Cows

by Matthew Stokoe

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The money wasn’t finished, but what he had would not last forever and Steven was anxious to have this last necessity taken care of. He left the flat on a cold clear day that made him think of pine forests.

  He felt tired. Transforming Lucy into something bearable was taking more and more energy. And ahead of him, the Guernsey was bound to be a problem. He tried not to think, his will was in danger of becoming diffuse.

  There was no cow to guide him from the storm drain, but Steven knew his way.

  The air in the tunnels was damp and it made his muscles ache. Sometimes there was half-light, sometimes he had to find his way by touch. And it was in these dark places that his head ran away with itself. The thought of the effort required to again assume leadership of the herd drained him and made his body drag.

  At the entrance to the chamber Steven paused and breathed deeply, trying to suck something useful out of the air. All he got was a heavy feculence of dung and animal sweat that further sapped his energy.

  He stepped from the tunnel into the copper-glowing vault and found it changed. The hard-packed floor was clean, cow shit piled neatly in far corners. And where last time there had been a chaos of undirected energy, there was now order and peace. A mound of earth had been erected at one end of an avenue of pillars, and ranged out from its base in rough ranks the herd lay at ease—chewing cud, sleeping, nuzzling youngsters—or stood flexing beef muscles, gazing into shadows with faraway eyes.

  Above them, on a flat space at the top of the mound, the Guernsey lay with the small roan female. She dozed and oozed recent cow seed from her dark cunt. The Guernsey was awake and alert, watching the herd, and Steven’s presence registered immediately. The animal pushed itself upright and tracked his approach, prodding the roan until she woke and cantered obediently down to the herd.

  As Steven walked through the rows of cows a murmur spread before him, a shockwave of restrained excitement that rapidly infected the entire herd. Around him cows heaved to their feet, shunting haunches and shoulders out of his way. Tongues flicked out to taste his arms as he passed.

  He climbed to the top of the mound. The cows began to bellow and stamp. The Guernsey eyed him closely, gauging strength, weakness, potential threat, then brayed a cow command that silenced the herd.

  In the sudden quietness Steven saw that more than the appearance of the chamber had changed. Something in the herd’s relationship to the Guernsey had altered also—the way they held their bodies, the angle of their heads, some indefinable rearrangement of muscle and attitude hinted of events during his absence. Steven sensed a realignment of loyalty, or rather a slight splintering of their previous devotion. It was not overtly threatening, but it was there nonetheless and it made him unsure of his position.

  “I expected you sooner.”

  The Guernsey’s voice, like his stare, was guarded. Steven scanned the cavern.

  “You moved fast.”

  The Guernsey chuckled softly. “I told you about hierarchies, man. When there’s space at the top it has to get filled.”

  “I can’t see Cripps.”

  “Yeah, he was getting too much attention, so I moved him. Come on.”

  The Guernsey led Steven down the back slope of the mound, away from the herd, to a hollow by a wall. Cripps’s ragged bones lay in a heap, half covered in cow shit.

  “My private dumping ground. Didn’t think it was right I should shit with the others.”

  “What makes you so special?”

  “They do, man. After we hit that building site they knew you were right. They had identity again and they believed. But they needed to keep it happening, like they thought it would slip away if they sat around too long. You weren’t here, so I stepped in.”

  Steven felt his skin tighten. “You took them on another raid?”

  “Had to.” The cow looked bland. “They would have gone crazy. Couldn’t let all your good work go to waste, could I?”

  The Guernsey was openly mocking him and for a few seconds Steven lost himself in visions of the slaughter room. He came out of it breathing hard and wishing for the balanced weight of a boltgun in his hand. But this was a time to tread carefully, he did not know how far he had been replaced in the eyes of the herd as the bringer of their future.

  “How did it go?”

  “Fine as wine, dude. Why wouldn’t it? How much do you think it takes? They want to be led. They need to be led. So we had ourselves a stampede, and I was master of it, man. I mean, I was in control. Found some engineers in one of the sewers. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They tried to run but the water was too deep. Fuck did they make a mess.”

  Steven stood silent, imagining the cow in pieces. But some of his uncertainty was leaving him. The Guernsey was too happy as pretender to the throne, too obviously self-seeking. While Steven didn’t give a shit about the herd and would gladly use them for his own ends, he understood, where the Guernsey did not, what they needed to evolve as a self-maintaining unit. Like him they had to find or create a new approach to living, and like him they had to unleash something within themselves that would give them the strength to do it. The Guernsey might see that they needed direction, but it could not know as intimately as Steven which way to point them. It saw things only from the outside, it knew the mechanics, but not the reason for their effect.

  “You think you’ve taken my place?”

  The Guernsey didn’t reply.

  On the other side of the mound the herd started to chant, a deep bass rumble that purled up one slope and down the other, like dry-ice fog, lapping across his body in warm waves, calling, Steven, Steven, Steven.

  They wanted him.

  He smiled at the Guernsey. “Doesn’t sound like it, does it?”

  Steven turned his back on the animal and went up to the top of the mound.

  The herd was on its feet, heads raised, throats stretched, throwing his name at the walls of the chamber in hot punches of sound. They were sweating, as though they strained at some invisible barrier, wanting to be near him, to thrust their destiny into his hands.

  Looking down on the slick brown backs, Steven felt the return of power. He was equal to the weight of their need. Each successive cry dragged him further from the blurred gray world of weakness that had shrouded him earlier, back into the dazzle of possibility. For seconds on end he saw nothing but the adoration of their eyes. There was a kinship between them. They had shared the release of a kill, and they needed it again as much as he did.

  The Guernsey stood close to Steven, its gaze scrabbling insolently over the gathered animals, picking at the shreds of its brief sovereignty. Steven brushed against it and felt hard flesh, this part-time leader was pumping hard to hold on to the advances it had made during his absence. Conflict was inevitable, but it would come later. The Guernsey was not stupid and a wrong move now, in front of the herd, would destroy any future chance it might have at leadership.

  The cows were getting jittery, they wanted action. Steven felt their tension in himself. He flexed the long muscles of his thighs and arms, and every cell in his body opened up and started screaming for the heroin of concentration—that state where the only thing that exists in the whole world is the thing before you, in your hands, bleeding and dying.

  He whispered close to the Guernsey’s ear, “What was next?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your next raid?”

  “Another raid? Sure, man. Have to keep things rolling along.”

  “What was it going to be?”

  The Guernsey sighed.

  “An underground station. End of the line. There’s a ramp from the tunnel to the platform and late at night not too many people … but enough. Thought the great leader would have a plan of his own.”

  “What about cash? There won’t be much in a station.”

  The cow laughed at him. “We don’t need money, man. Are you blind? We’re fucking cows.” It nodded at the herd. “They want what you promised, not
some mercenary substitute. If you can’t handle that you’re welcome to fuck off.”

  Steven didn’t have to think about it. He needed money, but he needed other things as well. He needed to feed his desire for power and the love of the herd.

  “It’ll do.”

  He stepped away from the Guernsey and spread his arms to quiet the chanting that had become almost deafening in the stone chamber. There was silence at the instant of his gesture.

  “I am back to lead you.”

  The cows shrieked.

  “There are things still to learn,” he looked sideways at the Guernsey, “that I alone can teach.”

  The cows shivered and rocked and screamed: “Show us!”

  “I will show you.” Steven’s words came back at him fast. They snagged on his hot skin and burrowed in, infecting him. He believed what he was saying, he really did want to show them. He wanted to be flying through tunnels with them and fuck everything else, heading for the bliss of a focusing sensory overload—Cripps communion.

  He swung up onto the Guernsey, oblivious to the animal’s flinching, and charged down the mound, straight at the herd, then through them, howling for them to follow. Spit streaked back from the corners of his mouth.

  To Steven, with the thunder of the herd behind and the muscle play of the beast beneath him, the journey to the underground station was an ecstasy. He kept no check on the Guernsey, he cared nothing to follow progress or determine location. All he wanted was movement toward some sense-sucking activity—toward strength and away from weakness. The Guernsey would run true, it had no choice, the herd would allow nothing else.

  Time passed as fast as the cows could force it to. Then they were stopped in a tunnel, in the shadows twenty yards back from where it widened into a station. Double tracks of bright steel fired straight from their feet, out past the platform and back into another tunnel on the other side. For a second their shine held Steven’s gaze, drawing him out through his eyes until he felt he could stand, one foot on each rail, and slam out into the almost happening bloodbath like some angel on a rocket sled, sure and unstoppable. And on and on, beyond now, through every future experience he might have, on an exact course where no mistakes were possible …

  Then the Guernsey started to whisper a plan of attack: “Okay, first section move along the tracks, right by the platform. Go slow, let ’em see you. Then section two, while everyone’s looking at them, take that ramp there, stay quiet until you get level, then steam in and waste the fuckers. Some of them are going to fall off the platform onto the rails, behind section one. So section three, that’s your job—sweep up behind and stomp anyone there …”

  Steven only half listened, the Guernsey’s voice fuzzed. What it said was so irrelevant he could not spare the energy to follow it. Instead, he listened to the crunching of the railbed as the cows shifted weight, the soft snorting and farting of odd animals, the scratching of a rat back down the tunnel.

  He tore his eyes from the rails and looked out into the sizzling brightness of the station—no trains, a ramp, about twelve people waiting to get back to homes and wives and children.

  The Guernsey was fucking things up. It was planning, rationalizing, making clinical what should have been wanton and intuitive. It had missed the point—they needed recklessness, not precision. Yak, yak, yak. All the words were wrong.

  So … Steven sat up high, sucked in his breath, twisted both the Guernsey’s ears and shrieked over its interminable babble: “Fuck it all. CHARGE!”

  And yanking on the ears, forced the Guernsey out into the white light of the station. The herd, in an anxiety-ridden limbo between their past and their future, plunged after him.

  From shadow to visibility.

  Steven released the Guernsey’s ears and the animal, knowing it was too late to rebel, shot up the concrete ramp and onto the platform like an insane three-ton truck. Close behind it the herd was a boiling collage of drawn-back lips, red eyes and pistoning limbs.

  The people on the platform looked up from their feet and their newspapers and pissed down their legs.

  None of them fell on the rails. Some started to move toward the exits, but there just wasn’t time. The herd hit them in a broad wedge, impacting against one then another and another, not stopping but carrying the bodies forward in a bleeding collected mass.

  Steven watched the white-tiled wall at the end of the platform come toward him as though he ordered it to move. He shouted, and the sound he made was the sound of the herd—hoof clatter, lung bellow, muscle noise. Blood and shit blew back across his face and there was nothing in the world but its wet salt taste.

  The herd was around him, pressing close, jostling to be in frontline contact with the moaning tangle of bodies. The Guernsey’s head was soaked with blood, part of its snout buried in the burst abdomen of a young woman held sideways and aloft by the snouts of other cows. Steven looked closely at her and saw her eyelids flutter. Wall impact was seconds away and there was nothing, absolutely nothing on earth she could do to escape dying under an avalanche of beef.

  Involvement on a more personal level was imperative. He reached forward, gripping the Guernsey with his knees, and took hold of her head, thumbs gently closing her eyes and resting there. He locked his arms straight and drew his fingers back until they were curled behind the woman’s ears.

  Her head was the first thing to hit and the impact drove Steven’s thumbs through her eyes and into her skull. Viscous milky sludge squirted from her sockets and wet his forearms, then her head burst in his grasp and fountained blood and brain against the tiles in an enormous ink-blot pattern.

  The herd broke against the wall, driving the bodies into it, trying to turn to avoid it themselves but failing and staggering and slamming into each other in a grunting cow pileup. Steven was hurled from the Guernsey but the ruptured carcasses of the dead train travelers cushioned his fall. Cows threw themselves down around him and made a cordon against the shunting rear ranks.

  For long floating seconds Steven lay where he was and watched the colliding animals, feeling other people’s blood soak the back of his clothes. He was safe and warm and free of doubt, recharged by murder.

  When the inertia of the stampede was spent, the cows picked themselves up and stood in a dripping curve before him, waiting for some indication of what to do next. Off to one side the Guernsey was alone, treading on a body and turning it to paste.

  Steven rose and touched the red-stained heads of those closest. They nuzzled his palm gratefully, but their eyes strayed to the dead people behind him. He lingered on the small roan female, stroking the underside of her chin.

  The herd quivered impatiently.

  “What do you want? Right now, without thinking, what do you want?”

  When she answered her voice was loud and Steven knew she spoke for them all. “I want to know always that I was able to do this. I want to carry the smell of their blood deep in my hide.”

  The cows shouted agreement and Steven shouted with them, goading, exhorting, whipping them into a frenzy. When a gap came in the noise, he told them to do what they wanted to do and jumped safe to an angle of walls away from the pile of bodies.

  The herd fell on the heap of flesh, smearing blood and piss and excrement over as much of themselves as they could. They rolled in the mess and drove it through hair to deep layers of skin.

  Steven watched as bodies were rent. This wild fulfillment of cow desire was a reflection of the power he felt raging within himself.

  A presence at his side—the Guernsey, face, chest and forelegs bloody, but uninvolved in the platform brawling. This animal’s own bloodletting had occurred before the sanction that had freed the rest of the herd to action. The implication was not lost on Steven—for this one, his permission was of little consequence.

  “You think they needed you for this shit? Jesus, the men I led them to in the sewer weren’t any different. They like you, but they’ll find out you’re the same as Cripps and one day soon you’ll be hi
story. Hear what I’m saying? I can lead them just as well as you.”

  On the platform the herd, exhausted now, and sticky with blood and pieces of flesh, were lying down.

  “A few raids to get me some cash and they’re yours.”

  “Don’t pull my dick. You’re getting into this killing thing. You got Cripps inside you and he’s waking up. You’re a bad man.”

  “How can you know anything about me? I’m a human, you fucking animal.”

  The Guernsey’s eyes narrowed. Things were out in the open now. Each was a threat to the other, and each knew it. Steven felt no fear, though, the thrill of the woman’s head exploding in his hands was too fresh.

  “There’s a train around this time, better find someone else to ride, motherfucker.”

  The animal moved off to rouse the cows from their dozing. They obeyed its commands but their eyes flicked to Steven. When they were ranked and ready to move and he still had not joined them, the roan female broke from the group and approached him.

  “It’s time to go, there’s a train coming.”

  “I know.”

  “I will carry you.”

  Steven stroked her head, scratching gently in the thick curling hair that grew like Persian lamb’s wool between her ears. Then he called to the herd: “I will follow. Go.”

  The Guernsey bellowed and for an instant the herd froze to absolute silence. Striations of locked muscle cast light webs of shadow across shoulders and legs, full-capacity lungs bled oxygen into frothing blood, and in every animal brain switches clicked to action mode. Time started again with a snap and they rocketed along the platform, swirling litter into mini-tornadoes with the wind of their passing.