Cows (14 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

M
orning 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.

Getting 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.

The structure got heavier, sick with its own weight. At night it groaned and its foundations shifted in the mud. Until one dawn, in the chain of pouring dawns that had tied Steven to his bed, the entire back wall of the apartment house pulled away and slid, slow-motion heavy, into a pile of smashed brick that bled red pigment into the flooded trash of the yard.

The roar of falling masonry tore through the mist of Steven’s misery and announced itself as something urgent that required attention. So much noise meant the world was breaking in, and he could not tolerate that.

He went to the back of the flat, down the corridor and into the Hagbeast’s old room. And stopped dead, aghast at the completeness of his nakedness.

Where there had been a wall and a window, the rain had left an open square, empty of everything but a dull, drizzled view of warehouses and flooding streets. As though God had reached down with a knife and neatly cross-sectioned the house, looking for sinners.

Steven edged to the hole and leaned out to look at the floors above and below—sad dead rooms full of rotted carpet and the refuse of abandonment.

He hung there in the gritty rain, tempted to laugh at this final ravaging of hope. How absurd it seemed now to have dreamed, to have dared to want a mapped and selfish piece of happiness. All the wishing, all the insanely unexpected aligning of factors—Lucy, Cripps, the Hagbeast’s death—all as nothing now, exploding out over an alien cityscape through a hole in his flat, like air into a void.

It almost turned him to dust.

He went back to his room and shivered. The city would not let him remain in so dangerous a place for long. There would be men and trucks, officials assessing damage and cost, questions, forms. They would reach in for him like a giant hand, the sharp end of society wanting to know how it happened, squeezing him for information until he was destroyed by an unbearable level of contact with a world he longed for but was unable to enter.

They came early. The rain had lightened to a fine spray but the sky behind the tower blocks in the east still looked heavy. Steven watched from the kitchen window, saw the shiny fire trucks pull up, looking foreign and too clean in the filth of the street. Counted the police and the men who stepped from bland social service cars, imagined their lives and envied them.

When they reached the street door and started pounding, he crept to the hole at the back of the flat and climbed down a pipe to the yard. There was no reason to look back, but he did. His one-time refuge, site of extended horror and brief happiness, was a stack of gaping boxes.

The terror of no place to crawl back to swooped down on him like a hawk and he puked into a puddle. He had to be moving, to get away from this magnet for people. The sodden wooden fence at the end of the yard was too weak to stop him and he moved out into the city.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

H
e walked fast in the sick light of early morning, through a maze of drab buildings that covered the area like some anonymous infection. The streets were empty, but they wouldn’t stay that way. In apartments and houses people were stirring—rolling out of bed, dressing, eating breakfast, getting ready to race out and crush him with their zest and their interest in life.

The rain stopped and he ran. His thoughts splintered against the problem of how to protect himself from this coming wave of contact. He knew he was weak again, that he had lost the ability to direct himself somewhere back in the days after finding Lucy dead. But this thought and all his others would not hold still to be dealt with, they rattled through his head in bright streaks of fire, building to a hot ball of anxiety that prevented the making of any decision. He ran faster, pumping his arms, throwing his head back and slitting his eyes.

There were people on the streets now—a lone factory hand with a bag of lunch, then two more, then further along a cluster of process workers, a truck driver stepping from an early-morning café, still chewing. More and more of them, clogging the sidewalks. The faster Steven ran, the denser they became. His head snapped left and right, desperate eyes searching for a hole, an alley, a crack in a wall, anywhere he could be alone and safe. But the street stretched ahead unbroken, built solid on each side with factories and small grubby shops that served the workers.

Each person he skirted, every group he dodged, was surrounded by some vicious field that corroded in successive layers whatever force held him together as a person. He could feel himself disintegrating like meat in a bath of acid. Soon nothing would be left to bind the separate parts of himself and he would splurge along the sidewalk in a bleeding pulp of guts and degenerating tissue.

He was lost. The street seemed endless. He ran until the soft insides of his lungs felt scorched and the muscles of his legs began to cramp. He ran without hope of escape, filling the world with the noise of his pleading, until, between the loading yard of a chemicals storehouse and a diesel garage, he found a blessedly deserted alley.

Into it—sobbing, sprinting far away from the growing crowds of morning workers, far away into an ecstasy of solitude, past trash cans and rear entrances, over straggling weeds that poked through cracks in the tarmac up close to the walls. The alley turned sharply to the right, so sharply that from a distance it looked like a dead end. Steven let his tearing eyes close and coasted around the corner, losing speed, gulping air, slowing, slowing, relaxing, stopping, bent forward hands on knees, breathing, trying to think.

For a moment there was no sound but the rasp of his throat and the thud of blood in his head. He let the red darkness of his closed lids calm him … Then he heard it, all about him, in front, behind, on either side—the sound of bodies moving, people talking, feet on ground. He straightened slowly and opened his eyes … And froze.

The alley had betrayed him. It had emptied him on to one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. Ranks of people broke against him, split and reformed around him, cursed and moved on.

Steven pissed himself, held his head in his hands, and screamed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

H
e woke in a narrow concrete tunnel, hunched into the small space between its smooth walls, knees against chin, ass in a six-inch stream of dirty water. Tired light worked its way through a grate immediately above his head and thin images of memory played against the bars—the fall from the sidewalk into the gutter, the mad clawing at the cast iron of the drain, people stopping to laugh as he finally pulled it aside and fell headfirst into its dim protection, scurrying like a rat further into safety. Then a dreadful weakness, and darkness.

It was early evening, Steven was cold and wet and hungry. He had nothing to go back to—no wife, no flat, no comforting lair—and in the gathering dusk his sniveling echoed through distances of tunnel.

He slept briefly, motionless as a dead thing in the city’s current of piss. And when he woke, his mind, frantic for succor, sought the only source of affection left to him. It streaked deep under the city and brought him back the image of a cow.

For hours the tunnels were unfamiliar to him. He crawled until they became large enough to stand, and then he walked. He waded randomly through sewers, swam artesian streams, dragged himself through cracks in the earth of the city. Until, eventually, he began to move more surely, making turns and changes of direction without thinking, but knowing they were correct, drawn by some lodestone of other living bodies, bodies that would accept him. Surrogate mother love, heifer sex, bovine companionship.

And then it came, as he knew it would—the first brick, the first yard, the first curve of stone that he recognized.

Above, the city churned with its small-hour pleasures, but for Steven it had ceased to exist. There had never been a home or a woman or a dog. There had been no TV, no nights, no days, no growing, no wishing for another life. All there had ever been were these tunnels and the herd at the end of them.

He moved faster, needing to be there, to be back at the heart.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

C
lose now. Soon he would be among them, drawing love from them like a black hole, drawing their companionship into coils of protection around him.

He smelled them first, the musk of their dung and sweat, and then he heard them. Not at rest, but stampeding, racing toward him in an explosion of sound. Closing, too fast to stop. Not intending to stop, thinking only of speed and momentum.

Steven jumped for an alcove as they slammed into his stretch of tunnel. And watched them pass, a mad conglomeration of horns and eyeballs and locomoting bodies, too caught in the excitement of stampede to notice him. He could taste their immersion and he wanted to be with them, lost in the pureness of their motion, safe from the bladder-weakening anxieties that had chased him down here.

The Guernsey was leading. Cunt.

Then a swallowing up of sound, receding hoof fall … and silence.

The chamber was empty, no one missed a stampede. But they would be back, smeared red and sated, the addiction to human flesh that Steven had begun reinforced by their latest dose.

Meanwhile, the stream still flowed and the Guernsey’s mound still stood. At the center of cow sanctuary Steven breathed deep … Yes, this place could be home.

Behind the mound, under a crusting of dry cow shit, Cripps’s bones were hard and smooth. Steven squatted beside them, pushed his hand through the ivory tangle to what desiccated organ tissue remained and closed his fingers about it as though it were a soul. He stayed there a long time with his eyes closed, not sure what he was doing, but remembering the horrors that had become glories through the conduit of Cripps’s madness.

When he opened his eyes again he wanted something heavy and dangerous to hold, so he pulled Cripps’s thigh bone from its socket. It had been broken just above the knee and one end was sharp as a spear. He weighed it in his hands and it felt good.

On top of the mound he played back scenes of his last time there—the upturned cow faces, the adoration, their surrender to his guidance. The chamber was open before him, waiting for him to fill it, daring him to take its emptiness and fashion himself a womb. He had done it before, the cows had arranged themselves readily enough to his words, surely he could do it again.

But so much rested on it now. He no longer had Lucy and the flat to fall back on if he failed.

He buried himself at the back of the mound, beneath Cripps’s bones and the Guernsey’s shit, and waited.

They were a long time coming and he slept.

The ground was shaking when he woke. Herd returning, circling the chamber, decelerating, dropping human bodies in front of the mound and gathering close. Steven listened to their panting and their short impatient movements from beneath his crunching blanket of excrement. He could see only the top of the mound where the Guernsey stood, planted like a cannon, surveying the herd.

“I have led you to bounty again. I have given you the meat of survival. EAT!”

Steven twisted Cripps’s thigh bone in his hands. From the other side of the mound came the sound of flesh and cartilage being torn—bovine mouths chomping and slobbering—but it could not drown the roar of anticipation that filled his head. How good it would feel to waste that pompous thieving fuck.

After a while the herd quieted and dozed. The small roan joined the Guernsey on top of the mound and took two feet of its ribbed cock from behind. When Steven watched the black length slide in and felt more keenly than ever the need to be close to some other living thing, to have someone accept him and provide comfort.

He closed his eyes and watched his mother choking on shit, saw Cripps flayed and bleeding, a woman’s head exploding against an underground station wall—pumping himself up as the herd slept.

When there had been no sound from the herd for an hour, Steven rose carefully from his bed of shit, flexed his arms and crept with the thigh bone to the top of the mound. The roan was asleep. The Guernsey, facing out over the sleeping ranks of the herd, was not. Steven stepped quickly forward and squatted, the animal jerked in surprise.

“Fuck!”

“How’s it hanging?”

“You made a bad mistake coming back, dude.”

“Didn’t have a choice.”

“Too bad, there ain’t room for you anymore. I’ve consolidated.”

Steven felt the familiar burn of an approaching kill, the rise of some chemical from the guts that doubled strength and crystalized thought. And when the cow started to push itself to its feet, he knew it was time to act.

At the edge of his field of vision he saw the roan lift her head and open her eyes. She looked at him with love and he knew she wanted him to be the winner.

The Guernsey had its hind legs straightened and was about to shunt the front of its body off its knees. Steven tensed in his crouch for a second, then leaped upright, holding the bone with both hands, angled and firm. The splintered end tore easily through soft beige neck skin, ramming in and cutting a vein. The Guernsey made a choking noise and lurched forward. Its chin hit the ground. Steven tried to tug the bone free, but it was stuck too deep in flesh and he had to brace his foot against the cow’s cheek and lever it out. A single thick stream of blood slopped from the hole it left.

The Guernsey jerked around trying to lift its head and pull breath into its body. Blood mixed with snot pooled around its muzzle. Steven felt like a god. He struck again, down through the top of the neck, just behind the skull. It was easier this way and the point of Cripps’s thigh bone made it out into air on the other side.

He missed the spine but the Guernsey was so badly damaged, was struggling against so much intrusion, that its hind legs buckled. Steven laughed and straddled its back and drove the bone in again and again until he was wet with blood from the chest down.

To finish it, to make absolutely sure, he found a rock and pounded what was left of Cripps’s leg through the Guernsey’s right ear. The animal bucked weakly, flopping against the ground, then farted in one long gust and dribbled shit between its splayed thighs.

Steven spread his arms and stretched. He could reclaim the sleeping herd now, he had the strength to reclaim a thousand herds. Under the arc-light of an ultimate selfishness the path before him led straight to a future where there would always be safety and something to be loved by—where he would always have a family.

Nothing he did not allow could enter here, and in this world, free of comparison with the outside, he would live a life as perfect as any he had seen on TV.

The roan nuzzled his side, he dropped his arm around her. Already he could feel the wind against his skin, the unstoppable power of the stampede, see the tracering splash of dim lights and the rush of tunnel walls, feel the glory of motion and power, his expansion into being … and the blessed communion of belonging.

He filled his lungs to shout. It was time to wake the herd.