and drew his belt knife, stabbed below his ribs, worked it back and forth between the bones, trying to crack the ribcage so he could cut out his heart.

It didn't cut. Dull. How the fuck was it dull.

He flung it aside, drew his ankle knife. This was dull, too. Oleg lay passive as a corpse, staring up at the stars. Eli tossed the ankle knife, drew his gun, jabbed the barrel beneath the corner of Oleg's jaw. Squeezed the trigger ten times. Jammed.

He felt heat, heard the crackle of flames. Heard a distant whup-whup-whup of a helicopter. Bullet wounds in his chest, his hip.

Eli pulled a crowbar out of thin air, struck Oleg in the face, but instead of shattering, his skull deformed like putty around the metal, springing back into shape as he drew back for another blow, and Eli was running out of time. He struck again and again, cursing. The flames grew hotter, closer. He heard chanting in Spanish. An old hymn he hadn't heard since...since Mom and Dad left.

Suddenly, Oleg sat up, grabbed Eli by the neck. His grip was iron. Eli scratched and kicked him. The altar opened up, a deep well of blackness, and Oleg's eyes glowed red. "Past due," the thing in Oleg rumbled. And they tipped down into the void, falling forever, burning, his consciousness dissolving like smoke, a confusion of terror and heat and cold, phantom bullet wounds, the helicopter louder and louder, the hymn sung in off-key trembling voices—

Robbie latched onto the hymn and the helicopter noise, hauling himself out of Eli's nightmare. Suddenly he had a body again, a self, his own self. He was sitting crosslegged in the dark, and he couldn't move, but that was fine, because this was a dream, this was a nightmare, and you can't move in nightmares, you just wait for them to be over. The helicopter noise was so close, booming in his skull. All over his body, bullet wounds burned like liquid nitrogen. His eyes opened into a dark room, where a half-dozen boys barely older than Gabe sat around him, singing in Spanish by the flame of a single cigarette lighter.

"Come to us, for we hunger and thirst for justice, we hunger and thirst for vengeance. Come to us, o spirit, o avenging spirit, for we are full of grief. Come to us, come to us, come to us..."

"It's here," his body said, still in Spanish.

What's here? Robbie could not move. But it was just a dream. The singers stopped, their eyes wide and shining in the dim light.

"Really?" one of the boys asked. "Are you joking right now?" Weird accent. Everyone had an accent.

His body winced, wrapped his arms around himself, gripping one of the bullet wounds. "I feel it...burning."

"Oh, shit," one of the boys said. "Oh shit, this is bad. Why did we mess with this, Santa Muerte isn't a real saint, she's a demon, a pagan goddess, oh, shit, why did we do this."

The kid in front of Robbie leaned forward, reached out to him. Robbie wanted to draw away, and his body leaned back. He had to concentrate to listen through the horrible noise of the helicopter. "Pablo, are you okay?"

"Yeah," his body said. "Yeah, hurry, it worked, it worked, where's Carlos' stuff, hurry, I can feel it in me—"

"Right here, right here," said the other kid, and Robbie was looking down at a crude altar right in front of him, practically between his knees. A little hooded doll made of what looked like chicken bones and a black T-shirt, anointed in blood. A fresh cut on his own left forearm, drying blood all over his right hand. A photograph of a man, a woman, a little girl, and a teenage boy, a family, the boy the same height as his father, all dressed up neatly in button-down shirts or embroidered blouses, all smiling. Green mountains in the background. The kid pointed at the boy. "This is Carlos, this is who died here." Robbie stared at the photo. High school age. Freshman at most. You don't have a more recent photo? "He was sick, but they wouldn't let him stop working. It's so hot in the barns, and the air is so bad. He couldn't be working, but Mr. Cobar didn't let him stop. He passed out in the middle of the cages. By the time Marco found him, he was all pale and—Enrique told Mr. Cobar to take him to a doctor, but he refused, he—" The kid took a break, a long breath. "He didn't want anyone to find out about us, so he made Carlos sit outside in the cold and he died. He died."

They worked a kid to death? The helicopter boomed louder, the bullet wounds burned colder.

His body winced. "Mr. Cobar worked him to death," it said. Pablo said.

"And he'd do it again. They don't care. They don't let us leave, Sergio said he was going to leave and Mr. Cobar said Mr. Díaz could have somebody back home shoot his dad if he left, and they—they said they'd give us six hundred a week, and they do, but then they take five-fifty to pay off the debt, nobody can leave. They've got people back in the old country, they have my dad's farm, I leave, Dad loses his farm, I came up here to help my family, I can't do that to them, they put our land on the line to pay my way up here, and it was supposed to be a good job, keep my brother and sisters from going hungry again—"

They tricked you, Robbie realized. They're using you. He stood up. Yellow, flickering light flared in the dim space.

The kids in the circle around him scrambled away, shit oh-shit, Pablo, what the fuck did we do to you, Mother of God protect us—

What was wrong with them?

He looked around. He was in a single-wide trailer, the floor grubby, bedding piled on the floor. A rustle of movement in the corners—cockroaches. A kitchen with no appliances. No light fixtures in the ceiling, just empty sockets. "Where are you?" he asked.

The kids in the room were backed up against the walls, silent.

He stooped and picked up the picture of Carlos and his family. His hand looked weird. Thin and dry, the bloody skin sunken down between the bones. Just a dream. "Where are you? Where am I right now? I need an address," Robbie demanded. "This Cobar fucker worked a kid to death. How do I find you?"

"Trillian Farms," said the kid who'd been closest to Pablo. "Iowa. SR 245."

Yes. He could show up, wreck the whole place, burn it all... All the kids were still huddled as far away as they could get in the cramped trailer. This was too complicated. Deeds? Farms? "We need to talk," he insisted. "I can't just wander around on a farm hoping to run into this asshole. We need a plan."

"Pablo?" asked the brave kid, squinting in the light.

"No, I'm not Pablo," Robbie said, annoyed. First he'd thought he was Eli, now the other people in his dream thought he was some completely different person. "I'm Robbie. Roberto Reyes—answer the question. What's the address for this trailer? So I can find you again."

"Is Pablo okay?"

Robbie rolled his eyes, spun around in the dim room. Some of the blankets in the floor had mildew stains. What kind of sadistic skinflint made people live in these conditions? The same kind of people who let a kid die of, what was it, heat stroke? Hypothermia? Both? "I don't know, I'm not Pablo. Address?"

Half the kids shook their heads, but Pablo's friend said, "I don't think it has an address. But the trailers are behind the chicken houses, from the road."

"Shut up!" the other kids hissed.

"This one's the green-and-white one."

"Green and white trailer, Trillian Farms, Iowa. SR—what was it?"

"245."

"SR-245. I'll come for you. We'll talk. Make these guys pay, get your families their farms back."

"Please let Pablo come back now."

"I don't have him," Robbie insisted. "I don't know where he is. I've got to go. We'll talk later. Bye."

He woke up in the car. He woke up as the car, the night wind humming against his antenna, the freeway rumbling in the distance, the quiet street shining soft in the glow of the insect-choked streetlamps. His engine was cool and still, resting. Usually when he was the car, it was because the Rider was too angry or injured to keep a human form, or he was lying in wait for someone, but to just be the car, drifting in the silence and stillness on a quiet Sunday night, was an unexpected pleasure.

Where the fuck did you go.

Robbie roused himself. What? I was sleeping. I get weird dreams when I take too much melatonin, you must be confused.

Eli was silent, but his agitation wound through the steel. Where's your body.

What?

Your body. Your sole useful contribution to this partnership. Where is it.

In bed.

You sure?

Robbie reached his mind out from the car, back toward the apartment where he'd been sleeping. No echo, no sensation of sweaty bedsheets tangled around his legs. Nothing. What the fuck.

A rush of alarm, and the car sparked up. His engine revved, warmed. The blower coughed fire. The Rider budded off the car from the driver's side door, steel and leather and kevlar, the vents of his skull wide open and spewing flame. He staggered away from the car on shaking legs, patted himself down. Eli, can you port me back to my room.

And here I thought we were starting divorce proceedings.

Yes. Because you are a manipulative, murderous asshole. But I would really appreciate it if you would port me back into my room please.

Oh, he said please.

I can just pull the bars out and climb in the window—

Fire in the hole. The Rider dropped down through the asphalt and emerged on Robbie's bed. He rolled off and snuffed out. Robbie found himself naked in his bedroom. He flicked on the bedside lamp. The T-shirt and boxers he'd gone to sleep in lay tangled in his sheets, as though he'd simply disappeared while wearing them.

He stared down at them for a long time. Put them back on, thinking.

He opened the top drawer on his desk and dug out his old English notebook where he kept all his notes on the surgeon he and Eli had killed that fall. His "serial-killer scrapbook." Turned to a blank page, scrawled down, "Trillian Farms, SR-245, Iowa."

Fuck is that?

From my dream. Remember? It was weird. I've got to look it up in the morning, I'm not sure it was just a dream.

What dream? All I remember is finally putting a cap in Oleg, like I should have twenty years ago—

Oh, bullshit. That was your version of the "giving a public speech while naked" nightmare. I mean the trailer, with the kids.

Silence. Then, Oh, of course. That dream. The trailer and the kids. Go on.

Eli hadn't dreamed that dream.

Robbie's body had disappeared.

The dream, now that he was awake and thinking about it, was freaky and horrible: the kids were crammed together in a vermin-infested trailer meant for three people; they gave him a story straight out of a Dickens novel; they'd fucking, summoned Robbie like he was a demon, looked at him like he was a demon, they'd been praying to Santa Muerte apparently, Robbie had—oh, shit, he'd possessed Pablo—like a demon—

Robbie put the notebook away, sat on the bed, and stared at his hands. His nails, stained black around the edges where the engine grease never fully scrubbed out. His fingerprints, the little nicks and burn scars and bruises on his forearms. His stomach growled. He felt real. He had a job and a lease and everything. He was pretty sure that, by definition, a ghost couldn't hold down a job. He stretched out his mind to the car, and that felt real, too, the wind on his body panels and the grit under his tires; that didn't mean anything, though, he just had a, a psychic link to the car, that was fine, plenty of people had psychic links to other people, and, like, pets, and magical artifacts.

He dug his plastic rosary out of his bedside table, with the paper print-out on how to say the Hail Mary. Started counting beads and saying prayers. It was long enough for his racing heart to slow, repetitive enough to bore Eli into leaving him alone, and had just enough variety to keep him from zoning out. It probably wasn't right to think about prayer that way, but, whatever. At least he wasn't praying to Santa Muerte to summon a demon.


Monday afternoon, after getting home from the shop, he woke up his laptop, did the dance with the VPN and the secure search, and looked up Trillian Farms. Found the map. It was so tempting to Google the place; DuckDuckGo's maps were kind of cludgy.

Trillian Farms was a real company, an egg farm, huge sheds bigger than warehouses. One of its facilities sat off State Route 245 in Iowa.

"Not a dream," Robbie muttered.

There were no trailers on the map behind the sheds. He wondered if it was worth going to Google Maps for the satellite view.

He had work Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday the rest of the week. Sunday he planned to take Gabe to the library. The best time to go out there was tomorrow while Gabe was at school. That meant he needed Eli. And—he'd promised the kids he'd make their captors pay. If Eli thought that meant killing someone, he'd help. Eli was a junkie, he'd do anything for a kill. "In that weird dream last night, someone killed an innocent kid in Iowa," Robbie said. "Like a vision. I want to go there to check it out."

Oh, you need my help now. You found a murder for you. Because we only get to kill your enemies. Suddenly, Uncle Eli is your best friend again.

Do you want to kill somebody or not?

And when it turns out to be "oops, just a normal dream, sorry, Eli—"

Nobody's forcing you. But I'm not sure enough about it to physically drive to Iowa to talk to these guys.

Silence. But Robbie knew he'd won.

It was three in the afternoon. Gabe wasn't due to get out of the Development Center until four-thirty. Over in Iowa, it was seven PM, and hopefully the kids from the trailer would be back and free to talk.

Whenever Eli decided to open a portal to someplace he was unfamiliar with, Robbie had to research the location. Google Earth was their friend here, even though it did save all Robbie's search data until the end of time. Google Street View was really their friend. That one time they'd used sat-view to open a portal, popped into existence a thousand feet above the Angeles National Forest, and briefly pancaked the Charger on the rocks was...memorable. So they remembered not to do that again.

Robbie dropped Google Maps down to street view, thirty miles up the road from the chicken houses at a gravel access road that where it branched off State Route 245. He fixed the images in his brain with five minutes of staring and meditation, got in the car, and drove off to the garbage alley between the hair salon and the auto parts store to burn up.

Robbie was a mechanic with anger management problems, and Eli was the ghost of a hitman who'd also practiced Satanism and serial killing. The car was a 1969 Dodge Charger outfitted with a blown, naturally aspirated 426 cubic inch Hemi V-8. Last spring, mercenaries with helicopters and automatic rifles had filled Robbie full of bullets and set him and the car on fire. The Rider had risen from the flames: Robbie's corpse and Eli's ghost and all the steel and power of the car, shrieking wordless fury with the rumble and whine of its engine, vengeful, feral, unstoppable. He'd avenged Robbie's death. Robbie had woken whole, in bed, the next morning. And he'd kept going to work and school and helping Gabe with his homework and going to Gabe's appointments with the pediatric psychiatrists and physiotherapists, earning money and paying bills, but still, ever since, he was part of the Rider and the Rider was part of him. And so, unfortunately, was Eli.

Some days it was hard to burn up. Some days he had to sit in the car for minutes at a time, waiting for the motor to warm, revving the engine, running over a carefully-chosen selection of wrongs in his mind to get angry at. Carefully-chosen, because some grudges he was saving for a special occasion. Robbie's anger was the combustion that gave the Rider life, and it could be difficult to use unless his anger was using him. Today, he sat in the car, goosed the throttle a little, and as the engine snarled and the blower screamed, he pictured the kids in the filthy trailer: the terrified faces in the firelight, Pablo's hand smeared with the blood from a self-inflicted wound; Carlos with his family in the photograph, smiling, Gabe's age. The engine exploded, fire poured out through the lights and grille and tailpipes and blower, his body burned away down to bone and metal. The Rider howled the blower's scream, fire spewing from his vents and teeth. Floored the gas while standing on the brake pedal, setting the rear tires spinning in place, the back of the car skidding from side to side over the asphalt.

Whoa Nelly.

Go. Go, go!

Eli opened the portal they'd planned that afternoon, a black hole ringed in fire, just in front of their wheels. The Rider let off the brake and they rocketed into it.

Blackness stretched long seconds. Their flames jetted out endlessly into the void. Within the car, the Rider waited, foot hard on the gas pedal, grinding his teeth and spitting molten steel.

They emerged in more darkness, but now the headlights struck road before them, fencing to either side. They shot off the road over the embankment, melted through barbed-wire, carved a great burning scar on the earth at a mile a second. Okay. Road, road. SR 245. Robbie fought for control—not against Eli, but against himself, his own anger. He couldn't feel Eli trying to drive at all, but Robbie could barely think straight. Road. Road. Thirty miles. Back on the road. We can't go after Carlos' killer now, that comes later! Later!

You're talking to yourself. You're all pumped up to get yourself exorcised and you're already talking to yourself.

Later, Robbie told himself desperately, and he managed to steer the car back onto the road, line it up in the correct lane, and snuff out. Panted out the exhaust from his lungs. Slowed the car to a legal fifty-five miles an hour.

The dark stretched out endlessly to each side of the road. Where his headlights struck, everything beyond the road was flat, square: fences, soil raked up into long rows. White. Robbie caught his breath and slowed further.

No stars glittered from the black sky, but a faint bright haze glowed softly in the distance: city lights where they reached the underside of the clouds. On the ground and crusted on each verge of the roadway: snow. Grids of snow: fences, ditches, the corduroy texture of plowed earth. Harsh blue and yellow lights to the right of him illuminated a ranch house and a pole barn, a quarter mile from the road, surrounded by nothing. A similar house house behind him to the left. A hulking, unidentifiable machine outlined in his headlamps beside the road, armed with banks and banks of red-painted blades. Everything capped in snow.

Iowa hadn't looked like this on Google Street View.

The road was cold under his tires, the rubber felt stiff and a bit numb. The radiator and the intercooler chilled as the air flowed between their vanes. The oxygen reaching the engine was dense, giving a fast hard burn; the boost from the blower was almost too much. The thermostat started to drop after just minutes, the water pump slowed. The air coming through the cabin vents was colder than the inside of his freezer at home, and Robbie turned on the heater for the first time in his life. Atmospheric air tingled through the heater block. The car had an ice-cream headache.

He saw more lamps in the distance, high overhead, illuminating big white rectangles. Cruised toward them. Slowed and turned at the concrete sign by the road, "Trillian Farms" in green and white, dimly lit by a canister lamp half-swallowed in snow.

The moment his front tires crossed the edge of the main road onto the paved driveway, they lost traction. The car understeered and almost smashed against the unyielding Trillian sign, a fine entrance for the Ghost Rider. Eli grabbed control of the car, slammed on the brakes, and sparked up enough power to phase the wheels through the thin crust of ice on the road until the rubber bit deep into the brittle asphalt. They stopped. Reversed out of the ditch and back onto the driveway.

Robbie panted, jittery. He was a good driver. He barely had to cheat at street racing. He had a damn 4.7 Uber rating. He felt like he'd just put his foot right through a ladder.

The fuck you think was gonna happen, taking a curve at twenty miles an hour in a rear-wheel-drive on black ice? Jesus, kid—oh. Oh! Gah-ha! You don't know. Anything about winter. You have never. This is the first time. You're nineteen years old, going, the fuck is this white stuff everywhere, oh, this is the stuff of Saturday Night Live skits, kid. You. You can't.

I forgot about the snow thing, Robbie thought, grinding his teeth. He took over control of the car, concentrated to keep the tires half-way phased through the pavement without ripping them apart. He usually just did this for a second at a time, to keep his front tires biting on hard curves. This was going to get old quick.

Snow thing. The snow thing!

Trillian Farms had a long driveway, about two blocks worth of empty road flanked by flat white fields and low straight barbed-wire fences that Robbie could slip right through without even scratching his jacket. Meant to keep cows out, not people. At the end of the driveway, though, were two security huts, a steel gate, and a built-up chainlink fence that stretched the width of the complex. All the walls of the tall steel barns barns shone bright with security lights. Plumes of steam rose from huge vents in the sides. Robbie didn't fancy his odds of getting through security from the front. Hey, I'm a Farming student at Iowa State University, I was hoping I could randomly drop by to talk to your employees. No, thanks, I don't need a tour because chickens are revolting. Hey, I'm Juan Rivera from California, I was just passing through in my non-winterized collectible car and thought I'd come catch up with my cousin Pablo. No I can't remember his last name, who keeps track of that? I want to talk to Cousin Pablo.

He pulled cautiously back onto the plowed-clean road and continued up SR 245. Turned at a cross street, passed the world's tiniest church and a single ranch house. Stared across the snowy void at the lights of the chicken farm. The fence, so imposing from the front, cut off abruptly at its sides. Just decorative, apparently. Behind the complex, a stand of leafless trees broke up the lights.

"Behind the chicken-houses," the kid had said. Well. He'd already found a farm at SR 245, called Trillian. Now he would find a green-and-white single-wide trailer behind the chicken-houses.

Robbie parked in the church parking lot. Put the radio on, flipped the little lever underneath so Eli could listen to police chatter for him. Got out of the car and gasped.

It hurt to breathe. The cold cut through the canvas tops and rubber soles of his Converse. He zipped his jacket up to the throat and pulled his hood over his head. His thin leather driving gloves were icy around his fingers. Through the chill, he picked up a sour smell on the air. Not quite rot.

He'd have to hurry.

He stared out across the black expanse, left the car, and approached the field. Padded over the dry grasses that stuck up through the powdery snow. It chilled his ankles, stuck to his socks. The farm couldn't be that far.

He ducked between the wires of the fence and jogged off over the field.

It was rough going. His shoes slipped over the snow, and the frozen, wrinkled field jabbed up into them. His toes first hurt, then went numb. He tripped, a rock or another frozen groove in the earth, and he fell and caught himself on his hands; his palms burned. His nose-hairs stuck together every time he inhaled. His leather jacket shrugged off the light wind, but the cold seeped through it steadily. The sour smell grew stronger.

The lights looked no closer than when he'd started. He turned and looked back at the car, still running, lights illuminating his path. The car looked a block or two away. He felt like he'd been walking ten minutes.

Robbie pulled the sleeves of his hoodie down over his hands and kept moving, jogging more carefully, still staggering now and then on the uneven ground. He crossed a frozen-over irrigation ditch lined with leafless shrubs and dried thistles. He kept moving on freezing, bruised feet toward the distant lights, the dark trees. At last he reached the sudden edge of the woods, a surveyor-straight line where the cultivated field ended.

He looked over his shoulder and saw the car's headlights, very small, watching him in the distance. Then he picked his way through the dark, between the low branches. His ankles burned with melted snow. Every time he breathed, his breath shuddered, and not with the vibration of his engine: all his muscles were so tense against the cold that he couldn't stop shaking.

He saw a broad square shadow looming in front of him, and he flashed his phone at it. Dropped it in the snow, had to kneel down and dig for it with numb fingers. He got the flashlight app running again, his night vision ruined by the bright screen, and shone it on the shadow: a single-wide trailer. White siding, red decorative skirting around the roof. Windows blocked off inside with blankets.

A trailer. Not the right one.

He circled the trailer, found a track in the snow where feet had packed it down into rutted ice: slick, but less snow to cake onto his cotton socks. He followed the track. Passed another trailer, white with gray trim, and a third, aqua with white trim. The green and white trailer.

He found the rickety metal stairs and knocked on the door.

Nothing. No light showed behind the covered windows.

It was cold, it was impossibly fucking cold, and Robbie wanted to bounce on his toes but he couldn't really feel his feet except for the itching and burning from the snow against his ankles. He banged on the door one more time, then growled and tried the knob. Open. He got out his phone for the flashlight and pushed his way in.

There was the narrow dark space from his dream, the floor crowded with blankets. A foot or so between each crude bedroll, a sad attempt at separating sleeping spaces. The trailer smelled like a backed-up toilet, and also the same sour smell from outside. He saw feathers dotting every surface, white and crusty. A half-used case of bottled water, partly frozen. "Hello?" he called in Spanish. "Is anybody here?"

Nothing.

He'd have to leave a note. He didn't have any paper on him—the Uber forums said to always carry a notepad, which he never did—but he did have a white grease-marker he used when working on timing belts and such in the shop. He picked his way between the beds to the bathroom.

The sewage smell was very bad here. Nothing in the toilet bowl, not even water. A five-gallon bucket sat beside the toilet, a sheet of plastic—old wrapping for a previous case of bottled water—draped over its mouth. This was the source of the smell. Robbie tried the faucet at the sink. Nothing. A water bottle and a grimy piece of soap sat on the counter. There were no light bulbs in the vanity over the sink, but at this point Robbie was willing to bet they wouldn't light up if they'd been there.

Who the fuck makes people live like this?

The same fuck who makes a sick kid work until he gets heat exhaustion and then leaves him alone outside in sub-freezing weather.

He braced his hands against the sink and panted. Far away across the field, his engine revved and his blower whined, and the noise and fumes began to pour from his throat. He saw his bad eye glowing in the mirror. Later. Later. Rein it in. These poor kids. He had to talk to them. He had to help them. He couldn't just break and burn shit because he was pissed off.

The engine fumes took the edge off the sewage smell, and Robbie calmed enough to fish the grease-marker out of his pocket and wrote on the mirror.

555-555-5555

Llámame

-Robbie

He noticed something smeared on the mirror when he finished and he squinted in the light of the phone. Blood. One of his palms was bleeding from when he'd tripped in the field—the ground was frozen so hard it had cut through his glove. He hadn't imagined that was possible. What the hell, America. This was some Jack London bullshit.

Which meant he'd just bled all over the trailer. He wiped at the counter with a paper towel from the roll that sat on the toilet tank, got rid of some of the blood, but the dried parts weren't coming off. At least now he could home in on the blood if he had to port over here later.

Kid, quit playing house and get back here. We got cops.

Robbie jumped. Hustled outside, shut the door, stopped by a tree to smear some more blood on the trunk. Across the field, he saw the Charger's headlights, and right beside it, the blue-and-white strobing of a light bar. What, already? I'm not doing anything!

Guards at the farm thought we were "driving suspiciously." Sheriff sent a deputy. Concierge service! It's like dealing with the Italians back in Jersey!

You couldn't have told me before they were right on our ass? Robbie demanded.

You were busy. I didn't want to disrupt your process.

Cops. They were practically touching the car. Robbie hyperventilated, his breath sweet with exhaust fumes and steaming in the frigid air, fanning the heat in his lungs and the hammering panic in his heart until his body burned again to steel and bone. He felt for the car in his mind and dropped through the darkness under his feet. Hauled out of the upholstery, into the driver's seat.

A young cop bundled up in a mask and thick gloves was pointing a high-powered flashlight into his backseat. The Charger revved, shot fire in all directions. The cop dove backward. The Rider shifted to Reverse and floored it out of the church parking lot, back onto the county road, screaming off into the night at two hundred and fifty miles an hour, leaving streaks of flame on the cold tarmac. Get us out. Get us out.

Eli opened a portal and they dropped down through it onto I-5, heat and daylight again, three thirty in the afternoon. The Rider pumped the brakes and wove through traffic, slowing to two hundred, one-fifty, seventy. They snuffed out and drove home.


That afternoon, Gabe had math and geology to catch up on after spending all day in physiotherapy and basic finance at the development center. His math worksheets from his eighth-grade classes still didn't give him enough space to show his work, so Robbie re-copied the problems onto some of the butcher paper Gabe used for drawing superheroes. This was a basic fucking accommodation. He could almost see Mrs. Jules pitching a fit about non-standard worksheet paper, and it was getting harder and harder to stifle the urge to break her hands with the stupid glass paperweights in her office, see how small she could write then. While Robbie re-copied the math worksheet, Gabe made himself flashcards on geology, using full sheets of copy paper. He stood plastic army-men on his open text-book to mark diagrams and paragraphs to stop himself from writing anything twice.

Gabe was fourteen. Some of the kids in that trailer looked as young and skinny as he did. Robbie felt his lungs heating, and he shook his head hard and stared out the bars on the apartment's front window.

The kids in the trailer couldn't see out their windows because it was too cold to let the blankets down.

"How was school, buddy?" Robbie asked, his voice rough.

"Good," Gabe said, reaching for a red crayon to add jagged plumes of fire to a volcano. "I saw Marcus and Emily. Emily likes comics a lot. I want to give her some."

"Do you think you'll miss your comics later?"

Gabe lifted his head and raised his eyebrows. "I won't give her my favorites. I'll borrow her my favorites."

And people told him Gabe was an actual angel. Robbie snorted softly.

"I like Emily and Marcus and Mateo and Roslyn," Gabe remarked. Roslyn, she was new. Robbie had met Mateo; he was Gabe's friend from middle-school. "They're really nice. I wish we all got to go to the same school all the time."

Robbie was so wrapped up in Gabe, helping Gabe navigate the wider world, that he forgot sometimes about all the other kids at the center and at school. Gabe wasn't like that. Gabe liked people, Gabe paid attention. This was why Gabe had more friends after three months at Robbie's old middle school than Robbie had made in three years. "You're right," he said. "That would be pretty cool."

Robbie waited for a call all night, and Wednesday. Drove Uber all Wednesday night, made out decently well driving people home from sports bars after midnight. Thursday, after seeing Gabe off to school, he took Benadryl and melatonin and slept all day with a blanket over his bedroom window. Still no calls. Friday, a serpentine belt change and a mysterious squeaking noise at the auto shop, cook dinner, nap, then Uber until three in the morning; Saturday, No-Doze, fifteen oil changes, a nest of dead mice in a Ranger's air intake, Gabe got to make dinner, nap, Uber till three again. No calls.

Sunday, Gabe made microwave-scrambled eggs with toast for breakfast. Gabe's cooking seemed to be an exercise in finding out how much cheese could one fit into a single meal and keep it edible. They hadn't yet hit the limit. "This is real tasty," Robbie said, scooping the last globs of egg out of the bottom of his bowl. Strings of cheese dangled off his fork and he scraped it clean with his teeth. He looked at the empty egg carton in the trash can. Eggs were cheap, filling. You could make three good meals for two people with a carton that cost less than three dollars. Robbie didn't get sick of eggs, and Gabe didn't have trouble chewing them. Eggs were a godsend. Still. He thought of the huge white sheds back in Iowa. The feathers and the sour smell in the trailer.

"Thank-you Robbie, I love cooking," Gabe said, and Robbie grinned back at him.

As promised, he took Gabe to the library. Sundays, a group of seniors came in to read to the kids, and Gabe liked to listen, power chair parked behind the ring of smaller kids on the floor. Robbie tried to pay attention, some Mayan folktale, but he fell asleep against one of the shelves. A librarian woke him up at four in the afternoon. Gabe had a pile of books on his lap, some from the children's section and one huge coffee-table-book on muscle cars. "I'm so sorry," Robbie said, shoving himself to his feet and staggering as all the blood rushed out of his head. "I'm so—Gabe, are you okay? Are you hungry?"

"Yeah," Gabe said.

"Shi—uh, come on, let's go, let's check out your books and go get food, I'm sorry—"

"Can we get ice cream?" Gabe interrupted. His eyes were wide. Robbie's stomach growled.

"Yeah, bud, we'll go get some ice cream. But then I gotta make peas, okay? Peas and butter sauce—ice cream's not dinner—"

"Yay, ice cream! Robbie-Robbie, let's go drive in our car and get ice cream!"

"You got it."

At eight pm after a balanced dinner of ice cream and buttered peas, Robbie put Gabe to bed and drove out to the alley he and Eli liked to port from. Take us to Iowa. It's midnight back East, the kids should be there this time.

They burned up and ported out. The same long silent trip through the black void, this time emerging in the church parking lot. The Rider stared across the snowy field at the copse of trees, felt for the blood Robbie had left days ago. Found the palm-print on the tree-trunk outside the trailer.

Come on. Pop into the bathroom. Show 'em we're the real deal.

Robbie focused hard on the blood on the tree.

You're no fun. Eli launched them. The Rider rolled down out of the dark at the foot of the bare tree and snuffed out.

It was even colder tonight, and Robbie hadn't thought that was possible. The trailer was still pitch-black, silent. He looked up.

The sky was clear this time. Stars burned down overhead, blue and pink and yellow, so thick he couldn't see constellations, just thousands and thousands of tiny lights receding into the sharp velvet black. He knew the stars were supposed to be better away from cities. But he'd never imagined this.

His toes burned in the cold and he looked down and picked his way to the stairs of the trailer. Knocked on the door. Waited thirty seconds, muscles already locking up from the cold, and knocked again.

A kid a year or two younger than him cracked the door. The air from the trailer was warm, steaming faintly in the night. Body heat. The kid shined a flashlight in his face.

"I'm Roberto Reyes," Robbie said. "I know it's late. Sorry. Did you get my message?"

The light wavered a bit. Then the door slammed. Robbie saw the light dancing at the corners of the blankets. Someone lifted a blanket at one of the other windows and stared out at him. Robbie paced in the snow a few minutes, getting powder melted to his socks. He already hated that feeling. He banged on the door again. "I said I'd be back to talk with you. Can I please come in? It's really cold out here."

The door cracked open again. "You're Roberto Reyes?" a kid demanded. The same weird accent from the dream. The voice sounded familiar, it could have been Pablo's friend.

"I am," Robbie said. "How's Pablo? Is he okay?"

The door slammed again.

Robbie ground his teeth. "You want your families' farms back, right?" he demanded through the closed aluminum panel. "You want justice for Carlos? Well, I won't know how to do that if we don't talk, and I think I'm gonna lose some toes if you don't let me in. I'll go if you want, but you seemed pretty desperate last week." He wrapped his icy fingers around his own wrists and stomped in tight circles in the snow.

The door opened again. "Come in," said Pablo's friend, and Robbie rushed up the stairs into the stinking trailer.

It was still cold inside, but only half as bad as last time. Robbie still shivered. His leather jacket was the same temperature as the outside air, and it was still sucking heat from his body.

The kids looked to be sleeping in their clothes. The empty trailer had seemed crowded enough, but now it was more crowded: ten people, rows of shoes stacked up against the walls, a new case of water, a sack of apples. The sour smell was stronger than last time. Feathers everywhere, still. Someone had stuck the flashlight into a knot of wire hanging from the ceiling, so the light bounced down somewhat evenly through the living room of the trailer.

One of the kids pushed through the group toward Robbie. He was short, and his untrimmed facial hair was fuller than the others'. Pablo's friend—tall, hooked nose, longish hair—put out one arm to stop him, but the shorter kid shook his head. "Marvin, stop." Marvin? "I summoned him, I want to talk to him."

You didn't "summon" me, Robbie wanted to say. I dreamed about you. But he knew that wasn't true. He swallowed. "Pablo?"

"Yeah." Pablo stared him in the eyes. Reached out slowly and poked him in the chest. He looked puzzled. Held out his hand for a handshake, and when Robbie shook it, he rubbed his thumb hard over Robbie's skin. "You don't feel dead."

"I'm not," Robbie said, staring at the bottled water. "Tell me about this place. Who's in charge? Who did this to you?"

"You can't be Roberto Reyes," Pablo said, dropping his hand.

Marvin shoved him back. "We're sorry. Don't tell Mr. Díaz, we were just being stupid, messing around with black magic, we know it's not real—"

"I am," Robbie insisted. "I saw you all in my dream. I came to your trailer on Tuesday, gave you my phone number." Heh-heh. Show your teeth, boy. "I dreamed you were calling for an avenging spirit, and—I didn't mean to hurt you, Pablo, I didn't understand what was happening. But whoever tricked you and trapped you up here, and worked a kid to death, they are scum, they are killers and slavers, they have to pay, suffer like you and Carlos suffered, they killed someone innocent, I saw your blood, Pablo, don't fucking tell me you were just messing around." He stopped himself, took a deep breath. Everyone had backed as far away from him as they could get, and he noticed that he was blocking the only door out of the trailer. All he could smell was gasoline fumes, a relief. "You wanted an avenging spirit. I'm a Ghost Rider, that's what we do. Tell me how to do it or I'll do it myself." He stepped away from the door. Sat crosslegged in the walking-path that lead to the bathroom, and pulled out his phone to take notes. "Who's in charge of this place? How do we fix this?"

Pablo and Marvin sat down in front of him—slowly, five feet away. "Mr. Díaz is a labor contractor for Trillian. He has recruiting agents back home in Guatemala. He and his sons supervise the work here..."

They'd grown up on farms and small towns in Guatemala, all within fifty miles of each-other. Cane sugar was the major cash crop, but cash was hard to come by in an economy upset by narcotraffic and political violence; every single one of them had gone hungry when their parents couldn't convert their sugar or coffee into cash to buy food.

Mr. Díaz had also grown up in Guatemala. He had friends and agents all over. Whenever they heard of a boy who wanted to travel North to the United States to send home money to his family—expensive as the US was, it was swimming in cash—Díaz's agents made an offer. Fifteen-thousand dollars—or ten, or twenty, or five, or however much they could get—and Mr. Díaz would arrange the trip, and a sponsor and a good job once the boy got through the border.

The families, as mentioned before, had very little liquid cash and could not pay for their sons' passage north. Very well, said the agents. Give us the deed to your farm as collateral. Your son can repay your debt when he has his new job in the US. And so, lacking liquid cash and desperate for money to buy food staples, equipment, schooling, and other necessities of life, the families mortgaged their land, the most valuable thing they owned, to Mr. Díaz's agents, and let their eager sons hop the train North.

It was a hard journey, riding the top of a freight train in the tropical sun. They got a cold welcome past the Border: picked up and detained in chilly warehouses, sorted in pens like cattle. Some stayed a few days, others a few weeks. Their release came when a government agent told them their aunt or uncle in the US had called to sponsor them. The government put them on a plane and they got off in Iowa, met a woman who could have been their aunt as far as the government was concerned; really, she worked for Mr. Díaz. She ushered them into vans and drove for hours between the flat checkered fields to drop them off at their trailers, where they would live while they worked on the farm. They thought they'd pay off their debts in a year or two, pool their cooking, eat cheap, and send money home each month for their families to live on and re-invest in their farms. They knew the work would be hard, and they were ready: that was what you did when you wanted something from life, you took a risk and you sacrificed and you worked for it, and then you got your reward.

The farm did not reward. It took and it took.

They worked in the chicken houses from eight in the morning until ten at night, walking between stacked rows of small, packed, stinking cages. Keeping the eggs rolling. Yanking birds out of cages and stuffing them into other cages for culling. Reaching into yet other cages and yanking out birds that had fallen dead. Gentleness was impossible, working at the speed the supervisors demanded; gentleness would be meaningless in the face of the cruelty of the hens' existence. One of the light duties, one they angled for because it was a chance to sit and an escape from the cage-rows, was to grab pullets by their necks and put their upper jaw into the burning hot guillotine that cropped their beaks, to keep the hens from cannibalizing each-other in the close quarters.

The din and stink of the hens was incredible. The air was oppressive, hot and humid and thick with feathers and feces and ammonia. Protective suits, they could buy from the farm. Eye-goggles, too: buy them from the farm. Leather gloves: buy them from the farm.

They cooked food on their own time. Mr. Cobar or Mr. Díaz Junior ferried a few of them into town once a week to go shopping, and they had a communal cooking pit in the woods between the trailers. There wasn't much they could cook there. They usually managed to eat twice a day. While working, they went drank canned energy drinks on irregular, five minute breaks. These, the farm provided free. Before working, they had to take a decontamination shower before putting on their work gear, to avoid introducing diseases to the chickens. After work, no shower. "Shower in your trailers," Cobar said, ignoring the fact that there was no running water in the trailers.

No one had called Robbie back, partly because they were terrified from finding mysterious streaks of blood on their mirror two days after they'd summoned a vengeance spirit who'd possessed Pablo and left him in a coma for an hour, and partly because those of them who still had phones had no way to charge them.

They got paid once a week. Like Marvin had said: a lump sum on their debit cards, nine-tenths of it withheld to pay down their families' debts. They never got paystubs. They never got any paperwork to show what they still owed on their debt. They had to trust Mr. Díaz's word.

Everybody worked. If they didn't make quota, one of Mr. Díaz's agents might call their families. He had people everywhere back home, a lot of them bad people. He had American money, which stretched a long way in Guatemala. When Rodrigo refused to work for what the plant paid, Mr. Díaz Junior threatened to have Rodrigo's father shot.

It was thirty miles to the nearest town.

Mr. Cobar was one of two supervisors for the chicken house Carlos had worked in. He was thirty or forty, short, wore an ostrich band around his stetson. Drove a white Chevy Silverado. Lived somewhere close to the farm: a little gray ranch house on the way to town where his own kids kept a few cows and sheep. Mr. Cobar worked for Mr. Díaz. As far as the kids in the trailer were concerned, they all worked for Mr. Díaz, but he didn't own the chicken houses. Trillian Farms, according to a discrete search on Robbie's phone, belonged to Michael DeCuster. Robbie couldn't find anything on Mike, but when he searched "DeCuster eggs," some old guy named Jack DeCuster came up in a bunch of news clips, testifying to Congress about a salmonella outbreak originating from one of his egg farms in the '90s. He had large glasses, a receding chin, and deep lines at the corners of his nose and mouth: a wrinkled and unrepentant turtle.

"This is important," Robbie said, squinting in the dark after the blue glow of his phone screen. "After Carlos died. Did the cops come? Did anyone come around asking questions? Did anything change?"

The kids looked at each-other. "No," Marvin said at last. "It was like Carlos disappeared. And we knew if they wanted, they could do it to anyone. No one's watching out for us. That's why Pablo prayed to Santa Muerte."

Crooks and campers lived by the saying, "Don't shit where you eat." It was wisdom Eli had attempted to impart to Robbie, though as far as Robbie could gather, Eli had regularly flubbed this rule while he'd been alive. It meant that when Robbie had decided to hunt down and kill a Los Angeles trauma surgeon who had abused and murdered his fiance, he and Eli had taken almost a month to devise a perfect murder. The papers still disagreed on whether the missing surgeon had faked his death.

Robbie and Eli didn't "eat" in Iowa.

The off-set time zone worked in their favor: late at night in California, when Robbie might be heading out to pick up Uber pax, was the small hours of the morning in Iowa. No one was awake. The hens were asleep, so the chicken houses were empty of people. There were few interior cameras: concern about internal blackmail, fines for harboring illegal aliens, leaks to animal rights groups and such. Better not to acquire inconvenient information in the first place.

The Rider could home in on Robbie or Eli's blood and transport himself to it with pinpoint accuracy, blind. This was how he could always port back to the car, or Canelo's auto shop, or Robbie's bedroom. Now he could port to the green and white trailer. Robbie had Marvin flick a bit of paper with a dot of blood on it under the farm's office door.

On a Tuesday night when Robbie should have been carrying passengers, the Rider ported into the office and snuffed out into Robbie. Robbie shielded his face from the webcam on the office computer and covered it with a post-it note. Used a cheap USB drive to install a worm on the office computer. He'd bought the worm last month from a real hacker, some Darknet black hat. Once an authorized user logged on, the worm could let Robbie remotely access the machine's files at his leisure. He hadn't thought he'd use it again after hacking the hospital, but it was so handy.

Careful, kid, that's how you get an MO.

Over the next week, he studied the address book, records, payments. Not much on Mr. Díaz, Mr. Cobar's boss: he was considered a contractor, not an employee of the company, and the kids and supervisors he provided were a step further removed. Instead, he found reams and reams of incomprehensible spreadsheets about commodities prices and futures and feed compositions and culling age and chicken production statistics and genetics. Weird chemicals that, when Robbie looked them up online, people couldn't agree on whether they were antibiotics or not.

He found something that passed for an organizational chart.

He found some mailing addresses, several for Mike DeCuster.


Six forty-five in the morning, and oncoming dawn obscured the stars in a haze of blue-green twilight, making the snowy fields glow faintly. Fernando Cobar cruised down the straight flat road toward Trillian Farms, power poles flick-flick-flicking by on his right. He had to get to work before the laborers. There was paperwork in the office, production statistics to review, tasks to coordinate. He had to walk the rows, check the conveyor belts, mix the feed. It was a shit job but it put food on the table.

Iowa was square, endless, flat. In the winter, you could see the deer crossing the road from half a mile off. Driving did not require great attention, other than to keep his Silverado's wheels in the dry ruts where previous vehicles had passed, so as not to wander into ice or drifted snow.

There were headlights facing him in his lane.

He watched them. Was it a trick of perspective? They drew close, faster than he expected: no, they were definitely in the right-side lane, the wrong lane, facing him: small round old-fashioned headlights, a broad black car gleaming with chrome, coming up fast. He flashed his high-beams and they flashed theirs back.

He ground his teeth. Let off the gas, eased his way over the low mound of snow dividing the road to the other lane: some kid, some idiot playing games with him. Well, he didn't play. He didn't have time for that.

The other car also slowed and sidled into the other lane, but half-way over it skidded on the ice, over-corrected, spun like a black and silver top, and ran itself off the road with a crunch and a scream of tortured metal. Cobar raised his eyebrows, whistled. Now that he could see it side-on, it was a beautiful car. Real muscle car. Vintage. Supercharged. Pity.

As he drove past, the beautiful car's gas tank exploded with a whumph. Fire, everywhere. It was spectacular, flames shooting out with impossible vigor from the hood and the blower and the tailpipe; even the tires caught fire like they'd been drizzled in diesel. Whoever was driving it was a goner even if their spin off the road hadn't done them in. Cobar crossed himself and eased back over the snow into the right lane as he passed it.

The dawn brightened in his rear-view mirror and he flicked the lever to darken it, to protect his night vision.

Something bright swung onto the road behind him.

The burning car was back on the road. Still burning: fire jetted out of it high and fast, forced out like the stream of a jet engine, the tires alight, the blower spitting. The burning car was gaining on him, accelerating, pulling up beside him as if to pass.

There had to be a rational explanation. He was getting punked. Some kind of Youtube stunt. Some Influencer outfitting their car with flame-throwers and a roll-cage, chasing rednecks to get likes and subscribes. Well, Fernando Cobar was no dumb redneck. He was going to stay cool, and keep going to work. The asshole in the beautiful car would get bored and go away.

Keep driving and they'll go away, he told himself as the burning car dropped back into his blind spot, just behind his Silverado's left rear wheel. Just keep driving—

He stepped on the accelerator despite himself. The burning car swerved at him.

A bang, and the airbags deployed, blinding him. The rear wheels spun out from under him. Now he was going off the road; he spun the wheel, but the world was twirling around him, he'd been jolted sideways in his seat; the truck tipped off the verge and rolled over the snow and stubble, rocked to a stop on one side.

He woke when the truck slammed back upright. "Thank-you," he sobbed, half-blind from blood in his eyes; the airbags were already deflating when the truck had rolled, and he'd struck his forehead hard on the side window. "Thank-you, thank-you—"

Glass shattered over his face. An iron hand gripped him under the jaw. The seatbelt shredded and reeled away, and Fernando Cobar was yanked from the car by his neck. He hit the ground hard. Brought one shaking arm to his face and wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

He had not been rescued.

What stood above him was in no way human.

It was the beautiful car. All the sound and hum and heat of a massive engine, compacted into a narrow upright form, with two legs and two arms and something like a head that gleamed in the oncoming dawn. Black and chrome and burning, it gazed down at him, its limbs all rigid with tension, fire erupting from its vacant eyesockets and between its horrible human teeth.

"No estoy en el Youtube," Fernando muttered, tasting blood.

It whined, a harsh metallic noise that rose to a scream as the flames jetted hot and bright out of what passed for its head. And then it dove at him, straddled him, strangled him. Closed his throat with one hot leathery hand, and slammed its fist into his ribs again and again.

Fernando bucked under its grip, trying to throw it off, but it was heavy, it might as well be solid metal; it didn't budge. He couldn't think. He couldn't breathe. He ripped at the fingers around his throat, mouth gasping, lungs burning, as the car slammed its fist into his side. The first crack was lightening: pain so sharp and bright it didn't register as pain but more like a star exploding in his chest. But the being kept hitting him. Crack, stars, lightening, the shift of bone on bone. At last the hand at his neck loosened, and he breathed, sucking shards of rib into his chest.

He lay still. Clutched his left side with one trembling arm. Every breath was agony, and he could not breathe fast enough.

The steel skull bent low in front of his face, hot as a running engine, suffocating him with gasoline fumes, watching him. Suddenly the being got off of him, stood, kicked him onto his side. It lifted him by the waist and dumped him in the snowy bed of his own truck. Climbed in, got it running, and drove off over the fields and ditches, crashing and screaming through barbed wire.

Fernando coughed blood. Concentrated on breathing: short, shallow, effortful puffs, each motion grating and tugging and never, never enough air. Clutched his side where his ribs ground together, ground into his lungs. Bounced and tumbled in the truck bed.

He smelled the farm's miasma: the exhalations and the manure of millions of chickens vented into the air by the great industrial fans that were never enough to fully cool or ventilate the chicken sheds. He heard the wheels rumble over gravel, felt the truck slow, the pound and jouncing ease, and now he smelled something new: the methane and ammonia that bubbled up from the lagoon behind the chicken sheds, where the manure and wash water fermented and percolated and settled into fertilizer fit for the fields that surrounded the farm. A great square artificial pond, always steaming with microbial activity, always red or orange with strange organisms and chemicals. Fernando dragged himself upright by the edge of the truck bed and crept toward the tailgate. He had to go. He had to get away.

The truck's door slammed hard enough to jolt his ribs and he felt the heat of the being before he saw it. It growled at him, picked him up by the collar, hauled him out of the car and dragged him by the coat collar toward the steep slanting bank of the lagoon.

"No," Fernando rasped, scraping his feet weakly over the frozen earth. "No! No, por favor! I have a family! I don't deserve this, no merezco morir!"

The being hauled him up around the earthen dam that contained the filth from the chickens, and then down the other side, into the creamy water up to its shins. Fernando could feel the warmth and steam on his face. The vapors stung his eyes. He coughed, and bones sawed against each-other.

"Parece que tienes problemas al respirar," it rumbled, a mocking tilt of its head. "Necesitas aire fresco."

And it gripped him by the back of the neck and shoved his face into the cesspool.


Mike DeCuster woke at one-thirty in the morning to the shrill of his phone. He stared at it stupidly. He was on the Do Not Call list; didn't matter how much you were worth, you still had to register on the Do Not Call list to keep the robots out. It was an unknown number. Iowa area code.

He silenced it. Fucking scammers. He was trying to sleep; he'd have his tech guy report it in the morning.

The phone rang again. Hung up before he could silence it. Another ring. Hang up. Two rings.

Mike answered the phone, and a young man's voice said, "Nice PJs."

Mike was wearing flannel pajamas with chickens and sunrises on them. He stared out the dark window, suddenly very conscious of the light of his own phone against his face. "Who is this."

"You might have heard about the assault at your Iowa egg farm," the young man continued. His speech was tense and clipped, with a California accent. "I...hope you heard about it. It's your farm. A man's in the hospital. They don't know if he's going to make it."

"Who are you," Mike demanded, getting up to draw the curtains shut. His skin raced hot and cold. He wanted to hurt someone. He wanted to hide in the basement. He crept into the bathroom, sat down in the walk-in shower. Tile all around him. Tile stopped bullets, didn't it?

"I'm who put him in the hospital," the young man said. "They don't know how it happened, do they. The car crash didn't add up."

Mike might have heard about it. The Sheriff said he would keep the local manager updated with the results of the investigation. As far as they could tell, one of the farm's contractors had been beaten with a sledgehammer and half-drowned in the lagoon. It was grotesque. Calculated.

"Your whole company is guilty," the voice on the phone continued. "I could keep working my way up. Just like I did Mr. Cobar. I won't run out of people who deserve that. Sooner or later, the FBI or someone is going to notice, and I don't think they'll be happy to find out you're...'harboring illegals' in the trailers behind your hen houses. I think that would embarrass you. Like your dad, with the salmonella thing. I think your...stock might take a dive."

A threat. This punk was threatening him. A threat was a species of negotiation. This, Mike knew what to do with. "Clearly you want something. And you want it badly enough to risk getting your prepubescent ass reamed in prison for the next twenty years. I...I honestly admire that, kid—"

"In the library you'll find your gold lion-head book-end is on the floor by the fireplace," the voice said, and Mike almost dropped his phone.

This person had been inside his home.

"Like I said. I could keep working my way up. There's a lot of people in your company who deserve what I did to Mr. Cobar."

This cruel, violent person had walked through his library. Knew where he lived. "I'm going to call 911," he said, "and I'm going to get officers all over this house. They're going to find you. They're going to shove you somewhere so deep—"

"No, they won't," the young man said. Pure dismissal. He was certain of himself, as only the very skilled and the very stupid were. "You don't get to live because you're rich. You get to live because you're useful. You can try to catch me, and maybe wake up in a cesspool with your chest caved in. Or, you can fix what you broke. I'm good either way." The man fell silent. Mike heard him breathing down the line, slow and deep. Heard his throat click a few times.

Mike, also, concentrated on his breathing, concentrated on controlling his anger and panic so he could respond, deal with the situation. Home invasion and physical assault were bizarre and unfamiliar risks to a man in his position. He did not know what to say.

"Good choice," the voice said at last. "I have demands."

"Money?" Money could buy time. Money could buy influence.

"...Just do your fucking job and make your contractors treat people like human beings."


Robbie gave DeCuster a four week deadline to meet his demands. Those four weeks were a special kind of hell.

Robbie had managed to sack away five hundred dollars and send it to a demonologist in the Valley, advance payment for an exorcism; the appointment was scheduled and everything, he was finally getting Eli out of his head, but now he had to worry: Eli kept suggesting that Robbie would disappear or die or his soul would rip in two if he was removed. Eli was a lying sack of shit, but Robbie had to wonder, especially after getting summoned into Pablo's body like a demon, just how alive he really was and what an exorcism would do to him. Could the demonologist do some tests, figure it out before starting? Now the exorcism was booked and he didn't have to keep sending off money, he wanted to get Gabe a set of nice marker pens for Christmas, but his money kept trickling away into pharmacy bills and rent and utilities and gas and food. Robbie still couldn't drive Uber during the day because pax kept one-starring him for having no air conditioning, and the bar traffic at night had slowed down because other people were also trying to save up for Christmas presents.

Eli was pissed that Robbie hadn't let them kill Cobar outright, and he kept accusing Robbie of tricking him. He goaded Robbie into ghosting up four times in two weeks; it was easy, now that Robbie was constantly on edge thinking about Carlos and the other kids. Four ghost-ups meant four hangovers, no appetite, puking up automotive fluids all morning at work. He saw the guys staring at him like they were going to find him dead behind the garage with a syringe in his arm. He resorted to Gatorade and energy drinks, like the kids, so he wouldn't pass out in the middle of the day.

He had to wonder if Eli was doing this to him somehow. Robbie fainting was the surest way for Eli to get control of his body.

Robbie kept tabs on the egg farm as best he could, checking that DeCuster was keeping his word. He used the worm to track the money moving in and out of the farm (so much money; if he knew how, he knew he'd steal it), emails between DeCuster and the local manager, emails between DeCuster and Díaz. The first few days since he'd put the worm in, it stole nine sets of usernames and passwords for him, including two dating apps and a Pornhub account. He searched for news on Fernando Cobar.

Call the hospital and ask if Uncle Fernando is alive, Eli ordered him that first week, while he was halfway through a brake service on a Geo Metro. We didn't finish the job. You feel it, don't you? Job's not done. You can't rest. You can't eat. You're hungry for something. Call and check on him, and if he's still alive, GET IN THERE AND FINISH HIM OFF.

Call the—are you kidding. Are you kidding me right now—caller ID, Eli! No!

Spook it! Spook your number, like with DeCuster!

You mean "spoof?"

Spoof it!

Robbie smacked a brake rotor with a rubber mallet, perhaps a little harder than he needed to. It was stubborn, rusted in place. His hands were shaking from puking up his breakfast. I did to Cobar what I wanted to do. If he dies, he dies. If he lives, he lives. Like he did to Carlos.

Justice isn't about the intent, Robbie. Justice is about death.Death!

Whatever.

The trailers got electricity. It was too cold to run plumbing to them, but they got porta-potties, freezing-cold, one for each trailer, and they got heat; electric in some and propane in others. Four more trailers showed up, but the kids were still packed five people into a space meant for two or three. The existing trailers got fumigated. Now they stank of insecticides. Work was still twelve to fourteen hours per day, verging toward fourteen now that the supers were allowing fifteen-minute breaks instead of fives. If they hired more people, they could work eight hour days, but it was...difficult to hire people to live in trailers in the middle of Iowa and work in the laying sheds. Robbie wasn't able to secure all his demands.

He did ensure, under the threat of exposure and violence, that DeCuster made Mr. Díaz return all the deeds to the kids' families' property in Guatemala, wiping out their debts, and then that Mr. Díaz be fired. DeCuster agreed immediately to firing Díaz, called him a dirty opportunist, accused him of stealing the kids' wages and threatening the viability of the company. Robbie tuned him out.

He checked in with the kids in the trailers in person; Eli ported him in, usually in the middle of the night Iowa time. Only Pablo and Martin dared step out to meet him, and they never invited him into the trailers again; he saw furtive lights in all the windows flick on whenever he came. Their cell phones were getting charged; they could talk to each-other and the outside world, when they had time. Marvin confirmed that they were making money now, six hundred a week like they'd been promised. Soon they'd have enough money to leave. Get documents somehow and work somewhere kinder, or head back home from this misadventure. The improvements in the housing and conditions were too little, too late, and after all, the farm had let Carlos die. Who knew how long these changes would last.

The farm would be glad to see them gone, if they could be replaced; the new supervisors were almost as scared of the kids as the kids were of Robbie, and they watched them like criminals.

Robbie kept checking in on the farm's finances, reading on his phone late at night while waiting for Uber pax to ping him, or waiting for Salomé to finish one of her appointments when she called for him to shuttle between hotels. Mike DeCuster wasn't an absentee boss, even though the kids had never heard of him. He was always in contact with management: talking about the price of commodities the farm used for chicken feed, new recipes for layer rations, changes in regulations about what antibiotics and things they were allowed to mix in, disease outbreaks, the price for stew hens, contracts with egg retailers, problems that came up with equipment maintenance at the farm. He paid attention. He wasn't stupid.

He'd told Robbie, when Robbie had made his demands, that he'd had no idea his contractors were breaking the law, certainly no idea that a kid had died; he'd said that Díaz had been stealing the kids' wages.

He noticed DeCuster cc'd on an incident report when a forklift driver, Hunter Borden, had injured his back and required a week off work.

If DeCuster didn't know about conditions on his farms, it was because he didn't want to know.

Or.

Robbie dug back into last month's expense sheet.

DeCuster hadn't paid the kids directly through the farm; he'd paid Manuel Díaz. Díaz was a contractor providing labor; the kids were technically Díaz's employees, Díaz's product. Manuel Díaz had a house with a little patch of land and a late-model truck and three sons, one of whom had been in the newspaper for going to Space Camp. Manuel Díaz made good money. Robbie wasn't great at estimating lifestyles and money, but he had to be making…mortgage two thousand, car payment five hundred, food for five…at least fifty? thousand dollars per year? Plus the trips to Guatemala, and the trailers were his, and at least two other people worked for him as recruiters…so Mr. Díaz's company probably accounted for two hundred thousand dollars per year, or about twenty thousand per month. Then he'd be paying the kids, or pretending to so he could pocket their wages: twenty-four hundred per month, per kid. About thirty kids. Another seventy-two thousand dollars per month. If Mike DeCuster was telling the truth that Díaz had stolen from him, he should have been paying Díaz's company about one hundred thousand dollars a month, probably more.

The expense sheet said thirty thousand.

Díaz wasn't stealing the kids' wages alone. DeCuster was in on it, too.

Cobar was directly responsible for Carlos' death, but not for the circumstances that lead to it.

DeCuster was the architect behind the whole damn place.

He could feel Eli go still in the back of his head. Picture his too-sharp eyes dilating, his right hand drifting to the knife he'd used to carry on his belt—a weight Robbie could almost feel sometimes, caught himself reaching for when he wasn't thinking right.

He needed Eli to port him to DeCuster's place.

You need me to take credit for what you're planning to do.

No, he didn't.

I'm happy to. Whatever helps you sleep at night, kid. I told you you needed it: one last fix, and then when I'm gone, you'll have no one else to blame for your hatred, your bloodlust, your murderous urges. Sounds fun. All safe and clean and ready to take care of Gabbie, right?

Robbie ignored him. Stared at his phone, flicked aimlessly through the spreadsheet. Everything you say is bullshit.

Sure it is.

"Hi, this is Eliot Miller, 555-555-5555. I have an appointment scheduled with Dr. Gregory next week for the, uh, extraction. I need to reschedule...do you have any openings next month? Something came up all of a sudden...Text me back or call me on, uh, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday between eight AM and five PM...uh, 555-555-5555. This is Ro-uh—Eliot Miller."


Mike DeCuster had two homes: a sprawling hill-house in Upstate New York, and a high-rise apartment in Brooklyn. Accessing the apartment was as easy as accessing the house had been: find DeCuster's mailing address off the farm's contacts book, bleed on a piece of company letterhead, and mail himself there. Robbie had done it that first night in the office at the hen houses. But he hadn't let DeCuster know he knew about the Brooklyn apartment, and that was why DeCuster was living there now.

He waited in the apartment's small white living room, staring impatiently out the window at the cars and people below, occasionally scratching his chin where his goatee kept catching in his ski mask. It was noon back home, an off-day at the shop. He'd normally be sleeping. Instead it was four in the afternoon.

Sometimes when DeCuster sent an email, it would have at the bottom, "Sent from my iPad." Generally, he started answering his emails on the iPad in the late afternoon. This gave a timeline on his habits of movement: CEO stuff in an office where there were likely to be cameras and witnesses, and then more CEO stuff at a coffee shop or restaurant, or hopefully at home.

Robbie fidgeted with his own phone. Airplane mode. Lens was clean. He propped it up against the cast-iron rooster decorating DeCoster's coffee table, checked the picture angle. Shifted a bowl of papier-mache eggs partly in front of it to hide it from view.

He's coming.

There were footsteps in the hall.

"Siri, start recording," Robbie ordered. He waited on the couch behind the coffee table, out of view of the camera.

The lock slid, the knob turned.

Mike DeCuster entered, blue suit and cowboy boots, grooves on each side of his mouth just like his father, on the video testifying to Congress about the salmonella outbreak. He shut the door behind him and walked right past Robbie.

"Hi," Robbie said.

DeCuster jumped, spun around.

Robbie knew what he saw. A thin male figure in close-fitting dark clothing, black ski mask, black gloves, leaning back against the couch with shoulders back and arms wide, a pose that made him look larger and more comfortable than he was. A pose that said, "Do what I say because I have a gun." Robbie did not have a gun. But Eli was right: DeCuster didn't even seem to check. "Sit down," Robbie said. He pointed at the recliner opposite him.

DeCuster sat. His hands were shaking.

"Why do you feed ethanol plant waste to your chickens?" Robbie asked.

DeCuster stared at him uncomprehendingly. Then he ducked his head, looked up. "You're serious?"

Robbie waited.

"It's the high protein fraction of the corn mash," he said. "Great nutrition, economical."

"How long does a chicken live?"

"What, in general or—"

"One of yours. Trillian Farms chickens."

"Sometimes we get three years out of them, average is two-point-three years to replacement. That's well within benchmark—"

"You sound like you know a lot about chicken farming."

"It's in the family. Look, I complied with your demands. I'm playing ball, here. You want money? After all I've done? Fine, where do I—"

"A kid died from working on your farms," Robbie interrupted. "Carlos Monterozzo. You know about him?"

DeCuster shut his mouth.

"Really. You don't know?"

Watch the eyes. If they're hiding something, they always look down and to the left. That's what the books say.

DeCuster's eyes were wide and still.

"I know how much you paid Manuel Díaz for supplying the kids," Robbie continued. "Tell me how much that was."

"I don't remember."

"Sure. You paid his company thirty grand last month. That's money for him, all his trips, all his employees, kids' college, and housing and salary for thirty farm workers underneath him. I saw the numbers."

Silence from DeCuster. Then, "That's just what he charged."

What a bore. At least Northwick had some fight in him. That's his excuse?

Robbie opened and closed his mouth, working the tension out of his jaw. When he spoke, his voice shook. "Thirty grand doesn't sound a little low to you?"

"What's this about?" DeCuster asked, looking down, shoulders hunched.

"This is about you," Robbie bit out, "and what you did. You had teenagers living in filth on your property. Your people tricked them and trapped them there. Your people got a kid killed. You know everything that happens on your farms; if you didn't know, it's because you knew you didn't want to know. You're the boss, I told you to fix it and you fixed it, you could have fixed it at any time. Your responsibility. You killed Carlos Monterozzo."

He watched the blood drain out of DeCuster's craggy face. Then, he watched him look down at the coffee table and notice the camera. DeCuster straightened. "You're filming this?"

Robbie grimaced. The ski mask hid it.

Told you you shoulda brought a gun.

DeCuster started to push himself out of the recliner.

"I didn't say you could get up," Robbie growled, but the older man stood, straightened, let out a long sigh of relief.

"You want a statement, here's your statement," DeCuster said. "I'm a busy man, I'm involved primarily with the business side of the operation. Marketing, sourcing, strategy. Manuel Díaz was a bad hire. He deceived me about his labor sourcing, and he stole wages from his employees. You want to sue someone, get Manuel Díaz. The only thing I'm guilty of is trusting the wrong contractor. Trillian Farms is a modern, ethical operation dedicated to upholding and exceeding industry standards in worker safety." And DeCuster reached down, picked up Robbie's phone, and shut it off. Set it on the coffee table, still keeping a safe distance from Robbie's clenched fists. "There. Go to the cops with that, okay, kid? And I'll tell them about your breaking and entering. Make a nice donation to the police pension fund."

Robbie took deep, measured breaths, his lungs growing hot with exhaust fumes, clenching and unclenching his fists and making his gloves creak. "You don't get away with this just because you're useful to people."

Just kill him.

No. I want cops.

He owns the cops.

Public justice.

No such thing.

Carlos should get public justice.

Shoulda brought a gun, kid.

DeCuster looked down at him, shaking off his fear, relaxing. "Not my fault what happens when people sneak into this country," he said. "Sometimes they run into bad luck. Not exactly American standards of living, but I figure, since they keep coming, it's gotta be better than what they're used to back South."

Robbie thought of the cold, the cockroaches, the bucket. He thought of Carlos and his family in the photograph, their clean pressed shirts and the bright sun and green mountains.

He planted his feet on DeCuster's white carpet. Then he seized the cast-iron rooster off the coffee table and swung it in a high fast arc, his whole body flinging it out like a haymaker, buried its heavy base in DeCuster's skull.