Cattle Cult Kill Kill

by Johnson, MP

  He touched the tree where the bark had been scraped away by bumper. It didn’t seem to have been struck too hard. The tree still stood. The dent wasn’t deep. An impact like that wouldn’t have led to a double dose of amnesia, or death. He smiled. Maybe he wasn’t so bad at detective work after all.

  When he turned to walk away, he tripped and fell face first into the snow.

  “Can’t even detect what’s in front of my feet,” he grumbled, cursing his old, fragile skin and knowing he’d have a ridiculous bruise from this, another big swampy yellow one. He was lucky he hadn’t broken anything. Last year, Margaret had shattered her wrist after missing the bottom step to the basement. The kids had gotten all in a tizzy about safety. He had shut them down fast. Now here he was, all alone and crumpled up on the side of Highway Twenty-Nine. If anyone found him like this, he’d be sent to a home as an Alzheimer’s patient. He could have cried if it wasn’t so damn funny.

  He kicked at the snow, trying to find what had tripped him, figuring it for a wild root or a fallen branch. What he uncovered was a thin sheet of metal. He brushed the snow off it. The plate had six red embossed letters: KIGSFT. He recognized those six letters. He had seen them on that dirty car that had pulled into his driveway for the first time last week. Renny’s car.

  Chapter 6

  A single paved road cut through Catspaw, Wisconsin. On it, between a tavern and a closed-for-the-winter bait shack, sat the police station, a whitewashed brick building that had once been a service station.

  Inside, Morgan stood in a dimly lit office no bigger than his bathroom at home. Behind a desk covered with neon green cereal boxes and balled-up paperwork sat Lawrence Wold, the young chief of police, a coat hanger of a man in a too-big uniform.

  Morgan held the license plate in both hands, listening in disbelief as the chief said, in a voice that seemed to come from far away, “Perhaps they called for a tow without calling the police. It’s not legal, but it’s pretty common.”

  “They would have called me,” Morgan replied.

  The chief shrugged. “Life gets crazy sometimes.”

  Morgan paused. He tried to lock onto the chief’s eyes, but they refused a meeting. “I get the feeling you’re not interested in helping.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to help with.”

  Morgan leaned forward. It was late, he was cold and he had no time for bullshit. With his forearm, he cleared the desk. The cereal boxes hit the dirty tile floor, spilling their contents. Multicolored O’s skittered everywhere. He slid the license plate across the desk, pushing down and leaving scratches in the finish.

  “Chief,” Morgan said, “I’m well aware of the things that go on in the parts of Wisconsin where nobody is looking, and Catspaw is one of those parts. I also know that crashed cars don’t just disappear. The people in them don’t just disappear.”

  “Well . . .” The chief started to put up another roadblock.

  Morgan interrupted. “Oh, I neglected to mention my last name. It’s Durn.”

  The chief’s eyes went wide. “Morgan . . . Durn.”

  “I see you recognize me now. So when I tell you that I’m going to come back to your town and turn it upside down until I find my daughter, you know what I mean?”

  The chief nodded.

  “Perhaps you could tell me then,” Morgan asked, “where should I start?”

  Chapter 7

  Chief Larry Wold picked up the boxes of Rainbow Zing-O’s and placed them back on his desk, carefully arranging them so their statuesque mascot, the redheaded cave sorceress Gar-Garla, faced him. He swept the spilled cereal under his desk with his foot, crushing much of it to powder in the process. He grabbed one of the boxes.

  “Well Gar-Garla, I do believe I have committed my ultimate fuckup,” he said.

  The cereal mascot stared back at him in wise silence, making her usual kissy face. She held a bowl of fruit-flavored O’s in front of her heaving bosom, as if in offering. That was one offering he could never say no to. If there was any bit of fat to be found on his rail thin frame, Gar-Garla was to blame. Ever since he first laid eyes on her as a kid, he had partaken of her treats, in more ways than one. He knew those treats well.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Part of me has wanted to spill the beans for a long time. I mean, after all I’ve done for the Hertin family… Hell, after all my father and grandfather did for them, and after all the previous police chiefs did for them going back as far as anyone can track . . . maybe I just want this ugly business to come to an end.”

  He squeezed the cereal box to his chest.

  “Yes, I know what will happen to me. I’d say I don’t care, except I do, if only because of Jenny and the girls. I don’t want Jenny to have to go out and get a job. I don’t want her to have to go over to the tavern to find a new man. Maybe if I get out to the Hertin farm and warn Grant, he’ll be forgiving. After all, it’s his own fault. His people dragged the wrong woman into this. Morgan Durn’s daughter. Jesus Henry Christ.”

  He rattled the box of Rainbow Zing-O’s.

  “Just in case though, I’m going to say goodbye to you proper right now.”

  With his pocketknife, he stabbed the front of the cereal box, making a quarter-sized hole in Gar-Garla’s red puckered lips. As the scent of artificially sweetened whole grains tempted his taste buds, Larry unzipped his pants.

  Chapter 8

  The Hertin farm straddled the northern boundary of Catspaw, up close to Highway Twenty-Nine. In terms of acreage, it wasn’t much, and a lot of it was woods. The rest was mostly cornfields, and a little fenced-in patch for a few cattle to mope around in before they got beheaded. The barn was on its last legs, and the two-story farmhouse where Grant Hertin and his men lived wasn’t much better.

  Sliding into the moonlit patch of ice that hid the driveway to the farmhouse, Larry had the door of his cruiser open before he even came to a halt.

  “Grant,” he shouted. “Grant, we got trouble!”

  Grant Hertin erupted from the farmhouse’s squealing screen door, his muscles wrapped loose in flannel and overalls. The man couldn’t move forward without looking like he was going to crush something. Naturally, Larry backed up. The farmer was well into his sixties, but it was hard for Larry to think of Grant as an old man. He moved with the strength and sureness of youth. Larry wasn’t half Grant’s age, yet he couldn’t remember ever moving that way. He started to ask himself where the old man had gotten such strength, such sureness, but he knew. Of course he knew.

  “It’s after midnight, Wold.”

  “I’ve got a lot more than that to apologize for, Grant.”

  “What have you done, son?” Grant placed a massive hand on the chief’s bony shoulder. Coming from anyone else, the gesture might have been reassuring, might have said, “Don’t worry, you can tell me anything.” Coming from Grant, it was a shackle.

  “I’m dumb, Grant. You know I’m dumb. Hell, you’ve said it yourself.”

  “I’ve never said that.” Grant tightened his grip on the chief’s shoulder.

  “Well, that doesn’t change the fact that I am, Grant. It just slipped out. I would have had to call in the National Guard, and that wouldn’t have been good for anyone.”

  “What are you saying, son? Who did you tell?”

  “Last week, that Pontiac the boys and I took care of for you, the woman that came with it, that was Morgan Durn’s daughter. Morgan Durn! He was just at the station. He said he was going to come back and turn Catspaw upside-down. I couldn’t have that, Grant, I just couldn’t. For the good of Catspaw, really.”

  Larry shook furiously. His legs retreated from Grant’s grip, leaving him hunched over, with his face still in front of Grant, but his lower half shifting further and further away. Grant did not let go of Larry’s shoulder.

  A look crossed Grant’s face briefly, and Larry thought it might have been fear, but then that look turned to a sneer. Grant took in a hard breath through his nose, sucking in snot, which he spi
t onto the ground by Larry’s feet. Larry stared down at the fast-freezing glob of mucus and nearly shit his pants.

  “What we do here,” Grant said, “is for the good of Catspaw.”

  “The crops have been nice,” Larry acknowledged.

  “The crops have been perfect. The livestock, too. Every farm in the county has produced and turned a profit, a good profit. When the farms in Outagamie County or Shawano County don’t yield, when the rain is bad and the ground is dry and the livestock gets sick, our farms produce. Even Garrison’s damn emu farm. As far back as anyone can remember, my family’s work has made Catspaw County’s produce and meat the most sought after in the state. Now, do you think that’s a coincidence?”

  “Of course not, Grant. It’s just . . .”

  “Do you want the crops to fail, son?”

  “It’s not that. Maybe Bovi . . .”

  Grant slammed his calloused hand into Larry’s throat, squeezing it closed before the chief could complete his thought. “You don’t get to say that name.”

  As Larry fought for air, he wondered why he hadn’t just gone home, grabbed Jenny and the girls and left town. Had he really thought he’d be able to walk in and tell Grant Hertin that he had betrayed him and get away with it? Why had retreat not occurred to him? Maybe because he hadn’t gone any further than the upper peninsula of Michigan in his twenty-eight years, and sometimes the rest of the world just didn’t exist in his mind. Either that, or he realized Grant would send people after him. Grant had plenty of people, too. Not just the ones who did the dirty, secret work here on the farm, but all the farmers in the county who offered tribute and accepted Grant as, well, as their religious leader, for lack of a better word. Either way, Larry was now good and fucked.

  He wished Gar-Garla was here. With her shoulder muscles and spears, she would have protected him against Grant. The sorceress would have stabbed the farmer in the gut and used his intestines as streamers to decorate her cave.

  Gar-Garla. Yeah right. What he should have done was call the state police, or even the National Guard. Let them sort this nonsense out, Catspaw be damned. So what if they took Grant away and the crops failed and the town went to hell? What did he care? He did this job because his father had done it and his grandfather before that. “It’s in your blood,” he’d been told time and time again. But it had never been in his heart.

  Now his vision went black. He didn’t even bother kicking or hitting or trying to break free. He just hung from Grant’s crushing grip until the farmer finally relented. Larry fell to his knees to huff in the cold night air once more.

  Grant ordered, “I’m going to need every hand. Go to the station. Call your deputies. Get every weapon. Get ready.”

  “I can’t do that, Grant. I can’t make my boys go up against . . .”

  Grant grabbed Larry by the hair and dragged the chief to the front steps of the farmhouse. He slammed the chief’s face into the concrete stairs. Blood burst from Larry’s shattered nose. Larry cried out as Grant smashed a porcelain pot full of dead flowers onto the steps and fingered through the shards for the biggest one.

  Grant flipped Larry over so the chief’s spine pressed against the edges of the concrete steps. He pushed his shin into Larry’s throat and then went to work on the chief’s face with the flowerpot shard, scratching deep ruts from lower eyelids to jawbone. Larry went numb under the weight of the massive farmer.

  “Son, you and the boys are going to protect Catspaw, as is your duty. You know damn well what is going to happen tomorrow night, what I’ve worked so hard for, what we all have worked so hard for. If this fuckup of yours causes so much as a hiccup . . .”

  Larry tried to reply, but couldn’t make a sound.

  Leaning closer, Grant whispered words that Larry couldn’t understand. They came out on a purple cloud and engulfed the chief’s head. The blood that oozed from the fresh facial wounds began to boil, melting his flesh. Steam rose into the winter air as the makings of Larry’s face bubbled and burst. He wouldn’t have been able to scream if he tried, but it didn’t hurt. It just itched.

  As if scraping cheese from a griddle, Grant ran his fingers through Larry’s disintegrating skin, pulling a wad up to his mouth. Gooey face meat hung from Grant’s chin as he chewed it like gum and spit it back onto the bare muscles of Larry’s face, where it settled and reformed, solidifying into a new shape that Larry immediately understood he could not take home to Jenny and the girls.

  Finally, Grant released him. “Get your men. Get ready. Come when I call.”

  Larry shuffled to his cruiser and drove back to the station to get ready for war. He wondered if he wouldn’t have preferred death.

  Chapter 9

  At the break of dawn the next morning, a black cargo van rolled east across Wisconsin on Highway Twenty-Nine. Adorning its hood was a coat of arms divided into four sections: one with an old fashioned plow, one with a pick and shovel crossed into an X, one with an anchor and one with a well-muscled arm gripping a hammer. The state seal. Only this version of the seal had one noticeable modification. It was clutched between the claws of an angry, fang-baring badger. And with that modification, the seal became the symbol of the Western Wisconsin Militia.

  A caravan followed, including rusted pickups and cars, and a big truck with a plow—just in case. Six vehicles total, moving no faster than the speed limit, drawing the attention of everyone they passed on that gray day but giving law enforcement no reason to take action.

  Morgan Durn sat in the passenger seat of the black van, hands folded in his lap. He mustered every bit of willpower he had to keep himself from pulling his few remaining gray hairs out, bashing his fists on the dashboard and telling Derby, his second oldest after Sera, to floor it. But Derby was right to toe the line. Although the group was on good terms with many police departments statewide, there was always some rookie somewhere who would love to pull them over and give them a speeding ticket, or worse, search the back of the van. They didn’t have time for that.

  “When I get my hands on that farmer,” said Cassandra, Morgan’s youngest by nearly twenty years. She sat between Morgan and Derby, intricately supergluing razorblades to the undersides of her long, black acrylic nails.

  “Don’t you think you’re going overboard with the razor nails?” Morgan asked. With her camouflage mohawk, matching makeup and stark black bodysuit, overboard was her forte. He sometimes wondered if she took the group a little too seriously.

  “Daddy, we’re leading half a dozen vehicles across the state and we have more guns than hands in this van alone. You think I’m going overboard?”

  Morgan laughed for the first time since Sera’s disappearance. “You’re a chip off the old block.”

  Cassandra clawed the air. “These will be good for close combat.”

  Derby said, “I want to get this over fast. I need to get back for my AA meeting.”

  “You’re not an alcoholic,” Cassandra replied.

  “Not Alcoholics Anonymous,” Derby corrected, “Awesome Anonymous.”

  Morgan grunted. He rarely appreciated Derby’s sense of humor. Certainly now seemed like a poor time for it. “This is serious, son.”

  Derby backtracked. “Do you really think there will be combat?”

  “I hope not,” Morgan replied. “I hope we go to this farm and all we have to do is pull up. They’ll see how serious we are and hand Sera over.”

  “And you’re sure she’s there?” Derby asked.

  “This police chief was a worm, but he understood the situation. He said those men took Sera, and I believe him.” Morgan wished he didn’t believe the man. He wished Sera had gone to Chicago or New York as Retta had assumed, but that wasn’t the case. The only outstanding question was, where was Renny, and why did he let this happen?

  Cassandra shook her head. “I think we have to mentally prepare for the possibility that they won’t be able to hand Sera over, at least not in the expected condition.”

  Morgan paused. “Yes. Yes, w
e do.”

  Cassandra grabbed an AK-47 from the back and placed it on her lap, petting its wooden stock like it was a cat. Of Morgan’s six foster children, Cassandra had been the only one to really take to the group, perhaps a bit too heartily. Sometimes he wished she’d go out and find herself a boy, like Sera had. Well, not like Sera had. A man, not a boy, that’s what Cassandra needed.

  As much as he loved cheering her on at jiu jitsu tournaments as she twisted men into submission, as much as he admired the time she had spent at the shooting range, he also wanted her to be well-rounded, to enjoy the lifestyle the group swore to protect. Somehow, she had become more of a man than Derby or any of her brothers, who casually joined in on training every now and then, more focused on goofing off.

  He never tried to force them into it. After adopting their third, Margaret had made a joke about him filling the militia’s ranks the easy way. That had stung, because there had been a ring of truth to it. He hadn’t been blessed with the ability to have kids, but he did want someone to pass the legacy onto. Pass, not force. So he had made a conscious decision to let them make their own choices about the group, especially now that they were adults, although they hadn’t done all that much to move into adulthood. All except Sera still lived in the house or somewhere on the compound.

  Sera had altogether disowned the group, calling it unnecessary and reactionary. He had tried to explain to her that the Western Wisconsin Militia wasn’t reactionary at all. It was proactive. And he hoped to God it was unnecessary, but that didn’t change the fact that it existed, and had been led by the Durn family for more than a hundred years.