by Johnson, MP
Chapter 1
Renny stumbled out of his wrecked car and followed the trail of blood across ice-slicked Highway Twenty-Nine, hoping to God it didn’t lead to Sera. He could still feel the warmth of her hand on his thigh. He could still hear what she had so calmly said to him as the car barreled through the dirty strip of Wisconsin snow that separated the two lanes, before it careened into oncoming traffic, before it crashed into a tree:
“I love you, Renny.”
What had he said? He couldn’t remember. He did, however, remember the flash of fur in front of the car that had set everything into motion. He had hit a deer. That’s what he would find at the end of this crimson streak.
But then where was Sera?
Renny’s head hurt. He must have lost consciousness, but for how long? Everything was so calm in the moonlight, so settled. His gray ’94 Pontiac seemed to belong in the ditch on the wrong side of the road, front end pressed against a tree as if it had been there forever, a minor landmark amidst miles of woods and frozen cornfields.
Even though the scene had settled, he had not. His body still shook. He couldn’t remember where he was. They had passed Thorp and its signature greasy spoon, the Thorpedo. That might have been minutes ago. That might have been hours ago. Had Sera gone for help while he was unconscious? Where would she have gone? The stars above seemed as close as any gas station. Maybe she had just wandered away, concussed like him. Into the Wisconsin cold. Alone.
When he reached the shoulder of the other side of the highway, he did not find a lump of mangled venison as he had hoped. He did not find splayed hooves and shattered antlers. Instead, the bloody smear led to a pair of feet. Human feet.
“No!” Renny cried out, turning away quickly. He didn’t want to see this. Everything inside of him became a vacuum, and he thought he might lose consciousness again. He thought that might even be for the best. He couldn’t deal with this.
But then he remembered something. Sera had worn her purple Chucks, because the heel of her boot had broken. He looked over his shoulder and saw beaten black work boots, big boots. Definitely not Sera’s boots.
He faced the body again. It was not Sera, but a man. A very dead man.
A man with the head of a cow.
Chapter 2
Renny’s elation at not finding Sera faded quickly. He realized he had killed a man. Or a cow man. Or something. He considered ignoring it and going back to his car. Instead, he leaned over to get a closer look at the strange corpse, putting his hands on his knees. The cold bit into his chapped knuckles. He tried to add this up. He tried to make sense of the tattered, bloody jeans. He tried to understand the naked torso and the muscular arms, twisted into exclamations of pain.
“This is insane,” he whispered as he looked into the cow’s eyes, dead and buried in the matted tan fur. They stared past him, into the night sky, reflecting the snowflakes that began to fall. The gleam had vanished from those eyes. Renny had always noticed the gleam in the cows’ eyes on field trips to nearby farms back in grade school. Despite their cages, the animals seemed somehow hopeful. Afterward, he would lay awake scheming about setting the livestock free. He never did though, of course.
He slipped his fingers under the frayed edges of pink meat where cow head met man body. Slowly, he pulled. The head slid off, making a sound like a boot being freed from a puddle of mud. A mask. The man was wearing a cow head like a mask. Another set of dead eyes hid beneath. These peered out of a face that was all too human. Dry lips bent down on one side, as if the man had started to frown but died before the other side of his mouth could finish the job.
A man was dead, and Renny had killed him. Renny told himself there was nothing he could have done to avoid the accident. He had been paying attention. The man had run out of the woods, probably barely able to see with the cow mask on. But why? Renny forced himself to come up with a reason, something that made sense. Someone had some drinks. Made a bet. Took a dare. That’s all there was to it.
This all could have been prevented if he had done as Sera suggested and waited until morning to drive back home to Green Bay from her foster parents’ house in Menomonie. But he had been given clear signals that he was not welcome from her father and her mini army of foster siblings, whispers about his age—twenty-eight, hardly a baby, but a fair bit of living short of Sera’s forty-one. It had been brutal, and it made him want to retreat to his own parents’ basement, which he had only recently vacated. Despite Sera’s reassurances and abundant kisses, he had insisted on leaving, forced out of the Durn household by the tension, really. If he hadn’t, he would be curled up in bed next to Sera right now. He couldn’t think of anyplace he’d rather be.
A pickup passed without slowing down. The driver saw Renny but quickly looked away, as if pretending he hadn’t. When the truck sped up, Renny got the strange sense that the man knew exactly what was going on. Or maybe the driver simply assumed Renny had a cellphone and all necessary calls had been made. Renny did not have a cellphone though. Sera had a cellphone. But where was she?
“Sera!” he screamed. Her name became a white cloud in the cold air and quickly vanished, as if not wanting to venture any further into the night.
Numbness crept into Renny’s fingertips. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket, a puffy blue behemoth that made crinkling sounds every time he moved. Could he make it to the nearest gas station? He decided against it. Too cold. Too many miles of nothingness. At least he was on Twenty-Nine and not some back road, so there was a chance of seeing another vehicle soon, even though it was after two in the morning. He would have to be more aggressive about flagging down the next car that drove by.
But he couldn’t just leave.
“Sera!” he shouted again. “Please!”
The sound of snapping branches drew Renny’s attention.
“Sera?” he asked, looking into the woods.
Eyes peered out from the darkness, but they were not Sera’s sweet, meadow green eyes. They were cow eyes. These eyes were just as gleamless as the pair at his feet, and the three heads that housed them seemed just as disembodied. At least, they did at first. When they floated out of the trees, Renny saw that they were indeed attached to bodies—large bodies with hairy, exposed chests and sturdy, rounded stomachs. Farmers’ bodies, he assumed. Bodies that had been worked, unlike his.
Fear overtook him. He choked out a half scream. This was not right. Good people didn’t walk out of the woods shirtless at two in the morning wearing the heads of cows.
He hurried toward his car, telling himself they probably wanted to be with their friend, telling himself nothing bad was going to happen. The footsteps behind him moved faster and so did he. He needed to get into his car. He would be safe there. With uncertain footing over the rutted ice and snow, he moved as quickly as he could without falling.
As he approached his car, he saw his own panicked face reflected in the passenger side window. He saw the reflection of a cow head close behind. It was a bull head actually. Whirls of midnight black fur hid its dead eyes. A stripe of white ran from its nose to the top of its head, where it culminated in a matted crown between two long, black-tipped horns. The white fur had turned yellow-brown, much like the snow. A wide gash divided its nose into two frozen pink continents.
Renny reached for the door handle, but he was too far away. Scar Nose wove his gnarled fists together and raised them up as if about to hammer through Renny’s skull. Renny braced himself for the blow. It caught him in the middle of his back. Falling forward, he stuck his hands out. They failed to halt his impact with the cold ground. His face hit the late winter snow, hard snow that had embraced the dirt and salt spread across the highway in a futile attempt to kill it. This toughened snow tore up his chi
n and threatened to shove his teeth down his throat. He tasted blood.
Scar Nose wrapped a muscular arm around Renny’s neck, pulling Renny’s head against a sweaty torso. Wiry chest hair poked into Renny’s ear as he struggled to free himself from the headlock. He grabbed the cow man’s forearm, his scraped palms burning hotter the tighter he squeezed. He felt so small in Scar Nose’s grip. He was small, five-and-a-half feet and chubby, a little toy of a man, a puffy-jacket-wearing Christmas tree ornament with rosy cheeks, ready to be shattered in the cow man’s vice.
“Please.” The word grinded through Renny’s closing windpipe. “Let me go.”
All he could hear was his own heartbeat and the sound of his puffy jacket crinkling as he tried to squirm free of Scar Nose’s concrete grip. The cow man relented. Then he slammed Renny’s face against the Pontiac and dropped him.
Scar Nose stood over Renny with clenched fists, daring Renny to move.
Renny stayed down. He would have buried himself in the snow if possible, to stay even further down. He had no intention of getting up, until he heard a familiar voice making a sound he wasn’t familiar with, a scream that drilled into him.
It was Sera.
He turned to see that the two other cow men held her. She had struggled free of the choker that had kept her quiet up to that point. He tried to stand, but Scar Nose’s fist drove him back to the ground. He closed his eyes and didn’t move.
“Renny!” she screamed again as they dragged her away. “Help me!”
He didn’t answer. He lay quietly beside his car, wishing the cold could numb his inside as quickly as it had numbed his outside. If only it could numb away everything he felt at that moment, the conflict between his fear of those men and his desire to help Sera.
The footsteps disappeared into the woods. Sera’s pleas disappeared with them.
As he lay there, he suddenly remembered what he had said before they collided with the tree, after Sera had told him she loved him. “We are going to die.” That’s it. Not, “I love you, too.” Not anything like that. Just, “We are going to die.”
That morning in bed, before they had crawled out to begrudgingly make the trip to Sera’s parents’ home, Renny had asked Sera if she loved him. She had grabbed the sides of his head, rooting her long fingers in his dense black hair. With all the faux melodrama she could muster, she had said, “Yes, Renny, I love you, forever and ever, amen.” Then she had giggled and pulled all the blankets off him, starting a tug of war that ended with them both naked on the floor, laughing wildly.
Sera said yes every time Renny asked her if she loved him. Even that first time, on that summer day they sat outside the public library reading children’s books to each other—they both had agreed on the one about the rodent who got shipwrecked on an island far from the love of his life—she had said yes without hesitation.
“Why do you ask all the time?” Sera had questioned once, not hurt by it, but curious. “I just like to hear the words,” he had said.
In truth, a doubting voice inside kept telling him she didn’t mean it, she couldn’t mean it. She was too good. He was too just-out-of-college-after-way-too-long and too just-out-of-his-parents’-basement. He was hot on the trail of his first real job. She travelled all over the country doing consulting. Not to mention the age thing. She would leave him, and he would be alone. Her family would definitely be happy about it.
But hadn’t she proven herself simply by being by his side day after day? He had no reason to doubt her love, and he knew it now with absolute certainty. They could have died when they hit that tree, and she only had one thought on her mind. He could not doubt that. How could an “I love you” issued in the face of death be anything but sincere?
Renny could be certain now, but could Sera? If anyone in this relationship should have doubts, it should be her. What real proof of his love had he given?
Now he had that chance.
Those three cow men had something in mind for Sera, and Renny was the only one who could stop them. Digging through the trunk of his car, he pushed Sera’s bags aside and grabbed his extra sweatshirt. Keeping it in his trunk had been Sera’s idea. Just in case the car broke down and nobody came for a while. She had made him promise to put gloves and hats in there too, a whole Wisconsin winter weather kit. He wished he had. He wrapped the sweatshirt around his head, a makeshift hood.
Renny walked into the woods to find Sera and tell her he loved her. He would tell her he knew she loved him, and she never needed to say it again. He would save her, proving to her that his love was just as true, proving to her that his I-love-you’s were more than just words, too.
Chapter 3
In the darkness of the woods, Renny followed the trampled snow. He ran carefully through the thick growth, hopping over fallen logs and slamming branches out of his way. The trees snatched up more and more of the moonlight as he got deeper. Branches grew without rhyme or reason, in every direction, as if scribbled in front of him by a hyper child with a fistful of crayons, intent on covering every inch of empty space.
Renny kept running until his breath ran out. Then he slowed down. His right knee felt loose. It didn’t hurt. It just didn’t feel right. If he kicked hard enough, it would spontaneously disassemble and he would collapse. He couldn’t remember the last time he had run. He had never been strong. Even in grade school, he had been terrible at every sport he attempted. Eventually, he quit attempting and later fell into a nice, sit-down job at his mom’s office. Now his body wasn’t ready for such intense movement. But he walked as fast as he could, his hands in front of him to shield him from whatever he couldn’t see in the darkness.
Looking back, he became aware of the distance between him and the highway. It was out of sight now. He had driven this stretch of Twenty-Nine hundreds of times. His eyes always stuck to the white lines. He never looked to the side. He never considered what might be wandering around between the woods and the farms.
When he faced forward again, he shoved a snow-drooping evergreen branch aside and screamed. More cow heads. Dozens. Maybe hundreds, staring at him with their drained black eyes. He fell backwards to the ground and scrambled away like a crab, dragging his ass so snow slid into the back of his jeans.
But the cow heads didn’t follow him. They couldn’t. They had no bodies beneath them, human or otherwise. They could only leer at him, impaled on stakes that lined both sides of the trail. He stood and brushed the snow off his bottom. He moved between them, certain now he was on the right path, the path that would lead him to Sera.
The first cow heads he passed were fresh. Bloody icicles dangled from where they had been separated from their bodies. As he continued on, the cow heads became more and more decayed. Those still covered with winter-frosted fur gave way to furless frozen meat with snow-filled holes where eyes used to be.
A few hundred feet later, the stakes on either side of him held only bovine skulls. These were less bold than the fresh cow heads, which stared straight at him as he passed. These hung awkwardly to the side, their meat picked away by years of scavengers and rot. How long had these cow men been doing this? How many people had they dragged into the woods with them? And why? Why the fuck would they do this?
Renny thought of Sera’s hand on his thigh and ran again, a limping run, but a run nonetheless. He needed to save her. He had built a vision for his future, and she was part of it. Hell, she was the motivation for it. Would he have moved out of his parents’ place if it hadn’t been for her? Finished college? Quit the fake job at his mom’s office?
He would rescue her and they would grow old together. This would become just another stop in one of their “remember that time?” conversations: “Remember that time we read children’s books to each other all day?” “Remember that time my dad called you a fetus and said you were no good for his daughter?” “Remember that time you got kidnapped by freaks in cow heads and I rescued you?”
His face hurt, not just his scraped chin, but the whole freezing thing. H
ow cold was it? Five degrees? Cold enough to turn his fingers into unfeeling attachments, no more a part of his body than the soles of his shoes. This was how frostbite happened. This was how people lost fingers. He almost laughed at the thought. The loss of fingers was the least of his worries.
Finally, the trees thinned and the woods spit him out into a moonlit cornfield. Rows of dried stalks, no more than half a foot high, stuck out of the snow like reeds from a still pond. A barn stood in the distance. It might have been red once, but it was gray now, dead. Planks were missing from its side, lost teeth from the mouth of an old man. From the gaps, firelight seeped like pus onto the snow outside.
Renny stopped to catch his breath near a stack of headless cattle. The bodies on the bottom hid beneath inches of snow. A light dusting covered the ones on top. The cold had preserved them. Other than the missing heads, they looked alive enough to get up and walk away. From what he could see of the ones on the bottom, they were not so fresh.
One body had been dragged from the pile. This one had a head. Its eyes had been gnawed out by crows and other things in the woods—not just its eyes, but the meat around them too, the matter behind them, all scraped away, leaving only emptiness. Renny stared at the lipless mouth spread wide, the crooked yellow teeth, the gray fillings.
He wasn’t looking at a cow.
That will be my body, he thought, stepping back into the woods. He loved Sera, but he didn’t know if he could charge across the field and into that barn. He didn’t know if he could do any good against Scar Nose and the other two cow men. He had known they were farmers from the moment he saw them, toughened by work and obviously insane. Whatever they were doing in there, they had been doing it for a while, judging by the age of the cattle carcasses. Maybe forever. They had likely fended off far sturdier opponents than Renny. They would be ready to stop him.
Looking around, he tried to find a place to sit and think, maybe a place to curl up and cry. Instead, he saw a fallen branch. He picked it up and squeezed it between his numb fingers. He couldn’t tell if his grip was too tight or not tight enough, just that his wounded palms hurt to grip at all. The skin on his knuckles had split too, but the blood there had sense enough to stay inside and not venture out into the cold.
