by Susan Berran
OLD MR INDITE tossed another couple of boxes out into the shed, then left the cavern with MOLLY slobbering and bouncing after him. The sound of chains rattling and clanging, started again as the roller door began to lower. They It finally slammed to the ground with a bang that echoed through the cavern like a cannon blast.
Alone at last; OLD MR INDITE'S voice faded into the distance and the earth-shaking footsteps of MOLLY along with it. We inched our bodies like swollen caterpillars out of our cosy hideaway. Jared was still holding his nose, the BLOOD dripping and winding its way down through his fingers, running down his arm and dropping to the red dust below.
The truck was almost full and ready for delivery. It was just about packed to the top with the white bags of INDITE MANURE. The conveyor belts were stained with the runny markings of sloppy poop that hadn’t been quite set enough. All around the room were these strangely beautiful, dusty red cobwebs stretched between machines, and hanging like chandeliers from the roof. We could just hear MOLLY and OLD MR INDITE yelling at the cows and there was this weird ripping sound every few minutes. The cows didn’t sound very happy either.
We needed to know what was going on out there.
It was time to get out the most phantasmagorical, incredible, one-of-a-kind, totally wicked, silent, laser metal hole cutter … but since I didn’t have one of those, we just peeked through a crack in the door. The tractor and trailer were just on the other side. We could see OLD MR INDITE and MOLLY out in front of the shed with the cows. It was strange, because even though those cows had been pigging out on the purple bushes, they just didn’t look happy at all. But I guess if you had a butt-plug nappy strapped to your big fat butt, you wouldn’t be too happy either. Of course the cows were so hugely fat that they weren’t really walking. It was more of a slow sort of shuffle and waddle towards the gate that led out to the desert. OLD MR INDITE was yelling and whistling to MOLLY and she would bounce around him like a hippopotamus that’s had way too much sugar. It looked like she had springs on her feet and the drool yoyo from her mouth was going up and down, flat out. She was darting back and forth, yapping her head off as she rounded up the cows. But they seemed to already know what to do. They were all forming a nice neat line and shuffling, one by one, up to where OLD MR INDITE was waiting for them.
The next bit, as you will see, was the most disgusting, yucky, and gross thing ever!
It was way cool!
As each cow stepped up to OLD MR INDITE at the gate, in one swift movement, he would yank that butt-plug nappy right off the cow’s butt . . . THOOP … and fling it into this huge great furnace to burn. And the moment he yanked that nappy off the cow, it would let out this high-pitched MOO and shuffle out the gate as fast as it possibly could. The gate seemed to be some sort of signal to release their load. Because the second a cow stepped out of the lush red sand area and into the dry barren desert … Braapp!! Plop, Plop, plop!! Braapp!! Plop, Plop, plop!!
They just seemed to explode! Who knows how long their butts had been plugged? But as they shuffled off into the distance, they were pooping faster than a runny nose at a flu party. Jared reckons the cows were even smiling as they had their nappy removed … well, I guess I’d be happy too.
You’d think the smell of the burning nappies would be pretty bad, like ‘chuck-up’ bad. But between the mouldy, crusty toe-jam still creeping over our bodies and the CRAP we’d already crawled through, we were actually starting to get used to it.
We were hoping OLD MR INDITE would be heading back inside after the last cow left. But he hadn’t finished yet.
He dragged over the boxes he’d taken from inside the cavern. He opened them up, yelled out some new commands to MOLLY and started to whistle again … what now? Suddenly, one of the sickly skinny cows from out in the desert, appeared at the gate. We figured that they’d been put out in the desert to die. That they were so sick or old that there was nothing that could be done for them. Or, that maybe OLD MR INDITE was just too mean to feed them. But now the puzzle was coming together. One by one, the sick, skinny cows, came to the gate. And for such weak animals, they were actually moving pretty fast. Definitely faster than when we first saw them. They were barely moving or breathing before. Now they were in a hurry … TO EAT! And it was obvious that they knew there was food in the enclosure.
One after another, the cows stopped on the dot at the gate. There, OLD MR INDITE took a new nappy from the box and placed it under the cow’s rear end, wrapped the sides up, over and through, then between the back legs with the Velcro straps holding it all together. With a final SLAP … MOOOWww … right on the backside, the butt-plug was slapped into place. THOOP … and the cow was free to pig out on the purple bushes. FOOD AT LAST! It was all so simple:
Butt-plug the cows …
Feed the cows purple bushes and feed and feed and feed …
Cow gets fatter and fatter and fatter …
When the cow is ready to explode … Unplug and put cow out into the desert.
Once in the desert, cow poops and poops and poops …
When the cow is skinny and empty, butt-plug and start to feed again.
Gather poop, bag poop, mix poop and best of all, sell poop.
This was great … except for the cows. I don’t know if they’re too thrilled by the whole process.
We didn’t bother to count the cows but there had to be a few hundred at least. It took hours to ‘BUTT-PLUG them all. I thought he’d never finish. But finally we heard the gate being scraped across the ground and the chain getting dragged into position. At last we could rest. The door to the house slammed shut, finally muffling MOLLY'S barking.
We needed a plan … we needed to eat … we needed a bathroom really badly!
There was no way we could possibly find our way back through the tunnels and even if we did, how would we get back up the ladder and out of the enclosure? We were definitely here for the night. Jared found a corner in the back and made a great little bathroom cubicle using a couple of boxes. At least the smell couldn’t get any worse we thought.
I had a little emergency ration pack in my utility belt that I always carried. A box of sultanas and one of those ‘just add water’ macaroni and cheese packs that we could cook up pretty easily. It was Jared’s job to find something we could burn while I set up the ‘stove’. I made it off plans from the ‘BULRAVIAN SECRET AGENT TOTALLY WICKED AND AWESOME SURVIVAL TOOLS’ magazine. We get the plans for most of our utility belt stuff from there. You only need two food cans.
The stove looks like an ordinary steel food can until …
Of course if Jared’s poxy little brother nicks the candle, then you have to find something else to burn. The trouble was the only thing we could burn was yep, old MAGGOT-CRAWLING Cow poop. Cardboard would burn in a second and the nappies had poisonous plastic on them, so there really wasn’t much choice.
It’s amazing how any food, when cooked on cow poop, tastes like cow poop. At least the sultanas would taste like sultanas. We took a handful each and threw them down our throat …
EERRR!! … SPPTTT … SPPTTT … SPPTTt … We spat the sultanas out, shooting them through the air like tasty bullets and bouncing them around the room.
RABBIT poop!! Jared’s rotten little brother! He’d replaced the sultanas with rabbit poop! Geez, he was gonna get it when we saw him again, if we saw him again. And to make matters worse, there was nothing to drink. We had no idea what was coming out of the hoses but we were pretty sure it wasn’t water. So we just had to keep swallowing spit all night to try to get the smoky poop taste out of our mouths.
We spent the night sleeping on a conveyor belt with butt-plug nappies as blankets. They may not be pretty but we knew that they’d keep us warm.
All through the night we could hear the skinny cows munching and getting fatter, while they continually ate from the purple bushes. And we could also hear the sickly mooing and farts of the fat cows, getting skinnier and skinnier as they continually pooped all over the desert.
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sp; CLANG, rattle, rattle … BANG!! The roller door slammed open.
THUD! I fell off the conveyor belt and onto the ground, sending up a cloud of red dust around me. Jared was behind one of the machines, waving his arms about like some psycho gorilla. He was trying to sort of whisper-YELL at me to get over there. I tried to crawl but my legs barely worked. Dragging myself under the conveyor belt and over boxes, my face pushed through the thick sticky red cobwebs as spiders ran all over my body. Just as I reached Jared, the switch was thrown and all the machines once again came to life and started their deafening jobs. poop began its journey and travelled along to the mixer with … the NAPPIES!
Oh No … our ‘BLANKETS’ were still lying on the conveyor belt. And they were now heading to the mixer, along with the poop, where they’d be chopped and bagged. At least a few bags of manure were going to be more absorbent.
This was not GOOD!
We stayed hidden as a shadow flowed in through the door, getting longer and larger. It was creeping up and over the boxes and up against the back wall of the cavern. The really obvious limp told us straight away that it was OLD MR INDITE and right beside him, was the shadow of a huge set of snarling jaws with teeth like a great white shark and drool hanging from them. It was the beast, MOLLY! As OLD MR INDITE fiddle-farted around the machines, he was getting closer and closer to us with every step!
I thought my head was going to EXPLODE from the noise. Just then, Jared tugged at my shirt. I glanced around at him. His face was as white as a ghost as he pointed to … the stove! It was still set up by the conveyor belt and just out of my reach. There was no way I could get to it without OLD MR INDITE or MOLLY seeing me. Thinking fast, I quickly picked up a handful of poop and red sand and rubbed it between my hands to break it up. Then I gently lobbed it over the stove. Jared started to push more towards me, with his mouldy clubbed hands, for me to mash and chuck when they weren’t looking … it was working! Slowly but surely the stove was being camouflaged into just another pile of red poop flakes on the cavern floor. We were safe … FOR NOW.
But we’d made things even worse for ourselves. The heat in the cavern, the panic and the fear, was making us sweat in OVERDRIVE. It wasn’t long before we were both sitting in a puddle of sweat, well at least that’s what we told each other it was. I wasn’t so sure about Jared’s puddle though, he was pretty scared.
As we sat there watching, I looked down to my toe-jammed legs. The sweat was rolling down and the toe-jam was creeping up. I could actually see it throbbing and still growing. It was now thick and solid to around my knees. I looked over at Jared; he was staring at his hands. They now looked like he was wearing a pair of ENORMOUS boxing gloves, right up and over his wrists. Our heads were just about EXPLODING from all the machinery noise. My brain felt like a raw egg, skydiving without a parachute. There hadn’t been time to get our earplugs and the utility belts were still under the conveyor belts where we’d been sleeping.
OLD MR INDITE was tossing more bags of poop onto the truck and limping around, adjusting levers and buttons everywhere as we silently watched. We could see the beads of sweat falling to the ground from his face. Each droplet made a tiny puff of red dust as it hit the earth below.
You could tell that his gammy leg was making work hard. It was so stiff that he was almost dragging it around like a dead log. Maybe in one of the wars he’d shoved his leg into a tank gun to save his mates from certain death and it had been blown right off into a gazillion pieces and then replaced with a wooden one. Or, maybe he kicked a grenade instead of throwing it and it got tangled in his shoe lace. Or, maybe he’s a BULRAVIAN SECRET AGENT and his leg was removed and replaced with a SUPERSONIC laser disintegrating RAY-GUN to get rid of anyone who gets in the way … it’s possible!
Just then it started to snow inside the cavern.
What? Oh no … the nappies we’d used as blankets were now in the mixer being diced up. There were tiny clouds of fluff flying everywhere. Within seconds, the whole cavern seemed to be transformed into a snowy blizzard. OLD MR INDITE was hobbling towards the machine switches as fast as he could, dragging his leg along like an anchor. He slammed his fist down onto the off switch. Silence. Fluffy snow drifted gently to the ground where the white bits of fluff landed in a powder puff of red.
With MOLLY sitting right by his side, OLD MR INDITE stood there like some great terminator robot. Scanning the room with his X-ray vision, studying it for changes, looking for intruders, searching for … US!!!
They began to walk around, moving very slowly. We could see his eyes squinting, as if they were piercing through everything like a knife. You could almost hear his thoughts. Had a box of nappies fallen and popped open onto the conveyor belt during the night?
He was standing so close to us that I could see the hairs in his nostrils swaying with the breeze of every breath.
We didn’t dare breathe …
“C’MON MOLLY. . .” he said as he turned; obviously satisfied that there was no one there.
Phew . . . we could breathe again. I thought for sure we were about to be caught and used as a chew toy or fetch stick for MOLLY. I could see it all so clearly, tied together, lying on the conveyor belt, cheek to cheek again, and knowing my luck, it’d be Jared’s butt cheek against my face cheek again. Then being ‘gooified’, baked, sliced and diced and finally bagged.
‘INDITE MANURE – NOW WITH EXTRA KIDS’ and … Tink!! What was that?
We peeked around the edge, just in time to see OLD MR INDITE bending over with his back to us. He was picking something up off the dirt floor. He stood up ever really slowly, then held something up to his face and blew on it a few times. He was studying it … then he turned around. Jared turned white instantly and looked like he was about to faint. His mouth was so wide open that it produced a waterfall of dribble. OLD MR INDITE'S face was creased with deep lines above his eyes. He looked really serious … really ANGRY … and he was holding … our stove!
“i’LL COUNT TO FIVE, THEN I’M SENDiNG iN MOLLY!” boomed OLD MR INDITE. “So GET OUT HERE … NOW!! ”
There was nothing we could do, what choice did we have?
“MOLLY'S going to kill us!” I bravely yelled from our no-longer safe hideaway.
“I’LL HOLD HER BACK,” OLD MR INDITE said, a little more quietly this time.
“Really?” I called.
“YES, REALLY!”
“Promise?”
“PROMISE!”
“Pinkie swear with sugar on …
“GET OUT HERE NOW!!”
I nodded to Jared so he’d go out first, with me just a few steps behind. We were both shaking like a newborn’s bare butt sitting in a big cold bucket of ice in the middle of winter.
As we emerged from our hideaway, I could see OLD MR INDITE holding MOLLY tightly by the scruff of her neck. Her shark-like teeth were shining with drool and slobber. She seemed to be preparing herself for a meal. I was kind of hoping she’d prefer low fat, freckle-faced redheads, instead of good-looking muscular me.
“ALL THE WAY OUT,” commanded OLD MR INDITE, sounding very serious.
We crept under the conveyor belt and slowly hobbled to the centre of the cavern. With each step, we could see a change in OLD MR INDITE'S face … he was squinting, looking us up and down, straining to study us. Then we realised that he could see my toe-jammed legs and Jared’s hands. He stared straight into our eyes and at that moment … he let go of MOLLY!
MOLLY instantly knew that she was free. Her mouth widened into a deadly grin to show every last one of her razor sharp teeth. She leapt into the air coming straight at us, drool and slobber flowing through the air like streamers from her mouth. Her thick, black, disgusting mop of a coat looked like the flowing cape of DEATH itself. As she lunged towards us, there was nothing we could do to stop her.
Before her front paws hit the ground, I knew her jaws would have locked around my throat and stopped me from taking another breath. It was like one of those s l o w - m o t i o n moments. I raised my han
ds; too late. For a split second, I looked into her deep black eyes and through the matted hair as she came face to face with us … thump!! MOLLY landed right at our feet, throwing up a huge cloud of red dust. It spewed into our eyes and mouths. We were both coughing and spluttering, I couldn’t see a thing. But I could hear … and Jared was gasping for breath. MOLLY had chosen her first victim … hopefully she’d choke on him, or get him stuck in her throat like a fish bone.
I was gonna miss Jared.
The dust settled quickly and as I wiped away the gunk from my eyes, I expected to see MOLLY chewing on Jared … and it seemed Jared thought she was chewing on me. But instead MOLLY was on the ground, rolling around on her back. Her humongous tongue flopped out across the ground and she was panting loudly …
“WELL, GO ON THEN … RUB HER BELLY, SHE LIKES YOU!” declared OLD MR INDITE.
We looked at each other, then we bent down and cautiously gave her belly a pat. Of course she immediately slapped her tongue right across both our faces in one hit, leaving a massive slobber trail, as if a giant slug had used our faces for a freeway, it was so gross. “C’mon then, let’s get something decent to eat,” OLD MR INDITE said as he turned and headed outside.
“MOLLY, HERE!” She was up and by his side in a single bound. Without another word between us, we gathered up our utility belts and followed OLD MR INDITE towards the house. As we got closer and closer to the front steps, we kept sneaking glances at each other, trying to somehow read each other’s thoughts. Should we make a run for it? And if we did … could we outrun MOLLY … did OLD MR INDITE have a shotgun, was I wearing clean underwear?
