Termination Shock

The airport fence would stop them, you would think. But swine had a weird genius for sniffing out low places and getting under things.

At the moment during their first conversation when Dr. Rutledge had spoken the words “Moby Pig,” a nagging thought—just the trace of an idea—had come up in the back of Rufus’s mind. It was a little like when you were a man of a certain age and a wild hair began to trouble the inside of your nostril, subtle and sporadic at first, but only getting worse until you came to grips with it and snipped it out. This word “Moby,” it seemed, had aroused some stray recollection. Not until he’d gone back to Lawton to spend time with some of his Comanche relations had he figured it out.

The Comanches were originally Shoshones who had come down out of the north speaking a language that, of course, had no word for “pig.” When they had encountered this alien species in what was now Texas, they’d had to invent a new term for them. The term was muubi pooro. Different bands of Comanches pronounced it in slightly different ways. The first of those words meant “nose” and the second meant something like a “tool” or a “weapon.”

The meaning was clear: pigs used their noses both as tools (shovels for digging) and weapons (tusks for slashing). It just so happened that “Moby” sounded a lot like “muubi.” He guessed that Dr. Rutledge’s phrase “Moby Pig” had gotten crosswired in the dusty electrical closet of his brain with muubi pooro, a term he had heard his Comanche relatives use, and created that nagging itch in his mind.

Once he had figured this all out, he’d even had cause to wonder whether the moby in “Moby-Dick” had somehow emerged from Indian roots. Because sperm whales, just like pigs, used their noses as weapons.

The applicability of all this to the current situation was as follows: pigs could root under just about any obstruction using their nose weapons. Just ahead of Rufus, on the left, there was a stretch of airport fence no more than twenty feet wide that had become overgrown with vines. This must be because there was water there. There must be a low soft patch of earth where some kind of underground drainage situation was happening. Pigs could smell that kind of thing from a mile away. Beneath the fence there was enough of a washout to accommodate Snout. Which meant plenty of room for any other pig in his herd. Pretty soon they were charging under the fence three or four abreast. They paused momentarily on the runway side of the fence. Then, impelled by whatever had panicked them in the first place, they bolted across open land beyond: the airport.

Rufus stopped his truck just in time to avoid hitting the alligator that was running after the pigs. He was marveling at this creature, which was long enough to block both lanes of the highway, when he heard a loud noise to the left. He looked over to see a small jet, landing gear skimming the runway. Blood erupted from a collision between it and one or more hogs, and the entire plane slewed to the right and came down wrong and hard on its front gear.

After that it was just a long tumbling skidding disaster. A whole section of fence went down. Rufus gunned his truck across it and came as close as he deemed prudent given the possibility of fire. He was half out the door when he saw the alligator run right by him. He reached back in and pulled his Kalashnikov down from the gun rack in the truck’s rear window. He had carried it halfway to the plane before it occurred to him to wonder what shocked observers in the control tower would make of a brown man with an assault rifle prowling around a jet crash.

But more pressing matters than that held his attention for a few minutes. When the gator was dead and the wounded man’s bleeding leg tied off, he turned his back on the scene and walked over to where Snout was lying on his side on the runway. Hind legs paralyzed, evidently. Blood coming from his anus and from his quivering nostrils.

Four hundred kilograms if he weighed an ounce. Maybe the cops would weigh him later and publish official stats.

Snout was dazed, eyes half closed. He still had that old pattern of spots on his muubi.

His nostrils twitched as he caught Rufus’s scent. His eyes came open and he tossed his head. But Rufus was too smart to be within range of those six-inch tusks. Anyway, this gave Rufus the impetus to do what needed doing, which was to fire four 7.62 mm slugs into Snout’s brain.

He was still standing there weeping when the blond woman from the jet crash walked up to him and said, “Are you all right, friend?”