Cows

by Matthew Stokoe

  Steven watched them disappear into the dark oval of the tunnel mouth, then moved to the carpet of plastered flesh and began peeling pieces from it. He found a T-shirt still clinging to something that looked like a lung and used it as a sack. He chose meat that looked soft.

  The roan was getting nervous and somewhere, far off, the whistling roar of a train began to grow. She whinnied, but Steven pushed it to the last few seconds, stuffing his bag full, collecting meat until the dim glow of the coming train’s lights fanned against the black curve of the far tunnel.

  Then they ran, Steven at her side for a few seconds then swinging up, Pony Express–style, onto her back. His makeshift sack was heavy and it thumped against his thigh. Behind them the train blundered into the station and sent hissing clicks along the rails under their feet. The roan flattened her ears and stretched into a gallop, sure-footed on the sleepers and gravel, straining to do service to the man she carried. Time flowed perfectly, it opened up and made space between them and the danger behind.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The roan skidded sideways in a shower of small stones and they slid into the damp quiet of an intersecting passage that had led them to the underground line earlier that night. She paced on a few yards, winding down, catching breath, then stopped, sweating, dull-gleaming in the dim light. Steven dismounted but stayed close, running his hands along her sides, forcing out small rills of perspiration with the edge of his palm. Her damp heaviness excited him and his cock went hard.

  “We’re safe now.”

  Behind her. She shook her ass. He used both hands to stroke the insides of her thighs, exploring the curves of muscle, bouncing his fingers over veins brought to the surface by her running. Up to the dark folds between her hips. Then into her vulva, parting it with his thumbs, bending close to catch its woody smell, pressing his mouth against it and swallowing what he found there. He ran short dreams of pushing his head all the way inside.

  But he didn’t want to hide himself in her. He wanted to command and control her, to slam himself in like his cock was a weapon, again and again until something ruptured or they both blacked out. He wanted to pump her so full of come that she burst.

  So he made a pile of stones and climbed up on it and fucked the living shit out of her. She didn’t resist because she wanted it as much as he did, and their moans tumbled along the walls and spread out under the city in a vicious cadence of dominance and submission.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  In the chamber the Guernsey was back on its hill. The herd was agitated, moving restlessly in knots of five or six that wove in on themselves, tightening until they fragmented and split to join other knots. The cows had emerged from their killing session unhappy. The satisfaction of the station had dimmed during the rush back to the central chamber and they were left wanting some undefined further experience to complete their journey toward self-realization.

  Steven slid from the roan like an Indian, flipping one leg over her neck and landing with knees flexed. He shouldered his bag of human scraps and strode through the milling cows to the base of the mound. The Guernsey watched him hatefully.

  He waited on flat ground, letting seconds pass. Above him the Guernsey stood set and heavy, gathering menace, as though with enough of it he could build a wall around Steven and blot him out.

  Finally the animal spoke: “You failed us, man. You didn’t bring us more than we already had. You’re a nigger down here, you don’t belong. The herd should be led by one of its own.”

  Steven rested the bag of meat against his foot. “You can’t do it without me. You haven’t learned to carry your killing inside yourselves.”

  “Early times yet, man.”

  “Time won’t do it. What is it that you think I have shown you?”

  “That we can kill men same as they kill us.”

  Steven laughed across the words. “I am not teaching you to destroy men, but to become like them.”

  He lifted the sack of flesh above his head and addressed the herd.

  “Here is my final gift. Here is the last thing you need to escape the weakness that binds you to your past. It will leave you no choice but to seek experiences that free you from yourselves.” He raised his voice. “When you stampede are you not free?”

  They bellowed.

  “When you feel bones break and flesh tear beneath your hooves are you not living as you wish to live? Strong and free of the uncertainty that has dogged you since the death of Cripps?”

  The cows bucked and yelled and tossed their heads. Steven had them.

  “Come forward and be blessed.”

  Before the first cow could move the Guernsey pounded down from the top of the mound and planted itself in front of Steven. Its eyes were bloodshot and there were deposits of dry spit in the corners of its mouth. It stood there, grinding its teeth, twitching, pushing against the line that marked the end of antagonism and the beginning of violence, wanting to cross over and crush Steven flat. But it did nothing, just breathed until its leg muscles relaxed enough for it to strut to the side of the mound and look on malevolently.

  Steven reached into his bloody sack and took out a small piece of flesh.

  “Who will be the first?”

  The roan moved close and ate from his hand. She kissed him with lips stained red from the meat and moved away. Then the others came.

  So it went. Cows filing by in the gloom of the cavern, taking their taste of a food that would drag them into their future.

  Back in the shadows the stream made wet noises and the rock of the walls ticked with the strain of hiding these fast becoming dangerous animals from the city.

  The Guernsey was the only one who would not eat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Lucy lay on the floor. The flat was empty, the windows were open and it was cold. She looked down at herself, past her breasts to the dome of her belly. She couldn’t see the hair on her cunt because it got in the way. Before he left that morning, Steven said he could feel the child kicking. But it wasn’t a child, she knew that.

  In the months since her periods stopped she had pretended she believed what Steven told her, had let him believe the thing she was carrying was his. But today she stopped pretending. Today, flat on her back with her skin goose bumping and tightening around the thing in her belly, she let herself see it for what it was—a hard black stone of poison that had grown and grown until her body had to stretch to hold it. And the fucking thing was going to keep growing until it killed her.

  Earlier that morning, squatting naked, she had tried to force her hand up through her cunt and into her belly. She used lubricant and corkscrewed her fingers until spots of blood fell on the new linoleum between her feet, but she couldn’t get further than her knuckles. It was after that that she had lain down on the floor.

  She opened her wallet of scalpels, buried at the back of a drawer since the move to Steven’s, and cut slits in her cunt, up through the clitoris and down almost to her anus. When she woke from a few moments of unconsciousness her neck and breasts were spattered with vomit, but pain was a small price to pay for the removal of poison.

  Her hand went in much easier this time, but even with the new looseness and the slipperiness of blood she couldn’t force it in much past her wrist. The angle was awkward and the inside of her forearm jammed against her slashed clit. She groped with her fingers but she couldn’t reach anything.

  The pain from her cunt spread out like acid over her thighs and pelvis, but the stone inside felt worse. She reached for the scalpel again.

  When she made the long grinning incision around the base of her stomach, things started to get cloudy. Her ass felt like it was floating half an inch above the floor, bumping softly up and down. There was an awful lot of blood and somehow it must have got in her eyes because everything was hazed red. It was a kind color and it wanted her to sleep, it lay on her arms and made them heavy to move. But there was something she had to do, something under the blanketing pain that couldn’t be
ignored.

  She dropped the scalpel and shoved herself up onto her elbows until she could see the gouting slice across her guts. The red lips parted as she moved and she was happy that her body was open to her at last.

  Her hand moved surely through the cut skin into the wet heat of her womb. She felt it immediately. A hard thing, a thing of solid form that no one could call an imagining. She smiled to herself and closed her fingers around it. It was oddly shaped—she had expected something smooth and oval—and it was slightly rubbery. But it was there and that was enough.

  The red was thicker in her eyes now and she was weak, so weak she had to lie back on the floor. She took deep breaths and braced herself, gathering strength. She couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed, but it didn’t matter because she was going to do it. She was going to empty herself of a lifetime of pus.

  She made sure her grip was tight, sucked in one last lungful of air and dragged the thing out through her wound. It was too heavy for her to hold so she dropped it on the floor. Her eyes had ceased to function but she pictured it there, lying black and stinking, and felt waves of relief wash away her pain, taking her away from herself into the soft darkness of freedom.

  She died feeling clean, the happy weight of the poison resting outside her, pressing against her hip.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  In the streets, high up on the surface of the city, Steven moved through a twilight of scattered stars—cars, lights, people, all of them carried a warm nimbus of intensity that illuminated but did not threaten. Everything was safe now, the herd and its potential as a mechanism to fund life was his. The sacrament of human meat had zapped cow cells and completed a mutation that had started with their escape underground. They were changed and they were happy with the change. The tearing anxiety of the intermediate period was over and they knew themselves for what they were—beasts with drives and the ability to satisfy them. They were no longer the frightened, hiding property of men. They had become hunters, able to abandon themselves to any action that advanced their well-being.

  Their future was cast in iron and their gratitude would be as enduring. He was God to them now, the giver of life, for they would have perished without him. The price they paid for survival, if it was a price, was an ongoing hunger for human flesh.

  In his street the sky was clear and the sodium vapor lamps burned like suns. The shadows they cast were pure and sharp.

  He climbed the stairs to his flat, picturing Lucy’s cunt spread warm and waiting just for him, and afterward the drifting hours in bed next to her before she rose to feed him. TV side by side, time passing without danger because of her presence, arms around him, fingers on his skin … warmth, comfort, safety.

  But there was no warmth when he entered the flat.

  He found Lucy in a lake of blood on the kitchen floor, a hole two inches above the tuft of her cunt and a yellow fetus corpse snuggled against the outside of her thigh.

  He started to puke but it died in his throat and his stomach went still and cold. Lucy was gone and she had taken everything that only a moment before had seemed so unassailable. Without her he would be alone—no soft body to lose himself in, no breasts to mother him, no movement in other rooms as he slept or watched TV. Only emptiness.

  The cold spread out from his guts to the walls of the flat, icing them, freezing the recently applied paint, dulling color and texture. It devoured even the light. Peripherally he saw the skeleton of the flat show through, a superimposition of the place as it had been before the Hagbeast left.

  Every night spent alone and frightened in the creeping dampness of his room hit him in an overwhelming pulse of memory. He fell to his knees under its weight, crying out against the fear of having to return to such desolation. No wife, no child, no perfect family. Not even a dog this time around.

  He stirred the blood on the floor, it was thick and clots of it stuck to his fingers. His tears made milky-pink splashes on its congealing surface.

  Thieving brainless bitch. Stealing his new life and taking it with her, over into the dead space where the Hagbeast waited cackling for him. It wasn’t fair that after a lifetime of pain such a small thing as happiness could be taken away from him by one mad cunt.

  He kicked at her head for a while, but the impact of his feet didn’t change anything.

  He lifted the rubbery fetus corpse from its sticky bed beside Lucy’s leg and nailed it to the wall at head height, this thing that was almost all head, with a couple of pointy knives from the kitchen drawer. It didn’t look like Jesus. It looked like what it was—dead, deformed hope. It was never going to grow sandy-blond hair or wear faded dungarees, it was never going to play in cornfields, and it was never, ever going to be something to love. On the wall it was a badge that screamed, Idiot, sucker, deaf dumb and blind motherfucker. Did you really think you’d get more than this?

  Steven ran away from it, out into the hall and down to his room … into the room that had held him in its grim arms through all those long nights when the Beast had raged in the corridor outside. The new paint and the fresh fabric meant nothing, the walls that had watched over his horror were there still, under all of it, and they closed their old darkness about him like a revolting but familiar narcotic.

  He turned the TV on, but he lay on the bed with his back to it because it was a liar. It held up pictures and said you could be like them, but it didn’t tell you how easily everything fell to pieces.

  Night wore on and the TV smeared the walls with its deceitful colors. Steven hunched into himself on top of the blankets and thought of nothing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Morning broke mercilessly and everything was the same. Steven woke but didn’t move, just stared at the wall, blinking when he had to, unaware of his body.

  Programs rolled through their schedule, hour and half-hour changes. Morning TV, talk shows, quiz shows … on into lunchtime soaps and movie matinees. The sun strengthened but the temperature in the room did not rise. Steven watched the wall brighten but it meant nothing. The passing of time meant nothing. There was nothing ahead or behind, to look forward to or back on. No reason to move or feel. So he lay and stared at the wall and made no effort to interpret the scrabbling TV noise.

  He stayed this way for three days, blank and adrift. His body pissed and shitted for him but he did not feel the wetness or the hard pellets that flattened between his ass and the inside of his pants.

  And all the time the TV babble ate closer to a part of his brain that would listen, ate across the wasteland of his shock to the last soft collection of cells that might react.

  On the fourth day Steven heard what it was saying, heard words and decoded them into meaning, began idly to listen to the perfect short sentences of commercials. Then smelled for the first time the stink of his own filth, felt it itching in the grooves of his body. And another smell that was worse and came from somewhere outside the bedroom.

  Slowly, achingly, he rolled off the bed and stood. His back felt broken, he had neither the strength nor the will to straighten fully. He started for the bathroom with the dim notion of cleaning himself and had to force every step. Motion was a battle against a lethargy that hung from his shoulders like a cloak of chains.

  Naked body—shrunken, water-logged penis, dark shit smears. He stepped into the shower and leaned in a corner so he wouldn’t fall.

  Into the hall without bothering to dry himself, dripping, trundling along like some sleepwalking Frankenstein.

  Lucy was ripe in the kitchen. Dark skin, bloated, heavy, like she had never lived. Lying there in a cracking ice rink of dried blood. The smell was appalling, Steven sucked it in to see how much he could bear. With his eyes closed it felt like he was standing on the edge of a rotting, canyon-wide cunt, about to fall in and be consumed by its geysering glit.

  When he tore her free of the blood she bumped across the floor like a piece of furniture. He dragged her by her ankles, and her arms caught on the legs of chairs.

  Ge
tting her to the roof was hard but Steven suffered it like a mule. The physical pain of lugging her up the ladder, the frustration of trying to fit her around corners, was just another part of unbearable existence.

  There was still something of Dog wedged between the chimneys. The upper part of its body was mostly stripped, but the lower half, beyond the reach of birds, retained a covering of dried meat. Steven peeled the carcass from the brickwork and carried it carefully to where he had placed Lucy.

  They had never known each other, these two dead things, but he had used them both for love and it seemed right that they should be together. He picked away the scabbed blood that sealed Lucy’s wound and pushed Dog’s body into the hole that had been home for his dead child. He couldn’t fit it all in and a small bundle of bone ends stuck out between the bruised flaps of skin, but it was the best he could do. He left them both for the crows and went back downstairs without bothering to look at the city.

  It took him several hours to clean the kitchen. The blood on the floor and the fetus hanging from its rack of knives did not bother him. Nothing in the flat was worse than anything else. Blood or linoleum or wallpaper or paint, all formed equally a cage for his pain. But getting rid of the visceral litter filled time, burned off some of the minutes between now and death in a blank monotony of physical action.

  Later it started to rain. Steven sat on his bed and stared blindly at the TV. The sound of falling water closed off thought, leaving only a dull resignation to loss.

  He sat there for days. And outside the rain never stopped. It came down in thick rippled sheets, soaking the old red bricks of the building until they became soft and started to flake, and the cement, already weak from resisting the black cancer of sadness within, started to dissolve.