Apocalypse Cow (25 page)

Terry sighed. ‘My cousin has gone mental.’

He related what he had witnessed in the night. The anger drained out of Lesley’s face as the details unfolded. She looked positively queasy when Terry pointed out the remaining traces of Constance’s buttock.

‘Do you think he’s going to eat us too?’ Geldof asked.

‘That’s not something I want to think about,’ Terry replied. ‘We need to get out of here.’

Terry examined the bonds around his ankles. They had used twine, which would have offered an excellent chance of escape had they not wrapped what looked like twenty metres of it around his legs and fastened it with a bewildering array of knots.

‘There must be something sharp down here,’ he said, scanning the cellar.

His gaze fell on a wine rack, which contained five dusty old bottles. He nodded towards it. ‘If we can get one of those
bottles
to fall, maybe we can use the broken glass to cut through the ropes.’

‘Great idea,’ Lesley said. ‘You’re closest.’

Terry shot her a dirty look, but nevertheless humped along the floor, getting a healthy mouthful of dust, dirt and cobwebs as he did so. He lay beneath the wine rack, a flimsy-looking home-assembled job, and gave it an exploratory kick. The frame wobbled and three of the bottles jiggled.

‘Hit it again,’ Lesley said.

Terry kicked harder, and the three bottles fell. Unfortunately they tumbled down the back of the rack, which had been loosely tied to nails embedded in the wall, and landed on an old carpet stuffed behind it.

‘Try pulling it towards you,’ Geldof suggested.

‘Feel free to join in at any point,’ Terry replied as he lay on his back and hooked his feet into two empty slots.

The bottles slid forward. At the last minute, Terry realized he was directly underneath them. He tried to free his feet, succeeding only in giving the rack one last jerk. The first bottle landed on his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. The second bounced off his shoulder and rolled across the floor, coming to rest against a cardboard cut-out of Bob Geldof on a stick, with a voice bubble saying, ‘Give us your fucking money.’

When Terry got his breath back, he was miffed to see Lesley trying to hide her laughter. ‘Yeah, real funny. Now we don’t have anything to cut the ropes with.’

Lesley stopped laughing.

‘Anybody else have an idea?’ Terry asked.

‘Maybe you could head-butt the bottles until they break,’ Geldof said.

‘Do you think that will work?’ Lesley asked.

‘No, but watching him try would pass the time.’

‘That’s it,’ said Terry, who was getting rather sick of being the one who ended up having to do everything, and he caterpillared across to the laughing pair.

He sank his teeth into Geldof’s calf, prompting an alarmed yelp, and then gnashed them in Lesley’s direction.

‘He’s got the virus!’ Geldof exclaimed, warding Terry off with his feet.

‘I don’t have the virus,’ Terry snapped. ‘I just felt like biting you.’

‘We’re getting a bit hysterical here,’ Lesley said. ‘Let’s calm down and think.’

Geldof glared at Terry, who had managed to haul himself into a sitting position and was panting with the exertion.

‘Does anybody have any real ideas?’ Lesley asked.

They looked around again. The cellar was filled with random pieces of fabric, paint pots and blank placards. There was nothing they could use. Bob Geldof stared impassively down at them, exhorting them to hand over their cash to charitable causes. Beyond that, he didn’t seem to have many ideas. From upstairs came the occasional footfall and the scraping of chairs. Terry fancied he could hear the sizzle of meat on the pan and what might have been the clink of cutlery.

‘Who do you think they’ll eat first?’ Geldof asked.

‘That’s a bit morbid,’ Lesley remarked.

Geldof shrugged. ‘I’m a teenager. I’m supposed to be morbid.’

Lesley smiled. ‘Fine, let’s play.’ She ran an appraising gaze over Geldof. ‘Hmmm. Skinny legs, skinnier arms, and knees so knobbly they could burst a water bed. Not you.’

Then she checked out Terry. ‘Muscle boobs, at least a B-cup, big strong arms and buttocks that could crack walnuts. Too tough. So not you either.’ She looked down at her own body. ‘Dinner lady arms, thunder thighs and bum cheeks you could lose a remote control in. I guess I’m it.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Terry said. ‘I might be a bit chewy, but I still smell of meat. That’s bound to attract him.’

‘Where do you get that idea from?’ Lesley asked. ‘You don’t smell of meat.’

‘Yes, I do. You heard David yesterday. He said he could smell meat everywhere. That was from me.’

‘No, it was because he’s a complete lunatic,’ Lesley observed.

‘Whatever. I’m like a walking fillet steak. He’d munch me up with a nice pepper sauce.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Geldof butted in. ‘You’re both much older than me. Everybody knows young flesh is tender. He’ll definitely want to eat me first.’

They all fell silent.

‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,’ Lesley said.

Terry prepared to caterpillar once more. ‘Let’s have another go at those bottles.’

Half an hour later, they huddled together, spent. They had tried kicking the bottles against the wall, but found it impossible to get enough force with their legs bound. They then tried two of them kicking a bottle from different directions, which only ended up hurting the soles of their feet. In sheer frustration, Terry even tried head-butting a bottle. Considering he had recently been walloped with a large plank of wood, it wasn’t his best decision. Escape seemed unlikely.

Despite the fact that David and the twins had imprisoned them, Terry didn’t really believe they were on the menu. Eating an already dead woman was one thing. Actually murdering someone for food was something else entirely. Terry knew what it took to end a life. Killing was something easily done in the heat of the moment, when a knife could be slipped into a heart or a trigger pulled while rationality was looking the other way. To kill in cold blood, when you could take note of the pleas of your victim, took real resolve.

Unbidden, the memory of the first cow he had slaughtered came to him. He thought he had long forgotten her, but now he saw her soft brown eyes, imploring and panicked. He suspected his colleague had deliberately failed to stun her properly as some kind of initiation rite. He remembered how his arms had felt like lead as he raised the trembling knife to her throat. He felt again the slight resistance to the razor-sharp blade and heard the spatter of blood on concrete. He remembered watching the light go out of the cow’s eyes, feeling some of the light drain out of his own soul.

Suddenly it hit him. He had been so sure his job was not affecting him, but he had been fooling himself. The years of horror he had been storing in some dark corner of his consciousness broke free and the animals he had slaughtered came to him, their body parts borne along on a river of blood that washed over his head. He thrashed, trying to shake off the ghosts and keep afloat. He was vaguely aware of somebody calling to him. He tried to swim through the blood to the voice. Severed cow heads bobbed past. An eviscerated pig whirling in an eddy grinned and pointed to the juiciest parts of its flesh, inviting Terry to carve it up. He had just about reached the far bank when a flock of sheep surrounded him,
their
open throats flapping like lips as they called his name.

‘Terry,’ they moaned. ‘Terry. Wake up, you silly sod, you’re going to have a heart attack.’

Terry’s eyes snapped open. Lesley’s face was inches from his.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘You were freaking out.’ She stared into his eyes. ‘I think you’ve got concussion.’

‘Is that what it was?’ Terry asked himself. It didn’t seem that way. It seemed like his subconscious had sent him a long-buried message.

‘I’m not going back to work at the abattoir,’ he announced.

‘Thanks for the career update. We managed to break a bottle.’

Terry put the images of his flayed and disembowelled victims aside for later consideration. With a bit of squirming, and a lot of complaining about how her bum was getting wet, Lesley manoeuvred herself close enough to pick up the largest piece of broken glass. She then bumped back to Terry.

‘Turn back-to-back and let’s see if we can cut through this rope,’ she said.

Sawing through somebody else’s bonds while your own hands are tied behind your back turned out to be a lot more difficult than Hollywood had led Terry to believe. After twenty minutes of speculative slashing in the vicinity of Terry’s wrists, they had succeeded only in eliciting three ‘shits’, two ‘bastards’ and one ‘fuck’ from Terry’s lips and about three tablespoons of blood from his arm.

They were resting, with a view to giving Terry a chance to exact his revenge by attempting to cut the twine around Lesley’s wrists, when feet scraped on the cellar steps. Lesley leaned into Terry, while Geldof tried to shuffle his way into
the
darkest corner of the cellar. Instead of a maniacal David scraping together two large carving knives, Mary appeared. She raised a finger to her lips as she tiptoed over and took the broken glass from Lesley.

‘I’m going to let you go, but you have to promise me two things: we leave right now and you don’t hurt David.’

Terry nodded. It took Mary less than two minutes to free his hands. He then cut his own leg bonds as she worked on Lesley. Once they were all untied, Terry held Mary gently by the shoulders and looked her in the eye.

‘Where is he?’

‘In the toilet, bawling his eyes out,’ she whispered.

There was no way to avoid the next question, even though he didn’t want to know the answer.

‘Did he eat it?’

‘No. He fried it up and put it out on plates, but the boys wouldn’t touch it. It goes without saying I wouldn’t either. He got as far as cutting off a piece, and putting it to his mouth. Then he saw us all watching him and threw it down.’

‘Well, that’s something, I suppose,’ Terry said, thinking it would have been better if David had suffered his crisis of conscience before he cut the buttock off in the first place, thus avoiding this whole sorry mess.

Mary hugged herself, her shoulders tensing. ‘I could see how much he wanted to eat it. I think if we hadn’t been there, he would have. He’s clearly gone insane. We need to get out of here. All of us.’

‘We will,’ Terry promised, wondering how on earth he was going to subdue David and his evil offspring, who he was convinced would resist any attack on their father despite their refusal to go cannibal, without causing any real damage.

Getting to the car wouldn’t be a problem, since the keys were hanging beneath the mirror to the right of the cellar door. With luck, the bags they had packed would still be in the hallway and Lesley, Mary and Geldof could sneak out. Then he would somehow have to tackle the problem of David and the twins.

‘Let’s get you all in the car,’ he said. ‘Then I can sort out the rest.’

They crept upstairs, Terry leading the way with a hefty piece of timber in his hand. The house seemed quiet as he snagged the VW’s key from the hook. They crept to the front door, which Terry unlocked with an audible click. He was just about to stick his head out when a voice stopped him.

‘Terry.’

They spun round to see David trundle into the hallway, holding a kitchen knife and rolling pin by his sides. He halted a few feet into the passage. Terry waited for a stream of threats to come pouring from his contorted mouth, which was half snarl, half miserable grimace, but instead he spoke softly.

‘I couldn’t eat it,’ he said. ‘It smelled so good, but I just couldn’t put it in my mouth.’

‘I know, David. That’s a good thing,’ Terry replied, taking advantage of David’s dreamy state to move to the head of his small group of charges. ‘If you come with us, you can put it all behind you and have meat soon.’

David seemed not to hear Terry’s voice, locked in the internal struggle that was reflected in the expressions fighting for dominance on his face. ‘Maybe we can try again later. If I put some ketchup on, it’ll be fine. The boys love ketchup.’

Mary ducked out from behind Terry.

‘You’re not turning our sons into cannibals, you bloody nutter,’ she said.

So much for diplomacy
, Terry thought, as David’s bloodshot eyes shifted back into focus, and anger won the battle for control of his mind. He pointed the knife at his wife, whom Terry was now struggling to prevent from dashing madly up the hall.

‘You let them out, you fucking traitor. Maybe I should eat you. The old woman was stringy anyway. You’re much fleshier.’

‘You’re calling me fat? Take a look at your own blobby gut,’ Mary said.

David cut the knife through the air, and even though it was a good ten feet away, Mary ducked back behind Terry’s broad shoulders.

After his inability to snack on Constance, Terry felt certain David was making empty threats, but it was equally clear from the way his emotions were flip-flopping that rational thought was a distant memory for his cousin. Only the judicious use of violence with a big chunk of wood would resolve this situation.