You Become a Serial Killer at Every Level

You Become a Serial Killer at Every Level Nobody grows up wanting to work the line at Aurora Seafood in Kodiak, Alaska. You end up there because a possession charge in Anchorage followed you up the coast, and Aurora is the only outfit that doesn't run a background check past the front counter. Eleven-fifty an hour, rubber boots, a hairnet that never fits right. You gut salmon for nine hours a day until your hands stop feeling like hands and start feeling like tools that happen to be attached to you. Here's the part nobody puts in the job posting. Twice a week, the byproduct — heads, guts, anything too damaged to sell — goes into a rendering cooker out back, a steel drum the size of a school bus that reduces four tons of fish waste down to oil and bone meal by morning. Somebody has to run it. That somebody, three months in, is you. Garrett Holt owns the plant. Owns half the harbor, actually, and acts like he owns the other half too. He's the kind of boss who remembers your name the first day and uses it like a leash every day after. You're the guy who threw up over a bin of halibut heads your first week, and Holt has never once let you forget it. You find out what else runs through that cooker on a Thursday night in November, when he keeps you past close, unlocks a walk-in you didn't know had a second lock, and what's inside isn't fish. He hands you a rubber apron the same color as the ones you wear for the salmon. "Same job," he says. "Different customer." You could walk out to your truck. You put the apron on instead.