Carcass. Stunner. Slaughter line. The words strike Marcos Tejo in the dead of night, waking him in a film of sweat. He lights a cigarette in the suffocating heat, trying to clear his head of the knowledge that another day of slaughtering humans awaits. No one calls them that, of course. To do so is a crime. They are “product,” “head,” “food.” The government calls their meat “special meat.” After the GGB virus made all animal flesh fatal to humans, the world changed with a ruthless speed the media sanitized as the “Transition.” Now, processing plants are retooled, breeding centers raise human livestock, and cannibalism is the law of the land, a fact most people have normalized. But Marcos cannot. He knows there are words that cover up the world.
His work is a circuit of methodical horror. He visits the tannery of Señor Urami, a smiling Japanese man who calculates the meters of skin on every person he meets and whose office is decorated with a print of a flayed saint. He endures the Tod Voldelig breeding center, where the sweaty owner, El Gringo, proudly displays his “First Generation Pure” stock - head born and bred in captivity, their vocal cords removed so they are easier to control. “No one wants them to talk,” El Gringo explains to a German client, “because meat doesn't talk.” They watch impregnated females, their arms and legs amputated to prevent them from harming the fetuses that will be harvested, lying silently on tables. Marcos endures it all because he is the best at what he does, and because the work pays for the expensive nursing home where his father, Don Armando, is slowly disappearing into a dementia brought on by the madness of the Transition.
One morning, a truck from Tod Voldelig arrives at his isolated house. It is a gift from El Gringo: a live FGP female, young and valuable, with all her papers in order. Marcos is furious. “I kill head, I don't breed them,” he shouts into the phone, but El Gringo is insistent. Marcos is left with a naked, trembling woman tied to a rusted truck in his barn. Her presence is a problem, an intrusion into the sterile detachment he needs to survive. He gives her a bowl of leftover rice and locks the door, trying to forget she exists.
His life outside the plant is a landscape of ghosts. There is his wife, Cecilia, who left him for her mother's house after the sudden death of their infant son, Leo. Their conversations are black holes of unspoken grief. There is Spanel, the butcher he supplies, a woman as cold and precise as her knives, with whom he shares a violent, unspoken history. “Today I'm the butcher,” she tells him over a glass of wine in her back room, surrounded by hanging carcasses, “tomorrow I might be the cattle.” And there is his father, whose vacant eyes no longer recognize him, a man of integrity who went crazy because he could not bear the weight of the new world. Marcos carries it all, visiting the abandoned zoo to sit by the empty lion's den, the only place he feels a flicker of connection to a past that seems more real than the present.
The arrival of the female changes the texture of his solitude. He is repulsed by her, yet responsible for her. He finds himself thinking of her while on his meat run, wondering if she is cold or hungry. One night, in a drunken, grief-stricken rage, he takes an ax to his son's cot and burns it in the yard. He cuts the female's rope, expecting her to flee, but she stays. When he wakes in the grass, she is curled up asleep beside him. He begins to call her Jasmine. He washes her in the rain, combs the tangles from her hair, and sees not a product, but a person. He brings her into the house, teaches her to wear clothes, to use a fork, to watch television. The house, once a tomb of memory, begins to fill with her wild, silent presence.
Then, Jasmine is pregnant. The discovery is a spark of impossible joy followed by the cold terror of reality. Their child would be a crime against nature and the state, a hybrid being with no place in the world. If they are discovered, they will all be sent to the Municipal Slaughterhouse. The world outside his home feels increasingly dangerous. An inspector from the Office of the Undersecretary for the Control of Domestic Head makes a surprise visit, his suspicion barely masked. A strained lunch with his sister, Marisa, reveals the casual cruelty of her family, who play a game called “Exquisite Corpse” where they guess what their relatives would taste like. The final link to his old life breaks when his father dies peacefully in his sleep.
The fragile world Marcos has built shatters when a transport truck overturns near the plant. A horde of Scavengers - the marginalized who live outside the fences - descends on the wreck, slaughtering the live head with machetes and killing the driver. The savagery is absolute. To prevent it from happening again, Marcos devises a plan for his boss, Krieg: in a few weeks, they will poison a shipment of head and leave it for the Scavengers. It is a solution of chilling efficiency, the kind of thinking that has made him the best at his job. The act solidifies the coldness inside him, the part of him that belongs to the slaughter line.
He returns home to find Jasmine in labor, the amniotic fluid a dangerous brownish green. In a panic, he calls Cecilia. She arrives, and upon seeing the female in her bed, her face contorts with disgust. “Are you crazy? You're sick,” she whispers. But when Marcos tells her the baby is in distress, the nurse in her takes over. For hours, she coaches Jasmine through the birth with a professional tenderness. Finally, a healthy baby boy is born. Cecilia holds him, her face lit with a forgotten joy. “He's ours now,” Marcos tells her, and for a moment, they are a family, united by the miracle of this new life.
Jasmine, weak and bleeding on the bed, stretches her arms out, desperate to hold her son. She tries to stand, to speak, but no sound comes. Cecilia looks on, confused. Marcos walks to the kitchen and returns with a heavy wooden club. He goes to Jasmine, stroking her hair and singing softly into her ear. He kisses the brand on her forehead. When she is calm, he grabs her by the hair and brings the club down hard. Her body falls to the floor, stunned and unconscious.
Cecilia stares in horror. “Why?” she screams. “She could have given us more children.”
As he begins to drag Jasmine's body to the barn where he will slaughter her, Marcos looks back at Cecilia, his voice radiant with a terrible, lucid calm. “She had the human look of a domesticated animal.”
