Dog Eat Gig
Twilight, the time of wolves, seeps scarlet across the skyscraper skyline, and Carrion rambles about the rumored valley of wild beasts beyond our walled city.
“It’s not like the prisons,” he’s saying, cigarette smoke silvery as his whiskers, exhaled out past the balcony’s discolored balustrade. “They don’t force you to Wildern through lashes and labor there. The valley, you can choose to run the way our ancestors did on all fours. You can Wildern for yourself, on your own terms.”
My eyes fixate on my phone, the encrypted job ads popping up in neon-colored windows only to disappear just as quickly, someone else having claimed whatever illicit dealings appear on the Dog Eat Gig app near nightfall. We are Civilized beasts now, and we must feed ourselves not by the laws of the forest, but of cement and steel and rainbowed pixels.
Besides, with how often and in increasingly dangerous ways we’ve been using the app lately, it’s far more likely Carrion and I will be deemed irredeemable, irreparable. We’ll end up howling in the labor prisons, building bigger cities for these so-called Civilized beasts, rather than the wild valley of his reveries.
“Nightshade,” Carrion whines, my name a high-pitched roll in my friend’s mouth. “Are you listening?
“Sorry, Carrion.” I force myself to stop stress-browsing Dog Eat Gig for a job that will bring in money, but not bite off too many pieces of us in the process. “You were saying?”
Carrion doesn’t always possess the best focus or endurance, but he’s been with me since childhood, loyally following me from gutter to bunk to ill-advised misadventure. His family treated him like the runt of the litter, no matter how old-fashioned a choice that is considered these days. Here, we had promised each other no hierarchy. So I make myself pay attention.
“I was saying, down in the valley, we can choose our pack.”
I tap his sandy-furred head. “Well, we’ve chosen each other. So can we please focus on–”
A notification from both of our phones prickles our ears. To a passer-by down below our tiny apartment’s tinier balcony, the sound would go unnoticed. But after so many jobs, our ears have grown accustomed to the specific frequency of the app.
“A private job?” Carrion asks, brow furrowed. “So someone requested both of us for this task?”
The posters are always anonymous, but the gig-takers must operate behind the same username: building credit, gaining underground notoriety. It’s not unusual for a username to be requested specifically for a job, and yet my fur bristles with a subdermal itch. “We shouldn’t get this, should we? It’s better to find the jobs than let the jobs find us. Less trouble that way.”
Carrion abandons his cracked screen to crowd over mine, our snouts pressed against the neon glow. The stylized icon of a dog, tongue lolling out of their mouth and two Xs for eyes, moves cartoonishly. It pulses with sparks and fluorescence, urging us to click.
Claim the job, get it done, sink deeper. Do it all over again tomorrow.
“Let’s go to bed,” I say, trying to convince Carrion, but also myself, that the job is not worth the high risk. “We’ll figure something out about the money situation.” The rent for our shitty apartment and the skyrocketing synthetic meat prices and ever climbing up from the bottom rung of Lykopolis.
Just as we’re about to close the app, the pouch of cartoon coins next to the dog triples in size before our eyes.
“Holy hell,” Carrion says.
I sigh. As one, we click on the dog icon. Watch the cartoon pulsate one final time, open a gaping canine maw, swallow a golden bone.
With the gig’s details and deadline pending, there’s no need to stress further for now. The worst is already done. Yet my fur prickles in uneasy precognition.
I steal Carrion’s cigarette. Inhale the acrid smoke mixed with our city’s smog. My phone burns a hole through the stained fabric of my jeans, my fur.
Across the darkened skyline of Lykopolis, city lights replace distant, dying stars. And yet the moon looms large enough to devour us all.
#
The small hours take over, howling their hunger. And music, a beat so hypnotic it slinks around us from claw to tail while we approach the squalid stairs leading down into Sirius. This nightclub–tucked between abandoned warehouses and steel peeking out naked and hazardous from the dusty ground–is not easy to find without encrypted coordinates. Most gigs start in Sirius’s nucleus. The music kind, and the illicit business too.
Just like Lykopolis isn’t the only city of Civilized animal species, but the first of many, Sirius too is the first of its kind.
Carrion and I duck through the door after the bouncer–a graywolf dwarfing me even at my full height–has stared us up and down. His eyes linger longer on Carrion’s slimmer frame, more fox than wolf in appearance. I bare my teeth at the bouncer, then feel a frisson of embarrassment at my blunder.
Carrion doesn’t need my protection like that; we have vowed to look after each other. Not because of some archaic pack hierarchy our kind has only semi-successfully shed from our genetic makeup. No, it’s because for the longest time, we only had each other.
He’s not the dog with the biggest bite. Finding the app, taking those early gigs, provided him with freedom never allowed by his tradition-clinging family. While Carrion was treated like dirt at home, I was abandoned as a pup, then left alone by my peers at the orphanage, too big and intimidating for anyone to harm me. Yet cruel words lingered still, scarring my soft underbelly that only Carrion gets to see. To this day I swallow my tongue around people, preferring Carrion do the talking for me.
He groans in my ear over the cacophony of the live performance, amid the smoke and mirrors decor of the club. “Nightshade, I know I was waxing poetic about the valley of wild wolves earlier. But this is just a disgrace.”
And he’s right. As we make our way to the hidden backroom where most dealings take place, we have a full view of the dancefloor. Sweat-drenched fur mingles with the chemical stench of perfume as it wafts above the crowd of our peers. They kick their legs and rub their bodies together on all fours, nipping or kissing one another with alcohol-induced mania under the strobe lights, silver as fake moonglow.
This nightly display at Sirius is no true wildness, no sense of pack. These are rich kids rebelling against mom and dad. Once they get it out of their systems, they will wash in the shower rooms, steam-iron and spot-clean their clothes, and rise back on their hind legs to walk to mansions and penthouses. They will go to university lectures and office jobs in the morning, and not think about what happened here until next weekend. And all the while they will laugh at those who, due to poverty or illness, aren’t seen as Civilized, as neat and well-spoken as the rest of them.
“Fucking hipster pests,” I say, to make Carrion laugh as we finally weave our way past the band releasing over-practiced howls into their mics.
“You’re late,” a voice echoes melodious in the sharp silence once the hidden backroom door has closed behind us. I always feel a sense of doom the deeper we wade into Sirius’ many-layered core.
“Lailah.” Carrion curtsies at the club’s proprietress. “Always a pleasure.”
She rolls her yellow eyes, one half-missing ear twitching at his theatrics. We don’t know whether she lost the tip in accident or fight, but the haggard look fits Sirius’ leader all the same.
“Follow me, boys,” Lailah says, ignoring the way both Carrion and I wince at the word, boys. Just another thing he and I have in common, an understanding in the safety of our cramped apartment: we’re not boys, or men. We are Carrion and Nightshade of Lykopolis.
Lailah isn’t the only broker in the city. But experience has taught us when it’s her we’re dealing with, the gig is too risky to complete with only the security layers provided by the app. The security put in place to protect the client, not us. My ears prickle again. Subtly, Carrion runs the back of his claw along my arm to calm me down.
We never know what the jobs are about, is the thing. We just do what we’re told, swift and stealthy, no questions asked or traces left behind. It does little to alleviate the guilt, the waking up in the middle of the night on the frameless mattress we share, sweaty and plagued by what if, what have we done?
It’s why watching the news to reverse engineer what bad deed or dirty job we have contributed to is inadvisable. Yet Carrion and I both do it, when we think the other isn’t watching.
We follow Lailah, not into her office as usual, but toward the stairwell dark and dank, down into the twisting bowels of Sirius. It’s where the liquor is kept: all the illegal moonshine, along with the wolfsbane absinthe Lailah and her people manufacture under the snouts of the militia patrolling other clubs. But not this one. Sirius, somehow, has always felt off-limits, a dirty oasis in the middle of Lykopolis’ violently enforced Civility. Just like Dog Eat Gig, in a way.
Our package awaits us in the deepest part of the cellar.
“Why’d you keep it in the liquor chiller?” Carrion asks. He’s smarter than to ask what the package contains. Who it’s for. We need our fur and skin to stay on our bones, after all.
Lailah smiles: a baring of teeth more in warning than in mirth.
“Pick-up time is dawn,” she instructs. “Client can’t be seen anywhere near Sirius. You will know the drop-off place for the drone to collect when it’s time. Until then, keep the package in that hole you call an apartment–no need to freeze the box further. And do not, under any circumstances, open it. Am I clear, boys?”
We gulp and nod, our discomfort for the word boys giving way to a chill up our spines. I knew this was more clandestine and dangerous than our usual picks-and-drops, hence the hefty price tag attached to it via the app. Once the built-in, closed-circuit tracker shows the drone has collected the object, money will transfer into our accounts anonymous, untraceable.
We will finally have enough to visit the bodega past dawn, buy synthetic jerky and a can of beer, perhaps even some genetically modified bread to ease our hunger. This is the price we pay for Civility, all food tasteless yet expensive with how modified it must be to contain the necessary nutrients now that meat is banned. A trade for our evolution, our technology, our life in Lykopolis and all the other cities of once-prey and predators, now Civilized beasts.
The package is a black box: medium-sized but heavy, and cold to the touch. Carrion hisses as he helps me load it into our pawprint-protected backpack we use for such operations. Lailah doesn’t give another word, turning back to her work as if we were never there. Probably to prepare another pick-up for some rich client paired with a desperate app user.
“Why do you think it’s so cold?” asks Carrion once we’re in the club’s secret passageway, an underground warehouse sewer whose manhole will spit us out far from Sirius’ grounds. “What if it’s the cryogenically frozen head of some dead politician or missing ambassador?”
“Stop it, you know asking questions only makes this harder.”
Back above ground, a graffiti mural gives me pause. It must have been spray-painted during the night, the pigments still shiny-wet. Would explain how the patrolling militia and drones zooming periodically overhead haven’t covered it up yet. The mural depicts a coven of wolves crouched on all fours and naked as the day they were born, fur agleam under a moon not veiled by smog and exhaust fumes, but low and bright in the sky, fat as a teardrop. A giant alien fruit you could bite into and sate a fathomless, hereditary hunger.
The wolves are howling in prayer, in praise. They are us and they are not. We’re Civilized now, we worship concrete and steel and artificial, lab-grown meat; Sirius and Dog Eat Gig serve as an escape from our manufactured realities.
Carrion and I walk on, yet when I close my eyes, I can still see that white graffiti moon like an open wound behind my eyelids. It’s not worth it, I think sometimes, being capital-C-civilized. Worrying about money and shelter and social norms. Being sent off to prison to build material for more cities if you misbehave.
The backpack is heavy on my shoulders. None of it is worth it, and yet we walk on, together as one. I stumble a couple of times, weak and dizzy with hunger. When Carrion asks to wear the backpack the rest of the way home, my first instinct is to say no, to protect him, possess him. But it’s instincts such as these that scare me, make me feel like I’m as bad as his family was.
His fangs flash a wry smile, because he knows my struggle. Then he shrugs on the backpack anyway and pats me gently on the shoulder. His touch lingers, as does his rising scent of cardamom and cloves.
It’s moments like this–despite the danger and the hunger, or maybe because of it–that the air sparkles neon-bright between us. We feel it sizzle as we weave between darkened back streets and side entrances, to our apartment near the looming city walls where the dawn light won’t reach and the rent is cheaper.
We don’t own each other; in fact we haven’t dated in a while, and even back then we were never exclusive, Carrion and I. And yet in some ways, we are a mated pair. With the package stored in our apartment and the canine cartoon of the app howling like a cuckoo clock with each passing hour toward dawn, we fall together in bed. We are a tangle of limbs and fur and twining tails, trying to keep each other warm, and awake until the delivery time.
People wouldn’t know just by looking at the two us, how well Carrion covers my body with his, pressing every part of me down with grounding firmness. How he lets me pretend I’m a helpless sheep, a little lamb in wolf’s clothing, a prey animal trusting his wolfish shepherd to guide him home.
Before my pleasure has crested, he bites into my shoulder from above and pants, “The package… What if there’s a dead baby preserved inside, to be smuggled and buried outside the city undetected?”
I roll away from Carrion, groaning. “Hey!”
“Dead baby not appropriate pillow talk?” he asks, only half-apologetic.
The mood has vanished. We both sit up in bed, the covers slung loosely around us, and stare at the foreboding black box in the corner of our cramped living space.
“We can’t grow a consciousness now,” I say. Not when we’re this close to getting triple the usual payment. Enough for us to eat and rest and stop drowning for a week, then maybe look for a job, a legitimate paying gig this time.
“But what if it’s–”
I muffle his next words with a pillow. His muscles twitch paw to tail, eyes gleaming with a feverish sort of impatience. I imagine if we hadn’t trained such things out of our DNA down the generations, by now he would be whimpering and scenting his frustration instead of using Civilized speech.
“Let it go, Carrion. It’s probably just drugs smuggled from a different-species city so rich people can experience the placebo effects of, I don’t know, catnip.”
Trade between different-species cities isn’t prohibited, but it’s heavily regulated by customs and searches. This is part of the reason Dog Eat Gig has so many low-profile jobs. Smuggling every-day objects free of hassle is an amateur’s job. It’s what we did for quick money back when Carrion and I first ran away. It was after he’d beaten his ma and dad to a pulp, tired of their unrelenting oppression. After the police had blamed the assault on me, big, dumb, orphaned Nightshade. So we said, fuck all this and made our escape together, into the encrypted pixelated maze of Dog Eat Gig.
I look away from the sleek black icebox, my body throbbing like a bruise. I realize it has for a long time now. I’m forgetting the last time I slept for more than a couple hours at a time. All the many small injuries accumulated during gigs always catch up to me afterwards, spreading poison-slow under skin and fur.
“Hey, you. Go sleep,” Carrion says, gentler than usual.
“But–”
“I’ll keep watch. Wake you up closer to dawn.”
I want to protest, but my eyes are falling shut, a vertiginous darkness. In my dream, I cannot see the locked box guarded by Carrion and I panic, only to realize that I am inside the box. It’s undulating red like warning lights, like the inside of a heart. I push my paws against the box’s sides, but instead of being freezer-cold, the walls are warm and wet, palpitating with some strange pulse that has my blood racing and my body shooting upright in our mattress.
“Nightshade,” a small voice quavers. It takes me a moment to realize it belongs to Carrion. “I fucked up.”
“What–”
“The box, I opened it. It felt like it was calling out to me and I couldn’t stop myself. Now I guess we know why.”
Like a nightmare where everything is slow and treacly, I untangle my tail from the sweat-soaked sheets, and stumble to the opened box. Carrion leans over it. In the dark, his eyes flash bone-white, and stranger than I’ve ever seen them.
I realize my dream sensation–that pulse of wet and warm and red–has followed me to the waking world. Only this time it’s a scent, it sits under my aching tongue so heavy it grows tangible. Together we lean over the box and look. And inhale. And gasp in unison even as drool drips from our aghast mouths.
“Meat,” I say.
“This doesn’t smell like any meat we’ve ever had,” Carrion replies, breathless.
The slabs are frozen, but still red beneath their layer of ice. The white marbling peeks coquettish through the rosy hue. A row of perfectly tenderized fillets, no uniform repetition like the cuts from the synthetic meat factory, but each one unique in shape, size, coloration.
“Herbivore meat.” I feel sick to my stomach even as my mouth throbs for a bite.
The most forbidden substance of Lykopolis. Its possession, the most severely punishable one too. If trade is so heavily regulated with simple items–enough for Dog Eat Gig to be born–then the genuine meat market should be an impossibility. It is the belief of the Lykopolis leaders that consuming animal meat will send us back to being mindless wild beasts. A single taste will let nature rule over us, instead of us taming biology ourselves.
“Who would be stupid enough to move herbivore meat through the app?” Carrion whines through his teeth. He too is salivating, the front of his T-shirt stained dark with the leaked drops.
Someone who thought they could get away with it through sheer audacity deflecting all suspicion. Everyone knows Dog Eat Gig users ferry petty drugs or fetish items between cities. But who would suspect genuine animal meat being moved by small-time dealers, without at least an established cartel behind them to support the whole mad endeavor?
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I say again. “Surely there must have been a fail-safe in place. This is dangerous wares, not to mention rare and expensive. And the box was just, what, unlocked the whole time?”
Carrion opens his mouth in reply, then clasps a paw over his snout as his eyes widen into white pools of fear.
“Shh, can you hear it?”
I stop talking, stop breathing, and listen. It’s less sound, and more like a whoosh of displaced air. For a moment I move to check my Dog Eat Gig notifications on reflex, so similar are these not-sounds you only learn to hear through sufficient exposure.
“Shit!” I shout. “The failsafe. This is it. There was a digital seal and we broke it, Carrion. Now we’re in big trouble.”
“Okay, okay, we run then,” Carrion says, reaching for the wardrobe where we keep our travel bag, always full in case of an emergency. We aren’t stupid, we never planned to stick around long enough to end up in the labor prisons in case anything went wrong with the gigs. But this, this is different. Something tells me we wouldn’t even make it to prison if we were discovered. Wouldn’t stay alive long enough for that. Perhaps it would be our bones that would build the new Lykopolis.
“The emergency roof access,” Carrion whispers. “We leave the box here and hope whoever comes to reclaim it doesn’t bother to chase us.”
He and I hold hands as we bound up the grimy communal staircase. This isn’t the first time we have run away. It worked before, when we escaped his family and the authorities. I have almost convinced myself we can pull it off a second time when boot-shod stomps echo up the stairwell from the sleeping building below. Broad shadows creep, belonging to beasts bigger and more brutal than us. Ohshitohshitohshit, Carrion is muttering under his breath as we reach the gray expanse of roof and kick the door shut behind us. We block the roof access with a metal bar that won’t hold off whoever is on the other side for long.
“Okay.” Adrenaline has me dizzy, my body’s aches forgotten. This is survival, this is teeth and nail if it comes down to it, this is keeping Carrion safe, not because of some extant biological urge, but because we’re all each other has, and we need to get out of this alive. “Fire escape stairs must be swarmed from below, too. But if we jump from roof to roof, we can make it out through another building unscathed.”
Carrion smirks despite the red-haze-urgency of our circumstances. “Remember our parkour-obsessed days? Who knew that would come in handy, huh?”
We lean over the roof’s raised edges, where the neighboring buildings are clustered close together, only a good, long leap away.
“Alright,” I say, stepping back to add to my momentum. “On the count of three?”
One, two, and Carrion screams. Carrion doesn’t jump forward, but falls, and only thanks to my anxiety-quick reflexes do I grab him by his clothes, ripping a fistful of fur in the process. I manage to pull him back against my body until we are both pressed flat to the dusty concrete.
“What happened?” I ask. In my head there is a cartoon dog like the one from the app, glitching with a corrupted neon light. I’m too frantic worrying about Carrion to wonder if I’ve finally lost my mind.
He raises his torso a breath off the floor and laughs as blood blooms from his midsection. “Drone,” he rasps. “This was not a warning shot. We’re fucked.”
I gather him in my arms, careful not to jostle his bullet wound, and look wildly around for the military-grade drone, and for shelter. A tiny neglected greenhouse stands in the middle of our building’s roof, and I shoulder my way inside, laying me and Carrion both under the skylight. My lips tremble in prayer to some higher entity or force, let us not hear the sound of glass shattering, let the drone and its controllers fear to cause a racket, let the authorities not get involved in this deal gone wrong.
In our glass house surrounded by withered vegetation, we pant covered in blood. How did everything turn this bad so fast? Just minutes earlier we thought we could finally take a break from the gigs, just being, just breathing. And now every breath feels like it could be our last.
“Carrion,” I say his name like the biggest prayer of them all as I stroke his matted-fur cheek.
“I figured it out,” he says, feverish and laughing still. “Dog Eat Gig, but see… gig eat dog, too.”
Through the dirty skylight, the stars are veiled by smog and the moon appears so distant, pale and immaterial like a slip of gauze. It feels a mockery to know our kind once howled its praise to the moon. I think about the labor prisons again, where fur falls off in clusters and gaunt faces become true animal with each stone laid to the towering behemoth of Lykopolis. The canine militia–those would-have-been alphas with their big boots and guns turned muscle-for-hire–are coming to drag us somewhere far worse than the prisons. Meanwhile, our secret gig clients will survive with impunity, will build and build their wealth and empire of meat.
And I realize then, why the app chose the two of us for this job. Carrion and I, we are easy to vanish without anyone there to look for us. No one to miss us but each other.
And I howl then. My rage blooms at the unfairness of this world of artificial Civility our ancestors conceived and constructed for us. How the City failed Carrion and I since we were young pups, how it promised us a future bright as broken glass or glitching pixels. How our kind thought in its hubris that steel, concrete, and neon lights were good enough a replacement for our past of moon and pack and forest.
“There are rumors,” Carrion says through blood-red lips and a smile meant just for me. “About the valley of wolves far beyond the city.”
I look at my friend, my Carrion, the last true wild creature in this city of smoke and mirrors. He laughs as he joins me weakly in a howl, and I squeeze his paws between mine and vow to him, “That’s where we’ll go, you and I,” and dare the moon to call me a liar.
Avra Margariti is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Rhysling-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, F&SF, Podcastle, Asimov’s, Vastarien, and Reckoning. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti)