Seattle, August 12, 2037

“Hey! My salmon!”

The paper-wrapped package of fresh fish whizzed past me, splatting on the floor and sliding under one of the vendor tables. I'd heard someone yell my name, "Joe!" and turned to walk into the porky arms of two big dudes in suits.

I fought back, applying some of my training. I even managed to chop a leg high enough to kick one of the snouts of these pig-eyed sacks of shit, drawing a little blood.

They shouldn't have been able to identify me. Just before the whole world fell into the pigsty back in 2034, I had received advanced face implants. That's when I was still a Federal agent. Now much of what I do is undercover, because defending truth and freedom has become illegal.

Anyway, a few motions of my forefinger and taps of it against my thumb, and my smartglasses could direct the implants to change my look within seconds.

As these goons dragged me from Pike Place Market and threw me in the back of a van, I noted that they showed all the signs of Scorpion, an ultra-secret, global, elite crime organization that pretty much ran the world now. There was no rear window to see out of the van, but based on the turns, the short ride and a quick descent at the end, I deduced that I was being taken underneath Seattle Center's CannaPower Arena.

I was taken into a luxury suite, where these henchhogs threw me on a couch. Some even more sinister-looking swine started interrogating me about some purloined property, but it was all Pig Latin to me.

Frustrated, they snorted and left the room. I figured they'd return to slaughter me, but instead, I was greeted by two very beautiful, and very naked, women: a ponytailed blonde, and a freckled redhead with flaming green eyes.

“Come on, Mister Kaplan,” the blonde pleaded seductively, circling me in nothing but heels. “Just tell us what we need to know, and we will do everything you ever dreamed.”

More like everything I ever creamed: they started kissing and squeezing each other’s supple tits and pointy nipples right in front of me.

But … Mister Kaplan? That’s not me, nor any of my aliases. I had actually heard of a Joe Kaplan in my circles, and come to think of it, my current disguise did look a lot like him. In attempting to catch a thief, had they abducted the wrong man?

Well, I could slap some lipstick on this pig. Thanks to my undercover training, I have developed several vivid alter egos upon which I can call when I need to make up a story. I picked the one most like what I knew of Joe Kaplan and started squealing. I knew the swine watching me through the glass were rather nastier than neighborhood loan shark that you might deal with to, say, invest in pork belly futures. Knowing they might kill me anyway, I might as well go hog wild, for Pete's sake. It was all hogwash, but I really hammed the thing up for the ladies.

I fed out my story slowly, enticing the women to take off my clothes and perform various acts as things progressed. As the redhead made out with me, I pulled both our heads down and we each started suckling on the blonde’s impressive porkchops. I told them a little more, then worked a finger into the blonde's cutlet. I pulled it out and offered it to the redhead, who sucked on my little piggie luridly, and I spun a little more of my twisted tale.

This tit-for-talk game went on for some minutes, and before I knew it I was lying on a couch, with the blonde sitting on my face and sharing her juicy schnitzel while she capably chomped my chorizo.

The redhead, meanwhile, was playing with the blonde’s hefty chops again, then spanking her across the hams, and finally licking her hoghole just a couple inches above my face. Next, she had the blonde sit up so I was licking both holes, and lowered her firehole onto my cockwurst. All through this I kept divulging little tidbits, though not of any real use to my captors. As my pølse plunged into the redhead, I felt the most amazing thing.

So pussy implants were for real. What I was feeling was a pulsing, throbbing, squeezing vibration around my dumbfounded dinglewurst. Red switched to an action that milked my mortadella rhythmically from base to tip, emptying my loins within seconds in one of the most intense orgasms of my life.

Per my usual inclination, I shoved my snout in her trough to slop up the mess. Curiously, the mixture tasted a little too much like peaches and cream, recalling rumors that these implants might have the capability to impart flavor as well as vibration. I'd been with a few wild redheads in my day, and none of them had needed any enhancement. This all seemed a bit ridiculous.

Maybe her cunt juice was drugged too? The next thing I remember is running barefoot down Elliott Avenue in the middle of the night, an electric air taxi easing down in front of me. The driver asked if I needed a ride. Astonishingly, despite the world having gone to the hogs, Seattle had procured some federal pork to pay for drunks and stoners to get free rides home after midnight.

In flying electric cabs, no less. First deployed on a wide scale for the 2028 global athletic extravaganza in Los Angeles, these cool copters had really taken off.

I climbed a’bird, thanked the cabbie for picking me up and gave him directions to my place in one of many office towers long since obsolesced by hybrid work, retrofitted into flats with balconies and started to decay into tenements since the Hog Horror. At least an air taxi could literally take me to my apartment.

Damn, my head was aching. So was my pork sword, come to think of it. That redhead sure had squeezed hard. I wondered if she had the ability to pinch an uncooperative client’s peckerwurst right off.

Maybe the driver thought it clever to play the now-classic “Drunk Drivers” while driving drunks home every night, but it was not helping my headache. I asked if he would turn it down.

“You don’t like my fucking music?”

“Listen, man, I’ve had a really rough night and I hate Car Shit Headrest.”

He slammed the vessel into a deep dive, splashing down in front of the Harbor Steps, which, thanks to the new sea levels caused by manbearpig, now literally reached the harbor when the tide came in. So much for all that land they'd freed up when they ripped down the Alaskan Way Viaduct twenty years ago. So much for a lot of ideas that seemed great before the Pig Sick.

“Get the fuck out of my cab!” Cranky Cabbie grabbed me by the shirt and threw me into the hock-deep water. I was soaked. Great. My once-lavish building at 1201 Third was only three blocks away, but I'd been counting on the air taxi to get me to my balcony since the elevators only worked half the time.

I still brought home some bacon, by the way. Let’s just say I did some investigations. Some of these delved into various activities of Scorpion. Fortunately, I still had lots of informants and former fellow Agents dedicated to fighting them at every turn.

One of my current gigs involved the origins of the great Hamdemic, in which I still suspected Scorpion had played a role. Over the space of a few weeks, all of a sudden people who ate pork started getting heart attacks. We figured this out pretty quickly when we saw it sparing most Jews, Muslims and vegans. No stranger to bacon myself, I had survived a heart attack of my own.

The malady struck perfectly healthy people, and the actual medical cause remained a mystery. Autopsies revealed nothing, no “smoking gun” virus had been discovered, and it wasn’t contagious. After a couple of months, the whole thing vanished without a trace … other than five billion corpses and the remains of humanity in shambles.

I now had a lead on someone who might have finally figured it out. They were, of all places, on a pig farm outside Olympia. In Hock Farm was just a few miles from the Olympia-Lacey CasTrak station, which is incongruously located out in the middle of the countryside. I could ride my bike the last few miles from the train out to the farm, stealthier than my car since the Scorpo porkos could still be on my trail and had access to the cops' license plate scanners.

On this classic Puget Sound summer afternoon, cloudless and warm but not hot or humid, I pedaled past a long brick wall - sturdy enough to withstand any wolf’s huffing and puffing, I mused - and arrived at a closed metal gate. When I buzzed the intercom button, a breathless female voice answered, “Oh thank God! Vibrator repair?”

This was the beginning of the agreed-upon call-response code, in this case an obscure line from a fifty-year-old movie. “No ma’am, Los Angeles Police Department,” I replied flatly. “Sorry.”

The main gate swung open. Three exuberant border collies trotted out to greet me, followed by two smiling, wholesome-looking women in coveralls.

The farm itself looked tidy and cheerful, with a bit of a hippieish vibe, almost as if untouched by the aporcalypse. There were chickens running all over the place, lots of casual artwork about, and a mural on the side of the barn depicting a flock of pigs lolling amongst clover and tall sunflowers. Very Olympia.

The owners introduced themselves as Sylvia and Connie. They started by offering me a farm-grown joint and a tour of the place. They had met at Washington State, Connie a traditional young student and the somewhat more mature Sylvia restarting her life after a failed marriage. Bound by a shared dream, they had graduated and started the farm twelve years ago.

The animals freely ranged over most of the farm’s 160 acres and were fed by organic grains and vegetables grown onsite. The chickens had been added three years ago to supplement their income when everybody stopped eating pork. Fortunately for In Hock, most of the larger pig farms east of the mountains had gone out of business soon after the disaster, leaving little competition. Pork sales had been banned, but the bacon black market kept them going until re-legalization earlier this year.

As the tour went on, I couldn't help noticing that in addition to Connie and Sylvia, the half-dozen farmworkers were all female. Despite my wackenwurst being a bit sore from last night’s activities, the weed was getting to me and I couldn’t help imagining making some wienerschnitzel with them.

We toured their rather sophisticated-looking lab, unusual amongst the bohemian farms in this area. As we entered the attached office, Connie explained the staffing arrangement. “You see, Joe, the reason is that everyone here is strongly opposed to the Repopulator agenda. Even though we are a business, we do not believe the kind of growth the Repopulators want is good for humanity or the planet.”

This was the big issue of the day: the Earth’s population having been reduced to just over three billion, shouldn’t we try to quickly reproduce our way back? The proponents of Repopulation kept telling us the economy would remain hooves-up without a lot more people. After five billion funerals and so many survivors sad and alone, wouldn’t it be nice to bring a bunch of life back into the world? For crying out loud, they pointed out, there were only five degrees of Kevin Bacon now!

In a pig's eye, I thought. The economy was already starting to reorganize itself, and we had food in our larders, cleaner air and abundant energy. Maybe that was the problem. The war pigs that ran the world wanted more consumers, more conflict, more fear, more desperation. More people would mean more control.

I happened to have insider knowledge that Scorpion, which more or less did the oligarchs' bidding, was fueling a lot of the debates behind this pigshit “movement.” The chauvinist pigs had gotten abortion and homosexual activity banned at the federal level earlier this year. Birth control, even condoms, now required a marriage certificate. And proof of already having two children.

Much of America was buying this pig in a poke, but the Pacific Northwest remained a haven. Just like the legalization of marijuana twenty years ago, these states’ citizens had passed ballot measures explicitly permitting these taboo activities, even finally legalizing prostitution, all in open defiance of federal law. But federal agents still raided clinics, gay clubs, brothels and even the pharmacies they suspected of selling condoms to single people.

Now you know why I had decided staying with the Bureau was for the birds. Scorpion had taken over everything, including the cop shops. I hadn’t switched sides. The Feds had.

Connie continued, “And so, to reduce our chance of contributing to their goal, we have all chosen to keep our distance from the world of men.”

“Awww.” I gave her a faux-hurt frown.

"Oh, we still like men,” offered Sylvia with a smile, locking my eyes with an intensity I couldn’t avert. She flipped her long blonde hair and sauntered towards me. “We just choose to reduce the frequency of our temptation.”

“Temptation?” I asked, looking back at Connie.

“Of course, Joe. Life has little meaning if you don't face temptation,” murmured Connie, her brown eyes boring into me. "And give into it once in a while."

“If you stay the night, Joe,” implored Sylvia, now lightly running her hand up my arm, "we can offer you the warmest hospitality.”

“And temptation,” giggled Connie, pulling her firm body against me, her pale pink lips meeting mine as I grunted acceptance. Within seconds, the pig farmers had removed my pants and I felt two warm hands on my stiffened salami.

Sylvia was a gloriously mature and natural woman: a beautiful smile with crow's feet that revealed experience and wisdom, big supple breasts, round hips, and a thick, full honey-blonde bush matching the roots of her long flowing hair. I lunged my lap cheong into her right there on the desk.

Before long, I found myself erupting inside her, both of our bodies glistening with sweat. I immediately kneeled on the office floor, parting feminine folds as velvety and succulent as the finest prosciutto. I soon had her squealing.

As Sylvia came down, Connie, a cutie in her thirties with short black hair, strong legs, firm breasts and large pale pink nipples, wrapped her arms around me and said, “I hope there’s more where that came from.”

There was. They took turns licking, stroking and sucking my tumescent tusk, and then I lay on my back on the desk as Connie unfurled a wrapper down my braunschweiger. “With me, you’ll need one of these.”

Oh, I’d heard about these. Most other technological progress having been at a standstill for three years, some laid-off software engineers and materials scientists had found an underground business opportunity in developing advanced, boutique condoms made with graphene. Called Naked Casing, they were so thin they felt like nothing at all. This latest version was designed to feel even more sheer, with a nanopermeable membrane that blocked sperm but allowed feminine fluids to seep through and wet your weiner. The geniuses who used to build AI and smartglasses were now engineering better sex. Go geeks.

My thuringer thrust into her. After a couple minutes of filling her with my frank, I sat up a bit to suck on her bouncing beauties and reached between us to finger her throbbing clit. That took her to orgasm quickly, generously slopping me and the desk. I was able to keep going, so Sylvia soon climbed on the desk and straddled my head, feeding me her delectable carnitas taco once again. This, and the moans emanating from Connie and Sylvia kissing and squeezing each other's tits above me, finally triggered an explosion from deep within me.

Having satisfied themselves, Sylvia and Connie now explained why I had been summoned to their farm. With an obvious interest in how pork could have killed five billion people, they had spent two painstaking years testing samples gathered from stores when the Muerto de Puerco hit, and had finally figured it out.

Someone had engineered a diabolical genetic mechanism, probably introduced through commercial feed. That explained why In Hock's vegetable-fed herd was unaffected. Vector animals produced a special mRNA code in their tissues, which would then be passed along to whoever ate it. When digesting the meat, the consumer's stomach acid triggered a timed-release mechanism in the mRNA that would wait about six weeks, and then suddenly start producing an enzyme that led to heart failure.

"Who could engineer something like this?" I queried.

"With the editing technology now available," Sylvia explained, "even a mediocre graduate student could pull it off..."

"But only if they were more twisted than a pig's tail to think up the idea," interjected Connie.

"For a pig's tissues to contain enough of the gene, it would have had to be given the bad feed right from the time it was weaned," Sylvia continued. "Here in the US, that's about four months before slaughter, but it varies quite a bit from country to country. To time it to happen at the same time in Europe, for example, you’d need to do it a month or two earlier. In developing countries, even earlier than that."

So, for the plague to hit all the world simultaneously in October 2034, the feed would have to have been given to pigs early in the year, with the exact timing depending on the country. But since the stuff usually sits around in distribution centers for weeks or months before shipping out to farms, how could the actual result have been timed so precisely?

"Wait a minute!" said Sylvia slowly, her eyes wide in realization. "I'd forgotten about this. Tthere were some mysterious fires at warehouses that handled animal feed, and a subsequent shortage here, in the spring of 2034. And a couple months earlier, the same thing had happened in Australia and the UK. I didn't connect that until just now."

Connie explained. “Taking the slack out of the supply chain like that is exactly what you'd have to do to control exactly when farms got the bad feed. But who could coordinate something like that on a global level?"

"Oh, I have an idea of the Frankenswine who could pull it all off." Scorpion. Had to be. "But you're a lot safer if I don't tell you."

"Likewise, we're all a lot safer if you don't share any of this with our employees," cautioned Sylvia. "We want them to think we're in here working on shit like tweaking the Omega profile of our bacon fat. To be careful, we’ve fed them each different scraps about what we do in here, so we can canary-test anyone who squeals.” They uploaded a couple of petabytes of research data into what looked like a classic mechanical watch, which I would deliver to a courier tomorrow at the Space Needle. I realized I'd fully transitioned from special agent to secret agent.

Meanwhile, the farmworkers had been preparing a banquet of plant and porcine delights grown on their farm in my honor. We absolutely pigged out that evening.

Later on, a procession of cute farm girls, from curly to bob to butch to pigtailed, trotted into my guest room to sample a pork delicacy not from their farm. I even got hogpiled by three of them at one point. I was happier than a pig in clover, except for my now very tender loins.

In the middle of a bizarre dream, in which I was pounding a famous pig's pudgy porchetta in front of her cuckolded frog boyfriend, I awoke to Sylvia's knock on the guest room door. "You'd better get up and catch your train, Joe." It was ten o'clock. Damn, the green eggs and ham they'd made with fresh basil pesto smelled amazing, but I had to go. Hell, I'd just as soon take another serving of Sylvia, but there was no time for her either.

As I approached the station on my bike, I heard a whining sound in the sky, spotting what could only be a slaughterdrone headed directly at me. These had been banned after too many mass shootings, but guess who still had them. It was no crop duster and I, the man who knew too much, would only get one chance to avoid becoming chitlins. On one side of the road was an earthen berm, over which I swerved the bike, leaping off as bullets spiked the pavement behind me.

My bicycle's frame contained an integrated, disguised handgun I had fashioned myself after leaving the Bureau. As the turret on the underside of the drone swung around, I released my weapon from the bike and started firing. Six shots missed.

My thought at this point, which could have become my last, was wondering which of the farmworker girls had turned psycho. Whoever it was, I hoped I’d given the sow a solid screwing, and that they had found her and fed her to the sounder.

Good thing I had a ten-shot clip. Steadying myself, I took out one of the drone’s rotors with shot number seven, knocking it off kilter and causing it to fire off wildly into the hayfield. Eight and nine missed again. I became a successful saboteur just as the machine was stabilizing and turning to fire upon me, my last bullet piercing the drone's battery pack and taking it down in a lithium fireball.

Oddly enough, one of the bullets from that pig on the wing had struck my bike’s rear tire. With my train due in ten minutes, I didn’t have time to fix it. I set my trotters in motion and ran wee wee wee all the way to the station, hopping on with seconds to spare, sweating like ... well, a pig. Obviously.

Once on the dilapidated train, I headed for the lounge car to score a terrible breakfast. While I was waiting for the microwave behind the counter to heat my sausage and egg sandwich, a large boar of a balding man, wearing of all things a porkpie hat, sidled up to me.

In a muted, British-accented voice he said, “Good evening."

It was eleven o'clock. What the fuck, was he telling me the time in England?

"You know," he softly drawled, "there’s a murderer on this train."

I gave him a blank stare.

“Why you, of course," he added snarkily. "Everyone in Washington has got a text alert with a clip of Joe Kaplan kicking a man in the head at the Market. He later died of head injuries." Leave it to Scorpion to dial M for murder. "You are, in a word, notorious.”

He continued. "A man in your situation would be well advised to conceal himself in the washroom until we reach Tacoma.”

“Thanks for the tip." Something in his eye prompted me to add, "Let me make it worth your while.”

He responded with a big grin. "Sage advice comes at a price.” We strangers on a train walked to the next car and stepped into the large handicapped restroom together.

The guy carried a bit of lard, but after so much schnitzel the last two nights, I could stand some sausage.

Put another way, I could mustard up some energy to ketchup on my knockwurst consumption. After unwrapping what proved to be a kielbasa-sized piece of meat, I vowed to relish it fully, grabbing his buns so I could take him in deep. I delighted this dude's dickwurst all the way to Dupont before he lubed my lips with a load from his large linguiça.

Then this porcine stranger who'd saved my bacon turned his butt to me. I slowly jammed my jambon between his hams, rooting around inside and playing anal andouille for several minutes. Still piggybacking him as we approached Tacoma Dome Stadium, I finished up and pulled out just as we pulled in. Two minutes and a couple of quick finger swipes later, I emerged from the station's restroom no longer looking like Joe Kaplan, and made my way to a Seattle-bound Sounder train.

Even more famished than ever, I hoofed it up Capitol Hill to Pigliacci - er, Pagliacci - for my first Hawaiian in years. This delight was finally making a comeback on pizzeria menus after a nearly three-year absence. The combination of pork with pineapple, whether on a pizza or in a taco al pastor, always put me in hog heaven.

Once fully sated, I rode the Streetcar to Seattle Center to fulfill a mission that could refill my piggy bank. Well-placed friends could correlate the data from In Hock with the movements of known Scorpion operators in the vicinities of pork feed producers and shippers in late 2033 and early 2034. Once they built a solid enough case, they would feed it to the public and the corrupt Feds at the same time, giving the latter no choice but to make some high-profile arrests.

At 9:03 pm on this fourteenth day of August (precisely six months after Valentine’s Day, I noted) I was to wait on the downtown side of the Space Needle's observation deck. Someone would approach me and say a specific line, to which I would give a predetermined response.

Sure enough, at precisely 9:03, a woman walked up and stood next to me at the railing. "Do you believe in destiny?"

"Destiny is something we've invented because we can't stand the fact that everything is accidental." I didn't actually believe that, of course.

I turned and found myself facing Jasmine, one of the farmworkers. For a moment she looked startled to see me, having recognized my voice but not the new face that went with it. Another cover blown, I might have to kill this traitor.

I made a move toward the elevator and saw two henchmen guarding it. They started coming towards me.

"Don’t be pigheaded, Joe,” Jasmine ordered. “Just hand over the watch.”

When pigs fly. More like when I fly. Without a shadow of a doubt, getting this bombshell information into the right hands was worth the ultimate sacrifice. I had a couple of well-connected friends in the Coroner’s office that would ensure my watch got into the right hands after I splatted into the big fountain six hundred feet below.

But first I had to keep them from catching me. I ran around the observation deck, threading like a greased pig through the throngs on the sunset side.

This gave me enough of a lead to whip out a cutting tool and snip a few wires in the cable mesh intended to keep desperate people like me from jumping.

Fighting vertigo, I quickly scaled the remaining mesh ladder onto the flying saucer of a roof. The minions followed, chasing me a few laps around the circular top before splitting up and boxing me in on the northeast side.

I was at the end of my rope. Hogtied. Hamstrung. Finally led to slaughter. The only question left was whether I could sail far enough to experience the roof of the Music Project. Or would I only reach the frankfurter stand?

As I moved towards the edge, I heard the sound of an aircar, coming fast. It swooped down low over the roof, bullets striking down both baddies.

It missed Jasmine, though, who was still approaching me with a knife in her hand.

I dropped, just missing the slash of her blade and tripping her. She slid over the lip, hanging onto the edgemost wire of the protective mesh, a whole lot of oxygen beneath her and pavement. "Joe, please! Save me! Didn't last night mean anything to you?"

Why, yes it did. I walked to the edge of the Needle and gave her piggies a good stomp.

Turned out pigs still can't fly.

I walked back over to the air taxi, which had now landed on the sloping roof.

Did I say something about destiny? Here was proof. My second savior of the day turned out to be none other than Jamie Flynn, the stunning and talented trans Federal agent who had convinced me to get into the detective business so many years ago. I had not seen her in a very long time. Rumor had it that she'd gone deep undercover, but it had been bacon my heart to think she might been taken by the 2034 Pig Plague. I finally realized I was deeply in love with her, and that we were both getting too old for this racket. I would beg her to retire with me.

She yelled something out the window, but I couldn't quite hear over the buzz of the aircar's spinning rotors.

"What?" I yelled, moving closer.

"I love you, Joe!" she shouted back. "How many times do I have to say it?"

"Once more would be nice," I said with a smirk.

"Get in, you dick!" she yelled back exuberantly.

I did, and she gleefully piloted us out over the middle of Elliott Bay. Hovering at a thousand feet, with views over Queen Anne, Magnolia, downtown, Alki, the whole city, I felt like I could see the whole world. But my eyes were only for her.

"Ever join the mile high club, Joe?"

We made some beautiful bacon up there.

Th-th-that's all folks!