by Johnson, MP
The big, black exhaust pipe on the front of the tractor seemed to be pulling the gray winter sky in, using its deadness to fuel it forward, closer to where Cassandra stood on shaking knees next to six other members of the Western Wisconsin Militia. The men made sounds, but she didn’t recognize them as words. Some sort of stupid-speak, meaningless and helpless grunts with question marks at the ends of them, question marks they wanted to hang from her. She only had one answer:
“Shoot them when they get close enough.”
Two combines flanked the tractor. Their engines howled wildly as the headers that adorned their front ends pointed the way. Each header had ten spiked heads like the beaks of metal crows, green and chipped and dented and hungry.
Hutch, the second in command of the organization, fired the first round with his shotgun. The bullet clanged off metal and disappeared. Worthless.
“Those things aren’t moving very fast,” Mike said, pulling a knife out of the sheath on his belt. Only a few years older than Cassandra, Mike had an obvious crush on the boss’s daughter. “I’ll take care of this right now.”
“Cocky mother,” Hutch grumbled.
Cassandra didn’t think it was such a bad idea. She wished she had thought of it herself, since she had prepped for close combat. With her eye trouble though, she really wasn’t good for shit. She cheered as Mike approached the enemy. He ran in one direction, causing the tractor to veer after him. A feint. He immediately changed directions. Before the tractor could correct course, he took a few carefully placed strides and leaped up onto the cab, jabbing at the driver with his knife.
But the jab didn’t land. The cow man at the controls kicked and Mike flew backward out of the cab. Tumbling into the snow, he quickly got back to his feet. Dazed, he didn’t realize he stood in the path of one of the oncoming combines. Cassandra raised her AK, but didn’t fire. She didn’t trust her one-eyed aim. She could hit Mike.
Instead, she screamed, “Mike! Watch out!”
Heeding her warning, he zigzagged through the snow. But he couldn’t move fast enough. As if giving up, he stopped suddenly. He stood directly in the path of the combine as it grinded toward him.
“What the hell is that idiot doing?” Hutch asked.
Cassandra shook her head and stared in disbelief. Deftly, Mike positioned his legs between the sharp steel heads, the biting steel beaks. Was he trying to mount them? Did he think he could just hop up onto the header and ride it like a surfboard? From the mischievous twinkle in his eye, Cassandra realized that was exactly what he intended to do. But when he leapt up, he lost his balance. Trying to regain his footing as he perched precariously on the front of the massive machine, his arms circled and flapped. He couldn’t maintain. He fell forward and immediately got caught in the gathering chains.
Cassandra had never heard such a scream. It rang out over the howl of the combines’ engines, only becoming lost in the sound of crushed bones when Mike’s face was pulled into the snapping rolls, which separated his head from his neck like corn from its stalk. It snapped him apart bit by bit. Blood irrigated the snow-blanketed cornfield. Intestines whipped around, caught up in the machinery.
When Mike’s hand rolled in front of Cassandra’s feet, skin torn asunder to reveal all of the little bones that made a human hand function, now snapped and skewed like the keys of a piano after being played with a sledgehammer, only then did she realize that she needed to shoot, she needed to shoot at anything, at everything, now.
She shot wildly, as did the men around her. All released battle cries that could never hope to be as intimidating as the stares of the dead black eyes piloting the farm equipment toward them.
One of the militia men fell. It was Mark. She looked down at him and saw that he had taken a bullet in the neck. The cow men in the trucks didn’t have guns. He must have caught a ricochet. She didn’t stop firing though. It was all she could do.
Two of the men beside her, Gears and Peter, did stop. With grunts of “Fuck this,” they ran back to their pickup and drove off.
“Fucking cowards!” she bellowed. “I’ll slit your throats!”
That left Cassandra, Hutch and McCoy, with his bow and arrow. Thankfully, old man McCoy was a hell of a shot. One of his arrows went through the forehead of the brown-and-white speckled cow head behind the wheel of the tractor. The tractor veered to the side and collided with one of the combines, the one with Mike’s intestines wrapped around its header like thread in a vacuum cleaner roller brush. The impact brought both vehicles to a halt. Two down. One to go.
Cassandra ran forward, giving wide birth to the still-running combine. She focused her fire on the driver of the one that had been shut down by the tractor. If she could kill him and get behind the controls, she might be able to ram the other one. Then she would wait for Black Bull and anyone else to come out of the farmhouse who wasn’t militia and chew them up. With only one good eye, her aim was shit. She kept missing her target until she was within spitting distance. Then the driver’s chest finally exploded under the rain of bullets from her AK.
She hopped up into the cab of the combine, moving quickly, recklessly. She needed to move fast. The other combine was bearing down on McCoy and Hutch. They retreated into the van. She suspected it would offer little protection against the combine.
In her haste, she lost her footing. She slipped forward awkwardly onto the blood-soaked lap of the dying cow man. For a moment, the blunder seemed funny, until she realized that the stream of blood was not all coming from her victim. But where was it coming from then? She hoped to God it wasn’t coming from her. How could it be?
But it was coming from her, and fast. It poured out of her neck into the cow man’s lap. She had fallen onto her left hand. Her razor nails had slit her throat.
She put her right hand up to her neck to stave the flow. The stinging, the rushing of blood out of her body, the feeling of everything shutting down—it made her want to hold something, to squeeze something, anything.
All she had was the AK, so she squeezed it tight, firing it wildly into the groin of the already-dead cow man, crying as her life bled out of her.
Chapter 13
Driving fast toward the Hertin farm, Larry steered with his knees. He ran his fingers over the new grooves in the flesh of his face. When he touched them, they felt so beautifully smooth, like gentle ripples from a rock thrown into a pond. If he rubbed them until they warmed, he wondered if he might be able to push them back into place, because when he looked at his face in the rearview mirror, he saw no beauty. What felt so right under his fingertips looked so wrong to his eyes. The melted flesh had turned the worst shade of poison ivy pink. One nostril hid under a skin dune. The other underlined his right eye. His lips had disappeared. Naked and nervous, his teeth chomped.
The horn of a pickup brought his attention back to the road. He had been driving into oncoming traffic, but that wasn’t why the pickup was honking madly. The driver was trying to get the chief’s attention. Larry slowed and pulled onto the shoulder. The half dozen police cruisers behind him did the same.
The pickup slid to a halt and the driver ran to Larry’s window. Larry rolled it down, pulling his hat low over his face.
“Officer! There’s some crazy shit going on at a farm back there.”
“You don’t say.”
“This is no joke, sir. People are being killed. My name is Peter. I’m with the Western Wisconsin Militia.”
Larry liked the way the man waved his arms around, as if still trying to get the chief’s attention. He pulled his gun and shot the man in the face without even looking. His first kill. Well, his first direct kill. He certainly had contributed to what Grant and his people did on that farm. Still, this was different. It felt more honest, actually.
“Oh God!” shouted another man in the pickup.
Larry gestured out the window for his team to block the pickup in and prevent it from leaving. They did as ordered, of course. They all knew what was happening tonight. They knew a
bout the things that had gone on at the Hertin farm for so many years. And they went along with everything, obedient as Christians, believing that these things kept the crops strong, kept the cattle thick, kept Catspaw and the whole county alive. Larry hated them almost as much as he hated himself.
Which wasn’t all that much anymore, when he started to think about it.
I might as well have some fun too, he thought. And all the blackness he had bottled up came out, thick as squid ink, into his veins, and he couldn’t help but laugh.
From his trunk he grabbed one of many boxes of Rainbow Zing-O’s. He put the front of it to his lips and smooched the redheaded cave sorceress. “Gar-Garla, I think you and I are gonna have a real good time together, all righty?”
“I’ve been waiting for you to say that, Woldy-Woo.”
“I know you have.”
“You’re going to do me right, aren’t you, baby?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
With the cereal box tucked under his arm, he dragged the remaining man out of the pickup. “Hold him for me, fellas,” he ordered.
“What are you doing? Are you crazy?” the man whined.
“Don’t talk,” Larry ordered.
Then the man saw Larry’s face. His eyes got all watery. “Jesus Christ.”
“I told you not to talk.” Larry smashed the butt of his pistol into the man’s trembling mouth, knocking teeth loose. He had expected all the teeth, at least all the front ones, to come out with a single blow, easy as pie. That didn’t happen.
“You must have strong gums,” he said, forcing the man’s mouth open to look inside. Blood dribbled from the corners of the man’s lips. “Hell, I think I only knocked two of ‘em loose. This is going to take a little more doing than I expected.”
He reached into the man’s mouth and pulled out one of the loose ones, which hung from a little thread of gum tissue. He flicked the tooth into the sky. Then he gestured for his officers to push the man onto his knees. “Hold his face against the blacktop there.” To the man, he added, “Shit, maybe the ice will numb you up a bit so this won’t be so bad. Probably not though.”
The man spit red bubbles as he muttered “no” over and over, struggling impotently as officers pressed his mouth to the highway, gripping his ears tight to hold him down. Larry stomped on the back of the man’s head, causing the man’s teeth to collide hard with the icy blacktop. The man collapsed completely and stopped moving.
“I think he’s dead,” one of the officers said.
“Nah, just passed out. That’s for the best.” Larry turned the man face-up, surprised to see so many incisors still clinging into place, albeit barely. He went in with the butt of his pistol again to take the remaining teeth out one by one.
After working up a swell of pit sweat doing that, he took out his pocketknife and cut Gar-Garla’s face off the cardboard box, careful not to nick any of her flaming locks.
“I need some tape!” he barked.
One officer ran to his cruiser and brought back a roll of clear packing tape. “I was sending out some packages earlier today and . . .”
“Shut the fuck up.” Larry snatched the tape from the officer.
With the tape, the chief affixed Gar-Garla’s cutout face to the man’s. He stabbed a hole between her lips, like usual. This time blood and saliva oozed out. It made him hard.
“I need all you men to turn around and keep quiet.”
The officers did as ordered.
Larry unzipped his pants. He slowly slid his cock between Gar-Garla’s cardboard lips. She came to life in front of him, and he grabbed her fiery hair. How long had he wanted to have her like this? As a child, he would watch cartoons in hopes of seeing one of her commercials, in which she danced lasciviously around a cereal-spurting volcano. Now he sank deep into her face. He imagined dinosaurs stomping out a rhythm around them as she chanted the chant that had echoed in his head so often:
Fruity Rainbow Zing-O’s
Cereal of your dream-o’s
I will suck your man-hose
If you kill everything-o
He thrust into every word, screaming, “Yes! Yes, Gar-Garla!” until he came with such steaming force that his buttocks cramped and he fell forward, awkwardly toppling over the kneeling, still unconscious body in front of him.
Gar-Garla faded away. He removed her cutout cardboard face from the unconscious man and shot him in the back of the head. The front of the man’s face exploded as the bullet exited, sending brains, blood and the cum Larry had deposited in the man’s mouth all over the frozen surface of the road.
Without wiping the crimson slobber and semen from his dick, the chief tucked in and ordered his men back into their cars. “Let’s get to the Hertin farm.”
Chapter 14
Derby dropped Aram’s hand and they ran upstairs, calves nipping at their heels in the darkness. Behind them, the milking woman giggled. When they cleared the basement, Derby slammed the door behind them, crushing one calf’s bloody snout in the process.
The rest of the men waited for them. Dead.
In front of the basement door, one of the men hung from a chicken wire noose, intestines dangling from a slit in his abdomen like a punctured can of dollar store spaghetti. Without thinking, Derby panicked and tried to push it all back inside the man, but he couldn’t get a grip on it. Too much. Too slippery. His fiddling only made it worse. The guts fell onto his sneakers, and he backed up into Aram.
“Stop that,” the big man chastised.
Derby heard gunfire outside. And something else. Engines? What the fuck was going on here? “Cassandra,” he whispered.
He stumbled past the remaining militia members’ bodies—two caught in bear traps, another with his face mashed and spread out. This last one’s head meat looked like the contents of the slop bucket Derby’s mom kept by the kitchen sink whenever she made a meal for the whole crew, the contents of which went outside to the pit bulls after dinner. Derby realized the dogs wouldn’t be getting one of those bucketfuls again anytime soon.
Outside, more blood, more bodies. Smoke billowed from a tractor that had collided with a combine. Another combine moved on the militia’s black van, pushing it back. The cow man at the controls leaned forward in the cab, eager to crush the other vehicle. He wouldn’t get the chance. Aram raised his pistol and took the cow man out with one shot. Then he climbed up into the driver’s seat with surprising grace for a man of his size, shoved the driver aside and shut the machine down.
Old man McCoy and Hutch climbed out of the van, hesitantly peering around.
“Where’s Cassandra?” Derby asked.
Hutch bowed his head. McCoy pointed at the two collided farm vehicles.
“Fuck me,” Renny whispered, seeing Cassandra lying still on the lap of the cow man in the cab of the crashed combine. He wanted to run to her, to check on her, but he could see that she was dead from where he stood. A closer look would help nothing.
“Is that all of the cow men?” Derby asked.
“Can’t say for sure,” McCoy said. “We didn’t exactly look around.”
“Where are the rest of our men?” Derby asked.
“All dead, except Gears and Peter. They ran off like bitches,” Hutch replied. “And the others that were with you? Dead too?”
Derby nodded. His dad was dead on one side of him and his sister on the other, and his other sister was likely dead in a hole nearby. Men with cow masks. Women with . . . And all these militia men, these men who thought they were such fucking warrior patriots. Dead. Now it was just him, Aram, Hutch and McCoy. If he had stayed home with his brothers, he wouldn’t have had to see the dying. Why had he come? He hadn’t been forced. He thought it would be a lark. A goofy day trip that he’d be able to joke about later, after Sera called to say she had been in New York all along.
The wailing of sirens stopped his thoughts. “Good,” he said.
“Morgan thought the cops were in cahoots with these guys,” Aram reminded.
&nb
sp; “I’m not saying there’s no such thing as a corrupt police department, Aram, but I am going to go out on a limb and say there’s no fucking police department that is going to back up a fucking mass murdering cow cult, okay? Gears and Peter went to get them, and now we’re going to get this shit over with,” Derby said.
He waved his hands overhead, signaling to the police, showing them that he was unarmed, making sure they didn’t confuse him and his men for the bad guys.
The gesture was ignored. The first police car came into the driveway fast, turning sideways and sliding in. The car hadn’t even stopped before the driver pointed his pistol out the window. The shot took out a chunk of McCoy’s neck. The old man dropped his bow and arrows as he pressed his hands to his wound. Blood sprayed between his fingers to streak the trampled snow around his feet. He fell to his knees and quickly gave up on any attempt to keep his blood inside him. Instead, he reached for his weapon. He almost nocked an arrow before another round of gunfire made a red mist of his head.
Hutch sprinted for the van, but took two bullets in the chest before he could make it.
“Put down your weapons,” the police officer yelled.
“Fuck that,” said Aram, running in the opposite direction, through the snow, through the cornfield, toward the woods.
Derby followed. He tucked his head and ran a winding path, attempting to dodge the bullets that would surely start flying any moment.
Any moment.
But they didn’t. When he looked ahead, he saw why.
Out of the tree line, more cow men emerged, dozens of them, a herd of them. They trudged through the snow, bare-chested. This group carried weapons. Not guns. Guns would have been welcome after Derby saw what these men intended to take him and Aram down with. Each of the cow men held a strange type of flail-like weapon. Unlike a flail though, which had a spiked metal ball at the end of a chain, this weapon had a frozen pig head at the end of the chain. But it was spiked. Wooden stakes protruded from the pig’s pink eyeholes, ear holes and mouth. The stakes already had blood on them, old blood. Massive arms swung the weapons overhead, slow and controlled.
