The Ballad of Meth-Bear

As I was a walk-en' one morn-en' for pleas-ure,
I saw a huge bear just a lopin' along.
His fur was all matted and his claws was a scratchin'
And as he approached he was growlin' this song.

Whoo-pee, ti-yi-o, git along little meth heads,
It is your misfortune and none of my own,
Whoopee, ti-yi-o, git along little meth heads,
I'll gobble your bowels and make your stash my own.

"God fucking damn it!" Liam smashed his fists down on the table, sending empty packets of cold and flu medicine flying in all directions. "Why can't I make this work?"

"What are we doing wrong?" James was muffled through his breath mask, frowning. He was little use for anything but passing ingredients, but he had some street smarts.

Liam yanked off his own mask and shoved the window up in its frame, rotten wood breaking away and sending startled pill bugs rolling everywhere. "If I knew that I wouldn't be doing it. Goddamn, I wish I'd paid attention at school."

James shrugged, which wasn't much help either, but he seemed to want to do something, so he began gathering up the empty packets and flattening the cardboard. "At least we can recycle these."

Liam grunted, frowning furiously at the stained print-outs, flipping them over back and forth, as though they would give up even more secrets on the hundredth reading.

"Liam..." James said, low and quiet, but Liam was trying to concentrate.

"Liam!" He tried again, hissing.

"What? I'm trying to think!"

"There's some weird old dude out by your car."

Liam scowled and squinted out the window, the shack was dark at the best of times, but the sun was out, and looking outdoors made his head ache.

Sure enough, there was someone out there, a 'weird old dude' with long grey hair and a straggly white beard. He was dressed in a ripped sleeveless flannel and greasy blue jeans with biker boots. He limped as he moved and, as he turned, Liam did a double take. The old man's face was covered in burn scars, and he carried one arm high and crooked, the flesh on it red, puckered and tight from scarring. One milky eye peered out from the middle of the scars, the other a bright and brilliant blue.

What really gave Liam pause, however, was the huge, fuck-off bowie knife, sheathed at the guy's back, and the battered revolver in his hip holster.

"James. Get the fuckin' gun."

James grabbed the shotgun from the skeletal couch and followed Liam out, both of them wishing they looked more intimidating than they did in their plastic coveralls and freezer-bag booties.

"What the hell you doin' here? This is private property!" Liam shouted. Behind him, James racked the shotgun. Truth be told, the intimidating noise was the real reason they'd settled on a shotgun.

The old fellow wasn't phased.

"Sure it private property. Jus' ain't your private property." He grinned. "No need for all that, jus' a friendly neighbour stopping by. Nice place, really got your 'Evil Dead' vibe going on. Though your Oldsmobile's too new." He hooked a thumb back towards the car.

"Well, you said hi. Now get out of here." Liam took another step, James following behind him, moving slightly to the side and half lifting the gun.

"Boy, don't point that at anyone unless you're willing to use it. Like I said, I'm just here all friendly like. I'm a cook too. Name of Carter."

"I don't know what you..."

"Horsepuckey. Come on, we're brothers in meth. Show a little professional courtesy. You havin' trouble?"

Liam deflated slightly and pushed the barrel of James' shotgun down with his hand.

"Yeah, how'd you know?" Liam squared his shoulders defensively.

"Smells wrong. Want me to come take a look?" Carter shrugged, lifting his hands up and away from his body.

Liam exchanged a look with James, both of them fretful and suspicious.

"What the fuck, it's not like we're doing too well by ourselves, right?" James' eyebrows lifted, and he glanced back towards the old man.

"Aren't we rivals?" Liam asked.

"Shit, since the cartels pulled out all people have is stove-top cooks like ourselves. There's business to go around." Carter started up towards them, dragging his injured leg and they followed on in after them.

Carter expounded, at length, about the ins and outs of cooking good meth, holding court while Liam listened and took notes. After a good half hour of talking, he fell back onto the skeletal couch with a thump, sending rusty dust falling to the ground.

"Well, that's me fuckin' parched. You got a pop or one of them piblets?" He pointed to the mound of empty cans in the corner. "Don't beat yourself up about the fuck-ups. A ton of people watch a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad, read a Wikipedia article and think that's all they need."

James reached into the cooler and dragged out a can, tossing it over. Carter snatched it out of the air with his good hand and yanked the ring-pull, taking a long, deep pull from the can. "Ah, that's so much fuckin' better. Now, you boys have been real polite, but you're wondering about the scars, right?"

"No, no, we weren't," Liam shook his head.

"What are you talking about? Of course, we were." James wasn't subtle, or that smart. At least he had looks and charm going for him.

"Ah shit, nothing to worry about. I know I look like a badly cooked burger patty and it's only natural to wonder how it happened."

"Cooking accident?" Liam said.

"Not exactly. You boys ever heard of Meth-Bear?"

"Oh, come on man. You going to tell us that's what a bear-mauling looks like?"

"No man, but let me tell you what happened." Carter leaned forward and took another swig from his can. "It goes like this..."

"Back in eighty-eight or eighty-nine, I forget which, me and my buddy Wyatt hit on the idea of cooking meth. Reaganomics hadn't worked out for everyone, and we had plans, man. We were caught up in the whole 'money' thing of the eighties, and the nineties counterculture hadn't kicked in yet. I was going to cook, I had a chemistry degree that wasn't worth spit and Wyatt was a charming motherfucker. Kinda like the set-up, you fellas have here."

"Told you I was useful," James grinned to Liam.

"Anyway, we hit on this fantastic idea of coming out here. There's a few caves, that'd help us keep cool, and people wouldn't find them if we were off the trails. Seemed smart. We even made sure we found a cave with two entrances, so if the police happened by we could get away."

"Clever," Liam observed.

"Your set-up is fine, this place is run-down, but a building is a bit obvious if people cotton on to you bein' in the area. So, we had our Batcave, made it about as cosy as you could hope to make it, with all the burners, broken glassware and toxic waste. We made good shit, and we got a bit of a name for ourselves, even got a brand, a rubber-stamped piece of paper with a buffalo motif in every bag."

"Buffalo meth? That's you? That's some great shit!" James started away from the wall, against which he had been leaning. "You're, like famous."

"Ha, thanks. Yeah, still making it, still perfecting it. The best shit, and often the only shit, you can get. All was going real fuckin' swimmingly until one day when we rolled up to work."

Carter heaved a deep sigh and crunched the empty can in his fist, tossing it into the corner. He fumbled some rolling papers and tobacco in his good hand, as he continued.

"So, we come back one day, and the cave has been turned over. Everything's smashed to fuck. Barrels are overturned, our stock is gone, or ruined. Glass is all smashed. All we can think of is some rival gang or a bunch of kids wandering the trails happening on our cookhouse. Still, we were spooked, and we decided to move, in a rush, to another cave."

"Was it the cartels?" Liam asked, getting drawn into the story despite himself.

"They didn't really muscle in until the nineties, so it wasn't them. Something just as bad though, in its way. We had a big order coming in, Wyatt was working his magic with the Sons of Silence, and they wanted to make a big push. Needed the money for something, we didn't care, we needed the money to make up for all the lost gear and chemicals anyway."

"Sons of Silence, the biker gang?" James asked.

"Yeah, one-percenters, real bad dudes. If you want to shift a lot of meth, you've gotta get in with the bikers, but they're assholes to a man. You gotta ask yourself if it's worth the trouble. Now, I'm not the kinda person who gets high on their own supply, all these teeth are my own," He grinned, broadly.

"That time though, we were up against it, so I admit, I got a little high to push through a marathon cooking session, and even after we were done, I was wired as hell. Couldn't sit still, needed something to do, so I left Wyatt lookin' after the stash, and I took myself out, back to our old cave. Still bothered me, you see, that we'd been fucked. Pops used to take me huntin', and I figured – high as I was – maybe I could track whoever did us over."

Liam handed Carter another Pabst, which he popped open with a hiss, wetting his whistle.

"I found tracks, but they were weird. More like an animal, but I followed them nonetheless. I don't know how long I was walkin' for, but I was mad and higher than balls on a giraffe. I'm starin' at the ground so hard I don't even realise I've arrived until I stick my boot right in some poor fucker's guts."

"Jesus," they said together.

"Pure, fuckin', carnage." Carter gestured with his twisted hand, drawing an invisible horizon in the air. It's a campsite, a pop-up cookhouse, another one of our sainted brotherhood, avoiding the pigs by movin' around. Only some dark, dark shit has happened to 'em. I yank my boot out of this poor dudes entrails and look around. There's two, maybe three guys. Hard to tell they're in so many pieces. There's baggies everywhere, blood, campfire's been smashed and tossed, tents are ripped to pieces, broken glass all over, but of the meth, there is not a sign. Only dust."

"Fuck, what did you do?" Liam felt a little sick from the apparent relish with which Carter told the tale.

"I was freaked out. I've seen some horrible things in my long life, but those ripped up bodies stay with me, and the stink. A backed-up sewer from their spilt guts, and grilling bacon from where some giblets had landed on the embers. It's enough to make you vegan."

"Are you?" James asked, always curious about people.

"Shit no," Carter laughed. "Let's not get crazy. I didn't need an excuse to quit that scene, but it was all fairly fresh, and I was worried about Wyatt. So I high-tailed it back to the cave."

"And that's when you saw this Meth-Bear?" Liam was edging back towards incredulity.

"I shit you not. I get back to the cave, and I hear roaring and screaming and Wyatt's Colt going off. Bam! Bam! Bam! Hurtin' my ears as it came out of the cave mouth. Fuck knows what I thought I could do, or if I knew what was really going on, but I charged on in there like a rodeo clown after a buckle bunny."

"And then you saw Meth-Bear?" James was spellbound.

"Then I saw Meth-Bear." Carter took another long swig from his can and shook his head.

"He was huge but thin, even skeletal. His fur hung off him in ropes and strands, and he was covered in sores and scabs. When he roared you could see he only had a handful of teeth, but his claws were enormous, caked with blood. He had a mad, starin' look in his eyes and he stank like the north end of a skunk walking south. Wyatt was still trying to shoot the bastard thing, and he was hitting, but Meth-Bear just didn't seem to care. If he hadn't been shooting it, maybe it would have left him alone, but never get between a bear and his meth."

"What did you do?" James asked, in hushed tones.

"I didn't have a gun, not that it would have helped. I didn't have a knife like I do now. I don't know what I had been expecting, but a giant, stinking, balding grizzly certainly wasn't it. I was scared shitless and couldn't move. All I could do was watch as it tore Wyatt to pieces."

"Fuck," the boys said in unison.

"It swiped his gun hand and all but took it off, so it hung, ninety degrees to the ground. Never heard a man scream like that before or since. It tried to bite him, but it only had a few teeth, so when it got hold of his neck that wasn't an end to it, just made the screams...wetter."

The sun had shifted while they talked, and now it came through a crack in the shack's wall, striking Carter in his white eye.

"I still couldn't move, and poor old Wyatt was done for. Meth-Bear finished him with its claws in his guts. They fell out on the ground like spilt noodles, and it near-as-hell tore him in half. All I could think of was the bodies I'd already seen. Then it turned and looked at me."

Carter's voice had been getting lower and quieter, drawing the boys closer.

"I'd just seen what it'd done to Wyatt, and that was enough to finally make me move. I fumbled my lighter out as it charged me, and I torched the chemicals."

"Badass man, badass," James commented, wonderingly.

"I remember the explosion and the fire, but not a lot else. I woke up in the morning, and the bear was gone, Wyatt was very dead, and I was horribly burned all down one side of my body. It's amazing that I was still alive. I managed to crawl back to the trail, and some hikers found me. Luckily enough my hospital stay meant the Sons of Silence believed my excuse and then the medical bills got me right back to cookin' meth again. He's out there though, Meth-Bear. Cooks around here have a bad habit of disappearing."

"Are we in danger?" James glanced at the shotgun, wondering if it was remotely adequate to the task.

"This was the eighties man, that bear is long dead," Liam noted.

"Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's not the only Meth-Bear out there. All I know is that cooks still keep disappearing. So if I were you, I'd learn the lessons I did. Cover your tracks. Cover the smell. Never leave your meth uncovered. If it is Meth-Bear though, it's like he's paying me back, taking out the competition."

Carter drained the last of the can and tossed it over with the others. "Well, good luck boys. Maybe we'll run into each other again. Just keep in mind what I said."

They shook hands, and he left.

"What do you think?" James asked Liam, as the old man reached the treeline and disappeared into it.

"It's bullshit, but it makes a good story. Maybe he's just trying to scare us off his patch. Still, we can try cooking again tomorrow with his advice, it sounds right."

"It is a cool story though," James stared out into the woods, a little apprehensive.

Carter walked away, humming to himself, back towards the caves. Every few steps, ever since he left the shack, he dropped a tiny little rock of meth, one after another, the humming stopping as he broke into a wicked grin.

*As I was a cook-en' one morn-en' for money, *
I saw a huge bear just a squattin' right there.
His teeth were all missin' and his scat stank like death,
And as he a sat he was growlin' this song.

Whoo-pee, ti-yi-o, git along little meth heads,
It is your misfortune and none of my own,
Whoopee, ti-yi-o, git along little meth heads,
I'll gobble your bowels and make your stash my own.