With Tub at my side, I climbed over a hill of decayed pinball machines to get a closer look. A corroded pipe held aloft by spindly stilts ran from the Machine, and from inside it I could hear the squish of pulpy matter. It stunk like death, but I leaned toward a section of pipe that had been rusted away.

Inside was meat, a lumpy sausage equal parts red muscle, white bone, and gray tendon mashed together with the multicolored gristle of internal organs. The fleshy sludge slugged through the pipe in uneven spurts as the Machine shoved it along. The kaleidoscopic viscera dazed me, and so I was caught unaware when the meat squirted forward and revealed something else sunk into the ground flesh.

A girl’s barrette.

Vomit lurched up my esophagus.

The little girl with purple glasses from the flyer was all I could think of, and I dropped my face into the Machine’s steam and let it bead upon my face like tears. But Jack was there in seconds to push me back toward the pipe, a cruel thing to do. All at once I wanted to kill him, I wanted to dig my teeth into his neck and pull out his throat in a wet chunk.

The tacks in Jack’s gloves dug into the sides of my head. Blood streaked down my cheeks.

“Look at it!” he demanded.

“I hate you! I hate you!”

“The Gumm-Gumms are infecting you! This whole place is toxic! Will you look?”

“I’ll kill you!”

“Just look!”

The tacks in my scalp forced my head within inches of the pipe and I choked on the smell. I couldn’t help but see what he wanted me to see: loose teeth, embedded in the meat, white as pearls. This made me all the sicker until the meat rolled and I saw that the teeth were tiny and pointed.

“Rats!” Jack shouted. “The meat is mostly rats!”

Within the threads of muscle I saw a long pink tail.

“Can’t you smell it?” Jack demanded. “This meat is ancient. Left over from the last war. He’s had to cut it with animal parts to keep him strong until the Killaheed is finished. Which means your friends aren’t in there, not yet. You’ve got to pull it together, Jim.”

He let up and pointed at the rickety tube that rose high into the air on rusted risers.

“Follow that meat,” he said.