Excerpt from “Cowboy Saints,” by Philip Raines and Harvey Welles

The franchise owner was a Vietnamese-American hag with greasy eyebrows and a surprisingly lovely honeysuckle odor. When Half Stone explained what he wanted, she told him immediately, "No adventure holiday."
"No holiday," he replied unhappily. "Vocation."
The owner regarded him suspiciously. "What you want?" she asked, but Half Stone could only shrug.
That seemed to satisfy her, so she drove him out of the main processing base of the fast-food ranch in her jeep. As they rattled along the hardened dirt road, Half Stone tried to take in the Utah landscape - broken rock and brittle bushes - but it was just useless wilderness to him. He'd grown up in places like this farm - scrappy industrial homesteaders. They dotted across a land which had been cleared centuries ago by fast pioneers on their way west, then slowly gnawed to the bone when they doubled-back decades later after running up against the sea. A single telecom cable ghosting above the track was the only trace of the electronic, and four rough miles up the road, the lone shack was the only thing plugged into the rest of the world.
The shack failed to hide the bleak bowl of land beyond the barbed-wire boundaries of the grazing. Not much to graze, Half Stone thought - not even dirt, just sand and boulders.
When they'd gotten out of the jeep, the old woman started telling him, "Simple job, look after meat."
She tapped one of the boulders with a sneaker and it stirred into shivery life. A headless, leathery pouch on four reinforced chicken legs. Sexless, almost senseless but for a sophisticated inner ear installed for balance. Apart from an excretory chute located between the legs, there were no orifices.
"Easy work. Three parts." The old woman took an aerosol with a hypodermic needle attached and filled it from the nearest canister.
"One, feed."
Placing a foot on the meat, she jabbed the needle into its side and emptied the specially-prepared feed. She turned the side of the can towards him so he could see the printed feeding instructions in Vietnamese and English.
"Two, circulate."
She started kicking the meats, rousing all thirty-five animals, and forced them away from the shade. Knocking into each other and rebounding like slow-motion rubber balls, the meats diffused out for five yards before dropping silently again to the ground. "So not lie in own shit, get disease," the woman explained and chucked the aerosol can to Half Stone.
"Three, not bother me for six week."