by Johnson, MP
He took a practice swing and smacked the branch against a tree trunk. The impact rattled the bones in his forearm. It hurt, but he could handle it. He walked into the cornfield. He refused to let Sera die alone, not now that he knew how truly she loved him. She would see he loved her just as much, and if he was killed in the process, then so be it.
The snow edged into his shoes, wetting his socks at the ankle. As he got closer, he noticed a few spots of red life remaining on the barn. They gave him hope. He crossed the field, conscious of his ever-crinkling puffy coat. There was no cover to be had, so he just approached the barn, and when he found his way into its shadow, he pressed his eye against one of the holes in the wood. Inside, ten men with cow masks stood around a fire. Ten. It hadn’t dawned on him that there might be more than the first three. The odds against him were even worse than anticipated. And there could be more of them elsewhere. There could be hundreds, thousands.
Near the flames, which filled the barn with smoke, two of the cow men held Sera. She seemed so collected, even now. Her clothes were torn, so she had obviously tried to fight. But no tears from her eyes. She held her chin up, her lips closed in a tight frown.
What kind of expressions hid beneath her captors’ masks? Were they grinning? Maybe they were somber. The cow faces betrayed no emotions. However, one’s pink tongue stuck straight out, the only evidence of its death struggle. Renny imagined the tongue as an independent entity, a parasite that had attempted to flee as its host’s throat was slit, only to become frozen in place to forever hang limp in defeat.
While Renny stared at that tongue, he failed to notice that he had been spotted. He did not hear the footsteps crunching through the snow behind him until it was too late. Scar Nose caught him, tore the sweatshirt off his head and slipped a blade in front of his throat. Renny dropped his stick. What little hope he had of getting out of this alive, with Sera, evaporated.
Chapter 4
Inside the barn, Renny stood close to the flames, Scar Nose’s blade still pressed to his neck. Heat pushed against his face and fingers, shocking the cold out of his blood. It felt good, despite the smoke that rubbed into his eyes. He fought the smoke with tears, which blurred his vision, making the cow faces surrounding him seem like reflections in turbulent waters, shaky and uncertain. He could smell them clearly though. Their eager sweat. Their hot breath filtered through layers of dead meat.
On the other side of the fire, Sera writhed as two of the cow men ripped her top off. Scratches covered her winter pale flesh, damage from being dragged through the woods. The men pulled her tight jeans to her ankles. One of them kneeled in front of her and pulled her beige panties down. She kneed him in the face so hard his mask spun to the side and he nearly fell into the flames. He slapped her.
“Fuck you,” she said.
Realizing Sera hadn’t noticed him, Renny said her name. It came out a whisper. He wanted her to see he was there for her. He had failed, but he had come.
“Help me, Renny!” she shouted.
“How?” he wanted to ask, and he remembered how paralyzed he had been before he met her. Stuck in his parents’ basement, stuck playing computer games (and occasionally making a spreadsheet) in his mom’s office, stuck, stuck, stuck—not because he wanted to be, but because he didn’t know how not to be. She had told him. She had explained how he could get a student loan and go to school. She had led him and she had pushed him, back then, but how did he do this now?
Scar Nose toyed with the blade at Renny’s throat, circling its sharp tip around Renny’s Adam’s apple. Renny thought about Sera’s hand on his thigh. He needed to help her. She loved him. She had proven it. Now he needed to prove he loved her.
He just had to wait for the right moment.
At the far side of the barn, he saw a massive pile of scrap—rotten wooden beams, mangled sheet metal and chicken wire. From it, two of the cow men pulled an eight-foot-tall cross. The gray, crooked thing had been cobbled together from slats of wood that had fallen off the barn. They dragged it next to the fire, next to Sera. Then they took out a coil of rusted barbed wire.
“Renny, please!” Sera screamed as Hang Tongue pressed her to the cross. Another cow man bound her to the wood with the barbed wire, stringing it around her neck, waist, wrists and ankles. Where the barbs didn’t draw blood, the rust rubbed off, leaving streaks of orange on her skin.
With grunts and flexed biceps, the cow men turned her and the cross upside down. They hammered it into the dirt until it stood on its own, barely. It could have tipped forward at any moment, sending Sera into the flames. The men behind the cow masks didn’t seem to fear this possibility.
“Why are you just standing there, Renny?” Sera asked, too quietly.
Renny couldn’t think of anything to say, anything to do.
Scar Nose stepped away from Renny. With the slightest hint of a bow, he handed the blade to another cow man. This one wore the head of an old black bull, a mask that still seemed fresh. Jagged edges of pink meat dangled from where it had been severed from its body, resting on the man’s barrel chest. Renny got the sense that the man had torn the animal’s head off with his bare hands.
Black Bull stretched his arms to the sides, clutching the blade—not a knife, but a sharpened horn—in one hand. He growled words Renny couldn’t understand, strange words that seemed neither backward nor forward, but piled on each other and spoken simultaneously. They came out with puffs of purple steam that twisted through the barn. No steam came from Renny’s breath though, not with the fire in front of him. The rest of the cow men chanted along, fists raised, squeezing closer to Sera.
Renny saw his opportunity. He had been left alone as the men focused on Sera’s naked body, soaked in sweat and glistening in the firelight. Although they were big, much bigger than Renny, only Black Bull had a weapon. Their cow masks would be a handicap. Maybe Renny could move faster. If he could grab a two-by-four or a lead pipe from the scrap heap, he had a chance. He could knock them out, grab Sera and go.
He took one step and froze. He knew what would happen. As soon as he armed himself, the cow men would be on him. They hadn’t needed weapons before and they wouldn’t now. They would slam him to the ground, just like they did outside his car. They would beat him until he couldn’t move. They would slit his throat like they did the cattle and they would throw him on the pile by the woods, where he would freeze until spring, the piercing Wisconsin winter certainly not pitying enough to let him rot.
Black Bull moved closer to Sera’s inverted body. The chanting grew louder, the words more mangled, the purple cloud denser. He dragged the horn over her stomach, cutting through stretch marks. Blood trickled over her breasts, her face, through her long blonde hair, anxious to mix with the dirt below.
Renny measured the distance to the pile of scrap. Ten steps. That was all he needed. His heart beat faster. Sweat moved down his back, and he took a deep breath. He wanted to yell “I love you” at the top of his lungs. They would just be words though. They wouldn’t prove anything unless he did something.
And he had to do something. Sera had done so much for him. She had spent nightlong sessions giving him pep talks about how smart he was, how he would be able to get a great job if he just kept applying and practicing his interviews. He tried to conjure up her voice, her “You can do this, Renny,” but he couldn’t find it. She had told him she’d always be there for him, and she had kissed him and fucked him and just loved him harder than anyone ever had, and oh God, he couldn’t let her die, he couldn’t. But what could he do?
Black Bull shoved the horn deep into Sera’s abdomen, slashing wildly from the bottom of her breasts to her belly button, back and forth, stirring everything up inside. Her screams grew weaker, barely audible over the demonic growling of the cattle. Words devolved into something else amidst the purple fog spit from dead bovine lips.
That’s when Renny decided to move, knowing full well what would happen. They would kill him. But they would kill him whether he
tried to save Sera or not. He could stand still and wait for it. Or he could do something.
He charged toward her. Thick arms grabbed at him. He fought them off with his elbows and inched forward. Ignoring the fingers that found their way under his puffy blue jacket, around his neck, onto his face and into his screaming mouth, he put one foot in front of the other until he was mere feet from Sera. When he couldn’t move forward anymore, he reached out to get as close to her as he could. She didn’t reach back. The blood pouring from her stomach told him he had waited too long. He couldn’t save her. He just hoped there was enough life left in her that she could see him trying.
“I love you!” he shouted as his knee gave out and he collapsed.
The men easily dragged him away.
Renny tried to stand, but Scar Nose and Hang Tongue kept him on his knees.
“Don’t hurt me. I’m . . . I’m on your side,” Renny said.
The words surprised him. His feeble attempt at a rescue was one thing. He could work with that. He could convince himself that he had done what he could. But siding with the men who had killed Sera? The words churned up acid in his stomach, and he felt sick. He wanted to take them back. If only he could.
“On our side?” Black Bull said. “Well then . . .”
He snapped at the cow men holding Renny down. They shuffled away, returning moments later, carrying a fresh mask. Each of the men held one horn as they lifted it above Renny. Blood dripped out of the hollowed bull head onto his black hair, slowly tickling its way to his scalp. They lowered it onto his head. The warm, wet meat rubbed against his nose, his cheeks. They twisted it hard, testing the strength of his neck, until his eyes lined up with tiny eyeholes, allowing him to see, barely. Breathing was tough. When he inhaled through his nose, he sucked in cow blood, and even when he blew it back out it stuck there, fetid and wet.
Through frames of pink meat and cow blood, Renny watched the men remove their masks, all except Black Bull and Scar Nose, who stepped back, crossing their massive arms across their bare chests. Without the cow heads, these old men, with drooping, razor burned necks and burst blood vessels adorning sun-damaged noses, looked so much weaker. Until they opened their mouths, hissed and swarmed on Sera.
Shoving each other out of the way, squirming to get first taste, they licked their lips and sank their dirty teeth into the only person Renny knew truly loved him. When they came up for air, rivers of blood ran down their chins and they laughed.
One of the men tore her completely open and her insides poured out around the men’s work boots. Innards came out crossed and complex, like a tumble of plus and minus signs—the equation of human life. All of these parts that should never be seen by anyone other than doctors seemed alive in the firelight, certainly more so than Sera.
Renny could only see her feet now, sticking straight up, barb-wired at the ankles to the inverted cross. They shook, not because she was still alive, but because of the savagery of the teeth and nails fighting to get deeper into her body.
Some of the men wrestled armfuls out of her and ran off, dragging stringy pink bits into the shadows of the barn, between the tractors and combines parked there. The shadows couldn’t hide the sound of slurping and chewing. Others didn’t require privacy and dug their faces into Sera, lapping up her blood and what was left of her life.
One reached in and clawed out a piece—maybe her heart. He stood in front of Renny, gnawing wild-eyed at the mass of muscle. Blood pooled in acne scars on his chin. It seeped over his thick fingers as he clenched the piece of Sera with both hands.
Scar Nose and Black Bull, still clad in their masks, dropped their jeans. Naked in the flickering firelight, their hairy behinds clenched, they shoved their cohorts aside to get to Sera’s body. With great care, they peeled her lids back and dug out her eyes. Each of them took one. They held the eyes in the palms of their hands. With ragged fingernails, they slit the backs of the orbs. They painstakingly scraped the ocular fluid from the insides like whites from an eggshell, which oozed down the sides of their hands onto their sturdy forearms.
Their cocks rose.
Delicately, they placed the hollowed out eyeballs on the tips of their erections.
The eyes—Sera’s meadow green eyes—stared out from the groins of Black Bull and Scar Nose. The cow men chanted in unison, more words Renny couldn’t understand, more words ushered into the world on purple clouds. Those clouds floated down, surrounding the eyeball-hooded cocks. The eyes flickered to life, silently screaming.
Renny just watched, on his knees, as the eyes approached.
Chapter 5
As a parent, Morgan hated the moments of helplessness the most, when all the bluster of “I’m going to be a good father and protect my child from the horrors of the world” showed itself for the facade it really was. He had felt this so many times, not just about Sera as she grew up and ventured out into the world without him by her side—first on foot, then on her bike, then in her car and then by plane—but also about Derby and Cassandra and Tom and Renora and Eric, his other foster children.
Sometimes, when he caught himself wondering if he could possibly love a biological child more, he reminded himself of moments like this. He had lost days driving back and forth along Highway Twenty-Nine, looking for any sign of Sera, whom he hadn’t heard from in a week. Nobody could question his love for his kids.
And when he found Sera he was going to give her what for.
He laughed out loud at that, the thought of him, now sixty-seven-years old, scolding his forty-one-year-old daughter as if she were nothing more than a kid. Of course, in his mind’s eye, he still saw six-year-old Sera on her pink bike, riding away with a backpack full of sock puppets to put on a show for her friends down the block. She would never stop being that little girl to him. That didn’t mean he wasn’t proud of her for starting her consulting business and becoming such a success.
Although maybe not for her choice of men.
Margaret, his wife, had told him that Sera had probably just gone off on a trip or something and forgot to tell them. She had done it before, jetting all over the country for work, helping massive companies implement quality insurance infrastructures . . . or something. But that didn’t explain why she didn’t answer her phone. No, he had a nagging feeling that something had gone wrong. That man, Renny, probably had something to do with it. What kind of name was Renny, anyway? That was no man’s name.
When Sera brought that lump of a man home—more fetus than man really, so young—Morgan had just stared. The nail biting. The out-of-place laughter. Sera was Morgan’s oldest child, the first of many foster children he and Margaret had brought into their home, the first they had adopted. He was so damn impressed at how fine she had grown up, despite their occasional petty disagreement over the family business. She had dated travel journalists, CEOs, men with their shit together, but she had never latched onto one. Morgan had taken hope that she wouldn’t latch onto Renny either. Until the fetus blurted out that he and Sera had been an item for almost a year.
Morgan got angry that she had kept this from her mother and father, and he had blurted out, “What do you have to offer my daughter?” “Dad!” Sera had shouted. Renny had teared up, and he got away without providing an answer.
Morgan figured Sera must not have been proud of the relationship. What was there to be proud of? Hell, the boy didn’t even know who Morgan was. Too young. Too wrapped up in videogames or smartphones or whatever kids got wrapped up in these days. And of course Sera hadn’t told him. She had never been particularly proud of the family business. Morgan had been tempted to take the boy out to the compound, but he never got the chance. At least the boy had the wherewithal to notice he wasn’t wanted.
After the boy had left in a huff, Morgan asked Margaret, “What does she see in that guy?” She had said, “His goodness, which obviously you don’t.” “Do you?” he had asked. She had just shrugged.
Morgan’s cellphone rang. He pulled diligently to the shoulder an
d answered it. “Dear, it’s starting to snow. I’m too far away and too tired to make it back safely tonight. I’m going to stay at a motel up the way. Maybe walk another stretch of highway.”
He could almost feel his wife’s sigh through the phone. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to get away from me.”
“Well, you do know better,” he replied.
“Sera’s probably off with that boy. They probably went to Chicago.”
“We’ve had this discussion, Retta.”
“Have you called the police again?”
“Yes. ‘We’re doing everything we can,’ they said. I asked what that meant. What is the ‘everything’ that the Green Bay police has to offer?”
“She may be in New York. She was talking about New York,” Margaret said.
“I just want to see her and know she’s safe.”
“I love you.”
Before he pulled back into traffic, he noticed tire tracks in the snow. They led to a tree that had obviously been struck. He had checked most of the spots like this between Menomonie and Green Bay, imagining that there had been a collision and somehow all of their identification had been lost and they suffered amnesia-causing blows to the head. He couldn’t remember if he had checked this crash scene, so he got out to investigate.
He trudged along the tire tracks in his big winter boots. Someone, he imagined, would be able to see these tracks and immediately determine the type of car they belonged to. Morgan was not that someone. He wasn’t entirely sure what type of car that fetus had driven. Pontiac? What did their tires look like?
The cold crept into him and reminded him how worthless this was. What did he expect to find, wasting all this gas and all these hours driving from one side of Wisconsin to the next? Ridiculous. But it kept him in motion, kept him feeling as though he was doing something. It was more than the police were doing. More than the fetus’ parents were doing, that was for sure. When he had called them to find out if they knew where their son and his daughter had gone, the mother had brushed him off. “He just moved out not long ago,” she had said. “He’s probably going wild on freedom.” It sounded like his parents were doing the same. Morgan could smell the booze through the phone line.
