Cows (11 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

U
nderground. Sitting deep in a cool stone passage, alone with the animal lieutenant, listening to ideas filter through beef, catching hints of the desire for power, working on it, weighing payoff and risk, moving further along the road to self-centered cow messiah.

“The place is across town. They’re building a skyscraper and its foundations go straight through a tunnel. It’s like a huge shell at the moment, just a wide-open floor with a little hut stuck way back in a corner. And that hut, man, that’s where today, each week, they get the payroll together. All the work’s happening further up right now, so where the hut is is pretty much deserted. If you want bread it’s a place to start.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Listen, man, this is only temporary, right? We do a few raids until you’ve got enough money, then you split. Okay? You don’t belong down here. This is cow country, men can’t stay.”

“The herd looked happy enough to see me last time.”

“They need to be led by one of their own kind.”

“Like you?”

“Yeah.”

“There won’t be anything to lead if you push me out too soon. They won’t take it from you, you’re too familiar. They won’t believe you can offer them anything they don’t already have. Wait. You’ll get what you want … But only after me.”

“Don’t take too long.”

The cow lumbered upright and waited for Steven to climb aboard.

“Let’s go see how good this shit you’re peddling is.”

The herd was gathered and waiting when they entered the chamber. Steven noted with satisfaction the tension that held them silent and still, the hard striations of muscle around shoulders and necks, the dry lips and impatient tongues. He rode tall on the Guernsey, felt himself swelling to fill the chamber, felt sure and strong and knew that each of his actions today would be unquestionably correct.

“Today you begin to learn. Obey me and you will survive. Generations of you will survive to become something more than escaped food. You will cease to be fugitives in the sewers of the city.”

Steven breathed the expectant cowstink deep into himself and savored for a moment its heavy potential.

“Let’s RIDE!”

The Guernsey swung into a tunnel and the herd followed. They ran slowly at first—a light canter, legs swinging smoothly forward and back, stretching easily to gather in the ground. Big bodies moving pushed the air and made it whisper. The fall of hooves lay around them in a layer of thick noise, like the sound snow makes when you scrunch it together then run into Mom and your wife all steaming from the cold, into warmth and embraces forever and ever.

Steven felt his skin glow. He shouted formlessly of triumph and transformation, emptying his lungs. The Guernsey bellowed back and picked up speed and the sound the cows made boiled off ahead of the beef juggernaut and raged against the roots of the city.

At the head of the tunnel that led into the basement vastness of the skyscraper Steven called a halt. The animals panted and strained against the stillness. The speed and the muscle exertion of the race across town had shut down their heads and left them gut-reacting and chafing for action.

He moved them forward slowly. A rough concrete floor stretched off three hundred feet into gloom. Bare, low-watt bulbs hung weakly at long intervals from single strands of flex. At far catty-corner to the tunnel a small Portakabin office had been set up. Yellow light drifted from its windows and collected in a pool around its flimsy prefab walls. The dark shapes of men moved inside.

There were no lectures to give. The cows were on auto and they would do what was necessary to start their healing. And from the rubble Steven would take what he wanted.

“Stay tight and hit hard.”

The herd launched itself from the tunnel at high speed. Zero to sixty in five seconds flat—full muscle contraction. Steven and the Guernsey drifted back, allowed the beef mass to swallow them. Wind and cow sweat and body heat. Steven arched backward and shrieked and lost himself in the madly plunging wave of steak.

Halfway there, the thunder of the stampede brought a man to the open door of the hut. For a second he froze with his mouth open, trying to fit the approaching wall of death into a framework of understanding. Then he shouted and kept on shouting and soon two other men pressed their faces into the space around him. Steven could see their lips moving.

The cows were fifteen feet from impact when the men unlocked enough to think about escape. By then it was too late. The herd hit like a train and the hut exploded in a spray of plastic cladding and molded fittings. Two of the men exploded along with it. Blood and brain and guts all over the place, staining the chests of the leading animals. The third man was hurled from the wreckage as the cows passed through the ruined structure and ground it to dust. He wasn’t seriously hurt and he ran for a flight of iron stairs that led to the floor above. Steven saw it happen and leaped from the Guernsey.

The man moved in slow motion, but Steven was lightning, eating distance so fast he left cartoon streaks in the air. He was a hunter, something loosed to destroy, free of the usual binding brainchatter. No thoughts, only a tremendous sense of himself in the world, and a glorious, instinctive certainty of action.

The man had his foot on the first stair and his hand on the tube steel railing, swinging himself up, when Steven closed with him. He was a big man but there was no possibility of resistance. Steven tore him to pieces with his teeth and fingers.

He bathed himself in blood from the large arteries in the neck while the thrashing body dropped shit down its trouser legs, trying madly to clean itself before God paid attention and took it back.

Steven let him fall facedown, put a knee between his shoulders and started to pull back on his head. But before he could get enough pressure on the spine to make it snap, something flickered at the edge of his vision and a hoof on the end of a sienna foreleg impacted against the man’s face, splintering teeth, caving in the front of the skull … And stealing the kill.

Steven jerked upright, fists clenched. The Guernsey smirked at him and wiped its hoof absently along the ground to get rid of the blood.

“That was mine.”

“Thought you needed a little help, dude.”

“Bullshit! You wanted it for yourself.”

“Hey, hey.” The cow’s voice was honey. “I was only trying to help.”

“I know what you were doing.”

“What’s the problem? Isn’t this what we’re supposed to be learning? Remember, it’s part of our nature now.”

Steven choked back his anger, this was not the time or the place for a confrontation.

“Let’s find what we came for.”

The herd was charging wildly around the remains of the Portakabin, playing football with two ragged bags of blood. They were oblivious to anything but the exultation of their newfound power. Steven rode the Guernsey through them and searched the rubble until he found a dented cash box spilling bills into the dust.

“Looks like you scored big.”

“It isn’t so much.”

“You trying to tell me we’ll be doing this again?”

“Is that a problem?” Steven nodded at the milling cows. “It doesn’t look like it’ll be a problem for them.”

“Could be, if you push it too far.”

Steven caught the edge on the cow’s words, but it didn’t bother him.

“We’d better go.”

The herd was so engrossed in their celebrations that the Guernsey had to ram a couple of them before they took notice and followed. All the way back they trumpeted and bucked and kicked chunks of stone from the tunnel walls. Some of them had hardons.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

B
ack in the chamber, with several thousand in his pockets, Steven watched the cows hurtle the perimeter, their movements stiff with decaying adrenaline. They had tasted a small part of what they might be and the flavor of the drug would not leave them. They moved for no reason but to block out thought, because thinking, remembering the liberation of exerting an influence on their world for the first time, was an emotion too potent to bear without some kind of outlet.

Steven felt one more warmly protecting layer wrap itself around his future.

“Bring them over.”

The Guernsey moved off without speaking and brought the herd to a halt.

The cows looked at Steven with awe and gratitude, but all he saw were idiot bovine faces slotted into some mechanism, the operation of which he was quickly mastering.

“Have I proved myself?”

The cows yelled like morons at an evangelist meeting, a chorus of affirmation. Steven waited for silence.

“Do you understand what I have shown you? Do you realize its importance? Your past is dying!”

The cows started bellowing again and Steven had to shout.

“Today was nothing! There is much more … I will take you beyond yourselves!”

Beef surged forward with a thunderclap of joy. Long rough tongues licked his face, his hands, his body, searched under his arms and between his legs. This was cow love, just like the Jesus love that people on TV churned out every Sunday afternoon. Steven let himself float on the warm rasping affection.

Then the tongues stopped and he opened his eyes to the small roan female, ass-on in front of him, offering herself while the rest of the herd watched.

The skin of her vulva was dark brown and leathery, but it was wet too, and Steven knew he had to fuck her. This was a gift that would seal the bargain—cash for him, self-discovery for the cows. He could not refuse. And anyhow, he didn’t want to.

He stood on an empty fruit crate that the cows kicked forward, held on to her rump with one hand, and rubbed his dick along the oily seam of her cunt with the other. Her glit was thicker than Lucy’s and it stuck to him in strands. Dried shit crusted the folds of her asshole and powdered the insides of her thighs in dusty smears, but the heat that came out of her gash made getting up her the only thing Steven cared about.

When he slid his dick in she shimmied and made small bleating sounds, pushed back against him to get as much as she could. He had to hold her tail out of the way while he pumped. Inside, she felt different to Lucy, the membrane around his dick was tougher and there was a lot more distance. Surprisingly, though, she was quite tight. He fucked her hard, running his hands over the solidness of her flanks, feeling the hair on her hide scrape into the spaces between his fingers. When things got hot and he was really slamming it in, the herd started shouting stuff like,
Yeah, do it. Fuck that bitch, man. Do it, do it. Fuck her ass …

At the end of it, when Steven finished blasting seed, she staggered forward and lay on the ground panting.

The herd applauded.

All except the Guernsey who had remained apart throughout the fucking and who now walked deliberately over and let Steven climb on its back. They left the herd and headed out of the chamber.

“You like cow pussy?”

“Sure.”

“Tight enough?”

“Surprisingly.”

The Guernsey laughed. “Must have felt like a cigarette to her.”

Steven didn’t reply. This cunt cow was becoming a new problem when a lifetime of others had been so recently overcome. He felt suddenly plotted against, as though everything in the world was conspiring to destroy what he had created. He thought of Lucy asleep in bed that morning and how, without the camouflage of domestic activity, her madness had seemed so visible.

Were the two of them, Lucy and the Guernsey, circling like sharks, waiting to move in and rip holes in the sides of his life? Either one of them could ruin things for him.

Lucy as wife mother homemaker was essential for the continuation of life as he wanted it. A woman was necessary, and all other women were unreachable, out in a world he could never be part of. Only another fuck-up like Lucy could understand how impossible it was for him to live anywhere but inside one small flat. If she left, or became unacceptably dysfunctional, his home would revert to the shell of its Hagbeast days and the TV would suck back his dream.

And the fucking Guernsey, impatiently counting the seconds until the way was clear for it to unleash its own bovine power hunger. In the flexing of the muscles across its back Steven could feel dissimulation, schemes to take control of the herd boiling like tar under the pale hide. The game would be to acquire sufficient cash and get out before they were put into practice. If the cow moved too soon everything would crumble.

Cunt bastards. In the darkness of the tunnel Steven flipped between anger and fear.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

L
ucy was on the bed, legs spread, the insides of her thighs slick with lubricant. She was naked from the waist down and below her swelling belly her hips looked loose, as though she had forgotten that her ass and her legs belonged to her. Steven stood in the doorway of the bedroom, for a moment too frightened to move closer. Beside the bed the endoscope monitor sprayed monochrome static into the room. The probe lay greasy and smeared on the floor.

He sat on the edge of the bed. Lucy shifted slightly, tiredly, watching him with blank eyes.

“What the fuck are you doing?” He wanted to let his fury overflow, but he kept his voice even.

“It isn’t going to work, Steven.”

Speaking seemed to drain her.

“What?”

“Why are we together?”

“Because we love each other.”

“We’re trying to hide inside each other. We called it love to pretend we were normal but it didn’t change anything.”

“I do love you.” Steven felt ill. It was hard not to grab her hair and scream into her face,
I knew you’d do this, you bitch!

But he hadn’t known. He’d been frightened of it, but he hadn’t known. He had thought her madness equal to his own and that in seeking to flee it she would run the track he laid for her.

“I thought it would be all right, that if I did what you wanted long enough I might forget about the poison. But it’s still there, it’s still building up.”

She lifted her hands to carve her pain in the air, to make it real enough for Steven to understand, but she saw how useless this was and let them fall limply back across her chest.

“It’s still there, Steven.”

“I can help you. I want to help you.”

“You want to keep this together, that’s all.” Her hands fluttered vaguely at the walls.

“Jesus …” Steven stood up and took a few pointless jerky steps across the floor, then stopped and turned around. “There isn’t any poison in you, you’re just fucking insane. Look at this place. Don’t you like it? Do you want to be back upstairs again, cutting up rats, spending all day thinking how fucked up you are?”

He dragged handfuls of money from his pockets and threw them beside her on the bed.

“Look, and I’ll get more and we’ll never have to go outside again. The poison will stop, I promise. When the child comes you’ll forget. You will, and we’ll stay together and be happy.”

Steven found himself on his knees by the bed, fingers curled into a corner of the mattress, tears and spit on his face.

He didn’t care about trying to generate love anymore, all he wanted was her, there in the flat, to bear his child, to dress like a wife, to eat with and be warm to touch. As long as she was there and alive he could invest her with whatever qualities he wanted. By sheer effort of will he could make himself see her as he needed her to be.

“You’re an idiot to talk about happiness, Steven. We weren’t made to be happy. You thought you could be like the people you saw on TV, but you should have looked closer at yourself. You aren’t like them, they had lives to build their happiness on, whole backgrounds of normality. You can’t do it without that. It’s not even worth trying.”

Lucy looked gray, exhausted. Her eyes were heavy, her speech singsong and drifting.

“There can’t be any happiness with poison inside, it doesn’t matter what you make around you. The only thing you can do is cut it out.”

When she started crying Steven lifted her from the bed and held her against his chest. He felt the beginnings of an erection and the return of confidence. Whatever Lucy might babble about things not working, she was obviously incapable of changing them. She was weak in his arms and his sniveling panic of a moment ago vanished as he realized it would be impossible for her to leave him and survive. Like him, she needed a construct within which to exist, and she had been so thoroughly sucked into his that to find one of her own again would be beyond her.

He put her back on the bed and while she slept he hung out of the window and stared at the city. It was mauve in the dusk and neon flickered red, blue and green as always, but the spread of the buildings and roads seemed changed, somehow smaller and less significant.

He imagined the network of tunnels that ran beneath it, imagined cows hurtling through them. His army now. How long would it last? Long enough? He thought so.

When he climbed into bed beside Lucy she felt dead, too heavy and too still. He wanted her to wake and turn toward him muttering soft words of love. But she did not, so he curled the blankets tight about him and closed his eyes. The last thing he heard before he lost consciousness was his own lips whispering,
That bastard cow.

Steven stayed home the next few weeks, watching Lucy and molding what he saw, in the zero time between eyeball and brain, into something acceptable. She became a nonspecific force to which he added the frills of personality, or from which he subtracted those traits that sent shudders through the bedrock of his certainty. He was aware her behavior was not perfect, but she was alive, she cooked for him, she slept in his bed—he could hold her and warm himself against her. If the nuances of care he had dreamed of were missing, it was something he was prepared to accept.

Lucy operated well enough during this period, but she seldom spoke. She moved heavily through the flat, limbs flaccid until required for some particular task. In moments alone or when Steven sat absorbed before the TV and did not require her interaction, she was motionless and silent, face screwed tight against the knowledge of her deterioration.

One night Steven woke to find her watching tapes of surgery, kneeling, face pressed to the screen as though she could force her head into some other world where the secrets of relief were openly displayed. The doctors were using an instrument that looked like a pair of bolt cutters to split the breast bone of a woman with very white skin. There was a lot of blood and one of the nurses had to keep sucking it away with a small hose so the surgeon could see where he was going. When they were satisfied with their hacking they used a clamp to keep the two halves of her ribs spread. The hideous mess visible through the hole reminded Steven of the meat plant and its endless harvest of guts. He watched for a while then went back to sleep. Lucy was still in front of the TV when he woke the next morning.