Meat

by Joseph D'lacey

  The Grand Bishop waved a hand at them. They bowed and retreated.

  When they were gone he stood and went to a slim closet where he kept his gowns. Hanging beside them was a heavy femur club, jaundice yellow and long untouched. He unhooked it and felt the weight in his right hand. Long-dormant aggression rose in him at the touch of cool bone in his palm. Stepping back, he swung it left and right until some of the strikes he had been so adept at returned to him. He’d never expected to need it again.

  Twenty-six

  Magnus was thankful for Bruno. There was a man he’d picked for the right reasons. There was a man that was loyal. When they’d broken out of the cells, Bruno was the first there. He directed four of the others as they freed Magnus from the railings.

  Magnus didn’t like to remember it. After so long hanging there, the spikes were almost part of his legs. It had taken three of them to hold his weight and an extra man to wrench free each leg. The pain was different, worse: his wounding in slow, jerky reverse. He’d vomited and then, mercy of mercies, passed out.

  Now he was on his bed, legs washed and bandaged by Doctor Fellows – another good man worth every illegally supplied bullock. Fellows said that he was a strong man and there was a chance he would make it. A chance. That was all Magnus wanted. That was all he’d ever needed to make things work for him. Magnus could do with slim chances what others could not. Most of the men Magnus knew didn’t even know a chance when they saw it.

  He might heal.

  He might not lose his lower legs.

  He might walk again.

  And if he could do all that, there was no reason he couldn’t carry on running the town by controlling every single cut of meat that would ever be fried.

  But his stomach was a vice of tension as he tried to ward off the pain that owned everything below it. The level of the pain varied from intolerable to insane-making. He rose and fell with it. The thing that surprised him most was how it had cleared his mind of all peripheral concerns. He was thinking more clearly than he had for months.

  His plan was a simple one. Bruno would take every surviving guard in Magnus’s employ and go immediately to MMP. There they would join up with all the stockmen and workers from the plant. They’d number at least three hundred men. That made the odds against Collins and Shanti ten to one. Not even Collins was good enough to survive those kinds of numbers. Finally, through the simple violence and force that had always ruled the town, Magnus would regain control. But that wasn’t the end of the plan. With the crazies eliminated, Magnus would take all his men and storm the Central Cathedral. They would capture the Grand Bishop first, as an insurance policy and to weaken the will of the Parsons. Then there would be a pogrom in which Magnus planned to end religious influence in the town overnight. They would burn every Book of Giving and every Gut Psalter in Abyrne and atop the conflagration cook the bodies of every Welfare worker. Perhaps they’d eat them too. It would have the desired effect on the minds of the townsfolk. In fact, yes, that was what he’d do: he’d eat the Grand Bishop’s roasted heart in front of every person in the town. They’d never forget the image of his flame illuminated face, feasting on the core of his enemy.

  Bruno had already left. The plan was in effect. Only time lay between him and the new future of Abyrne. Only waiting and pain. He’d survived the worst of that already at the hands of Shanti’s demonic twin bitches. Those girls and their father would live a lifetime of pain before he let them die. He’d see to it personally. He knew how much their suffering would aid his recovery.

  He looked down at his legs. Already the bandages were soaked through with fresh leakage. It was spreading gradually out onto the white sheets. He had lost a lot of blood and though Magnus wasn’t short of anger to fuel the ensuing weeks and months of convalescence, Doctor Fellows had expressed concern over the blood loss. ‘If anything kills you now,’ he’d said, ‘it’ll be the life blood you lose and how quickly your body replenishes it. Because you were inverted, the wound did not bleed as much as it might have. You’re fortunate to be alive.’

  Fortunate wasn’t a word Magnus would have used to describe his situation. But he could accept the benefits of the second chance Bruno and Fellows had given him.

  A symphony of agonies swelled upwards from his legs and he closed his eyes against this new tide. This was how it had been ever since they’d lain him down. Something to do with the blood trying to flow in places where it could not, the doctor had said. Magnus clamped his eyes tight but couldn’t prevent tears escaping. His yellow teeth showed through the fur of his beard as he grimaced. The pain was so loud he didn’t hear the door open.

  When he opened his eyes, he was looking at the Grand Bishop. Behind him stood the full complement of his housemaids, ten of them. Magnus was too shocked to speak. The Grand Bishop approached, the femur club held casually at his right side. From time to time it twitched to the clenching of his fist.

  ‘I’ll make a religious man of you yet, Rory.’

  The Grand Bishop smoothed his gown from his buttocks and sat down on the edge of the bed. The movement made Magnus cry out through his clenched teeth.

  ‘Your domestic staff have been telling me of your mistreatment of them. It’s more than just heavy-handedness, apparently. They say you wilfully and knowingly force them into all manner of degradations. Bestialities, one might even say.’

  The Grand Bishop raised the femur club and brought the head of it to rest in his left palm. He tapped it there a few times very gently. He leaned very close to Magnus. So close Magnus could smell the rot on his breath.

  ‘We have laws against that sort of thing in this town you know.’

  ‘When have you ever adhered to a single law?’ said Magnus through his teeth.

  ‘You’d be surprised just how pure a man I’ve been all these years.’

  The Grand Bishop moved the head of the femur club a little closer to Magnus’s knee. Magnus caught the motion and tensed. Even that caused the oceans of pain to rise up. His breaths shortened against the threat.

  ‘Seeing as you’ve ruled this house without a thought for law or decency, I’m going to allow it to rule you in exactly the same way. I will accompany you to your basement where your female staff will be free to make use of you in any way they see fit. And I mean any way. I will be there purely to offer the succour of our God and to accept your conversion before the end of your life.’

  The Grand Bishop tapped Magnus’s shin with the tip of his club. Magnus screamed.

  ‘I must say, Rory, I’m rather looking forward to it.’

  The maids approached and the Grand Bishop moved out of their way. Magnus saw the looks on their faces. There was still fear there but they were rapidly overcoming it. When it flipped into anger, he would be lost.

  ‘Please go ahead, ladies,’ said the Grand Bishop.

  Looks passed between the maids and they stepped forward. Hands reached out and caught Magnus by his hair and beard. They yanked and he screamed again. More hands took hold. They pulled him to the edge of the bed. As one, they hauled him off. His torn legs landed heavily and the screaming reached a new pitch. Magnus tried to make himself understood but no words would form through his agony. In this way, they dragged him along the upper hall, through his study and bumped him down the stairs. Each of the women grabbed tools from the walls and drawers.

  They jostled to be the first.

  She’d have slept badly anywhere in her condition but the wind at the top of the wooden observation tower, had troubled her all night. Cold and insistent it had whined through the gaps in the tower’s planks and chilled her back no matter which way she lay. She was grateful for dawn’s grey arrival; staying awake would be less of an effort than trying to sleep.

  The pain and unsteadiness in every part of her body were constant companions now and she decided it would be safer to stay up in the tower than to try and come down. It had been dangerous enough climbing up there. The towers weren’t used or maintained much any more and some of the rungs
were missing on the access ladder. She’d risked it because she realised there was no way she could get close to any of the barns where the Chosen slept.

  When they sensed her approach, a rigid tension rippled through the herds. It passed from one field to another and through every barn until it was quite clear they all knew she was there. Ten thousand of them setting their minds against her. Perhaps they sensed her sickness and would not tolerate it. She believed that for a while. In time, though, the reality settled over her making her original assumption seem very foolish.

  It was simple. They could smell the flesh of their own upon her gowns and probably from her very skin. They knew that she was one who ate them, one for whom they died. Why would they want her near? Why should they let her shelter with them?

  There wasn’t long to wait now and she knew it. She had begun to look at things differently in these last few days. There had been time to think, time to be most terribly afraid of what lay beyond her physical end. She was separated from a God who did not speak to her. She was therefore cut off from every other Parson, even the Grand Bishop – this was not something that could be discussed with any of them. She was the natural enemy of Magnus and every MMP worker because she had religious power over them. She was the enemy of the townsfolk because she was an enforcer of the Welfare’s protection.

  Surely now, as she finished her life, she could at least be honest with herself.

  When the light was strong enough to see by, she stood and looked over the slatted wooden wall of the tower. Down in the fields a thin mist lay between the hedges. Above it rose the well-defined edge of every field and the walls of the barns. In every field around her, the Chosen began to leave the barns. They walked with a crippled gait, rolling a little to each side. Once outside they stretched and yawned. In every field the Chosen stood next to each other, touching. Some leaned their heads together. Some used the stumps of their fingers to rub at the necks and backs of others. This was the kind of contact she had never known.

  But she did not envy them.

  Here were creatures that spent their short lives herded and controlled by the stockmen. Naked and downtrodden they lived every day of every season outside or in a barn. They were mutilated from birth to suit the townsfolk’s purposes, to suit the laws in the Book of Giving and the Gut Psalter. Finally, they were systematically unmade to feed the hungry mouths of Abyrne. And many mouths there were. For generations it had been so.

  Silent in her tower, she watched them as the sun came over the horizon, watched the way they faced it – every single one of them – and seemed to absorb its light. Minutes later, before the stockmen arrived, they broke into random groups or re-entered the barns, behaving once more like animals.

  The Parson lay down again when the stockmen came. She didn’t want to be seen or challenged. She lay down on the damp, slowly decaying boards and wept.

  For she knew her truth was no truth at all. No God would ever answer her calls. How could He?

  The loss of a hundred Parsons was in part to blame but even with the extra muscle they’d have lent, it might not have been enough. The townsfolk were fractious and anxious. They’d been shocked by the blasts at the gas facility. The realisation that there was no more power in the town – not even for the wealthiest areas – had hit hard. Rumour spread from house to house about the struggle for supremacy between their Meat Baron and the Welfare.

  Other stories made the rounds. Prophet John had a band of warriors and planned to starve the town into converting to his insane ways. The supplies of the Chosen were dwindling. Prophet John had friends at MMP who had already begun to dump meat by the truckload and bring on a famine. Other tales told of a mass slaughter that had begun; to reduce the Chosen and push the prices of meat up further. Abyrne would then be split between the rich and the hungry. Most of the townsfolk had suffered a little hunger from time to time; a week or two in a year when meat was in short supply. And it was true, a few people did live at the edge of starvation but there’d never been a threat like this hanging over Abyrne. The Chosen existed in huge numbers – God’s sacrifice for his people to live upon. If the numbers of the Chosen were reduced too greatly the whole town might face a famine.

  The grain bosses heard the rumours too. They had their own spies and the stories they’d heard were closer to the truth. They couldn’t let the slaughter take place if they were to continue to supply grain in previous quantities. They didn’t care what occurred in Abyrne as long as the town survived. It was the grain bosses’ men, more organised than the average dwellers in Abyrne, who led the townsfolk in a column to Magnus’s mansion. Their demands were simple: No culling of the Chosen. No discarding of valuable, usable meat. A guarantee that Prophet John would be brought to task and executed.

  It said much about the balance of power that they went to Magnus and not to the Grand Bishop.

  The delegation started out as a few hundred of the more outspoken and courageous townsfolk. As they marched through the streets of Abyrne, their numbers swelled. People stepped out of their houses to watch them pass and when they learned where they were going soon decided to join them. By the time the front of the column reached the road out of the centre of Abyrne there were thousands of people in it.

  When they found the mansion empty but for the stringy remains of Rory Magnus, they wrecked it. A couple of youths set fire to the curtains in the drawing room and the big old house began to smoulder. The defilers ran out and watched the flames take hold. When the house began to collapse in on itself, releasing huge upward gusts of sparks and flame, they took that fire into themselves and turned away.

  They marched out to the road and, jeering and chanting, turned away from the town. The grain bosses and their workers were lost in a mass of townsfolk they could no longer control. The column flowed out of the mansion’s grounds and towards Magnus Meat Processing.

  Parfitt decided to smoke his cigarette outside. The atmosphere in the dairy was nasty now, worse than the sense of doom in the slaughterhouse. Each cow that came for manual milking struggled and ended up being not only restrained but beaten too. The new dairy boss made no effort to control the violence. It made Parfitt sick.

  The greyness of the morning had never really lifted and though it was brighter now, the clouds hung like a low ceiling, pressing down on everything, suffocating it all. He walked away from the dairy block so he wouldn’t have to listen to the thrashing of bodies and the curses of his co-workers. He walked to the fence line to look out at the road and across the fields to the wasteland beyond.

  If he hadn’t picked that moment, he realised, he wouldn’t have been one of the first to see Shanti and Prophet John arrive with their tiny entourage. They ran with a very particular kind of intention, focussed and purposeful steps bringing them swiftly towards the gate. His only thought at that moment was that they must have come here knowing they would die, a misguided suicide squad whose deaths would change nothing. He felt nauseous despair. He feared for them.

  Across the space between the front gate and the nearest buildings of the plant came Torrance with a crowd of stockmen and dozens of Magnus’s black-coats. Dull grey reflected off every blade, chain and meat hook. Fearing he’d be seen, that he’d be expected to lend a hand, Parfitt backed away along the fence line and crossed to the rear corner of the dairy from where he could watch unseen.

  There seemed to be some words exchanged between the mismatched factions; Shanti and Collins speaking for their group, Torrance for the superior number. Collins’s and Shanti’s people did not enter the main gate. None of the stockmen stepped outside it. Torrance’s faction became by degrees more frustrated and belligerent. They began to taunt their opponents. Soon every hand with a weapon in it was raised and shaking as the guards and stockmen jeered. Parfitt could even see some of them laughing. If he’d been with them, he’d have been laughing too. The band of skinny, ragged tramps standing outside the gate had no more chance than the Chosen.

  As he had the thought, Torrance too
k the fight to the Prophet. He released a group of thirty or more stockmen and they charged through the gate. Parfitt didn’t believe what he saw next, didn’t even understand it. Faster than he could follow, the stockmen fell. Blades swung and whirled but made no contact. Instead of the tramps being hacked up, the stockmen were cut down by blows Parfitt wasn’t convinced he’d even seen. Machetes and boning knives clattered onto the road, dropped by dead or unconscious men – Parfitt couldn’t tell which from this distance.

  The jeering inside the perimeter of the plant died away to silence.

  At the same time Parfitt saw a smaller group approaching the Prophet’s band from further down the road. They were running. Two of them, a little further back than the rest, were giving very similar-looking little girls a piggyback. An extra ten bodies and two children, thought Parfitt. It still wasn’t enough. They’d tire and the numbers would be too great for them.

  News of the arrival of Prophet John had spread and now Parfitt turned to see stockmen and other workers, armed with whatever tools they could find, running from every part of the plant to join to the defensive force. Torrance had told them to expect it. No one had realised it would come this soon. The pack of men in the forecourt grew and, having not seen the recent defeat of their own colleagues, the new additions brought fresh enthusiasm to the ranks. The shouting began again, louder.

  There seemed to be some confusion on the part of Torrance about how best to take the Prophet on. Getting his own men to retreat from the front gate further into the plant’s grounds would be difficult enough. They wanted blood. Most especially they wanted Richard Shanti’s blood. Parfitt heard the man’s name shouted again and again. They hated him for being a traitor. Fingers and blades were pointed at him, threats to gut him, castrate him while he watched, promises to saw off his living limbs.

  Weakness buffeted Parfitt and he swayed for a moment. A sick sweat broke all over him. This was the end for the Prophet and Shanti. All of them would die today. Then the town would get back to the way it had always been, ruled by bloodlust and greed. He felt he was on the brink of some final possibility, a gesture in the name of a last stand. He didn’t know John Collins, nor did he really know Richard Shanti but he believed in them more than he believed in the mob of MMP stockmen, more than he believed in Magnus and his guards. Why, he didn’t know.