“Better dead than alive,” I shrug, and Trigger makes a face like he takes my point.
Lucky fumes silently, still roiling with a disproportionate amount of anger.
“Did I really have to come all the way down here to?—”
“They’re not defective!” Lucky interrupts me, his attention still on Trigger. “They’re fucking meat. Make them eat it! I’m notdragging them back to the car, and I’m sure as shit not burying them out here by myself.”
Trigger shrugs again, his nonchalance clearly designed to get under Lucky’s skin.
“My babies have refined palates, what can I say? And I never said you were allowed to bury them here. You’ll have to take them away and pay somebody else to dispose of your trash. And next time, send a goon that isn’t afraid of a little physical labor. Or maybe just… taller.”
I roll my eyes, because this seems much more like a pissing match between the two of them than something that I actually need to be involved in.
I think I’m getting a headache. As my hand comes up to rub the bridge of my nose, Fallow starts to giggle beside me.
“This is fantastic,” he sighs, looking between the three of us.
“Look, can you just incentivize them or something?” I ask, at my wit’s end.
Trigger gives me a hard look for a minute, before stooping to grab onto the body closest to him on the ground. It’s naked, the clothes presumably in a burn bin somewhere, and when he starts to handle it, I can see everywhere that Fallow’s blade sunk into the man earlier today.
It’s a reminder I didn’t need of this morning, and I move my gaze and my body as far away from Fallow as I can manage before I get distracted.
Trigger hoists the corpse, demonstrating a kind of strength that’s impressive enough to have Fallow wolf-whistling.
“Knock it off,” Lucky and I both say at him in unison, which is frankly more terrifying than the gators. Fallow’s eyes widen as he looks between us, and I fight back the flush threatening to stain my face.
“Possessive?” he asks, although I don’t know which of us he’s talking to, and I don’t really care.
“Shut the fuck up. Both of you.”
I’m going for a commanding tone, but I think it falls flat. Thankfully, we’re all distracted when Trigger finally gets closer to the water and heaves the damn thing in, landing with a splash near the other body.
The gators don’t even flinch. One gives the body a slow-blink and then just disappears entirely beneath the surface of the water.
“I don’t know what to say, Colm. They don’t want it. Y’all can fish those out and take them somewhere else, because I don’t want them rotting here and poisoning my water,” Trigger says, arms crossed.
“Alligators only eat once a week in the wild. They can go years without food before they starve to death. You’re not going to convince them,” Fallow says, like a fucking encyclopedia.
“I don’t want to know why you know that,” I say before turning my attention back to Trigger. “Jesus fucking Christ, do you not have something else we can feed them to? I’m not spending all goddamn day on this.”
I feel exhausted, even as I spit the words.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Fallow says, bouncing on his toes as he grins beside me. “Snatch!”
The three of us blink at him, waiting for some follow up, which makes him sigh like we’re the weird ones here.
“Snatch.The Guy Ritchie movie.”
Still, nothing.
“Fucking Americans,” he mutters. “No fucking culture. Not even Brad Pitt can drag you to a decent film.” Fallow sighs again, looking like a put-upon ingenue in the golden afternoon sunlight, before he continues. “They have those big hogs. The ones raised for meat. And they feed people to it. Do you have hogs?”
Trigger’s eyebrows climb upwards before he answers. “No. No hogs. I only do wildlife here, not domestics.”
“Is there something else big enough?” I ask, problem-solving the stupidest problem I’ve ever been roped into.
Trigger’s mouth twitches, like he’s going to answer, but he stays silent. Lucky notices anyway.
