You’re Chris, pothead hipster and all-around douchebag. You’re hanging with Ethan, your buddy that annoys even all your stoner buddies with his marijuana crusading. He wears hemp clothing, has notebooks made from hemp paper (not that he ever takes notes in class, on the days he bothers to show up), smokes a minimum of three bowls a day, has white guy dreads, buys pot-flavored lollipops (yes, those are a real thing), and is constantly preaching about how marijuana is natural and therefore harmless (he didn’t even slow down when someone told him that hemlock, nightshade, and death lilly were all natural too), it cures cancer, yadda yadda.
Man, you smoke a ton of weed too, but his constant obsession gets on your nerves. He even keeps referring to pot as a “lifestyle”.
Whatever, man. You’re just here to smoke blunts.
“Dude,” Ethan says as he blows a stream of pot smoke into your face. “Imagine, like, there’s no possessions. Like, whoa, man. Whoa. WHOA.”
“You’re really out of it, y’know that? Pass the bong, quit hoggin’ it.”
“Naw, man, it just… oh shit.”
“What?”
“Oh SHIT.”
“What?!”
You’re starting to get paranoid. What, is there a cop peeking through the window? He just remembered he left five pounds of dank weed sitting on his desk in class? What the hell is it?!
“Dude, I just had the BEST idea.”
Oh, geez.
“No, like, really, dude! I scored some 'shrooms from my cousin. We should go camping and eat 'shrooms! It’ll be so awesome!”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Nah, man, naw! It’ll be cool! No cops, no people, no cars, we’ll just hang out with all the animals and happy little trees and chill, y’know? I got some peyote buttons too, we can totally turn this into, like, a vision quest, man! We can all be enlightened like… Geronimo, or some shit.”
You ponder for a moment. There’s all kinds of things that could go wrong here. You could get hopelessly lost while high as a kite. You could get eaten by a bear (do they have bears in this state?). You could fall in a hole and die. You could get bit by a snake. Anything could happen. Neither of you is outdoorsy, nor are you really prepared for life outside of gated suburbia and your sheltered lives of leisure endowed by daddy’s trust fund.
“Fuck it, let’s do it.”
Ethan is driving, his vision only mildly impaired by the cloud of smoke you’re both generating. You totaled your car for reasons unrelated to being high as balls. That telephone pole came outta NOWHERE, man.
“Dude, where are we going?”
“I told you, we’re goin’ to the woods!”
“We’ve been in the woods for an hour.”
“Nah, we gotta make sure we leave all the tourists behind! Just us and Mother Nature, right?”
You shrug. Then you see something shining in the headlights.
“What’s that?”
It’s a yellow sign, obviously homemade, showing a coiled up snake and the words COPPERHEAD ROAD.
Below that, it says NO TRESPASSING. It’s next to a dirt road.
Ethan turns onto the dirt road and starts driving down it.
“What are you doing?”
“Going into the woods, man!”
“This is private property, it says no trespassing!”
“Pffft. If they really wanted to keep people out, they’d have a gate.”
Twenty seconds later, Ethan stops in front of the gate. It has three signs on it.
The first said NO TRESPASSING. TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN.
The second said TRESPASSING MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.
The third had a picture of a sniper rifle and said IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE IN RANGE.
“Uh, I don’t think they really want us on their land, dude. We should turn around.”
“Nah, this is great man! This is real backwoods, hillbilly bullshit! We can totally fuck with some inbred redneck hicks before we get high! It’ll be great!”
“Seriously, this is like something out of Deliverance. Let’s turn around and find a different spot.”
“Weeeeaaaak!”
Ethan turns the car off, switches off the headlights, and grabs his backpack with the huge pot leaf patch sewn onto it.
“You comin’?”
“… we’re fuckin’ stupid, you know that, right?”
You both hop the gate, cursing as your hoodie gets snagged on the barbed wire strung across the top, and walk down the road until you see a small house. It looks old as fuck. There’s a dim light shining through one of the windows and you can hear Rocky Top playing on a scratchy stereo inside.
You look at each other and grin.
“What’d I tell you? Hillbilly bullshit! You wanna fuck with 'em?”
“Nah, you know rednecks are all gun nuts. I don’t wanna find out if those signs are serious. Let’s just find a good spot to trip, a’ight?”
“Man, you’re no fun. Let’s go this way.”
Neither of you thought to bring a flashlight, but the full moon is bathing the woods in silvery light and your eyes are adjusting to the dark. You crunch through the woods noisily, shushing each other and giggling, until you run into something.
“The hell?”
“What?”
“I ran into som- oh, it’s a fence.”
It’s a wire mesh fence, as tall as you, with sheet metal a foot high all around the base. It’s enclosing a big clearing in the woods, with a small barn and four dog houses.
“Oh shit, man, they got dogs. Let’s get the hell out of here before they wake up and start barking.”
“Yeah, I- shit, quiet!”
You both stand stock still as something comes out of one of the dog houses, squats with a grunt, and lays a fresh turd on the ground. You get a whiff of it even from here and it smells vaguely… familiar. You shift your weight and wince as a twig snaps underfoot.
“Daddeh? Dat yoo?”
Wait, what?
“Dude, it’s a fluffy. DUDE! I bet these redneck fucks raise fluffies tryin’ to make money off them!”
“Daddeh? Dawe scawed, pwease say it yoo.”
You look at each other again.
“We gotta fuck with 'em. We gotta.”
“Let’s do it.”
You both scale the fence, dropping down inside it and walking over toward the dog houses and the lone fluffy.
“Whoo yoo?!”
“C’mere, shitrat. Let’s play.”
“Nu wan pway! Sweepies time! Daddeh nu wike stwangews, yoo gu way!”
Ethan grabs the fluffy by the scruff of his neck and raises him to face level.
“Don’t you tell us what to do, shitrat!”
“Hewp! Heeeewp! Da-”
Ethan grabs the fluffy’s back legs and swings it in a downward motion, snapping its neck on the roof of its own house. It flops lifelessly to the ground.
“Holy shit. That was fuckin’ awesome!”
You both spend some time fumbling around in the dark until you locate the latch and swing open the entire front end of the dog house, the fluffy-sized door being too small for you to get through.
“Buh? Daddeh? Wauwa sweepies, why wakies-”
You and Ethan stomp and sweep fluffies with your feet, driving several adults and some foals out into the fenced-in yard. The mares leave behind a half dozen or so still-living foals, all chirping and flopping around helplessly. It takes only seconds to acquire stains you wouldn’t wash out of your Converse sneakers even if you could. The little nightlight inside the dog house makes it easy to make sure you stomped them all.
All the fluffies in that dog house were earthies. The next one is full of unicorns, who all get stomped, kicked, tossed, or otherwise driven out of the dog house. Once again, several chirping foals are left behind and you and Ethan make short work of them.
The third dog house is full of pegasi. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The fourth dog house is all bloated, pregnant dams of all three varieties, and a couple attendant mares. The attendants shriek and run off, abandoning their charges. You and Ethan amuse yourselves by hurling shrieking, pregnant mares into the ground so they burst like rotten watermelons. Two or three bounce instead of popping, and start crying about “bad huwties nu gud fow tummeh babbehs”. One starts hyperventilating and something wet and dark starts spewing from its rear end; you can’t tell if it’s shit or blood. Either one is hilarious.
Then you open the barn and the dim light inside reveals bags of kibble, a couple flat shovels, a couple bales of hay, and…
“Are those alicorns?”
They are. There’s more than a dozen of them, some sleeping in pairs, others in a big fluffpile in a bed of straw in the middle of the barn. They all look up at you.
Then they scream.
“DADDEH! HEWP! HEEEEEEEEWP! BAD STWANGEWS! HEEEEEEEWP!”
You each grab a shovel and start swinging.
A mare tries to run past you out into the yard and you swing like a golfer, smashing her face in with the flat part of the shovel blade. A stallion screams a name, presumably, the mare’s, and leaps at you, teeth bared. Like a fucking fluffy is going to accomplish jack-diddly-squat against a human. You stab with the shovel and partially sever a foreleg. You leave the screeching alicorn to writhe in pain and step further into the barn. A large foal of indeterminate gender, almost full grown, goes skittering by, screaming for its mother. You swing and the edge of the shovel neatly decapitates it; the headless corpse slumps down, blood streaming out of one end and shit out the other.
“Holy shit, that was awesome! Did you see that?!”
Ethan has his shovel raised above his head; at his feet are a bloated, pregnant mare, and a large stallion trying to shelter her with his body. The shovel comes down.
CLANG!
“Whuff!”
The stallion is driven down on top of the dam, legs splayed, and doesn’t move. The mare pukes, shits herself, and starts crying about ‘bad tummeh huwties’. Ethan leaves her, turning to grin at you, blood dripping off his shovel.
“Dude, those rednecks are gonna be SO pissed when they wake up!”
“Totally! C’mon, there’s a bunch outside in a big pile, we should go beat the shit out of them with our shovels before we jet.”
“Right on.”
You both step out of the barn just in time to hear the unmistakeable CHK-CHK of a shotgun being pumped. A light over the door of the barn turns on, bathing the yard and the carnage within in bright light. On the other side of the fence is a tall, lanky man with an unkempt beard and the scariest fucking shotgun you’ve ever seen. Seriously, it’s like something out of a movie. It even has a fuck-huge knife on the end of it, pointed right at you.
“What. The FUCK. Do you think you’re doing to my fluffies?”
You both drop your shovels and raise your hands.
“Shit! Dude, we’re sorry! It… it was a joke!”
“We’re totally sorry, dude! We didn’t mean-”
“Shut the fuck up. Get on your knees.”
You both drop to your knees. Even though it’s cool, you’re suddenly sweating like it’s a million degrees. The man opens a gate in the fence and walks up to you, shotgun never wavering.
“Get inside the fucking barn. Both of ya.”
“C’mon man, we’re sorry, we’ll pay for-”
“Next time you open your mouth, I’m washing it out with buckshot. Move.”
You both get to your feet and stumble into the barn.
“Now strip.”
“What?”
“Did I fucking stutter? Strip naked right now or I’ll kill you where you stand.”
You’re getting that Deliverance vibe again. You look at Ethan; he’s crying now. You both strip naked, shivering in the night. The redneck grabs some cable ties off a shelf and tosses them at your feet.
“Put one around your ankles. BOTH ankles, dumbass! Now you,” he gestures with the shotgun. “Zip tie his hands behind his back.”
You comply, cuffing Ethan’s hands together. Neither of you has been zip-tied since that protest at the university that turned violent. Pepper spray SUCKS!
You feel the tip of the knife press into the small of your back and tense up.
“Put your hands behind your back. You move, you die. It’s that simple.”
You put your hands behind your back and he sets the shotgun down, then cuffs your hands so tight it hurts. You can feel your hands swelling already.
“Geez! Not so tight, dude!”
He makes the cable ties on Ethan’s wrists and both your ankles tighter, then forces you to lay face down on the ground. When Ethan complains about the straw making his junk itch, the hick kicks him in the balls, then shoves his face in a pile of fluffy shit. Both of you are gagged with duct tape.
“Now, don’t either of you move an inch. You move and I’ll kill your asses. I gotta assess the damage.”
You’re Elroy Bigsby, entrepeneur. And right now, you’re fucking pissed.
You’d just finished listening to Rocky Top and switched over to Choctaw Bingo, which was about the most accurate description of your family reunion you’d ever heard, when you heard a racket out in the fluffy pen and grabbed your shotgun. You occasionally had to shoot coyotes that tried to get into the fluffy pen, but you suspected trespassers.
You weren’t big on people. Didn’t like 'em much. Nobody in your family did. Came with the territory. Your granddaddy, Clayton Sr., had been a moonshiner back during Prohibition, running a number of stills and selling homemade whiskey and gin to feed the family. Business stayed good even after Prohibition ended, but then he got drafted in 1941 and shipped off to the Pacific to fight the Japs. He came home in '45 with a BAR that ‘fell off the truck’ and some new ideas to protect the stills that he’d learned from the boobytraps the Japs had made.
Your daddy, Clayton Jr., had followed the family business until he got drafted too. He got out of boot camp and deployed to Vietnam just in time for the Tet Offensive. He came home with some ideas for protecting the stills he’d learned from Charlie, an AK-47 he’d smuggled home, and new ideas to turn a profit. He still ran a moonshine still, mostly for personal use, but his big thing was farming marijuana.
Naturally, you followed in his footsteps, but you volunteered for the army. You spent some time blowing shit up in Iraq during the Gulf War, then returned home to farm pot and make shitloads of money doing so. You didn’t get to smuggle home an M-16 like you wanted, since they were more paranoid about that sort of thing now, but you still got valuable experience shooting people.
Your son, Ira Hayes Bigsby, is in Afghanistan on deployment right now, since we’ve had to invade it AGAIN to “stabilize the region”. In other words, the CIA wants to secure the pot and poppy fields so they can keep turning a business in the drug trade. He can’t smuggle home any M4’s or anything, but during his last trip home he brought home his idea for expanding the family business: poppy seeds.
Opium poppy seeds, specifically. They’re all over the fucking place in Afghanistan, he just stuffed the cotton inside his Zippo lighter full of seeds and brought them home. When he gets out of the army at the end of his current deployment, you and him are going to plant some of the seeds and see if you can’t start producing opium, heroin, etc.
You decided that since granddaddy started the moonshining business, daddy expanding to moonshine and pot, and your son was expanding to moonshine, pot, and opium, you needed to do something to expand the family business as well. You considered cooking meth, but it was dangerous and your wife would shit a brick over the stench, so that was out.
After finding a fluffy pony with a collar during a trip to town for fertilizer and returning it to its owner, you were surprised to discover there was a cash reward for the fluffy. Even more amazing was that it was an alicorn and you got $100 for it. You didn’t even know what the hell an alicorn was before the guy handed you a Ben Franklin for returning it. Shit, you had no idea fluffies were so valuable!
Turns out, they’re not. Not the ferals you rounded up and tried to turn in for money, anyway. You were lucky if you got $5 for a foal with good colors, $10 for an adult; most of the time you got a dollar per foal and $5 per adult. Some they wouldn’t take because of their attitudes or colors and you let them loose again. No sense killing them; sure, they could be annoying and they shit everywhere, but they never hurt anybody. They were like little, fuzzy kids: harmless. So any you couldn’t sell you just released into the wild to do whatever it was they did. Probably breeding more technicolor bastards for you to catch and sell. The ones you could sell, even if they weren’t worth much, were pure profit since all you had to do was catch them.
But then one day your son told you just how valuable fluffies could really be. Carefully bred and trained fluffies could sell for as much as $50, way more than you were making off the ferals. Ones with rare color combinations or so-called ‘designer fluffies’ could sell for over $100, and alicorns were serious money makers. Ones with bad colors went for $300 to $500, and ones with good colors could fetch you over $1,500 apiece.
You did some research, bought some books about breeding fluffies, and started keeping the best of the ferals you rounded up. Then you spent some of the money you made selling weed to buy a couple alicorns as an investment, and you got serious about breeding.
Your regular fluffies have good colors, and once the foals are weaned you make more money off of them than you spent raising them: profit. Not as much as your weed, but it’s still additional income. The alicorns bring you shitloads of cash, and you were staggered to discover one day after adding up the profits from selling your weaned foals that you were making more money as an amateur fluffy breeder than you were as a pot farmer. You could literally stop selling pot entirely and still be making more money than you ever had, and go legit to boot.
Everything was going great. You had some really rare color combinations amongst your regular fluffies, including a Rarity, two Fluffyshies, and a Rainbow Dash (you had no idea where the hell those stupid names came from, but you knew the colors from your books), and you had a record twenty alicorn foals, half of them nearly ready to sell. You were only a week away from making a shitload of cash.
And then these faggots show up and ruin fucking EVERYTHING. You look at them, naked, shivering, one with a tattoo of a band you’ve never heard of, crying like little bitches. They had the nerve to come on YOUR fucking property, jump YOUR fucking fence TWICE, and start slaughtering YOUR fucking fluffies.
First off, you were kinda fond of the little bastards. Sure, they shit a lot and they were annoyingly talkative and dumber than a bag of hammers, but they were still kinda cool. Their shit made GREAT fertilizer for the pot farm too, so even if you kept making the same kind of crap money you’d been making off of ferals they’d have been worth the effort.
But these were your bread and butter. You were about to make a SHITLOAD of money, and these two dipshits fucked it up for you. You’ll probably never get that many alicorn foals again no matter how long you keep breeding.
Eye twitching involuntarily, you lean the shotgun against the wall of the barn and start inspecting the damage.
First, the alicorns.
Of your twenty foals, twelve are dead. Three are seriously injured, probably crippled for life; there’s no way you can sell them now, but if they survive you might be able to keep them as breeding stock. Mares… eight dead. Daisy has miscarried and probably has broken ribs. Susan’s face is crushed in; she’s not responding, but she’s blowing bloody bubbles from her destroyed nose and sinuses, so she’s still alive. Probably won’t be for much longer though. Stallions… five dead. Duke has broken ribs and a spinal injury from getting smashed with a shovel while trying to protect Daisy; he’ll probably live, but you have no idea if he’ll be of any use. Bob is screaming and trying to hug his foreleg, which is flopping around below the knee and will have to come off the rest of the way. You use a cable tie as a makeshift tourniquette to keep him from bleeding to death and continue your triage.
Unicorns next. Thirty foals… eighteen dead, two crippled for life. Mares, four dead, one injured but not seriously. Stallions, three dead, one with his dick and balls chopped off by a shovel blade. You’re not sure whether to patch him up or finish him off; you know you wouldn’t want to live without your manhood. The rest of the unicorns are fine.
Pegasi… pegasuses… whatever, nineteen foals, seventeen of them dead. Including your fucking Rainbow Dash. Looks like you’re not selling very many ‘wingie babies’ this season. Two mares dead, five stallions. One mare with a broken leg.
Earthies. Twenty-two foals, nine dead, four hurt, none seriously. All of the injured ones got trampled by their own mother as she fled. Seven dead mares, two with broken legs, one miscarried and screeching about it. Eight dead stallions, five with injuries, none terribly serious.
Nearly all of your pregnant dams are dead, meaning it’s going to be at least another four or five months before you can get another batch of foals ready for sale, and with all the dead mares, that’s cutting into your breeding stock severely.
You bend down and inspect the body of Dale; his neck is broken and he isn’t moving, but he’s breathing and his eyes are blinking. The fluff on his face is stained with tears.
“I’m sorry, little buddy. I’m so sorry.”
You hug him closely for a second before yanking on his neck with a loud POP, finishing the job. His breathing stops, his eyes glaze over, and you lay his body gently to the ground. Poor Dale. He’d been your favorite earthie and helped you keep track of how all the fluffies were doing, alerting you to any needs or problems. He’d been better at it than the more intelligent alicorns, even. You’re gonna miss the little guy.
You tally the total amount of money you’ve lost and see red. These fuckers break into YOUR fucking property, kill YOUR pets, and fuck you over for a shitload of cash.
You cut the zip ties off their ankles, then pick up your Mossberg 590 combat shotgun, gripping it so tightly that the heat shield digs into your palm, and brandish the M9 bayonet on the end of it.
“You fuckers get on your feet and start walkin’. We’re going for a little moonlight stroll.”
They’re both crying like bitches, making muffled protests every time their tender bare feet step on something uncomfortable, and you poke and prod with the bayonet to keep them moving.
You’re leading them to The Cave.
Only the son that goes into the family business knows where it is. It’s where all the family skeletons are buried.
Literally. Granddaddy put four revenuers from the ATF and its predecessor agency in the cave back during Prohibition and a county sheriff in the 50’s. Daddy put two DEA agents in the cave in the 70’s, and a boy who raped your aunt in the 80’s. The entrance to the cave is hidden, you have to know exactly where it is; several generations before granddaddy used it to hide some bodies, it was used to hide some Confederate gold and a stockpile of muskets at the end of the War of Northern Aggression. The gold was long since sold and the muskets either turned to rust or used for hunting; you still have one hanging on the wall that your great-granddaddy and granddaddy both took their first deer with. It hasn’t been shot since though; granddaddy was afraid to let daddy shoot it, in case it blew up. It’s just a wall hanger now.
You lead them both to The Cave, shove aside the bushes growing over it, and make them wiggle in like worms since they can’t crawl with their hands behind their backs.
You’re pissed enough that you were going to do this anyway, but realistically you have no other option. If you call the cops, they’ll come out to document the crime scene and they might stumble across the moonshine still or the pot farm. And then you’re really fucked. If you let these shitheads go with just a severe and prolonged beating, they’d probably call the cops and lie about how you kidnapped and beat them up or some shit, and you’re back to square one with the five-oh finding your fucking drug plantation.
You shove them along to the back of The Cave, both assholes blissfully unaware that more than half a dozen bodies are buried in shallow graves right beneath them. You pull a rubberized tarp out of the box of supplies kept in The Cave and use it to line another large, shallow grave dug in the back of The Cave. Then you uncap the dozen jugs of industrial-strength drain cleaner and pour them into the pit, eyes smarting and nose threatening to sneeze from the fumes. Once filled to the brim, you toss aside the empty jugs and grab one of the shitheads by the hair and look him in the eye; he squints his eyes shut, blinded by the light from the LED head lamp you’re wearing.
“I’m gonna enjoy this way more than I really should.”
Then you shove him face first into the pit of drain cleaner and hold his face under the surface with your boot. He splashes, thrashes, and blows bubbles, but soon takes a big lungful of sulfuric acid and dies in agony, just like your fluffies. You push his body further into the pit, making sure it sinks below the surface, then turn to the next one. His eyes are bugging out of his skull and he’s making muffled noises you know are pleas for mercy. Just like your fluffies begged not to be killed and maimed.
“You fucked with the wrong redneck, fucktard. Now you’re gonna die like a little bitch; how does that make you feel?”
Without waiting for an answer, you smack him over the head with the butt of your shotgun and then shove him into the pit of drain cleaner. He blows bubbles longer than his butt buddy, but the end result is the same.
You pour in another jug of drain cleaner, just to ensure the bodies are fully submerged, then gather the empties and leave The Cave, coughing and gagging from the fumes. You’ll come back in a week or so to top off the pool of drain cleaner, and in another month the bodies will be nothing but unidentifiable slurry, bones and all. No intact DNA either. Nothing to prove there are even bodies there.
You go through the pockets of the two dead hipster’s clothes, pocketing cash and a couple baggies of 'shrooms, weed, and peyote, remove the batteries from their cell phones, then toss their clothes, shoes, backpack, etc. into a steel drum with some gasoline and burn it all. Then you inform your wife that someone attacked the fluffies; while she gets dressed and grabs the first aid kit to help patch up the survivors, you walk down to the gate and find the car you suspected would be there. After putting on a pair of gloves and searching it for any more valuables, you toss the dead shitheads cell phones in the passenger seat and pull your own out.
“Hey, Victor? Sorry to wake you, man. Listen, if you drive out here right now, I’ve got a car you can chop up. You can have it for free. In fact, I’ll pay you a hundred bucks to take it and everything in it off my hands. I even got the keys. Yeah? Sounds great. See you in half an hour then. Bye.”
You sigh in irritation, set the shotgun back inside the house, and head up to join your wife in dealing with the massacre in the fluffy pen.
It’s gonna be a long fuckin’ night.