Apocalypse Cow

by Logan, Michael

  Geldof ran to his parents’ room. ‘Did you hear that? We’d better start packing.’

  Fanny was sitting on a bean bag by the window, giving the soldiers the finger. ‘We’re staying put. Once they have us in the camps, they’ll keep us there. It’s all about control, Geldof.’

  ‘I thought it was about zombie animals running around killing people.’

  ‘Don’t be naive. The state just wants to keep you in line.’

  ‘Are you crazy? What if the animals attack our house?’

  ‘They won’t,’ Fanny replied. ‘They know we mean them no harm.’

  James, who was lying on the bed staring at the ceiling, nodded in agreement, although he could have been conducting some internal dialogue with himself – it was impossible to tell how engaged he was on any given day.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ Geldof said.

  ‘It’s all about the vibes,’ James said in a languid voice.

  So he was listening.

  ‘Let me get this straight. Your plan is to sit here and hope the good vegan vibes you’re sending out will protect us?’

  Fanny and James both nodded.

  ‘It’s Judgement Day for all the carnivores, Geldof,’ Fanny said. ‘Those poor animals lived a life of servitude to fill mankind’s bellies. Now they’re fighting back. But the righteous will survive.’

  Fanny leaned back out of the window to yell more abuse. ‘You don’t fool me! Tell the Man he can shove his camp.’

  Geldof snorted. ‘You’re actually enjoying this. Unbelievable.’

  He stomped back to his room and looked through his wardrobe. The act of opening the door and exposing himself to the concentration of hemp within sent a fresh wave of itching across his body. Once packed, he went back to the window. Going out now would be a mistake, as Fanny would come after him. He would wait until the trucks were about to leave, and then sprint down.

  Some of the neighbours were already dragging their bags to the truck. They must have pre-packed, given the amount of baggage being lugged along. A middle-aged man and woman, with a great deal of puffing and panting, were dragging two enormous wheeled Samsonite bags each. Various smaller bags festooned their bodies, the pinch of the straps ruining the lines of their expensive clothes.

  When they got to the rear truck, the soldiers stared at them.

  ‘One person, one bag,’ one of the squaddies said in a broad Highland accent.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ the woman replied. ‘We can’t possibly fit everything we need into one bag.’

  The soldier raised his heavy eyebrows. ‘You’re not going to your villa in Barbados. You’re going fifteen miles round the corner to live in a tent.’

  ‘A tent?’ From the look of horror on the woman’s face, the soldier might as well have told her she was going to be living in a septic tank. ‘Then we are definitely going to need all our little comforts.’

  She paused to adjust her cashmere scarf and pat down her dyed-blonde hair, and then indicated the truck with a nod of her head.

  ‘Get them on, Trevor,’ she commanded.

  Trevor hoisted a suitcase into the air and got the top corner onto the truck. When he began to push, the squaddie placed a boot on the other side of the case. ‘I said one small bag each. Go back and pack again, or you bring nothing.’

  By this point at least a dozen other residents had turned up, each of them toting matching Samsonite luggage in different shades of pastel colours. They gathered in a semicircle behind Trevor, who had got his shoulder under the case and was trying to heave against the soldier’s boot. The other squaddies laughed at their increasingly red-faced colleague, who finally lost his patience and gave the bag a hefty kick. Suitcase and Trevor tumbled to the ground.

  ‘How dare you!’ Trevor’s wife trumpeted. ‘Our taxes pay your wages. We’re all in the forty-per-cent bracket, you know.’

  There was a rumble of agreement from the assembled crowd.

  ‘I don’t give a rat’s arse,’ the squaddie said. ‘Take all this crap back.’

  The residents all began to talk at once, crowding forward with their luggage.

  ‘Right, that’s it. No bags for any of you,’ the soldier said.

  He grabbed Trevor’s wife and began dragging her onto the truck, ignoring the weak blows she dealt him with her expensive-looking handbag. Her neat little pink skirt rode up, revealing matching pink knickers.

  Trevor grabbed his wife’s ankle and a tug-of-war broke out. While the squaddie was younger and stronger, Trevor had gravity on his side. Eunice remained suspended in mid-air, waving her handbag and shrieking. The crowd took advantage of the distraction to start attempting to load their luggage, forcing the other soldiers to fend them off, like mariners repelling a boarding pirate force.

  As Geldof watched with initial amusement, a rumble rose above the hubbub, deeper and more insistent than the babbling voices. And it was growing louder. Geldof knew instinctively what it was, and shouted out a warning that went unheard.

  Round the corner came a herd of cows, shoulder-to-shoulder in a moving wall of beef. The soldier, who now had a handful of pink knickers and was trying to encourage Eunice on board by giving her a painful wedgie, was the first to see them. He let go of the knickers and reached for his gun. Trevor failed to compensate and heaved Eunice off the back of the truck. She landed heavily on top of her husband. The other soldiers now had their weapons out and were pointing them at the fast-approaching cows. The residents, still so focused on getting their full luggage allowance they were unaware of what was approaching, thought the barrels were pointed at them. They scattered. At this point they finally saw the cows, which were only about fifty metres away. Their panicked shouts blended with the growing chorus of sneezing, snuffling, grunting and mooing. The guns burst into life, sending bullets cutting through the stampeding cows. Spurts of blood flew up into the air and two of the cows stumbled. They were trampled under the hooves of the rest of the herd.

  ‘Move, move, move!’ one squaddie yelled, slamming the driver’s cabin.

  The truck leapt forward, almost hitting the back of the vehicle in front, which was slower off the mark. Collision narrowly avoided, both accelerated up the street. Trevor and Eunice ran after them, luggage now forgotten.

  ‘Don’t leave us!’ Eunice yelled.

  A stray bullet caught her on the shoulder. She fell. Trevor fearlessly hurdled a hedge and ducked around the back of a house. The others had similarly leapt out of the cows’ path, leaving only Eunice in the street. Geldof’s first instinct was to run down and help her, but the cows were so close he knew he would never make it. She tried to drag herself to the side of the road with her good arm, leaking blood onto the tarmac. Still the cows came on, ripping off wing mirrors and setting off car alarms. The luggage disappeared under their hooves. They were directly under Geldof’s window now. He could smell their beefy rankness; see the sores on their backs, the little fountains of blood created by each bullet.

  Eunice was trying to crawl under a parked car when the cows reached her. The front runners tried to stop for a munch, but were forced onwards by the sheer weight of those behind them. Eunice was swallowed up by the tide of cows. If she screamed, Geldof couldn’t hear it above the din of hooves striking concrete. It took almost a minute for the cows to stream past and around the corner in pursuit of the trucks.

  Once they were gone, there was no sign of Eunice. Her body was probably being carried on by the cows, a reluctant surfer on a wave of hooves. But the animals had left other devastation in their wake. The suitcases were burst open; clothes, makeup, hair-dryers, books, CDs and all manner of household knick-knacks were strewn amongst the two fallen cows that had succumbed to the bullets. One of them was still moving, kicking its legs like a giant dying fly. Car alarms brayed furiously, demanding their owners come out and attend to their wounds.

  Geldof backed away from the window and returned to his parents’ room. Their faces were grey.

  ‘Maybe we should stay
after all,’ he said.

  School was cancelled until further notice, so Geldof attached himself to the computer. He emerged only to dash across to the Alexanders’ with his parents to watch the early-evening news. Fanny had abandoned her TV boycott and called an uneasy truce with David, brokered by Mary, in what she said were the interests of staying informed. From her earlier comments, however, Geldof was pretty sure she was still enjoying the outbreak, revelling in it as justice for the years of abuse animals had suffered at human hands. Every time a particularly brutal attack was reported on a farmer, an abattoir or anyone even vaguely related to the meat industry (she seemed to especially relish a cow-led assault on a McDonald’s in Glasgow city centre), a furtive smile sneaked out to play around her lips. Fortunately, she didn’t vocalize her feelings. Ever since the failed evacuation, the tension had grown until it crackled in the air. Fanny, perhaps sensing this, kept her gob shut.

  While the television was not showing the violence in all its glorious Technicolor horror, internet users showed no such restraint. For every animal attack, there was an army of witnesses eager to record the carnage on their mobiles and upload it to YouTube or Facebook. Geldof watched as many of the shaky recordings as he could stomach, filling in the information gaps with Twitter, blogs, online newspapers and the news.

  The virus quickly escaped the quarantine zone. Geldof viewed the most popular clip first, which had over 80,000 hits in two hours, most likely due to the relative fame of the victim: a keeper in Glasgow Zoo who had once been the subject of a National Geographic documentary on the close relationship he had built up with a twelve-year-old male tiger named Raja. The relationship ended abruptly when Raja charged his keeper, who was entering the cage for the daily public tickle and roughhousing session, and knocked him to the ground with an effortless swipe. Raja then leapt onto the unconscious man’s back and finally consummated their long love affair with frantic pumping of the hind legs and a throaty roar. The tiger then munched on the keeper’s face for a while before pushing open the unlocked gate. At this point the person filming the attack wisely skedaddled, but news reports revealed that Raja charged around the zoo, fatally mauling an ice-cream vendor and two Hungarian tourists before police marksmen managed to fill him with enough bullets to kill him.

  The next clip Geldof watched was filmed in the centre of Glasgow, where a guide dog ran wild on Union Street, dragging its master behind it and snapping at passers-by. The owner only let go of the lead when the dog dragged him under the wheels of a bus. The dog then attempted to grab a baby from a pushchair before a mob kicked it to death, still clutching their Primark and Marks & Spencer shopping bags.

  Geldof could not help but enjoy the next clip. Somebody perched on the balcony of a high-rise block in Easterhouse filmed a battle between five youths, dressed in tracksuits of varying hues, and four pit-bull terriers they had been forcing to fight on a patch of wasteground. Geldof had received plenty of grief from such characters, who sometimes hung around the chip shops and street corners near where he lived, looking to pick up a posh girl or kick the shit out of a posh boy. The last time it happened, Geldof only got away because the inbred trio were too wasted on jellies and Buckfast – a cheap fortified wine made by monks, which was ironic since it fuelled much of Glasgow’s violence – to chase him very far. So Geldof allowed himself a little smile as the pit-bulls made short work of their owners, despite liberal use of carpet knives and empty Buckfast bottles as defensive tools, leaving bloody scraps of Kappa-clad flesh scattered over the yard.

  It went on and on, an ever-growing parade of attacks involving every animal imaginable. Geldof stayed on YouTube for three hours the first day, finally signing off with a clip of rats streaming out of the River Clyde. The brown swarm scampered across the mosaic paving stones of the walkway and headed for the high-end flats reclaimed from the former docks. They climbed the walls and blue metal stanchions, throwing themselves against plate-glass balcony doors until they found an open window on a second-floor flat and poured in. Thirty seconds later a man came crashing through the glass in what seemed to be brown Y-fronts, although it was hard to tell since he was covered head-to-toe by rodents, allowing only occasional glimpses of pale Scottish flesh. He flipped up over the balcony and fell, shedding rats as he hit the concrete. There was no sound on the clip, but Geldof could almost hear the meaty thud.

  By day two, the attacks had spread outside Glasgow. The most high-profile incident came when a cattle truck, destabilized by the animals’ thrashing about in the back, tipped over and crushed a Mini Metro on the M74. The resultant pile-up went back four miles. The battered and bloody beasts went on the rampage, killing a dozen drivers who had left their cars to rubberneck, before disappearing into the woods. Geldof also began to notice a pattern to the attacks. Many of them involved a bizarre inverse bestiality, with humans on the receiving end.

  At first, the quarantine zone expanded to keep up with the virus, which news sites represented as a ripple spreading outwards at an exponentially increasing rate. The expanding front of the virus carried panic, and racial hatred, before it. Jittery police officers shot dead a Somali on the London Underground when he ran away from them holding a container that looked as if it could contain a virus. It turned out he was late for work and trying to catch the tube. The container was a thermos flask full of tea. Many of Britain’s immigrant population barricaded themselves at home as racial attacks rose, carried out by right-wing loons who thought anyone with a slight tan was a terrorist. Nadeem and his family had already left to stay with relatives in New York after a gang of baseball-capped thugs lobbed bricks through their window.

  People split into three camps: those who rushed to the supermarket to frantically fill their trolley, prompting brawls over the last loaf of bread; those who hunkered down and hoped for the best; and those who piled into their cars and fled. The only silver lining came for airlines and the manufacturers of face masks, who saw business go through the roof. Across the land, Britons turned into Japanese tourists. They scurried to work with small white masks covering their noses and mouths, as though a flimsy piece of cloth could hold back such a monstrous virus should it mutate.

  By day three, the government gave up trying to stay ahead of the virus, and instead sealed off Scotland with a new Hadrian’s Wall of armed forces ordered to blast the crap out of anything that tried to cross the border. All cattle were to be culled and people were urged to kill their pets, although Geldof couldn’t imagine pet-owners plunging bread knives into their furry little friends. He presumed most would do what his neighbours did and kick the animals out onto the streets, thus adding to the problem.

  The army tried to evacuate as many people as possible from the area of the outbreak but often, as had been the case on Geldof’s street, ended up fighting pitched battles with slavering animals as the would-be evacuees dived for cover. And despite the army’s efforts to keep the main roads and motorways clear for themselves through roadblocks at on-ramps, there were too many vehicles to divert. Lines of cars stretched back for miles, caught in gridlock. The drivers were marched under escort to the nearest camp. Once the occupants had departed, bulldozers pushed the cars off the roads where possible, leaving tens of thousands of bashed and crumpled vehicles lying on their sides in fields and gardens.

  As soon as it became clear that sealing Scotland had failed, all airports and ports in Britain were closed and the Prime Minister announced the pre-emptive evacuation of all major cities in England and Wales. From London to Cardiff, cities began to empty into camps the UN refugee agency was helping to set up. With the aid of Wikipedia, Geldof discovered that the idea for the ‘rest and reception’ camps had come post-9/11, when the government began to fear the possibility of a chemical or nuclear attack on a major city. But the plans had been designed to handle only one city at a time. Now a whole nation had to be corralled. There were just too many people.

  There were also too many animals. After a little research, Geldof drew up a picture of th
e opposing forces. In the animal corner, there were 8.5 million cows, 36 million sheep, 5 million pigs, 1 million horses and ponies, 8 million dogs, 8 million cats and 60 million rats. Then there were other animals, wild and domesticated: deer, badgers, weasels, foxes, rabbits, wildcats and God knew how many exotic creatures kept in zoos and homes across the land. He popped in a conservative estimate of around 10 million for the unknowns, giving a total of 133.5 million animals on mainland Britain.

  In the government corner, there were 113,000 regular soldiers, 35,000 Territorial Army and around 150,000 police, although less than five per cent of these officers were armed. Given that around 10,000 soldiers were in Afghanistan alone and others were stationed elsewhere around the world, Geldof optimistically put the total number of soldiers in Britain at around 100,000. Adding 7,000 armed cops – he didn’t see the others doing much damage with their truncheons – gave 107,000.

  His final calculation revealed there were precisely 1,247.62 animals for every armed member of the security forces. Even though the animals would not be carrying automatic weapons, the odds struck Geldof as skewed. In addition, many of these troops would have to be deployed at the camps, further weighting the ratio in favour of the animals. The UN Security Council was discussing sending in peacekeepers, but the British government wasn’t keen on having foreign troops on its soil. The speed the UN worked at meant half the country’s population would be dead by the time reinforcements arrived anyway.

  Geldof was starting to get very depressed, so it was just as well that on the fifth day, as the virus reached the suburbs of London, the plug was abruptly pulled on his information source.

  They were all gathered round the TV in the Alexanders’ living room, glued to the news. Their street had been relatively quiet for a few days. Sporadic gunfire, sometimes near, sometimes distant, continued – although the army had not returned – and half the neighbours had slipped away in their cars. The dead cows lay bloating in the street, releasing an acrid stench even ten sticks of Fanny’s super-strength sandalwood incense could not disguise.