Apocalypse Cow (9 page)

He woke with his own scream echoing in his ears, and lay on the bed until his heart rate had slowed down. All thought of sleep gone, he swung his legs off the bed and stared past the orange street lights strung up the road to the dark hills just beyond the end of the suburbs. Somewhere out there, the cows were waiting. And they were hungry.

6

In the doghouse

Lesley slouched at her desk, sluggishly typing up a story on road accident figures. It was the kind of dull piece she would normally churn out in an hour, but she had spent three on it. Even if the previous day had brought only redundancy, her motivation level would have been so low a cockroach would struggle to squeeze under it. But the tip-off was also pulling her mind away from the task at hand.

She had played the recording at least ten times, constantly changing her mind about its authenticity. On the first listen, she heard chuckling in the background. On the second, the chuckles became rustling paper. On the third, she became convinced Professor Martin was Colin affecting an accent. And so on. She had to resort to quaffing a bottle of red wine to quell her buzzing mind and get some sleep.

Colin’s scoop about the abattoir attack being a virus released by al-Qaeda had gone up on the website the previous evening, and was splashed all over the front page this morning. On the one hand, she could take the story as a sign the
tip-off
was real, since it matched the supposed fake information Colin was being fed. Then again, he could easily have slipped the terrorist angle into a fake tip-off to make her pursue the story.

On top of that, al-Qaeda actually had claimed responsibility through an audio message on a renowned Islamist website. And the police had raided two mosques in the Shawlands district of Glasgow, arresting sixteen people. But al-Qaeda could just be opportunistically attaching its name to the incident to spread fear without having to go to the trouble of doing anything, and the government could just be looking for scapegoats, as Brown had intimated they would.

It didn’t help that she and Colin had been exchanging looks all morning. Either he was looking at her to see if she had taken the bait, or he was looking at her because she was looking at him to see if he was looking at her to see if she had taken the bait.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Just make a decision.’

She walloped the full-stop key, and then rose to go outside for a cigarette.

‘PMT?’ Colin asked as she stomped past his desk.

‘Go stick your cock in a blender.’

‘I’ll take that as a “yes” then,’ he called after her.

Lesley lit up in the alley, blew out a long stream of smoke and watched a stray tabby rake through the bin bags. The cat had unearthed three tins of Tennent’s Super Lager, a used condom and a jumble of shredded paper, but it wasn’t satisfied with its haul. It stuck its head deep between the bags. There was a squeak, and Lesley expected to see the little hunter emerge with a mouse between its teeth. Instead, the cat squirmed out and streaked down the alley. A rat the size of a
rabbit
burst from the rubbish, scattering the beer cans with a flick of its fat pink tail. It had cat fur stuck between its protruding front teeth. Lesley yelped and pressed herself against the wall as the rat raced off after the yowling cat.

‘I hate this city,’ she said, and took a long, mournful drag on her cigarette.

Smoking usually helped her think, but the two packets she had puffed away in a nervous frenzy since the previous afternoon had only left her throat raw. She took another drag and let it out in a sigh that ended in a hacking cough. In her position, Charles McBrien wouldn’t have been smoking furtively in a seedy alleyway and worrying about whether he was having the piss taken out of him. He would have bagged the story or kicked Colin in the balls. Probably both. She imagined her father in his study full of journalism awards, which he had the maid from the slums of Mombasa polish each day so they gleamed, like his reputation, with a phone stuck to his ear and his lips kinked downward in disappointment.

To hell with it
, she thought.
Let’s do it
.

Lesley threw her cigarette to the ground with the intention of grinding it out purposefully. It rolled away from her. In her hurry to stamp it out, she brought her foot squelching down on the condom, which she then had to scrape off on the step before hurrying back into the office.

Alexandra stuck her head out of her sanctum as she passed. ‘Lesley, do you have a second? I’ve got an assignment for you.’

‘I’m just about to head out to chase up on something,’ Lesley said.

‘Really? What exactly?’

Lesley didn’t reply.

Alexandra sighed. ‘Let’s not make this more awkward than it has to be.’

‘Fine. What do you want me to do?’

‘A puppy attacked a wee girl at a cat and dog home near Bearsden.’

‘A puppy?’

‘A poodle puppy, no less. The pound’s only a few miles away from the abattoir, so I need you to check it out in case it’s linked. I emailed you the address. Oh, and go to the Western Infirmary as well. The girl was taken there. If there isn’t an abattoir connection, we can run it as a curiosity piece.’

While this was exactly the kind of shitty job that normally drove Lesley into alternating fits of despair and apoplexy, she was grateful for the task. It gave her the chance to check out the facility without having to cook up an excuse. Maybe things were starting to go her way. Alexandra withdrew into her office, leaving Lesley to return to her desk for the address and to collect her camera and other paraphernalia.

‘Make sure you get some good quotes from the poodle,’ Colin called as she headed for the exit.

She held a single digit aloft over her shoulder and marched out of the door.

Lesley heard the pound before she saw it. The building was tucked behind a run-down and largely disused industrial estate, but the barking and yelping carried as far as the two oddly grandiose stone columns that flanked the estate’s entrance. The combined smell of piss, shit and wet dog hit her when she parked. She lit a cigarette and sat in the car for a few minutes, steeling herself for the coming olfactory assault.

At least the visit with the little girl had been short. She was
all
blonde curls and big brown eyes, although her cuteness was reduced somewhat by the teeth marks in her swollen nose. Once Lesley had finished asking a few desultory questions and taking some pictures, the girl asked her to make sure the poodle wasn’t put down. Lesley had promised to do what she could, thinking she would happily kick every yappy dog in Scotland to death.

Once the cigarette was reduced to a lonely filter, Lesley headed over to the metal gate leading into the pound and rang the bell. The chorus of barks grew louder.

A thin young man with bedraggled hair and bad teeth opened the gate.

‘You from animal health?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she lied brazenly, extending her hand. ‘Agnes.’

‘Carlo.’

‘What exactly is the problem?’ she asked quickly, moving the conversation on in case he asked for ID. ‘The poodle thing seems pretty minor.’

‘There’s more to it. Let me show you.’

He ushered Lesley in, and then stood aside to let her precede him through an internal door into chaos. Metal cages flanked the walkway that stretched out before her, each one containing a howling, snapping dog. A sausage dog in the first cage flung itself at the metal grille, only to bounce off. It growled then relaunched, blood spraying from its snout as it hit. Lesley went down on her haunches with the camera, keeping a safe distance from the fence. The dog’s eyes were bloodshot and it had sores on its haunches. The smell was putrid.

‘They’re all like that,’ Carlo shouted above the din.

He led her past the cages. From German shepherds to
chihuahuas
, they hurled themselves at the grilles or stood on their hind legs to hump the metal wire. Many of them sneezed, making the walk along the passageway like proceeding through a car wash that spat out mucus instead of soapy water. By the time they had cleared the cages, Lesley’s matt black tights had taken on a foul gloss. She tried not to look down.

‘When did this start?’ Lesley asked.

‘This morning, a few hours after some new dogs came in.’

‘You didn’t notice anything unusual with them?’

‘Well, they were aggressive, but that’s not uncommon with strays.’

Carlo led Lesley into a small concrete room, where a tiny white poodle yapped away in a cage in the corner. Its muzzle was stained with blood.

‘I want to give it a lethal injection. It keeps biting me any time I go near it with the needle,’ the attendant said, holding up his hand to display plasters that hung from his fingers like leaves.

Lesley approached the cage. The poodle growled, revealing little red-tinged teeth.

Carlo bit his lip. ‘So what should I do?’

Lesley indicated a half-empty glass bottle of Irn Bru sitting on the desk. ‘Maybe you could club it to death with that.’

Carlo frowned. ‘You’re not from animal health, are you?’

Ah well
, Lesley thought.
My cover’s blown
.

‘No, I’m a journalist,’ she admitted.

‘Why did you lie? I would have talked to you anyway.’

‘Sorry, force of habit,’ she replied, trying to sound blasé and experienced.

The two of them stood together and watched the poodle,
which
now had its teeth locked onto the gate of its prison and was trying to pull it open.

‘Can you take a picture of me with the poodle?’ Carlo asked.

‘Sure,’ Lesley said, and captured a few shots of Carlo standing by the cage with mock horror on his face.

‘Make sure you spell my name right in the article,’ Carlo requested. ‘And mention I’m single, just in case.’

What, just in case there’s a woman out there who gets all moist at the thought of shagging a boy who smells of dog piss? That’s likely
, she thought.

‘Call me if anything else odd happens,’ she said, handing over one of her business cards.

‘Maybe I’ll just call you,’ Carlo replied, eyeing the card with glee.

Lesley ignored an urge to snatch the card back and left, running the gauntlet of dogs again. Once outside, she rubbed down her tights with a hanky as best she could before driving off. When she had travelled fifty metres, another car came down the narrow driveway. The driver, a middle-aged man in a dapper suit wearing wire-rimmed glasses, gave her an appraising stare. In the back seat, two men, one of them rather cute if a little too muscled for her tastes, stared straight ahead.

Probably the real animal health people
, she thought, rounding their car and accelerating away before they realized she had been impersonating them.

Lesley parked at a picnic site on the other side of the woods backing onto the facility, which she had found on Google Earth, and set off through the trees. Her heels caught on every little hole or hidden branch along the rugged trail, so it took her twenty minutes of stumbling and swearing to reach her
goal
. She hunkered down behind the largest tree she could find and scanned the clearing before her.

The facility was a long, low building with cars parked out front, and would have looked completely innocuous were it not for the electrified fence encircling the compound, security cameras on each corner of the building, and smoked glass windows. Lesley snapped off a few wide shots before zooming in on the security measures. She had just focused on the main gate when it swung inward to admit a car. She almost dropped the camera when the face of the driver filled her lens. It was the bespectacled man she had passed at the cat and dog home. She took several pictures of him as he emerged. There was no sign of his two companions. He opened the boot and lifted out the cage containing the poodle, which was still going bonkers. He leaned his face close to the wall (
Retinal scan
, Lesley thought, taking more pictures) and then spoke into an intercom. His voice was strong, clear and crisp, and the wind blowing in Lesley’s direction through the quiet valley carried it to her hiding place. ‘Alastair Brown, four four five seven eight.’

The door opened. Driver and poodle disappeared inside.

Lesley backed off until she was deep in the trees and headed back to the car, taking her heels off to speed the way. Once she was out of earshot of the facility, she let out a great whoop of triumph. The story was real, and now she had a picture of Brown, the man in charge of security at the facility, to accompany it. Colin and Alexandra were going to be pig sick when she broke it in another paper. She couldn’t wait to see her father’s face either.

She was so busy imagining her glorious victory that the first rustle in the bushes didn’t really register. The second, accompanied by what sounded like a snort, got her attention.
Her
legs went cold. Images of the dogs throwing themselves at their cage doors flooded her mind. If whatever had infected the dogs and the cows had leaked out of the facility, there was every chance the wild animals in the surrounding area had it too. Her unease wasn’t helped by the sudden recollection that Brown had displayed a rather cavalier attitude towards human life in the recorded conversation, followed swiftly by the thought that he would be rather displeased if he found her roaming around in the woods with pictures of the secret facility on her digital camera.