The truck barreled down the highway at a steady seventy three miles an hour. Certainly too fast for a few of the sleepy towns Denny passed through. Many of them were simply speed traps for the local and state police to fill their coffers. Every summer the beach traffic would fill these highways like water gushing down a rain spout. Denny was fine with a few tourists getting pulled over and fined, but it was a different story entirely when he had work to get done.

Behind the cab of his tractor a long bed loaded with crates of chickens was keeping pace. Trailing behind the soon to be deceased was a cloud of feathers and dust a mile long. Like all the hauls he did away from local farms, they trailed quite a lot of chicken feathers around the county along their route. There wasn't much of a wind today which meant the cloud Denny stirred up drifted off the road under it's own momentum and came to rest in the fields and houses all along the country highway. Often drivers would try to cut their wind resistance down by trailing close to Denny's bed. He always got a laugh out of frightened drivers who's face lit up bright read with a sudden pump of his brake lights.

When the men were done working, Tom surveyed the scene. A few birds with broken wings, or missing legs lay about the dusty floor in house Four. For whatever reason these birds were not worth the extra effort to run down or to toss into the crates on the back of the large truck. And there were usually always a few birds left behind like this. Tom collected them and took them up to a small old rabbit hutch near the back of the house. He or his father would slaughter, clean, and prepare them later for the freezer.

Tom did notice one thing as the men were filling the truck one last time. The birds. They were - aggressive. Over the years Tom had watched, oversaw, and helped load the trucks countless times. Usually the too fat to walk poultry would only exhibit enough energy to take a few steps away from a collector. Today - the birds were in rare form.

First things first, Tom knew he had to seal the hole in the chicken house. And that meant removing the dead deer carcass. He stood and shook his head clear from the waves of nausea that often accompanied his clean up of the dead chickens. But this time was different, this time there was something more powerful behind his cascading waves of vomit. Perhaps it was just remnants of the River last night washing over him one last time. But Tom thought that deer was a bad sign.

He walked to the shed and grabbed a length of chain, and a saw. If he wouldn't budge by force Tom would be forced to do a little surgery. Funny thing - growing up in a hunting family all his life - disemboweling and dismembering a deer never phased him. These rotting, stinking, bloated chickens were another matter altogether. He always hated cleaning the houses, and he usually ran from the house at least once to vomit. Why should today be any different? Closing the tool shed Tom took the long walk back along the crushed clamshells to the rear of the houses.

Walking past the out buildings, Tom passed the corpse bin where all the rotted chickens lay in layer after layer of rotting layer cake. Tom crossed the crushed shell driveway and headed to the tool shed. Glancing over his shoulder at the old house he felt a pang wash over his heart that was all too common. The sense that the old house was more neglected at times than the corpse bin. Certainly more neglected than the chicken houses themselves. But then - the houses earned their family a meager living. The old house was an endless source of frustration, mounting repair costs, and growing property taxation. In the end, Tom assumed, he wasn't as concerned about the house as he was for himself. He felt neglected. He felt under valued. He felt underappreciated. But none of that really mattered now, because he had a job to do.

The ear bud slipped into place, and soon after a wave of crashing cymbals and guitar riffs flooded Tom's ears. The squeal of Steve Tyler's alto crescendos always seemed to appeal to Tom more than almost any other musician. Aerosmith had been his one confidant on long days in the houses. When the heat was bearing down hard and the humidity wouldn't cease. It was the clever lyrics and bluesy bass guitar that carried his spirits back and forth from the dark endless corridor of the house to the stinking putrid mass steaming into mush at the corpse bin. Now with a full day of work ahead of him, and only half a day's worth of light, Tom was glad to have Steve and the crew with him.

Tom woke up later than usual and his Mom was already screaming up the stairs. Pulling on a pair of week-old jeans, and the t-shirt he wore drinking the night before he moved toward the door. On the way past his overly cluttered dresser Tom grabbed the ear buds hanging from his iPod and slipped the pair into his back pocket. His father never liked Tom listening to music while he worked, but it was the only thing that Tom had found could keep his stomach from churning and breakfast down. It was the one thin layer between the reality of the situation, and the disgusting images that flashed through his mind. The music helped keep him calm and sane a little longer. Long enough anyway to finish the grizzly chore.

Today would be even worse thanks to Mark and Jett and the bottle of bourbon they filched from their dad's cabinet. Tom's friend Mark was the ring leader of their little crew, and more often than not the one to slip away from trouble when he saw it coming. That didn't stop Mark from pulling Tom and Jett into all sorts of misadventures that usually resulted in one or both boys having their hides tanned. Jett always got the worst of it, Tom was sure. His Dad was a raging drunk and a lightweight meth chef. He never cooked enough to get on the radar of big guns at the state level. But the local cops knew where to look if there was a string of meth heads breaking any store windows. Either way - when Jett's Dad brought the hammer down - you sure as hell didn't want to be the nail he was aiming for. And Jett was always the nail.