by Johnson, MP
Leading the herd: Black Bull, the man who had killed Derby’s father. He must have slipped out the back door after killing all the men in the farmhouse while Derby and Aram were in the basement. Slipped out and gathered his army. He reached out in a magnanimous greeting. “Drop your weapons,” he said through dead beef.
Derby grabbed the back of Aram’s shirt. “Do it,” he said.
“No way, man.” Aram shook himself loose of Derby’s grip.
Derby understood Aram’s resistance. Derby wanted to fight too. He wanted to destroy Black Bull for killing his dad. He just didn’t see how he could, at least not at the moment. He knew if Aram didn’t drop the gun, they would both die then and there, for certain. If Aram dropped the gun, they might get an opportunity for revenge later. So he did what he had to do. He lunged and knocked Aram’s pistol away.
It disappeared into the snow as the cow men circled around them.
Aram shoved Derby. “You killed us, you piece of shit. You just killed us.”
Chapter 15
Derby and Aram lay face down in dirty hay in the barn, arms tied behind their backs and ankles bound. Derby realized Aram had been right. Death was eminent. And why shouldn’t it be? Derby was lucky he made it this far. His birth parents had done everything they could to end him early, but he had been a fighter, not like his younger brothers, his real younger brothers. They hadn’t made it. What the fuck had happened to him? What had happened to that scrappy six-year-old who had taken the bat out of his crazy birth mother’s hand and threw it out the window before running half naked to school to get help? That kid was tough. That kid would never be in this situation.
To make matters more laughable, he was now the de facto leader of an organization that had been the focus of more TV news programs than he could count. Those hoary shows always rehashed the same headline: “Western Wisconsin Militia: Benefactor or Threat?” Some threat. A gaggle of farm farts in pickup trucks, now reduced to a wannabe comedian and the one black guy in Menomonie, Wisconsin, tied up in a barn on the wrong side of the state.
He wondered about Sera. She was probably dead. He didn’t like to think that way, but it was realistic. His dad was dead. Cassandra was dead. Sera was dead, and he would be dead soon. Half of the Durn family wiped out. And poor Sera cared even less about the militia than Derby did. It was she who encouraged Derby to pursue funny business. As kids, she had told him to write his jokes down. She would patiently listen to him as he ran through half-hour sets of material. Awful material, in hindsight. “What do you do when vegetables knock on your door? Vitamin! Get it? Like invite ‘em in.” She had laughed genuinely. But she was the only one, unfortunately. When he had finally started doing open mic nights, he hadn’t been prepared for the negative reaction, thanks in part to Sera’s convincing him that he was good. Still, he was a better comedian than militia leader. He wondered if he could get that on his tombstone.
Derby wormed his way onto his back to prevent the hay from jamming into his nostrils and saw that he and Aram were not alone. In the corner of the barn, a man crouched. One of the cow men. This one looked more haggard than the rest. The eyes had rotted out of his mask, and the meat in the eyeholes had turned black and gelatinous, draining out onto sparse fur. Shit, probably his own, covered his naked body.
The man knocked his mask off carelessly. It landed upside down beside him as he started scraping the ground with his hands. Jesus, was he scooping up his shit and eating it? Not just eating it, but slurping it up eagerly. When finished, he licked his hands clean, but only his hands, so that it looked like they were peeking out of the sleeves of a shit suit.
Derby met the man’s eyes. He recognized those eyes—stupid fucking fetus eyes, as his father had called them. He saw the cow mask and added everything up.
“You,” he hissed. “You’re one of them!”
Startled, a shit-covered Renny punched himself until his nose bled. The crimson fluid branched off in odd directions through the crust of feces on his face. He muttered something that Derby couldn’t understand. Not that Derby cared what the man had to say. He could see what had happened. This freak must have been in cahoots with the cow men. He had brought Sera to them. And now he was standing guard.
Derby tried to break free. “Where is Sera? Where the fuck is my sister?”
Renny rubbed his hands over his face, dirtying his fingers once again with shit and blood. When he noticed this, he fell back, surprised. Then he began licking them clean again. Between licks, he whispered, “Sera’s dead.”
Derby kicked madly. He fought his ropes until they bit into his wrists.
“I’m going to fucking kill you,” Derby growled.
“I didn’t kill her. I’d never kill her. Don’t you understand? She loved me. But I let her die. I just stood there. What could I have done? I could have done something. Fucking something!” Renny punched himself as he shouted.
“You’re a liar!” Derby yelled. “You have a mask. You’re one of them.”
Renny kicked the mask. It rolled through the shit. “They made me wear it. They put it on me and just left me in here, to remember. She hardly screamed.”
Derby didn’t buy it. Renny had no ropes around his hands or ankles. He was not bound, nor was the door to the barn locked. If he wasn’t part of it, if he wasn’t one of the cow men, then why hadn’t he left? Why would he stay here in the barn without even a bucket to shit in for a week, eating his own feces and mumbling? It didn’t make sense.
Then Derby noticed the hatchet next to Renny’s feet.
Chapter 16
Chief Larry Wold sat in his cruiser, watching Grant’s men come and go. They could have been preparing for a family reunion or a barbecue, and not a particularly lavish one, the way they casually strolled from the farmhouse to the field to the barn and back. Yes, they carried crucifixes and dead bodies instead of streamers and bowls of punch, but it certainly didn’t seem as though they were getting ready for a ceremony that the Hertin family had been working toward for decades.
When Larry turned eleven, his pa had sat him down at the kitchen table. Larry steeled himself for the birds and the bees talk. Instead, the old man had told him, “You’re going to find out that there are things that happen on the Hertin farm that can’t be described as good, no way no how. But these things, these awful things, are for the good of Catspaw.” That had always been the theme. The good of Catspaw.
“You’ve already asked why there are no churches here, and I’ve told you it’s because we don’t need them, and that’s true. We don’t worship God, like the pastors on the Bible Channel tell us to. They’re not in Catspaw. They’re on TV, and God is even further away. We respect what he has done, and what he’s created, but we worship Bovikraaga because he takes care of our fields and our herds. He’s here, and he’s helping. He asks for something in trade, something messy, but something that everyone in Catspaw has decided is worth it. My job is to facilitate that messy business and make sure it stays in Catspaw. One day that’s going to be your job, too.”
The whole conversation had gone straight over Larry’s pre-teen head. Sometimes he wished he had gotten the birds and bees talk instead. Unfortunately, his pa never delivered that bit of education. Larry had gleaned everything he needed to know about sex from late night television, with a little help from Gar-Garla.
His pa had done such a good job of keeping everything at the Hertin farm under wraps that Larry didn’t figure out what went on until he turned eighteen and started working at the police station. Eventually, he had noticed a high number of out-of-towners stopping in to look for someone who had gone missing. Those conversations had gone much like the one between Larry and Morgan Durn the day before. “Nope, haven’t seen nothing,” Larry’s dad would say, even though Larry had likely taken a wrecked car that matched the description out to the junkyard just a few days earlier.
Eventually, Larry even learned about the little game of chicken the Hertin clan played on Twenty-Nine, a game of chicken that
typically ended with a car going off the road and the driver and passengers being dragged away. Only recently had it proven fatal to one of the Hertin men. Larry still thought it was stupid. How hard would it have been to build a gas station in that spot and occasionally take someone from there?
It seemed to Larry that a lot of what Grant and his men did was pretty haphazard, and that’s why he had no real belief that anything all that mystical was going to happen at the ceremony tonight. Hell, he didn’t entirely believe that anything had been happening at the Hertin farm for the duration. Yes, the crops were great, consistently great, no matter what, but couldn’t there be other reasons for that? Maybe the county just had good dirt. Didn’t that make more sense than believing in some old god that even the Native Americans thought was a joke that someone had tried to pin on them?
But Larry couldn’t deny that Grant channeled power from somewhere. The chief wore the evidence on his face. And he damn well wasn’t interested in challenging any of this, any more than he was in participating in it. That was the agreement. Wold and the police didn’t have to do anything more than facilitate, and he had facilitated three militia men into the ground already.
He was parked in front of the farmhouse, and the rest of his men had their cruisers lined up like a blockade at the entrance of the driveway. Nothing was getting in. Nothing was getting out. From his research, he knew there wasn’t much militia left. That threat was gone. The night would be uneventful. Grant would light his fire, say some words, blow some purple smoke and nothing would happen, save a few more pointless deaths.
Then hopefully Grant would fix Larry’s face and shit could get back to normal.
Chapter 17
“You don’t have to kill me,” Renny reassured Sera’s brother and the other man. “They will. They promised. And I deserve it! I fucking deserve it!”
He punched himself in the face again. He hardly felt it. Maybe because of the cold. Maybe because of the repetition. Then he picked up the hatchet and held the blade against his throat. He breathed hard and fast through gritted teeth, spraying spit and blood and shit. The blade felt right, like it belonged there, and he wanted to push it deeper, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. He threw it back into the shitty hay and howled.
He put his hand on his thigh, where Sera had rested hers prior to the car crash, where she had touched him last, where a bit of her essence still dwelled, repeating to him, “I love you, Renny.” Wishing he could erase those words from his head, he cried in gushes so thick they washed the shit and blood from his cheeks.
“I’m sorry. I’m not going to kill you,” Sera’s brother said. He spoke almost soothingly now, changing his approach. “My name is Derby.”
“I know,” Renny said.
Renny remembered the man from dinner at Sera’s family’s house. This one was the joker, the one who made snide comments. What had Derby said to Sera? “If you’re going to rob the cradle, don’t go to the special hospital.” He wasn’t making jokes now.
“And this is Aram,” Derby introduced the other man.
Renny said, “I did not kill Sera. Please believe that.”
“It’s okay,” Derby said, still feigning calm. “I know you didn’t hurt her.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t hurt her!” Renny shouted, grabbing the hatchet again, pacing hard, kicking up muck with every step. “You weren’t here! You didn’t see what they did to her! You didn’t see how I just stood there, paralyzed.”
Renny growled and pressed the blade of the hatchet against his ribcage. He only managed a quick slice, a paper cut really, no more damaging than the others he had left all over his body and then filled with his own shit. Why weren’t they infected? Why hadn’t he gotten sick out here in the cold? Why was he still breathing?
“We saw them, the men in cow heads,” Derby said, the veneer of calmness starting to fall away. “There were nearly a dozen of us, and now there’s only two.”
The other man interrupted. “He’s crazy, Derby. He’s not listening.”
“No, Aram, he’s just scared. I’m scared too. Renny, what I’m saying is, all of us couldn’t stop them. There’s no sense getting down on yourself because you couldn’t.”
“Sera was the only girl who ever loved me, and she said it while the whole world was collapsing, and I didn’t even try to save her when they took her, when they . . . You tried at least. You came here and tried.”
Aram shouted, “Why haven’t you left, man? Why are you still in this barn?”
“They put me here!” Renny shouted, falling to his knees and slapping his palms into the layer of shit he had been nesting in for a week. It splashed everywhere. “They put the cow head on me and left me here!”
“But the door is open! You’re not tied up!” Aram added.
“There’s no point,” Renny replied. “I know what they’re doing.”
“You’re fucking nuts!” Aram shouted.
“Aram, you’re not helping. I’ve got this under control,” Derby interrupted.
“Yeah, like you had things under control out there?” Aram asked.
“Fuck you,” Derby hissed. Growling now, Derby asked Renny, “What are they doing? What is happening out there?”
“They’re calling Bovikraaga.”
Now Derby laughed. He scream-laughed. The tendons in his neck bulged and his face reddened. He kicked so wildly that bits of hay flew up around him. “Oh, they’re just calling Bovikraaga? What the fuck is a Bovikraaga? No wait, I’ve got a better question: What’s Bovikraaga’s phone number? Huh? Maybe I can call first. Maybe I can give him the old, ‘Is your fridge running?’ gag. How about that, you fucking fetus fuck!”
“You’re both out of your minds,” Aram mumbled. Then to Renny he said, “Please, come over here and cut us free with that hatchet. Then you can go back to rolling around in your shit and being a self-pitying bitch.”
“Oh, I can free you,” Renny said. “I can free you for real. I can’t free me, but I can free you.” He picked up the hatchet and carefully licked the blood and shit off the blade, cutting his tongue, tinting his drool crimson. When it was clean, when the steel shined, he stood in the shit, smiling. He walked slowly to where Aram and Derby lay.
He raised the hatchet and squeezed the wooden handle tight.
“I can free you,” he repeated.
Chapter 18
Night dropped in full. Sick of sitting in his car with the heat blasting onto his twisted face flesh, Larry dragged a folding chair out into the cornfield and sat next to the fire as Grant and his men continued their preparations. They pounded upside down crosses into the dirt with all the pomp of pitching a tent, dragged the dead bodies of the militia men out like kids dragging sleeping bags. Nobody wore any vestments, not even their cow heads at the moment. It all seemed so casual.
Larry leaned back and poured himself a bowl of Rainbow Zing-O’s.
Even though the flames burned low at the moment, the fire pit was five feet across in any direction. When more fuel was added, it would burn bright. A moat ran around the fire pit, a couple feet deep and twice as wide. Clutching a knife, the old farmer cut off pieces of dead militia men and tossed them into the moat. The channel already overflowed with a bizarre mix of remains—human, cattle and agricultural. Ears of corn bobbed on the surface of blood. Meat and saved yield from the last harvest bulged out of the snow-covered field like a sick mole that had been scratched too hard.
“You can change my face back, right?” Larry asked Grant.
“I think it’s an improvement, Wold. A new face for a new world.”
“Cut the shit, Grant,” Larry said. “There ain’t gonna be no new world.”
“You doubt Bovikraaga?”
“I doubt you,” Larry replied. “You’ve got powers. You’ve made that clear. But look at this. Is this a world changing endeavor? Crosses, fire and a gut pit?”
“We will bring Bovikraaga into this realm once and for all,” Grant replied, confident. “No more of this spitti
ng between dimensions to give our crops power. He will come to lead us.”
“Where, Grant? Where is this fucking cow god going to lead you?”
“Someplace better.”
Larry spit in the snow. “This is Wisconsin. Ain’t no place better.”
Grant sighed. “Son, I can’t rightly say your pappy would be proud of you.”
“My pappy was a drunk.”
“You’re a drunk, Wold. And I know what you do with those cereal boxes too.”
Larry couldn’t argue with that. He couldn’t believe he had argued at all. This new face had come with a new set of balls, apparently. Still, he didn’t want it. He didn’t want any of this. He replied, “I’ve got a wife, Grant. Kids. I can’t take this face home.”
“You don’t have to worry about that.”
Larry stood, his bowl of Rainbow Zing-O’s in one hand and a silver spoon in the other. He dug the spoon into the bowl and lifted a heap of multicolored O’s to his mouth. Before he could drop them onto his tongue, Grant whispered, “No.” This was no ordinary “no.” This “no” was accompanied by that damn purple fog, which surrounded Larry.
The chief found that he no longer controlled the movement of his hands. He placed the bowl upside down on his head. Milk streamed through the pink creases in his face, toward his mangled mouth. He lapped at it with his tongue, laughing.
“Good one, Grant,” Larry said. “You got me.”
But he didn’t regain control of his body. He still held a spoonful of cereal in one hand. With the other, he undid his fly. He pulled his cock out and it rose high even in the cold night air. He put the spoon to the tip of his penis. For a moment, he wondered what Grant was going to make him do. He giggled nervously, thinking this was a joke.
