Warren Ellis - Dead Pig Collector

He began to compress his client’s chest, on a ten-second rhythm. The ribs flexed, and, after a minute, blood began to squirt from the slashes and perforations.

“The heart, you see, is just a pump, and can be manually operated.”

Amanda giggled. “The heart is just a pump. I love that. It sounds so true.”

“It’s a mechanical fact,” said Mister Sun, bringing the compression to a five-second beat.

“In so many ways,” Amanda said. “I’ve never met anyone who had anything other than a pump inside them.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Mister Sun saw a new line appear on her forehead. “I’m sure that’s not true,” he said.

“I’ve only been able to wash my hair for the last two years,” Amanda said.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“When I worked for other people? Working in big rooms divided into cubicles? They were like human pens for software writing, and the ratio of women to men was maybe, maybe one to thirty. I stopped washing my hair, for years, and wore nothing that wasn’t a Junior Anti-Sex League chastity sack. I met nothing but boys who had pumps for hearts. I’m not great at reading social cues, but even I, after long enough, worked out that if my hair looked like a hobo wig and I wore nothing but thick onesies and lime-green Crocs then they’d leave me alone. The whole point of the start-up, of creating a new business and getting out from working for other people, was that I could start to be myself again. Whatever that means.”

The crease in her brow had gone. Amanda’s face had re-assumed a sort of flat placidity that had informed much of their time together so far. The joy of her smiles and laughs seemed, to Mister Sun, to be in her genuine surprise at their arrival, as if strong emotions traveled some miles to get here and showed up without warning.

“I do understand the pleasures of working for oneself,” Mister Sun offered.

“Well,” she said, gazing at the corpse. “Almost working for myself. He had skills I didn’t have. He had money I didn’t have. He always had money.”

Mister Sun decided not to comment on that, since quite a lot of that money was currently sloshing around in his own bank account.

“Fucking bastard dogfucker,” Amanda said, all in a rush. “I bet you liked him.” Her expression seemed not to change as she said it.

Mister Sun raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never met him, or directly spoken to him.”

“Oh,” Amanda said. “That’s how the process works? How did you communicate?”

“There’s an app for encrypted self-erasing images with text overlay, made by security experts.”

“I know that one,” Amanda said. “Or, I’ve read about it. It doesn’t work on Android phones yet. I prefer Android. You can get much deeper into the operating system. Men like men with money. Even when they profess to hate them, they respect the money and admire its keeper.”

“Respect,” said Mister Sun, pushing blood out of his client’s body, “doesn’t come into it. I provide a service. I like to get paid for it. I may, perhaps, suspect my clients are not people I’d want to spend time with”—he gave the corpse a harder shove, for emphasis, and there was a pattering rainy noise as blood struck the underside of the plastic sheet—“but, happily, I do not have to.”

“It’s a transaction,” Amanda said. “No emotional content.”

“No emotional content is required. I’m a dead pig collector.”

Amanda leaned forward, spotting new information. “I don’t understand that reference.”

Mister Sun stood, unkinking his shoulders and back, taking stock of the liquid in the bath. He approved of that useful slight incline in the tub’s surface, helping the blood run down toward the plughole. It was almost impossible to manually pump all the blood out of a corpse. There always somehow seemed to be a pint left in there. But he’d certainly processed out the lion’s share, and, given the unexpected situation he found himself in, he probably had more time to play with than usual. He went to get the bottles of bleach from the bottom of the messenger bag, nestled there around the small roll of heavy-gauge garbage sacks.

Amanda uncapped the green can and gave a few blasts of something synthetic and cloying into the air. “These things fascinate me,” she said. “It’s like what you’d get if you tried to describe spring to a robot. Not remotely authentic but somehow true. What’s a dead pig collector?”

Mister Sun poured one bottle of bleach through the left-hand hole in the plastic sheet. “China,” he said, “is a place rife with pollution and disease. It’s not just that, but that is certainly a part of the landscape. It’s also a place of pig farming. And a part of pig farming—”

The bottle was empty. He stood it by the bath and opened the second bottle. In it went, through the second hole. “There are periods—we’re in one right now, in fact—where serious disease and pollution events will kill the pigs. They will wash up on riversides in their tens of thousands. They will litter fields and pile up in their pens. A small farm—and, in places like Shanghai, they’re all small farms—cannot spend what little time they have disposing of tons of dead pigs instead of maintaining their remaining assets.”

The second bottle was empty. Mister Sun swiftly cut five small sections of duct-tape and fixed them around the edge of one of the reserved plastic-sheet discs. The disc was therefore stuck back on the sheet, closing the left hole.

“The farmers could,” he said, “just sell the infected dead pigs into the food market. But, of course, people get sick. Sometimes they die. The food supply is always on the edge of triggering a pandemic. So it’s illegal. People get sentenced to life imprisonment for selling contaminated pig meat. You can draw your own conclusions about the life expectancy in a Chinese prison.”

The second disc fixed on, Mister Sun busied himself with lightly tacking the sheet around the bath with a few more short sections of tape. “So,” he said, “there are people who have learned how to effectively and safely dispose of swine carcasses. If you have a stack of dead pigs, and you don’t want to go to prison, then you pay for a dead pig collector.”

Mister Sun pulled off his gloves and delicately pushed them into one of the empty bleach bottles. Twisting on the cap, he then went to his toolbox, tugged out another pair of gloves, and snapped them on. He looked at Amanda, and gave her an uncertain smile.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Not as such. It’s just that this is an unusual situation, and I’m not sure if it’s correct to ask for a cup of coffee while the blood breaks down.”

“You shouldn’t tell me too much about yourself,” said Mister Sun, sitting with a handmade espresso that had been produced by a strange device whose shape suggested nothing but two cubes fucking. He had watched Amanda get lost in methodically selecting, weighing, and grinding the coffee beans, tamping the ground coffee and hand-pumping the espresso out of the device with extraordinary focus and vigilance.

“In case something happens,” she said. “I understand that. It just seems somehow wrong that you shouldn’t know anything about the person you came to kill. Does that make sense?”

“Um,” he said. “Not really. I did say there was no emotional content in the work.”

“But,” Amanda said, “that makes me just a dead pig in a pen.”

“Amanda, you killed your own business partner with a cleaver and are in the process of allowing a complete stranger to dispose of the body.”

“I did,” she said. Her eyes were flicking side-to-side, very fast, unfocused. “I did do that. And when I said ‘help,’ you could have said ‘call the police.’ Because he had a gun, didn’t he? I could have claimed self-defense. Home invasion. Even though he had a set of keys. But you didn’t say that. Because you would have been questioned as part of their process. Of course you would have been. You broke into my house too. And you might be dressed like a generic service employee of some kind, but I bet you didn’t arrive in America dressed like that. So it was in your best interest to help by doing the job you came to do anyway, thereby guaranteeing my silence.”