Adam Contini is an amateur writer and professional recluse who currently lives somewhere in Pennsylvania.
~~~
Somewhere out along the highways of east Colorado, plains full of man-high grasses rubbed affectionately against the sky and gentle hills tumbled away from the road toward a horizon that, on a clear day, bristled full of mountains. For acres in every direction, the landscape was empty of anything but the soft fur of rolling hills … and feedlots, each larger than half a dozen football fields combined, that dominated acres of land and were crowded with the country’s most popular source of meat so that you’d be forgiven for thinking that the area from fence to fence consisted of a sea of white flesh and hair. Flanks flexed nervously between silky tails and exceptional manes. 150,000 bulky unicorns per lot, crowded together tightly enough to prevent any undue exercise, fed dozily from concrete troughs.
Tossing some refuse outside, meat packer Benny Porcini could see a tour underway in the middle distance—big shots of one stripe or another were ogling the livestock with what was no doubt an air of near-understanding while Trench pointed vigorously and called attention to the hallmarks of quality meat that they were to pretend to appreciate. Benny could almost hear the hmms and exquisites from where he stood before he returned to work.
Earlier, Gus Trenchmouth III had given the crew the rundown: The big shots would be shown the inside of the factory soon, and the packers were not—repeat not—to be seen nor heard under any fucking circumstances if they knew what was good for them. Standing arrogantly in his polo shirt and fleece vest in front of a fifteen foot tall painting of Ronald Reagan, Trench pointed to the red light bulb behind its protective metal grate and emphasized its importance. It was the shut the fuck up light, and when it was on, they were to do precisely that, with the lights off, and pretend to be brooms in a closet. They were not to turn on the lights, they were not to talk amongst themselves and they were absolutely not to leave the fabrication room. They were not, in any meaningful way, to exist, as far as that tour was concerned. This was time for which they would not, of course, be paid and if Trench heard so much as a peep from anyone about that particular fact, he was more than happy to extend said compensation indefinitely. The big shots were never ever to know how the real work got done, and would instead be given the most thorough possible tour of a clean and disinfected show room full of post-processed carcasses that had never been used for even a little actual meat production and that would not, therefore, send them screaming to therapists and/or the press.
Until that light went on, however, the slaughter would continue.
The way it worked was this: the unicorns couldn’t be caught, couldn’t be ridden, couldn’t have been lassoed even by the greatest wranglers in history if they’d had a mind to try. Like so many of the species that arrived with them, they obeyed laws often divorced from the physics of our world, so that ropes slipped off their bodies like haunted anklets and mounting cowboys fell to the dust with a frustrated grunt and reddening cheeks. No, the job of turning them into profit-making assets had to be applied according to the unicorns’ own rules. Thus, the necessity of bait. At this plant, the role of bait was played by Kim Hyun Woo, a well-meaning, pimply young man who was obsessed with Starcraft. Hyun Woo (Benny, and pretty much everyone else, called him Kim) was a fugitive from North Korea who had fled to America with no understanding of the English language and who, arriving on these shores, had spent all of his free time watching South Korean Starcraft tournaments (viewable more easily from American cell phones than anywhere on North Korea’s siloed intranet), feeding off the super-compressed free stream featuring the greatest players on earth, the first and most treasured role models he had found with whom he shared any commonality. He had, therefore, had to craft an idea of himself from the clash of these three disparate cultures. He learned English heroically: forcing himself to watch the American commentators of the Korean games on his budget phone and piecing what he could together from his limited knowledge of common terms and a considerable deductive ability. He slept on a cheap mat in a dingy basement in town, along with half the shift’s crew, among discarded chip bags, diapers and mice. Through a window of his camper van, Benny often spotted young Kim, face lit only by the phone’s blue screen, spending an evening gripped by the exploits of his heroes and quietly, unceasingly mumbling the English words to himself. It was an uncommon adolescence, one result of which, along with a quiet demeanor and an aversion to eye contact, was that he ended up becoming that most prized of slaughterhouse employees: a virgin of legal working age. He wasn’t proud of this, and he had certainly never intended to earn the onerous distinction, but a job’s a job.
So the first step of the shift was when Kim headed out into the lots at the appropriate time to let as much livestock as possible get a hint of him on the breeze. Tempted just as the old fairy tales claimed, they started to crowd him gently, and the nearest all rubbed their muzzles against him affectionately. Though it was diminished by the knowledge of what was to come, Benny could tell that Kim enjoyed this part, at least, for what it was. He reached both arms out as wide as he could, petting the unicorns within reach and cooing to them softly. Soon, he lead them inside, allowing the tapered steel fences and a few men with steel poles to funnel them into a nice, orderly, single file line up a series of shallow switchback ramps until they reached the killing floor. The herd didn’t resist at all, partly because the entire operation was arranged to keep them from seeing their ultimate destination, but also because they were so overfed, and pumped so full of steroids, that they existed in an unnaturally languid state.
From there it was up to the rest of the crew. Benny could picture the whole disassembly line perfectly from long experience. The men with poles would shut the gate once the queue was full, at which point it was time for the knocker, a half-ogre named Kronk, to do their duty. A steel and plastic bolt pistol hung from the ceiling, a blunt little instrument that they fired at each horned skull, dispensing and retracting a fat metal stud like a large dull sewing machine needle that splattered blood and bits of brain. After a few dozen carcasses the pistol always began to fail and Kronk, having no time to waste and quotas to hit, grabbed the sledgehammer that lay next to them at all times for just such a contingency and began their task manually. This stunned the beasts, who then received a loop of chain around their rear legs and were promptly lifted to the ceiling track, on which they’d be carted upside-down and twitching to their next destination: the sticker. Here, their carotid arteries were sliced by Luis, who bore a knife that began the shift as a sharp blade but inevitably became so dull that it needed to be applied with extra force to be effective and humane. Trench neither needed nor asked for humane slaughter but it was important to Luis, who hit the carotid every time, silently and grimly, as blood soaked him through his chain mail suit. Luis was always silent, and had never actually said a word to anyone he worked with. Rumor abounded, of course, that he must have Seen Some Shit in his native country of El Salvador. In one rumor his entire family had been killed while he hid under a bed without making a sound. In another he was the killer, now silent in penance for his crimes. But rumor is the child of ignorance and stereotype, and no one really knew anything at all about Luis except that he was a highly effective sticker. Benny, for his part, had no intention of attempting to pry open that particular locked box.
In short order, everyone present was working in ankle- and then knee-high rivers of blood and gore. This made everyone in the fabrication room miserable. Not just because of the death, not just because this specific butchery involved a creature of mythically renowned innocence, but because of a property that, as near as anyone could tell, was unique to unicorns. At the instant of death unicorns radiated some kind of short, poorly understood psychic explosion of sadness. Those who have experienced it often said that it was indescribable, the worst feeling of their lives. But Benny described it like being drowned beneath a tidal wave of your own worst memories, piled one on top of the other until your entire life appeared in your mind as a simultaneous picture-on-picture overlay of every horror and failure from which there was, and could be, no escape. It was an experience that, though brief, had claimed more than its fair share of lives. But in the fab you had to do whatever it took to keep working through it. Many of the workers turned to drug abuse. Many of them were supplied in this by Gus Trenchmouth III.
Benny’s own montage of pain was a return to the war. In the fab, he was in charge of the kidneys and other organs, scooping them from each opened chest cavity with his bare hands directly into a vat that itself would be emptied, its contents shipped to various other food processing facilities to become sausage, spam, scrapple, and the ever-popular nugget ... except that he could see in his hands both a kidney and the slick, spongy evidence of atrocity, the remains of his squad-mates and enemies, gone long ago, that felt so real and present that he couldn’t keep himself from sobbing as openly as everyone else…
“Watch your head, idiota!” this from Rosie, who spotted the latest carcass rocketing toward Benny on its track and likely to clock him if he didn’t duck. Rosie: the true chief of the shift. Rosie: taker of no shit whatsoever. Rosie: possessed of muscles—earned lifting everything she could find in the absence of a gym—which gave her arms an appearance like the famous riveter who was not, but easily could have been, her namesake. Head breaker and wielder of the power saw that neatly bisected each bleeding carcass before it moved on to the rest of the line ... Rosie’s was the voice that everybody listened to, and Benny was no exception. He ducked and the carcass continued on its way, dripping volumes of blood all over him and everyone else it passed, eventually reaching the skinners and carvers to have its hide ripped off, flank meat separated and hooves ripped free to join the kidneys and other organs.
Jorge, an Argentinian drifter and hapless poet, swung his head around a passing rump and chopped into a rib cage, saying “Bugs, my sister, watch that knife, unless you’d like some more of my fingers to join the ranks of departed meat bits.” This request was met by his partner in rib-chopping with tears and a string of curses in her native goblin language. Like the other refugees from the war, Bigleek (pronounced buhGLEEK) spoke what they called Common but which sounded to Benny’s ears like a bizarre pidgin French. Bugs and Kronk both spoke English well, but under the current psychic assault it was no wonder that they lapsed into the language of their memory and pain—returning, perhaps, to the circumstances that stranded them on this side of the mystical gates that had brought them here.
Regarding the unicorns, it was said that back in their own universe, when one of them answered nature’s call there wasn’t even any evidence left. Just a slight tooting sound, a multicolored puff and a faint whiff of sugar. Here in the fabrication room, it was nothing so pleasant. What they produced here, what came sliding from the ruptured bowels of the once majestic creatures, was closer to tar—rainbow colored, sure, but refractive and oily—a viscous sludge of the foulest-smelling offal imaginable … tons of it eventually funneled off to a man-made lagoon not far away that caused half the county to smell like a tire fire doused in rotten milk, the product of an all-corn diet and more steroids than a nation of weightlifters could take in a year. And all of it ran down and over the meat that traveled along conveyors through Packaging to be wrapped in plastic and on to Logistics to be shipped to every fast food restaurant in the world. The fabrication room was the worst smelling place on Earth, and every surface was splattered to greater and lesser degrees in colorful, tarry spots.
Hearing this, it would be natural for anyone to think that, what with the color of their refuse, maybe the unicorns’ blood was also colored whimsically, that everyone in the fab was covered in a motley rainbow of splatters.
No. It was red. There was no escaping what this was.
Roughly mid-shift, the lights shut off and the caged red light came on. Machinery that didn’t even stop running when the overnight cleaning crews came in (and all too often fell in the grinders or beneath the conveyor belt gears to their deaths) shuddered to a halt for the first time in the memory of this crew. Rosie let loose a single extended shhhhhh, and everyone stood as still as death.
Except the unicorns, who had not really been given the memo.
One of them, Kronk’s most recent stun, still alive in its Fool tarot card position, twitched in its chains and came violently to consciousness, panic and action. It twisted back and forth, screaming as it swung until first one leg slipped free of the chain loop and then the other and the poor creature hit the blood-soaked cement floor with a wet bone-snapping sound. One of its front legs was broken, and the animal screamed even louder—a particularly distressing sound for everyone present—making a valiant and partially successful attempt to regain its footing and flee in the darkness to the only source of light it could see. It managed a hobbled, tripedal shuffle toward the red bulb and the demonically lit, smiling face of the Gipper.
Rosie hissed at Kronk, the big softy shaken and crying, to do something but Benny could tell that they were in no shape to swing the hammer so he jumped the conveyor belt to find Kim. Meanwhile, Luis, Rosie, Bigleek and Jorge tried lamely to surround and shush the fleeing mythical creature, which ignored them utterly and clopped toward the large double doors that served as the exit from the fabrication room, to where Trench and numerous big shots were loitering.
Kim, who was neither oblivious nor stupid, had already grokked the situation by the time Benny found him, and had inserted himself between the unicorn and the door, waiting for the animal to detect him and hopefully to calm itself.
That this didn’t happen was not, in Benny’s view, Kim’s fault. Whatever mystical characteristic caused these creatures to gravitate toward virginity, purity or maybe just an excess of pent up hormones did not seem to also have anesthetic properties, and really why would it? However attractive a virgin may be to them, it only made sense that a broken leg would dominate their attention rather spectacularly, and this poor specimen could stop neither screaming nor thrashing. As it lurched in its side-to-side manner its hooves were largely unstable, slipping on the blood and partly failing to favor the injured leg. As Kim approached the beast, hands out in a pacific gesture and making gentle shushing noises, the unicorn slipped and stamped its undamaged front hoof on Kim’s foot as it tried to stabilize. Kim fell over screaming while the unicorn finally tumbled through the door in a flood of reception area light and dragged itself horribly toward Trench and the touring big shots, whose own expressions suddenly and rapidly approached the hysterical.
Trench failed to meet the moment with any kind of dignity. He threw himself at the big shots saying “No no no,” grabbing shoulders, pushing, urging them to look away and believe him: this was not how things normally were. At which point Kronk came stomping through, tears in their eyes and hammer in their hands, tight-jawed and determined. Kim, still sobbing on the floor and gripping his mangled foot, cried out for them to stop but it was no use. With just seven mighty swings, Kronk brought the heavy weapon down on the doomed animal until nothing, absolutely nothing, in the room was making a sound.
* * *
Once the big shots had driven off in their big cars, Trench roared back into the fab, screaming at the crew about how much money they’d just cost him and that they had better pray to God that the big shots didn’t see anything else that went on in that room. He shot a look at Kronk and opened his mouth to speak before coming to his senses enough to note the remarkable difference in his and Kronk’s relative sizes and therefore turned, instead, to Kim, who was still sitting on the floor in tears and trying to hold his foot together.
“You! You little fucking freak, you were supposed to keep the god damn things calm! Did that look fucking calm to you?!” Fists balled, he moved toward Kim but was stopped short when he saw Rosie standing there in front of him. Had she always been standing there? Benny had been staring hard enough at Trench that he hadn’t noticed her move, but he also knew that Rosie was possessed of the ability to see shit coming and note the location of the fan. Someone else might have stepped out of its way, but that was Rosie for you. She was a woman in difficult times—vulnerability was no stranger to her, nor the necessity for action. She had a look, directed squarely and unflinchingly at Trench, that made it clear she was not letting him get any closer to Kim.
“Do you think I won’t put you down on this floor right now, Roselita? Do you really want to try me?”
“No,” Rosie said. “That’s not how this is going to go.”
Benny didn’t know what urged him to step up behind her. He wasn’t sure if that was what she had been implying, or if she was simply and correctly confident that she could handle Gus Trenchmouth Jr’s junior, but in an instant he had a speedy epiphany: there was simply no other acceptable place to stand in that moment than behind Rosie, a fact made clearer when he realized that everyone else had done the same thing.
“Of course we did,” he thought.
* * *
They were all fired. Armed men escorted them out.
Outside, by the bus stop bench, Rosie stared back at the ranch. The three feedlots stretched away for acres below a blue sky fading with distance to cloudless brush strokes of red over the mountains.
“I’m freeing those unicorns,” she said at last. And that was that.
“How we doin’ it?” Benny asked.
“Um, actually…” It was Kim. “I have a plan?”
* * *
Midnight, outside the lot fence, and Benny had no idea what they were supposed to be doing.
“What are we supposed to be doing?” he asked.
“I dunno,” Bigleek said. “Kim said his friend was gonna meet us here.”
“We’re, um … here,” Kim said from out of the darkness, then stepped close enough to be seen. He was leaning on a makeshift crutch and the shoulder of someone new, an old man dressed in a criminally uncool fashion: Bermuda shorts, socks in knock-off Birkenstocks, sunglasses (in the dark!) that seemed to have little margarita glasses molded on the temples, and a t-shirt over his scrawny chest that bore a faded graphic of Cheech and Chong.
“Cook Mallard, at your service,” the old man said, and bowed, causing Kim some discomfort before he clumsily righted himself.
“Kook?”
“Cook, yes. Or you can call me Mal.”
“Kim, this is your friend? The key to your whole plan?”
“Mm. Yes. He’s a bonjwa. He’s important.”
“A bone jaw? What on earth are we talking about here? How is this old man going to help?”
“Bonjwa, a master.”
Benny saw Bigleek seem to suddenly understand something and step back.
“Oh hells. Kim, you didn’t say… we gotta go. Benny, this is not okay. We gotta get out of here.”
“Bugs, what’s wrong?”
“Benny, this old man is a fucking wizard.”
It made sense, now that she said it. The guy had a very long white beard and looked both bookish and moderately insane, so Benny shared Bigleek’s fear. When armistice had been reached and the treaties all signed, the one set of people that no one on either side of the war had wanted anything to do with were the wizards who had started it all. Every human on earth knew that these people were insane, but more importantly dangerous. And the orcs, goblins, elves and others who came through the gates with them all blamed those very wizards for being tyrannical overlords who had committed them to the foolish and aspirationally genocidal enterprise against their will in the first place, even before they realized just how excessively armed and bloodthirsty the parties that awaited them on this side were. Benny had thought there were no wizards left on earth. The end of the war had seen them either falling in battle or fleeing in disgrace through their own portals, then slamming the damn things shut so that the foot soldiers like Bugs and Kronk were suddenly homeless, defenseless and at the mercy of their enemies. It had not been good for anyone, but for the rank and file of the invading armies, it had been the worst of all possible outcomes.
“Now now,” Mal said. “There’s no need to be alarmed. I’m not one of those awful evil wizards, with the death magic and the invasion plans and all that. I’m honestly more of a neutrally-aligned type of guy, if admittedly a bit on the chaotic side, and anyway, I can pick a lock like nobody’s business.”
“So can a teenager with access to YouTube tutorials. Kim, what in the hells are we doing here?” Bugs looked about ready to freak out.
“We need to get the locks open on all three of these lots, but they’re alarmed and there are dozens of gates to open. We can’t get them all open in time, and none of us can disable the alarm. If we want to get this done, we need Mal. I know how it looks. I won’t make you do this. But this is the plan I have. You don’t have to trust Mal, but I do. I understand if you want to go. It won’t be easy, but Mal and I can try to do it alone.”
No one responded for a few heartbeats, and ultimately nobody moved. Bugs didn’t look any happier, but she looked resigned and determined. Kim took a deep, shuddering breath.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re split up into control groups. Bugs, Benny: You and Mal are control group one. Kronk and Luis are control group two, they’re already scouting the second lot’s gates and will open them as soon as we open ours. Rosie and Jorge are at the third lot. Once Mal has done his part, all we need to do is open the gates and then you drive me to each lot to lure the unicorns out. We’ll need to move quickly, because even with the alarms off someone is bound to notice something.”
“Okay, but then what? Where on earth are the unicorns supposed to go? Where on earth are we supposed to go?”
“Leave that to me,” said Mal. “It’s not a secret or anything, I just haven’t had a chance to be properly mysterious in a while, so indulge me.” Benny and Bugs shared a worried look.
“Ok, everybody, step back,” the old man said. “I’m about to meddle with the primal forces of nature, so... y’know, keep clear, man.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a second. He stretched both arms upward dramatically and then slowly, with one finger, tapped the lock on the gate they were standing next to.
“Meep,” he said. The lock he touched immediately popped off and the gate was ready to open. Down the line of fencing, they could hear locks popping off each gate with a loud, metallic ping in the night.
“Abra, I say, cadabra,” Mal said. “And the alarms have been disabled, too, I’ll have you know. You’re welcome,” and then he bowed.
Promptly, alarms went off all over the compound.
“Whoops!”
Everyone cursed, opened the gate and hauled ass to Benny’s camper, except Kim, who limped to the unicorns and let them get a sense of him before he lead them back to the camper van himself. Once he was in, Benny and company tore off at the thing’s maximum speed toward the second feedlot, trailing a massive crowd of fleeing unicorns.
“Kim, just where did you meet a wizard?” Bugs asked while they all tried to hold onto something and Benny floored it along the bumpy plains.
“On a Starcraft forum. He has really great insight.”
“It’s such an elegant game,” Mal said. “Do you play?”
“We don’t exactly have computers,” Bugs said.
Way off beyond the lots, where the plant’s powerful floodlights served as the only light source for miles, faint voices could be heard screaming, as could engines snarling to life. They were going to have company soon. Benny pointed the van straight at the second lot and prayed they could get there before Trench and his cronies got too close. Unfortunately, up ahead and to their left he saw that the company jeeps, pickups and ATVs were, in fact, already racing along the lane between the lots, packed full of gun-wielding degenerates and certain to be on Benny’s heels just a bit after he pulled up at Lot number two.
Mal had an idea. He directed Benny to pull aside just at the intersection with the dirt lane between the two lots. He grabbed Bugs and ran in a bow-legged trot to the center of the road, then faced the oncoming trucks and their murderous passengers. In the dark, it was possible they couldn’t see him yet, since they weren’t shooting.
“Mal, I don’t think you’re gonna abracadabra these guys to death,” Bugs said.
“Of course not,” the wizard replied. “What, are we, psychopaths? I’m not going to kill anyone. Here, take this dynamite...”
“Dynamite?! What… where did you even get this? What are you, Wile E. Coyote? Did you reach off screen to pull this out of thin air? Does it have ACME written on the side?”
A slow and decidedly mischievous grin crept up the old man’s wrinkled cheeks. “Goodness, no, but I have to say, I like the way you’re thinking!”
The wizard snapped his fingers, and a huge anvil fell out of the sky onto the hood of the lead pickup racing toward them, smashing its engine block through the hood and sending the stupid thing into a whirling collision with a nearby ATV. This set off a chain reaction of fender-benders that gave them a few more seconds to complete their task.
“Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo-hoo!” said the wizard. “You know, I wasn’t totally sure that would work? Goodness, but I do love this world, sometimes.
“Now, quick! Bury that dynamite upright in the dirt, leave maybe an inch sticking out.”
The Wizard then patted and prodded himself until he produced a pair of small wire clippers from no-one-knew-where and clipped the fuse of the buried explosive so close to the stick that the top of the thing was just a flat circle. He licked a finger, wiped it on the circle, and legged it back to the van, dragging Bugs in tow.
“You know, I really believe their cartoons are the best art these people make. They are truly brilliant.”
“Yeah yeah, you old loon. Just get in the van.”
By now, the recovered pursuers were shooting. Bullets flew around their vehicle and the odd hole began to appear in the walls as everyone ducked for what little cover they could find. As they drove away, Benny, hunched behind the wheel and steering by what he could see just above the dash, spoke up.
“Hey, Mal... I don’t think you remembered to light the fuse back there.”
“Light the... I am a wizard, man.” With that, he poked his head out a window and howled, “Behold! My Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modula-tor!”
Benny could just see, in the side view mirror, a tiny spark ignite where they’d buried the dynamite, which promptly detonated and made an enormous pit in the earth right in front of the pursuing vehicles. They had no time to turn aside or brake in order to avoid the nasty spill awaiting them. Trucks and ATVs roared into the pit, going practically vertical as they crashed into the newly exposed earth and each other. Those that didn’t fall in directly still ran at almost full speed into the backs of the vehicles that had become perched just on the edge of the pit, completing their fall and abruptly terminating their pursuit.
Benny screeched to a halt at the next gate, where Kronk and Luis had already been opening the unlocked gates and trying, unsuccessfully, to coax out the unicorns. Kim stuck his head out the window and called out. The unicorns noticed him immediately and trotted over, joining their comrades. The entire vast Colorado plain outside the lots was soon to be overflowing with hundreds of thousands of confused but peaceful unicorns nuzzling each other and wandering aimlessly while the van, and Kim within it, were temporarily stopped. Kronk and Luis hopped in.
Recognizing his cue, Benny hit the gas, and they were off to lot number three.
Rosie and Jorge were there, the gates were opened, but they’d had as little luck in moving the stubborn unicorns as Kronk and Luis had had. When Benny’s beat up vehicle pulled up and she noticed the positive ocean of equine flesh following it, Rosie thanked God and told Kim he was a genius, producing a flush of scarlet in the young man’s cheeks.
“But what the hell do we do, now,” she said. “Slap all 450,000 of these things on the rump and wish them well? You know Trench and his thugs are still coming, and even if the unicorns get away, he’ll just wrangle them all up again when he finds a new virgin.”
Kim hobbled down from the van and explained. “We won’t have to make them go. They’ll do it themselves. All we need to do is open the door.” He looked at Mallard.
“Okay, man,” the old wizard said. “Just, like, nobody freak out, okay?”
He drew a little red gem from his pocket and, raising both arms in the air, mumbled something nobody could make out and crushed the fragile jewel in his hand.
The air wobbled. It visibly shook, refracting light so that everything they looked at swam dizzyingly back and forth as though they were standing in a swimming pool and looking up at the rest of the world. Then a series of red toroidal shapes opened up in front of Cook Mallard, until they were 40 feet tall and just as wide. Three, then four, then five concentric circles in total spread out from their geometric center before they expanded back along the z axis, forming a kind of telescoping tunnel that opened onto a landscape only a few of the people present had ever seen in their lives.
Despite Mallard’s warning, everyone freaked out. Bugs positively squeaked with her balled up little fist held to her mouth, and Benny went dead silent. All of them, everyone who had been in the war, experienced a small shock seeing the circular, ribbed gate in front of them. Within, a pastoral scene of extraordinary beauty stretched away from them, lazy rivers ran in serpentine pathways over hills and through fields unmolested by any kind of modern industry. Stone towers and thatch roofs populated a tree-rich countryside, mountains taller than the tallest on Earth serving as their backdrop.
“It’s Earth,” Kronk said.
“Our Earth, yeah,” Bugs said tearfully.
“This is the plan,” Kim said. “The unicorns can escape this way. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you up front. We figured the portal would be tough to get everyone on board for. I hope you’re not mad.”
They were, a little. But like so much of their lives since, their memories of the war weren’t categorized easily enough to be reduced to just one thing. In one sense everything in the world had changed, and in another it was quite literally business as usual, thanks to events so massive their impact on the lives of these small people wasn’t even counted as a statistic. What they felt was everything they had ever felt, year after year, since armistice. Anger, sure, but also relief, fear and even some small amount of hope. Over the years, trauma had made each of them a lot of different things, but it had not yet made them bastards, had not yet made them the kind of people who’d abandon a friend in need. They were still in.
The problem was this: it would take hours for so many head of livestock to move through the portal, a process that would slow considerably when one accounted for the immense weight and slowed faculties of these adulterated examples of the species. Benny, Rosie and the rest didn’t have hours, and with Trench and his men finally crawling out of the pit and approaching on foot, they probably didn’t even have minutes. Mal confessed that, at this point, his part was played. If he was going to keep what he called “this colossal fuck-up in space-time” open, he couldn’t interrupt the spell by firing off another. He could not produce anything to meaningfully help them beyond what he had already done. As they always figured it would be, at this point it was up to the meat packers. Rosie looked around, knowing that out of everyone on the crew she was most often the de facto captain, the person they turned to when someone needed to cut through the bullshit.
“Ok, everyone but Mal: make a funnel with your bodies heading toward the portal. Kim, you get in front of these unicorns and start leading them in, I’ll… think of something. Get moving, everyone.”
But bullets began to fly, and most everyone hit the deck. Trench and his thugs had finally gotten within rifle range.
Kim, still standing on his crutch, set his jaw and started to hobble away from the portal and toward Trench. The way he saw it, he might have been the brains behind the outfit, but he wasn’t going to stand aside while everyone else did the hard work and got shot for it. A bullet sent dirt flying up at his feet, and another whizzed an inch past his ear. Terrified, he stopped for a second, but then continued to make his way. Trench, seeing this, set his feet squarely and sighted his hunting rifle at Kim’s chest. He yelled something that he probably thought sounded cool but Benny couldn’t hear it. Trench fired.
Kim staggered back, almost collapsing on his wounded foot, but managed to stay upright. He looked down at his chest, only to see a single unicorn horn stretching out in front of him from the left; the unicorn it belonged to was standing next to him. At the very tip of the horn, spinning like a top, was the bullet Trench had just fired, deprived of momentum, seemingly held in place by the horn itself without any physical contact having been made. It rested, still spinning, in a tightly fitted sphere of colorful magical energy just a quarter-inch from the tip of the horn. The unicorn looked up and the bullet kept its position relative to the horn until the magical creature made a dismissive gesture and flung the brutal and stupid thing away in a harmless direction.
Trench recovered from his surprise and ordered his men to fire. Dozens of rounds were let loose and a cloud of gunpowder smoke grew until the entire brigade of thugs eventually had to stop, owing to a total inability to see shit.
When the smoke cleared, Kim, Rosie, Benny and everyone else was unharmed and dozens of unicorns all had little spinning bullets at the tips of their horns.
“Anyone else get the impression,” Bugs said, “that the unicorns have had just about enough?”
With a collection of dismissive gestures, the captured rounds were flung away to join their departed colleague in harmlessness. Trench was visibly furious, slamming his gun to the ground and jumping up and down in a fit. Eventually, he marched toward Kim. Benny almost thought he saw steam coming out of Gus’s ears.
“You think I’m just going to sit here and watch you steal our livestock, you pieces of trash?” he yelled. “You think I’m some idiot who would just watch millions of dollars in company assets walk away?” He took a knife from his belt. “Fine, I can’t shoot you. Bummer. But I will fucking gut you, you—”
Kronk punched Trench dead in his face. The supervisor and heir collapsed like an old sock and none of his thugs moved a muscle in response.
“I’m sorry,” Kronk said to their friends. “I know violence doesn’t solve anything.”
“It doesn’t?” Rosie said.
“You and I must read very different history books, doc,” Bugs said.
Cautiously at first, Benny and everyone else began helping the unicorns through the gate while Trench’s hoodlums were shooting nothing more dangerous than nervous looks at the unicorns and staying very still. At some point, the idea that they were free and could return home seemed to finally take hold in the herd’s minds and they all ran through it eagerly. It still took hours, but a few dozen of the magnificent specimens stayed behind… maybe to guard against the thugs, who didn’t wait long before they gave up the entire wasted chase and went home.
Helping with the evacuation, Benny experienced a feeling that was closer to actual joy than he had felt in years. He knew that, when this was all over, if he was lucky the best he could expect was a hassle-free drive to another town and another demeaning job and the endless parade of nightmare-plagued nights in the van. If he wasn’t lucky…
When he was young, Benny had gone with his cousins to a nearby lake to gank a neighbor’s dinghy and try with no prior knowledge or experience to fish. Younger than the others, he’d begged in vain for a chance to hold the rod in his hands, to wrestle a flopping fish into the boat, and had received for his trouble only derision. He spent the afternoon staring down the wide mouth of a bucket full of gasping, striped trout. Frustrated and bored, he eventually kicked the bucket over, spilling silvery gilled creatures into the lake and followed them in himself, swimming away in exultant glee. He left the screams of his cousins behind him, pulling handfuls of water front to back as, stroke after stroke, he made his way to a solitary platform of rotting wooden planks to lay there in the sun. Later, he would come to think of it as a perfect afternoon, spent feeling each droplet of lake water evaporate in the heat and the breeze swim tickling across the fine hairs of his body. Perfect less for the time in the sun and more for what he would come to recognize as the immortal satisfaction of saying goodbye—to the fish, to his cousins, and most of all to the idea that what they thought ever mattered. He lay there full of nothing but a sense of abiding freedom.
Past midnight outside the last feedlot, and he knew he would never work in another fab again.
As the last unicorns surrendered their vigil and turned to leave, one of them approached Kim and, with slow dignity, lowered its beautiful head to his feet. Kim didn’t know what to say.
“It’s letting you ride,” the wizard stage-whispered, at which point no one knew what to say, except Luis.
“Holy shit,” he said.
Kim Hyun Woo, possessed of a nobility few enough suspected, knelt cautiously down to thank the magnificent beast, which allowed him to touch the bridge of its nose. Then he climbed on top, and the unicorn bore him softly through the portal.
“Can we…?” Bugs asked, hardly daring to believe it was possible.
“By all means,” Mal said.
“My family,” Kronk said.
Bugs and Kronk looked at each other, exhausted but smiling ear to ear before they ran full tilt to and through the giant, red, ribbed tunnel to their home.
“The rest of you are welcome, too, you know,” Mal said.
“Welcome?”
“But we’re—”
“We fought—”
“I know, man,” Mal said, suddenly serious. He looked at them sympathetically, and for the first time, it occurred to the meat packers that this impulsive miscreant might have joined them for reasons other than mischief and a relief from boredom. “I know. I mean, this is not something we do. Enough of you guys come through one of these gates and people might start wondering when the assault rifles and drones will follow. But the war was years ago, and the people on the other side of that gate have never even met anyone from here. They only know you folks from stories. But this is different. You’ve more than earned a chance at some kind of peace. And, y’know, maybe my people could do with a better example of humankind. Who knows? But if you want it, you are, for real, welcome to come along.” He then sighed.
“I mean, I can’t promise you that our world is any better than yours. You see us as fairy tales, but we’re really just a lot of messed up people, too, right? There’ll be misery to spare over there, just like here, but ... I don’t know. If you’d rather keep on trying out here, I get it.
“For those of you who are interested: that tower you see through the gate there is mine. I’m not in charge or anything, I really just stay in there reading books. But, when other wizards come by trying to raise their ridiculous armies I have a knack for getting them to fuck off.
“So that’s it. That’s the whole pitch. At the end of the day, this’s your call, folks.”
Rosie couldn’t do it. She had people depending on her back home, and Jorge had something similar. Benny asked them if they would really be all right after all of this. Things might get rough for them, and they’d need to get the hell out of town for sure. Rosie reminded him that this was hardly her first rodeo. She’d always been able to take care of herself before and she didn’t have a problem with continuing to do so. Jorge said he had some ideas for new poems. That had always kept him going before. They hugged everyone tearfully, and Mal wanted them to know that people would sing songs about them over on his side, that they do actually do that, believe it or not. Benny and Luis, having no such attachments, hopped in the camper van and waited for Mal to release his spell. Presently, the old man did so and climbed in as the portal began slowly to shrink. Benny then pressed the gas pedal on what he figured was likely to be his last drive. He knew the van would eventually become a plain old, stationary house as a matter of course once the gas ran out, and he figured that was a better start on life than plenty of people got to have.
As they drove through the gate, he asked Mal what the hell his real name was. He didn’t believe for a second that it was Cook Mallard.
“You know, I don’t remember?” the old man said sheepishly. “Haven’t for some time...”
On the other side, Benny stopped the vehicle and got out to look one last time at his old world. Through the closing portal, he could see Rosie and Jorge walking off together, and see Gus Trenchmouth III, unconscious, still laying just where Kronk had left him. Midnight had long passed, and the starry sky was slowly burning away in the first hints of morning with a flourish of orange and blue fire. It wasn’t a bad world, when he thought about it, but he didn’t think he’d miss it. Before he turned to head off into the incredible new day he’d been offered, he was possessed by an urge he didn’t quite know the origin of, but experienced as a familiar immortal satisfaction. As the five red circles shrank inward to a final, closing point in front of him, Benny Porcini waved goodbye to his former home and said the last words he would ever say to that broken, tender, suffering and beautiful old world.
“That’s all, folks!”
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