Street Meat

A Story by Joshua Mallett

In a future where meat has become scarce, one entrepreneur seeks to open up a new market.

You'd be amazed what folks will do for meat these days. Heck, we all thought things were bad when the pencil pushers in Washington first decided that reducin' emissions was better than producin' fine animal products, but at least you could still find the stuff, if for a price. Now you're privileged to find some cubed dog meat for stew. I intend to change all that.
My name is William Montague LeFleur the fourth, but you can all me Billy. My familys been livin' in Lousiana for ten generations, tacklin' every trade you can imagine, from trappin' to huntin' to fishin'. Naturally, we decided to move into the butcherin' business as well. No middle-man to process the meat, you understand, plus we could sell straight to our neighbors. With the new regulations raisin' the price of meat, it seemed like the family butchery was sure to fail.
Then things got all screwy. The government was havin' trouble with some protests over the unemployment rate. Apparently, robots had taken over most folk's jobs at the time. Thankfully, a robot hadn't been made that could carve up a cow or a sow quite as well as a skilled man. After a while, the protests broke into sure-enough riots, with burning buildings, cop barricades, the works.
Apparently there was some new-fangled tech fad that people thought was involved, some kind of computer that you put in your body. I'm fine with my smartphone, thank you very much. Call me old-fashioned, but if the design worked in the 10's, it'll work now.
Anyway, after the riots, the government came down awful hard on the protesters, and a lot of the poor of the greater Nola area concentrated around the center of the city. This meant my little shop had lots of new potential customers, but I was running out of food to sell them. I mean, there's only so many deer and squirrels near Nola, but people made the step from there to possums and coons pretty quick.
The real problem came when even the pests ran out. It took a few years, to be sure, but people have a serious connection with meat 'round here. I mean, what's gumbo without some kind of meat? And red beans without sausage? Needless to say, the month after the last coon was shot was mighty hard on pet owners, but even the pets ran out a year or so ago.
As I said before, I intend to change the sitiation. With all the poor people piling into the city, the cops have given up on patrolling the worse parts of town, including the space 'round my family's butcher shop. That means there's a lot of drifters, with no one to miss them and no one to sniff around if they go missin'.
You may be thinking to yourself, How could you kill another man? It's actually real simple. I mean, compared to stalking a deer, stalking a man's easy as pie. They can't smell you coming, for one. Heck, most of the time they don't even bolt if they see you. They're too busy holding onto their cardboard square of real estate to worry about a man creeping up with a buck knife.
I won't bore you with the details, but I will say a man's s'prisingly easy to clean. As long as you tend to the meat like you would any boar or deer, you end up with some choice cuts. Nicer than anything that's been around for years, that's for sure. Nice enough that people won't question where it comes from.