Steven wondered at the lightness he felt, paranoically fretting he might burst into laughter, right there in front of everyone on the bus, at these first gossamer strokings of happiness—so unused was he to their touch. What brought them? The time with Lucy? The Hagbeast’s first plateful of shit? Or could this elation, this feeling of possibility, be a delayed gift from a dead cow? He flexed his arms, twisting the muscles to see if he was stronger. He couldn’t tell.
Half an hour later, the drifting, window-gazing euphoria of the bus journey evaporated as he entered the process hall. Here things were real again. The weight of the boltgun and the spurts of blood were no longer smooth-edged prefugue memories, but intense and unavoidable occurrences that stuck sharp red fingers of recognition into his head and refused to be ignored.
He walked past the other men with his eyes on the floor, ashamed they might see the mark of the slaughter room on him and know the intimacy of his experience there. He sat by himself at the grinder, staring at the scoured steel work surface, dazzling himself with the million curving scratches that caught light and bent it into a bright flat tangle.
The flow of meat started with the horn and time passed in chunks of bleeding beef. Steven worked hard and tried not to think, because when he did he got confused. He didn’t understand what had happened in the slaughter room. It had frightened him … And yet there had been that flash of happiness on the bus. Now he was frightened again—of the blood and the cutting of holes into cows and the mad, wantonly exposed selfishness of the slaughtermen, and of not knowing what all this had done to him.
When he heard the voice behind him he froze, thinking it was Cripps. But there was too much smoothness to it, too much humid depth for it to belong to the striding, blood-bathed foreman.
The voice called his name again and it came through a lot of throat. Steven twisted quickly on his stool.
Just a white wall and, down near the floor, the ventilation grille. Then movement behind the grille and Steven was on his knees, peering through it, pressing his face against the mesh. In there, in the shadows beyond the spill of light from the hall, the outline of an anvil-shaped head swayed gently. Two eyes blinked limpidly, insolent in their slowness. A dark mass moved forward into the light.
“That Cripps man is going to fuck you up, dude.”
It was a cow. Most of the body was below floor level but Steven could tell it was a full-grown animal. A sienna Guernsey. He looked closely at the flawless sandy curves of forehead and cheek, at the chocolate darkening of the mouth and nostrils, at the badger rings around the eyes. For an absurd second he thought that if he looked hard enough at it the thing might phase back into his head and disappear.
But it was real and it stayed.
“What … ?”
“Yeah, I’m a cow, man. Touch me.”
Steven stuck his fingers through the grille. The cow was a cow, warm and solid.
“Can you handle it?”
Steven nodded, but it didn’t mean anything one way or the other.
“Good. Listen, man, you keep going to the slaughter room with Cripps, you’re gonna get fucked over. You think it’ll help, but it won’t. You got sick last time, learn from that.”
“How do you know?”
“Ah, man, we’re always watching. And we know Cripps. He’s been here forever and this ain’t the first time it’s happened. He told you the slaughtermen weren’t like other men, right? He talked about power and freeing yourself to take whatever you want. And you thought, ‘Shit, that’s just what I need. He’s right, look how different those guys are.’”
“I didn’t know what to think.”
“Yeah, but you wanted it, didn’t you?”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“Sure. But can’t you see it’s a load of shit? Course those guys look different, but it ain’t because they’ve gotten to be better people. Shit, they spend all day chopping us up and raping us, it’d be fucking weird if they didn’t look a little different. But it ain’t magic like Cripps says, no fucking way. What it is, man, is a way to stop yourself feeling, and you need your fucking head read if you think that’s the way to go.”
Steven sat back on his haunches, head gridlocked by a stream of cow words he didn’t want to hear. He wanted the strength Cripps promised, he wanted to change himself into someone on TV, someone who had the guts to get rid of the Hagbeast and build himself a life.
“You might be wrong. How can a cow know what changes a man?”
The cow stamped and rolled its shoulders. “Hey, fuck you, man. You think we’re stupid? We watch those guys outside this place and they ain’t the supermen they think they are, believe me. You don’t want to hear this right now? Okay. But remember what I said, it’s gonna fuck you up. Here comes the Crippster. Later.”
The Guernsey flicked its tail, turned and trotted into darkness. Steven looked over his shoulder and saw Cripps at the far end of the process line, heading his way.
Lumps of meat from the conveyor had built up in a sodden mound next to the grinder and some of them had fallen on the floor. He got up, cold and slow, and started chucking them into the machine. Waiting for the hand on his shoulder.
And it came. Cripps beside him, up against him, hard hand sliding from shoulder to neck, rubbing and squeezing.
“How do you feel, boy? Does yesterday still live within you?”
“I don’t know.”
Cripps laughed. “Don’t be frightened by the sickness. It lessens each time until it ceases to be felt.”
“It doesn’t frighten me. I just want to know what it means.”
“If meaning is what you need, you’ll have ample opportunity to search for it. I’m moving you to a slaughter station.”
Cripps shoved him off the stool and they moved across the floor, Steven flotsam in the bow-wave of Cripps’s will.
This thing with Cripps and death trauma was impossible to evaluate. Cripps said one thing and the cow said another—and his body, when it fugued out and got sick, seemed to agree with the cow. His head, though, was greedy for change and, not knowing the correct path to take, but unable to pass up a chance at happiness, slipped into neutral and waited for the decision to be made for it.
Cripps led him on to a slaughter platform and pressed the butt of a boltgun into his hand. The slaughtermen were peripheral, the world was a grabber and a cow being maneuvered into it. Around him there was nothing else, except the dead feeling that everything now was inevitable and beyond his control. It was going to happen—wholesale slaughter for hours on end. Not yesterday’s single cow, not the separated viewing of cow death pornography, but participation in what Cripps said made these men what they were.
“You remember the feel of the gun. Good. Hold it firmly—this and your cock will raise you from your weakness. Do it, boy. I shall watch for a while.”
Steven blew a hole in the cow’s head, felt the animal’s collapse in his own body and a fine spray of blood on his face.
Gun swings back on its chain and slaughtermen drag the still shivering cow out of the grabber and hook it up to the conveyor. Then back in again, press hard against the next cow’s head and pull the trigger.
He puked over the third cow before he killed it.
Dimly, at his side, he was aware of Cripps wanking. Aware, too, that it was over him and not the dying cows. But it meant little. He was inside himself, watching himself kill and unable to stop. Working faster and faster in sprays and fountains and gouts of blood and brain and slivers of skull and arcing jets of shit. Working fast to burn through the fever, to have it finished. But it wouldn’t end and Cripps spurted come against the side of his leg, and his back and arms ached with the weight of the boltgun and his clothes stuck to him with blood and sweat and his hair was plastered down flat.
The cows kept coming, and each one took something from him: shavings of sensitivity, perception, care. He was being robbed, violated. One of the few parts of himself he wanted to keep was being cauterized into hard scar tissue.
Between waves of nausea and desperate silent pleas that the loss not be permanent, the idea crawled in that the cow in the vent had been right. He was scared. But the straight-jacket of events tied him to the platform and kept his hand on the gun.
He began to phase out of perception. He dipped into long troughs of redness where there was nothing but the swaying of his body out over the guardrail and the distant jerk at the end of his arm. During these periods he did not see or hear or taste. He knew only motion and he let it rock him to sleep, into a void where the horror of bovine death became a buffer against itself.
And then he would be back again in the immediacy of it all, feeling every ridge of the gun, seeing individually each hair on the back of the cow’s head, each minute globe of blood as it danced in the air. Then, colors were concentrated, as though the dye of every object was collapsing in on itself, turning dense and hard.
On the last of these awakenings he found himself pressed against the side of a cow, down on the slaughter floor with six other men and Gummy. His dick was in it, through a hole in its hide. It was wet in there and the organs slid around unpredictably. A slaughterman held arms with him.
Gummy was shrieking down at the ass. His face dripped shit and he twitched through some kind of jig as his leathery cock splattered come over the flanks of the animal.
“Now ya know what a cow’s for, dontcha, ya little bastard? Now ya know what old Gummy meant. Thought I was just a fuck with a chewed-up mouth, didn’t ya?” Gummy threw his head back and shouted at the roof, “God Jesus Christ, I love cows!”
No one listened to him.
Cripps was alone, buggering a heifer, watching the slaughtermen through eyes glazed with the exultation of whatever truths he saw opening before him in their sadism.
The men started to make loud mooing noises, shaking their heads and bellowing deep in their chests, bringing their lips into tight O’s. Steven did the same and they all moved faster and the cow’s guts began to slosh.
When he came, spurting into the soggy viscera of the cow, he wanted to scream. He wanted to scream in a white-hot burst words that would burn away this sin he had so greedily allowed himself to participate in. But his lungs were childhood-nightmare-paralyzed as the monster races in from the hole in the wall and heads slavering for the bed and you want to yell but your body just won’t do what you tell it to and you’re gonna die if you don’t make some sort of sound so you arch yourself until only the back of your head and your heels still touch the mattress … but it doesn’t do any good.
So Steven flipped back onto the floor and blacked out.
CHAPTER SEVENTEN
It was dark. Consciousness crept back in tattered gray rags, a piece at a time, worn thin during its absence. His eyes were closed. He felt the weight of his back on the cold concrete floor, felt the weight of a black waiting silence pressing him into it. Time passed, large bodies shifted and made the air around him move, deep voices muttered vaguely. He opened his eyes, blinked, pushed himself up on an elbow. The muttering grew louder and shadows closed in. A soft hoof prodded his hip.
“Told you it’d fuck you up.”
The cow from the vent.
Steven stood up in a circle of cows, lightheaded and dizzy, while a single set of hooves clopped away to the edge of the slaughter room and made the lights come on. Cow faces pushed at him, a dozen, brown and pied and black. Trying to see into him like there was something they needed to know.
He squinted in the sudden brightness. The rest of the slaughter room was empty. It was late night, the men had gone. The brittle halogen light filled the room with memories of killing. He felt ill.
“You have a good time this afternoon? Do what Mister Cripps wanted you to?”
He bent at the waist and vomited.
“Oh dear. Thought it was going to make you a big strong man like all the other guys. Don’t look like it right now. Tell me, man, did you enjoy killing us?”
Steven didn’t answer.
“You’re lucky we got the charity to dig up reasons for what you did. We could take your life away, motherfucker.”
The cow rocked sideways, breathing heavily through its nose, but Steven did not feel threatened. There was more to this gathering than retribution.
“Come on, man, climb up, we’re going for a ride.”
“Where to?”
“Just get on.”
What choice was there in the middle of this posse? Steven swung himself weakly over the Guernsey’s wide back and lay flat, close to its neck, as if the life in this animal could warm away the deaths of the others.
They clattered past the empty holding pen to a vent with a grille that hung open on a single screw. Each cow got down and slid through the hole on its stomach, grunting and cursing, heaving its bulk into the space beyond. The lights in the slaughter room went out and the last cow pulled the grille back into place.
The group moved fast along the duct. Shiny sheet steel bounced their reflections back at them in ripples, golden from the low-watt maintenance bulbs that poked into the gloom every ten yards. Steven clung to the Guernsey, the breeze of their passage blowing his hair. The cows moved with a loping synchronization, gathering momentum, merging to a single kinetic mass. There was joy in their motion, revelry in speed, grace for big bodies clumsy at rest.
Two hundred yards on, the group turned through a rent in the steel cladding and plunged like a roller coaster down a crudely gouged tunnel, into a labyrinth of passages and chambers. Hooves rang loud on stone floors and the cows ripped out long trumpeting bellows.
Despite the still clinging horror of the slaughter room, Steven was awed.
“What is this place?” He had to shout close to the Guernsey’s ear so his words weren’t drowned in the clamor.
“Old sewers, old subway lines, holes in the ground, tunnels. We found them and joined them up. They go everywhere, man. Citywide. And we live at the center. The asshole of the city.”
“This is insane.”
“That we live under your feet? Why? Cripps left the first of us in the holding pen one night and we got out. Found the vent and fucked off fast. And we grew, man. Cows like pussy same as the next guy. Plenty of food down here too. It ain’t clover but, fuck, it ain’t so bad.”
“Didn’t he come looking for you?”
“Cripps? That was in the early days when he didn’t think he was a god yet. He was pissed off, sure as shit, but he didn’t try to find us. Made damn sure he didn’t leave anything in the holding pen again, though. And he won’t stay in the slaughter room alone now either.”
They jogged along the platform of an old underground station and some of the cows made train noises and chuckled at each other, nipping ears and tails and pretending it wasn’t them.
“Why didn’t you get out to the country?”
“Shit, man, people see us wandering around the countryside, they’d just round us up again. And after we’d been down here a while we didn’t want to be anywhere else, anyhow.”
“Is it safe?”
“Yeah, but it’s more than that. ’Cause our eyes are sorta on the side of our heads, running through tunnels gives us this really intense feeling of speed. Makes us feel like horses or … well, not like cows anymore.”
The cows rocketed through more tunnel.
“Check out these lights up ahead. If you go fast enough it works like a strobe. See? Wild, huh?”
A string of small bulbs set into the side of the tunnel flashed by, dazzling Steven. Then they were in darkness. Total. He felt the floor sloping down, the increased speed and potential impact-mass of the cows as they lengthened their stride, felt the approach of some center, some home, heard the animals shout.
Sudden light. And space. An explosion into openness. A columned chamber so vast that the walls were beyond the soft orange light that filtered through ancient air ducts high in the vaulted ceiling. The posse ploughed into it, then slowed like their power had been turned off. Slowed and drifted with the last of their momentum in
to a herd that ranged out from a narrow stream in the center of the cavern.
The Guernsey, though, had stopped near the entrance and Steven looked down on two hundred cows chewing cud, sleeping, talking together, drinking from the stream, farting, fucking, playing.
“It ain’t much, but we call it home. Get down, man.”
Steven slid to the dirt floor and breathed in the smells of the herd—warmth and dung and sweat, cow breath, cow presence.
“I like it here, it’s like the outside doesn’t exist.”
“Yeah, well don’t start making plans, man. This is cow-land and you can’t stay.”
“Why bring me here, then?”
The Guernsey walked in a circle around Steven, round and round, like a thinker pacing. “Cripps … See, man, you gotta understand about him. He’s like the figurehead of it all for us. All the death and torture and rape are all him because he does it and enjoys it and teaches it to other men. When the first of us escaped we lived for revenge. We worked hard to build the herd, to find this place, to get into a new way of life. But all the time we knew what he was doing to our brothers on the surface. And it was emasculating knowing we couldn’t do anything about it. You know what I’m saying? As long as he lived, Cripps had our balls.”
“Killing him won’t stop cows dying.”
“Fuck, I know that. But it’ll stop him living. You don’t know what it’s like to be in the pen watching him do that stuff, knowing your turn is coming. How it is to shit yourself with fear, to be broken even before he puts his hand on you. Take my word for it, any one of us would die to get that fucker.”
“There are enough of you …”
“Shit, Cripps is too careful. He doesn’t give us the chance.” The Guernsey stopped circling. “That’s why we brought you here.”
“You want me to kill him?”
“No, we want you to make it so we can kill him. Bring him to the slaughter room at night. Get him alone. Just set him up for us, man, that’s all.”
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