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- Start in the early morning, outside Las Nevadas.
- The sun is not yet up, but you can feel the night coming to an end.
- The horizon is gentling its blues in preparation, spurring clouds into tulip-soft shades of pink and orange.
- Two figures stand amidst the sand dunes:
- Wilbur Soot — talking about something, posture languid in the perfect, exaggerated way of an actor on a stage — and
- Badboyhalo — sweet-voiced but getting less so the longer Wilbur speaks.
- Let them keep talking for a while. The topic is not important.
- Next to them is a pen filled with cows.
- Bad could make a comment about the ethics of keeping so many animals in such close proximity.
- Establish that Bad is here to commit cattle theft. Establish that Wilbur is saying he’s hungry.
- The cows low. They strain against the fence.
- The nearest one nibbles at the stalks of wheat Bad is holding.
- Bad could make a comment about the ethics of keeping so many animals in such close proximity.
- Quackity climbs over a dune on the edge of Las Nevadas.
- He sees Wilbur. He sees the cows. There are a lot of things he is feeling in this moment (and maybe he says something about it, as the camera lingers) but what it comes down to is that those are his animals, and these two have no right to them.
- Quackity shouts. Bad spots him.
- Quackity doesn’t like them being here, in his city. His nation.
- Bad doesn’t like being here while Quackity is. He just wanted a quick snack.
- Bad makes a hurried shooing gesture at Wilbur, then flees, deeper into Las Nevadas.
- Wilbur doesn’t run. He’s tired. He might yawn at this point.
- He takes out a lighter, or something like that. Waves, or flicks the lighter, or something else that reminds the audience that this whole server’s built on blowing up and burning.
- Quackity watches this and realizes that he has figured out what he’s feeling: it’s a profound, bone-deep annoyance.
- Camera rests on their faces. Shot of one, then the other. Pull back to get shot of
EXT. LAS NEVADAS — DAWN
The city is lit up beautiful by its lights, but losing its shine as the sky gets lighter.
QUACKITY, armoured in suspenders and ironed slacks and a sleek black tie, slides the rest of the way down the dune to stand in front of WILBUR, who is eyeing a cow.
QUACKITY
What are you doing here?
Wilbur stands very, very still. It’s uncanny enough to make onlookers uncomfortable.
WILBUR
It’s—It’s embarrassing.
QUACKITY
This is my country, Wilbur. What are you doing here?
WILBUR
I… Fine. I couldn’t sleep.
QUACKITY
Wilbur.
WILBUR
Don’t tell Tommy.
Quackity shakes his head like it will shake Wilbur away.
QUACKITY
You know I wouldn’t. Don’t bring him into this. Just tell me what the fuck you’re up to, Wilbur. Tell me what you’re doing here.
WILBUR
I know I’m not supposed to—I know you told me to stay out but fuck, Quackity, it’s—it’s like this bottomless wanting. You put your hands on every good thing and it just turns to dust and rot when you touch it and you bring it up to your mouth anyway just to see, just because maybe it’ll be better than the bile and fumes you’ve been going on before and you’re so fucking hungry you can’t even think and I just…
Wilbur tugs off the beanie he was wearing. Clutches it to his chest. His hair is curly, greasy. Highlighted by the dawn. Quackity puts his hand out toward a cow, starts petting it, pretends not to look directly at Wilbur.
QUACKITY
So you’re hungry. So what? I’m done cleaning up after people like you, okay? I’m done making your bad decisions. Get away from my animals.
WILBUR
(snippily, without thinking)
You’re a bad decision.
Wilbur snorts and Quackity closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to snicker. They have this in common, and the sun isn’t even up yet. They are both thinking about the things that they have in common, and they do not have the energy to overcome their own gravity. Quackity hasn’t been sleeping either.
QUACKITY
(raspy, using his lowest register)
If I get you something to eat, will you finally listen to me when I tell you to go?
WILBUR
(whispering, seeing dawn after years and years in the dark)
Yes. Yes, anything you say—
QUACKITY
(the light catching on the buckles of his suspenders)
Fine. One cow. You get one cow.
WILBUR
(a spark in his eyes like the neon signs on the distant skyscrapers have gotten closer, somehow)
I want this one.
Wilbur leans just over the stone wall, as if to kiss the cow Quackity is petting on the forehead, and doesn’t Quackity know exactly what that kind of ache is like? The silica-white-gold sand of Las Nevadas shifts under Wilbur’s feet as he moves to cup the cow’s face in both of his hands. Quackity pulls his own hand away and watches. Wilbur’s nails are bitten-down, moving against the cow’s jaw just a touch too gentle to count as scratching.
“That one?” Quackity says, testing his emotions and settling on irritated. Easier than anything else, when Wilbur is standing right there and Quackity can’t think fast enough to keep up.
“Please,” Wilbur says, turning his face and catching Quackity with those eyes, dark-bright chiaroscuro like a man born for classical paintings.
He’s good at that, isn’t he? And Quackity is getting better at being in this position.
“Bad said this one reminded him of you.” Wilbur coughs into his hand. “He actually said a number of rather impolite things I’m not going to repeat to you but—”
Quackity takes a deep, slow breath, and feels himself spit out the hook from behind his teeth. “Listen to me, Wilbur. You get one cow, and then you get off my property. But remember, these are my cows. Those cows are rightfully mine. If you want to choose which one to eat, you owe me.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Wilbur mutters. He’s stroking the cow’s ears now, the velvet-soft skin flicking under his fingertips as he unloops a lead from where it was hooked on a fencepost nearby, pulls it smooth and slow over the cow’s neck. (Quackity ignores the tremble in Wilbur’s hands, because that’s not his problem anymore, it’s not.)
Quackity appraises Wilbur’s choice in silence as he leads it out of the pen. Pats along its left back leg, feels at the fat behind its shoulder, along its ribs.
Quackity looks up and Wilbur has a knife.
“You know how to do this?” Quackity asks, rolling up his sleeves.
“Oh, don’t get your nice creased pants dirty for some cow,” Wilbur says, stroking absently along the cow’s flank. He guides it over to the table, the frame tent, the make-shift slaughterhouse a little ways away, the sand clinging to the shape of his sneakers. “I’ll figure it out.”
“No, you won’t,” Quackity sighs.
“Whatever, man,” Wilbur says. “On the ground, like this? Seems like a pretty ignoble way to die.”
Quackity shrugs. “Be quick. Sand’s not ideal but—” He glances toward the sky. “It’s not snowing.”
Wilbur blinks. “...No, it’s not.”
Wilbur drops to his knees, a soft thump that throws up fine particles and puts his head solidly around the level of Quackity’s stomach. It’s not snowing.
Wilbur lifts his knife, tilts it back and forth so it catches the growing light.
“Forty-five degree angle,” Quackity says. Wraps his hand around Wilbur’s — it’s as warm as the cow, that same feeling of living skin under his hyper-sensitive fingertips — and adjusts Wilbur’s grip. “Toward the head. Above the breast bone. Make sure you get the jugular vein and the carotid artery at the same time.”
“Someone’s learned some big words—” And Wilbur cuts himself off with a startled noise as blood spurts out, clinging, leaving clumps in the sand.
The cow’s legs kick, its eyes rolling. Wilbur narrows his eyes and plunges the knife in again.
Wilbur is kneeling by the furnace, feeding pieces of freshly-slaughtered cow into it. The dawn light falls over them both, washes them in its pale colours, unforgiving. The type of dawn where even a world of electric colour discovers it can’t compete with the sun.
“Hey, Big Q, look at this.” Wilbur produces a chunk of meat, and Quackity’s dark, dark eyes follow the motion. “Watch me. Watch me eat this.”
Wilbur makes a show of opening his mouth, of holding his tongue out, of wrapping his lips around a morsel of pink-brown meat. (Carved out from somewhere beneath the backbone, if Wilbur’s memory of that poppy-petal liquid dripping down his hands is right, hot and steaming in the chill air.)
Wilbur groans, tilting his head back. Chews leisurely, and realizes that the sound of open-mouthed chewing is not so different from the sound of flesh slapping on flesh.
Quackity says, “Tell me what it tastes like.”
Wilbur sighs, slow and heavy, licking along his molars to get the last of the flavour. “He tastes heavenly. Oh, Quackity, I think this is going to kill me all over again.”
Quackity has put an apron on, is hefting a bucket of offal and letting red creep up through the fibres of his altogether too-nice button-up shirt. He says, a little condescending, a little uncertain, “He? How do you know it’s a he?”
“You said this was your meat, didn’t you?” Wilbur swallows, runs his tongue over his lips, and Quackity—
The sun is getting higher and higher. Rays like fingers running over Quackity’s face, his mouth pulled to the side partly from bemusement, partly from the evidence of violence jagged over his eye. Quackity looks good in a spotlight.
God, what Wilbur wouldn’t give to sink his teeth into that. (This is why Quackity is a problem. Quackity might know exactly what Wilbur is and let him put his teeth in him anyway. If Wilbur were a less feeble man, he would go far away from here, instead of staring out the window of the Burger Van just to see if that glimpse of netherite has something to do with Quackity.)
The sand is cold where Wilbur plunges his hand into it, gritty with plastic and glitter and rock so worn it turned to prickling. His other hand reaches out to scoop another handful of cow meat.
And suddenly Quackity is there, standing over Wilbur, fingers digging into his arm. “Raw,” Quackity rasps. The light in his eyes is intent, ravenous. “Eat it raw.”
They are like-skinned animals, same stuff in their veins: two parts flashbang, three parts want. Additions of smoke, to taste. Wilbur digs out the cow’s heart, and the iron puddling on Quackity’s tongue is a wet dream and a faded memory and a songbird swallowed whole. (Good thing Quackity weaned himself off such useless things as shame years ago.)
Wilbur lifts the whole ugly hunk of it up to his mouth, fingers digging into the muscle and hissing when it nearly drops to the sand.
Quackity catches it. “Slippery,” he mutters. “You gotta prepare them carefully, or be ready to chew for a long time.”
“Right,” Wilbur says slowly. “Right, you like being the one doing the eating, don’t you?” Raises it again, as if lifting a glass of wine, and meets Quackity’s gaze. If he shivers, it’s no more obvious than usual. “I don’t judge.”
“Keep it in your mouth,” Quackity commands. Wilbur’s expression is hazy, reverent, and he’s still fucking kneeling, and Quackity thinks he’s gritting his teeth hard enough to break bone. He could. He could, if he wanted to. “Don’t swallow until I say.”
Ripping out a chunk small enough to hold between his canines looks like a fierce, arduous task when Wilbur does it. Quackity knows the taste. Dense and rich, so hard to bite through you could almost believe every poetic scrap out there about how much it matters, to have a heart.
Quackity takes the knife away from where Wilbur set it down, the wood of its handle hot from the furnace stones. Wilbur stops chewing and Quackity feels the stillness like the space before a punch.
“I hear you’ve learned a thing or two about butchering. Heard you made a place for my body to rest back when I was dead.”
Quackity turns the knife in his hand. Hunting knife, drop point. Quackity thinks, Field dressing. Quackity thinks, Control in close quarters.
“I did,” Quackity says. He catches Wilbur’s eye. “Swallow.”
Wilbur obeys too fast and nearly chokes, and when he can breathe again, Quackity is standing over him, knife in hand. Oh, Quackity knows what the pit in his stomach is. Bottomless hunger. I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied, Wilbur had muttered once, late night, Quackity shaking apart like his skin was cracking open, Wilbur watching the flickering torchlight and mumbling prophecies none of them totally understood yet.
And now Quackity gets it. Every sentence meant the same thing, in the end. We’re the same kind of animal, you and me. We’re headed for the same slaughterhouse, you and me.
Quackity doesn’t believe in that; doesn’t have enough room in his heart for any of it. He raises the knife, and Wilbur lifts his head, guided by the touch of Quackity’s fingers just under his chin. The skin is as soft as the inside of Quackity’s wrist, as thin as the curved line of the dead cow’s ear. He angles the knife. Forty-five degrees. Won’t make the same mistake he did.
“Oh, Quackity,” Wilbur says, the way someone else might say, oh, God. He falls back on the sand, coat fanning out like a bird’s wings. “Will you?”
“Wilbur,” Quackity mutters, standing over him, holding that glistening, pointed blade.
Wilbur grins, and doesn’t care about the rest of what Quackity says. The sound of them is what counts. The sound of his name in Quackity’s mouth is what counts. The whole world is fuzzy at the edges, dark along the west, and everything is the hazy heat of Nether-smoke and underground bunkers.
How does a rooster feel about a butcher’s knife? How does the knife feel buried inside the rooster’s heart? Does that hand around your neck almost feel like being held? Does that slick red heat almost feel like being alive?
“You’re not going to put that knife in me?” Wilbur asks. Quackity shudders, fingers clamping down on the knife handle, and Wilbur is remembering all over again that he is still hungry. “Quackity. I was good, wasn’t I? I did everything you said. Everything you asked me to. Why won’t you—”
“Why would I, Wilbur?” Quackity raises the knife, and Wilbur’s pulse quickens to a rainstorm scream, and Quackity plunges it into the heart Wilbur is still holding without so much as grazing as Wilbur’s palm. “I want to, sometimes, but we don’t get to have everything we want all the time. We’re not kids.”
“Quackity, we could,” Wilbur says. The sun is getting higher, the city getting closer to the listless alive-ness any casino city must drudge through during the daylight hours. Grit and blood are getting all over his pants. (Dark brown, stained, belt loops without a belt.) “Aren’t you hungry, Quackity? Don’t you feel it too? What’s stopping us?”
Quackity picks up the heart. Brings it over to the table. The body of the cow, split, ruptured, and refusing to rot even as the city picks up heat around them. Quackity carves the heart, slowly, in two.
EXT. LAS NEVADAS — MORNING
WILBUR
It’s not real anyway. Not if we say it isn’t.
Wilbur picks up the half Quackity holds out to him. Quackity rests his palm on aorta, on atrium, ventricle, chordae tendineae. Watches Wilbur eat. Watches Wilbur watching him.
WILBUR (CONT’D)
(fervent, or exhausted, or both)
Do it. Do it. It’s not real. They’ll listen to me. To you. They’ll listen to us, if it’s both of us. I hear you’re good at it, these days.
QUACKITY
(bitter, or laughing, or both)
I put Schlatt in power.
(beat)
Do you think that you’re still here because you decided to be?
WILBUR
I just want to try. I’m just so fucking bored—
QUACKITY
No, you don’t. You aren’t. You fucking aren’t, okay?
WILBUR
I know what I am.
Quackity shakes his head, business man’s smile, business man’s sympathy. Something gets his attention, somewhere in his pocket. A ping, and he scowls, feeling his whole body twitch in reaction to it. He doesn’t want to see what that’s about— but that’s the sleep deprivation talking.
WILBUR (CONT’D)
He tasted really good. The cow, I mean. If I could eat him a thousand times over, if I had to die a million more times just to taste him again…
QUACKITY
Don’t say shit like that, man.
WILBUR
It’s not real. It’s not real.
QUACKITY
Right. No, of course not. This isn’t… Yeah.
- We’re done here.
- Quackity says this. Or he conveys it somehow.
- He has people to look after now. Or people to look into.
- Quackity is the one with the reins, now.
- Wilbur watches him decide that they are done here.
- He feels sick, and holy.
- He knew this would happen, didn’t he?
- They’re done here.
- He’ll leave Quackity alone, sure.
- He’s not an asshole.
- He feels sick, and holy.
- It’s like sand plummeting onto an open torch flame.
- It’s like the groan of a zombie in an unloaded chunk at sunrise.
- It’s like