by Johnson, MP
The cow men sank their dirty hands into human and calf meat alike, lying on their backs and dropping their jeans to jerk off as they ate. Everyone writhed on the ground, except Mother Cow and Black Bull. He stood in the midst of this and raised his arms to the night sky to utter one last series of undecipherable words, while she stood at his side, smearing blood and breast milk all over her body.
Louder and louder Black Bull shouted. The wind whipped. It grabbed the flames from the fire and pulled them like putty, whirling them over the feasting cow men, forming a giant halo. The flames burned hotter and higher, melting a hole into the night, opening up a fissure blacker than any black Renny had ever seen.
In that black, a pair of eyes appeared. Renny could not meet those eyes. These were not the glimmering cow eyes he remembered seeing as a kid. These were no benevolent eyes. These eyes seared through him like acid, slaughtering whatever husk of a soul he still carried around with him, leaving him hollow and free.
Bovikraaga. The true god of agriculture, lost to time, now reclaimed, stepped out of the blackness on massive hooves. The first landed in the woods, felling trees. The second crashed down on the barn, crushing it with such perfection; it was as if the structure had never existed. The cow god emerged completely, a bull that stood on its hind legs, as big as a skyscraper with horns as long as it was tall. Except it wasn’t entirely bull. Yes, it had a cock, but the cock hid behind udders that dangled down almost to the ground as the cow god squatted on its hind legs.
Around Renny, the world went mad. Black Bull’s chanting stopped suddenly. Mother Cow squeezed him tight, gasping somewhere under her mask. The other cow men remained on their knees with their pants down. Half-eaten kidneys and hearts rolled out of their blood-coated hands, forgotten now. Whispers of disbelief echoed as they pulled their cow masks back on.
From the cow god’s hide, little barns grew like warts. The doors of these barns creaked open. Things rained out of them, falling to the snow all around Renny with a thud. Dozens of things. Fleshy, little things. But what?
One landed in front of Renny, and he immediately scooped it up, having been left unattended once again by the feasting cow heads. He could hardly believe what he held. A baby. A crying human baby, perfect in every way: its wrinkled face and bright eyes, its grabbing little fingers, its kicking feet. It was truly perfect, and Renny felt the urge to protect it and keep it safe, no matter what.
Until he noticed the baby’s one imperfection.
There in its crotch, where the tiniest genitalia should have been, was the front half of a tiny cow. At first, it looked as though the baby was in the process of giving birth to the bovine, but that wasn’t it. The mini cow was actually fused into the flesh between the child’s legs, with a pair of front legs of its own that kicked wildly, as if trying to pull free.
The crotch cow mooed viciously. Then it opened its mouth again to discharge a thick fluid the color of old oil. Renny dodged the stream. It shot over his shoulder and landed in the snow, melting it. A stalk of corn shot up from the spit.
Renny threw the infant into the fire.
Above, Bovikraaga’s udders dripped milk that burned holes in the earth. The milk splattered around the fire, melting everything it came into contact with. One cow man caught a drop. It burned through his bovine facade with a hiss, then dissolved the human face that hid below. The cow man screamed through lips that bubbled and disintegrated until only skull was left. Then that melted too.
The remaining cow heads rejoiced on their knees, soaked in blood.
The cow god shattered stars in the sky with its front hooves.
Black Bull frothed at the mouth. “Praise Bovikraaga! Praise Bovikraaga!”
The words came not from his human lips, but from the lips of the cattle face he had assumed. The beef that had once hung loose on the farmer’s bare chest now grew into him, melding the head in place. Once-dead cow eyes lit up. Black Bull pressed human hands against the side of his head, trying to pull the mask free, but it would not come loose. It was his head now.
“Master! Nooo!” he mooed.
From the snow-glazed ground, dead stalks turned bright green and sprouted corn. Suddenly, corn surrounded Renny. One moment, he was in a winter wasteland. The next, a thriving, iridescent cornfield. The snow melted. He couldn’t see anything other than the night sky above and the suddenly fertile soil beneath his hands and knees.
He crawled forward and an ear of corn fell into his path. The husk spontaneously peeled. There was no corn inside though, just a massive worm, segmented and paste white. It jumped into Renny’s mouth. The taste lingered on his tongue far after the worm had been ingested, and as eye-widening as it was, as indescribable as it was, that taste was nothing compared to the sudden fulfillment he felt in his stomach. No, not just in his stomach, in his whole body. Every Thanksgiving meal he had ever eaten, every days-in-the-making home cooked meal ever served, paled in comparison.
He rolled onto his back, rubbing his belly. Above him, the sky moved. No, not the sky. This was Bovikraaga’s black hoof, coming down toward Renny fast. Bodies clung to the bottom of it, now nothing more than smears of meat with jeans sticking to them.
Renny just smiled and whispered, “Praise Bovikraaga.”
Chapter 21
Aram crawled out of the charnel pile, dragging Derby behind him. Cutting the ropes with bits of bone had been easy. Holding his breath while the stench of rot flooded his nose and tested his gag reflex was less so. Thankfully, the cow cultists hadn’t noticed him bobbing up for air, and now they were too preoccupied to notice him and Derby crawling away from the fire into the woods.
When Aram finally wiped the guts from his eyes and looked back to see what had the cow men running around like madmen, he thought he might have held his breath a little too long. Maybe he had given himself brain damage. There was a giant cow-thing stomping through cornfields. Not through snow, but flourishing cornfields.
“Jesus,” Aram said.
“It’s not real.” Derby replied, sounding so confident that, for a second, Aram believed the statement to be true.
Perhaps the giant was a projection of some sort. A puppet maybe? But then Aram saw the milk oozing from those udders. He saw one massive droplet break open behind a fleeing cow cultist, splashing the man in the ass. The man’s ass just dripped off, jeans and all, and he stumbled forward, trying to drag himself away from his own sizzling backside. Eventually, he left his legs behind. It sure didn’t look like special effects.
“It’s definitely real,” Aram said.
“No.” Derby shook his head. “Don’t you get it? We’ve been drugged. Renny was drugged, too. That’s why he was acting so weird. We just assumed he had gone crazy, but they’ve probably drugged him every day, and now they’ve done the same to us. We’re just sitting here, completely lost in our own heads, you see?”
“Have you ever done drugs, man?” Aram asked.
“I experimented when I was in college,” Derby replied.
“What did you experiment with?”
“Marijuana.”
“Marijuana?”
“I was going to try bath salts too, but when my friend Todd and I tried to—”
Aram grabbed Derby by the jacket and pointed at the massive thing that had just hard hoofed its way out of the night sky. “Look! We’re both seeing that! We haven’t been fucking drugged. Drugs don’t make people see things like this.”
The cow god . . . had they called it Bovikraaga? Its head was without flesh, without fur, just a battered skull with twisting yellow horns that screeched as they slid through the darkness, like a blade on glass. Was that the sound of the night being torn? The cow god had no eyes, just voids, blacker than any darkness Aram had ever seen.
Bovikraaga leaned over the lush cornfield that had sprouted out of what had been a wasteland of snow just minutes before. Ears of corn split open. Giant worms launched themselves from the cornstalks. Hundreds, thousands of them shot through the sky, leaving trails
of stringy cornhusk floating back to the ground in their wake. The worms landed on the cow god’s skull. They writhed over it, forming a layer of living flesh.
“I don’t know. I hear bath salts are pretty crazy,” Derby said.
“Are you seriously joking with me right now?” Aram growled. “I am covered in fucking blood and guts and you’re joking with me right now?”
“Yeah, I guess . . .”
“Your dad’s dead back there, Derby. Two of your sisters. A lot of good men.”
“What can I do?”
“You can do your job. You can do what the Western Wisconsin Militia is supposed to do, what your dad would want you to do. You can help me kill that thing.”
Chapter 22
Derby followed Aram through the newly sprouted cornfield. Was cornfield the right term? Wormfield, maybe. Not all of the worm husks had hatched. Some still bulged at the top of strong stalks while those that had been evacuated hung limp. His internal monologue continued to tell him that this could not be real, that any moment everything would return to normal. Attempts to convince himself otherwise wouldn’t take.
Until he stepped on one of the babies.
At first he thought he had stepped on a pumpkin, the way his foot sank into it and it stuck tight to his shoe for a few steps. Then he stopped and looked down to see that his foot was fully engulfed in a baby’s face. Its tongue flicked wildly just behind Derby’s heel, about the only facial feature still intact. Everything else was pink mush.
The baby’s body was okay, though. Well, there was nothing okay about the black-and-white spotted cow leering from the infant’s crotch, hissing at Derby, spitting sludge. Derby kicked and the thing flew off his foot. When it landed, the baby turned around. Brains slopped out of its mangled face like preserves from a shattered glass jar, leaving little more than that flopping tongue. The baby crawled back toward Derby, fast.
“Daddy?” it cried, the word dripping off its tongue with ropes of viscera.
“Daddy?” echoed a deeper voice, a voice that came from the little crotch cow.
“Daddy!” the voices shouted in unison.
“Gah!” Derby screamed, hurdling over the infant and sprinting to catch up with Aram, who had already reached the militia vehicles in the driveway.
Aram went straight for McCoy’s big-wheeled pickup with the plow in front. Derby guessed what the big man had in mind. “You’re going to ram it?” Derby asked incredulously, sliding into the passenger seat as Aram turned the key.
“You have a better idea?”
“Uh, yeah. Go get the fucking National Guard.”
“No time.”
“What you’re thinking, it’s physically impossible,” Derby said. “We’re not going to be able to ram it and knock it over with this truck. That would be like a gnat shoving a person down. Physics. It’s not good physics.”
Aram hit the gas.
The monster stood a few hundred yards away, upright on its hind hooves, getting acquainted with the Wisconsin landscape. As they drove toward it, they dodged the massive hoof-prints it had left behind. Derby buckled his seatbelt. Under his feet, he could feel the stalks of corn that they plowed past beating on the undercarriage. They popped right back up behind the truck, as good as new.
Derby braced himself for impact. He had no delusion that this was going to work. Glancing at the speedometer, he saw that they had only managed to accelerate to forty miles per hour, barely enough speed to knock over a mailbox, let alone a god from another dimension. How tall was it? He had no way to gauge. The cow god seemed to be as much a part of the night sky as the stars. It could have easily pulled the whole of space down like a blanket to smother the earth.
The plow hit hoof with a sound like a hammer on wood. When the truck stopped, Derby’s head continued forward, nearly to the dash. Then it whipped back and collided with the headrest so hard he felt like his eyeballs hit the back of his skull.
Aram yelled at the cow god, “Fuck you, motherfucker!”
Bovikraaga leaned down, contorting itself, folding forward. Its non-eyes, its chasms stuffed with stolen pieces of night, stared in through the windshield. Around those chasms, white segmented worms constantly rearranged themselves, giving the illusion of facial expressions. The worms writhed and oozed white pus.
Derby lost it. He pounded on the seatbelt release until it let him go. Then he leaped out of the truck and ran into the cornfield. He would be fucked if he would be eaten by that thing. He did not look back. He didn’t hear footsteps behind him. But he didn’t hear gunshots either. It was hard to hear anything over the sound of his own panting. He decided he would just keep running. He would run to the highway and he would keep running until he found a car, and then he would call in the National Guard.
A pair of enormous hooves collided with the earth in front of him. The ground shook and his legs got twisted. He fell flat on the ground. Looking around, he saw that the cow god was now on all fours. Derby was directly underneath the giant.
He rolled onto his back. The beast’s udders hovered above him, filled and taut. Veins bulged under the pink skin like massive mountain ranges, the topography of these planet-sized abominations. A layer of thin white fur covered everything except the teats. Brown and wrinkled, the teats seemed to drip from the udders like dirty rainwater, coming closer to Derby. Closer. Slowly closer.
“Aram!” he screamed. “Help! Please!”
The big man was nowhere to be seen.
Derby stood and ran again. Bovikraaga simply stepped to the side, remaining above its prey. The cow god didn’t need to move particularly fast to keep up with Derby. Its udders followed the man like a dark cloud. He kept looking up. They moved closer, descending slowly. He could feel their heat. Acid milk collected on the tips of the teats. He knew he could have been sprayed at any moment, melted down to nothing, but he wasn’t. The cow god was toying with him.
“Leave me alone!” he yelled.
The four teats touched ground around him, caging him in. One bulging udder rubbed against his head. He pushed up against it to create space, and it was like squeezing a water balloon. But it was heavy, and it was coming down on him. He dropped to his knees but still had to bend his neck. So he crawled, but still the cow god followed him, mirrored his every movement, its legs bent at odd angles now, like the legs of a spider, so it could press its belly closer to the ground. Derby could not get away.
Then he thought something he had never thought before. He thought: What would Dad do? What would Morgan Durn do at a moment like this? The old man would keep going, in any direction he could. And now, the only direction was down.
He found a dip in the ground and tore into it with his hands, his feet. He dug fast, ripping his nails off in the process. He ignored the pain. He ignored the way the dirt collected on his bleeding fingertips, dulling his progress. He was thin. He didn’t need to dig deep, just a few inches. And if his legs didn’t fit, so be it, as long as the hole was deep enough for his head and torso. Protect the brain. Protect the heart and lungs.
He kicked dirt away, peeled it away, and when he felt the press of udder at his back, he sank face-first into his pit, biting more space with his teeth, swallowing one mouthful of ground after the next. He could spare the space in his stomach.
Then all light disappeared, and he was trapped. He reasoned that the cow god would move on in a matter of seconds. It would think that it had crushed its prey and would focus its attention on someone else, like one of those motherfucking cow-head-wearing freaks. It would not take Derby’s ingenuity into consideration.
Derby was going to live.
As long as the cow god moved away. And that would happen any second now.
Any second.
But it didn’t.
Derby felt the weight of the massive udder on his back. It seemed to be filling in the space around him, pushing out any air pockets. Soon, Derby ran out of oxygen. His lungs panicked and worked faster, only inhaling dirt. He tried to twist around, to face
upward so he could beat on the balloon-like flesh that entrapped him, to claw at it, to get it to move, even just an inch, but he was pinned down, his face in the cold brown earth. He couldn’t move at all, not an inch, not a millimeter. His muscles burned at the trying, but his effort got him nowhere. He tried to get his lungs to stop pulling in dirt, but they were desperate and out of his control.
“Help me!” he screamed, so weak he could barely hear it.
Then something was in his mouth, probing him. At first, he thought he might have been confused and it was his own tongue moving around. But that wasn’t it. He had inhaled one of those worms from the ears of corn, from the cow god’s face. It had come out of the earth and into him.
What was it doing? It flicked against Derby’s tongue, and Derby tried to push it away with the only muscle he could currently control, but it was no good. The worm was too strong, and now it was in his throat. He could feel its segmented body forcing its way in deeper, little by little. He wished he would just pass out. Wasn’t he out of air already?
The worm expelled something into Derby, some liquid. He could hear it, swooshing harshly through tubes that fought to stay open, and for a second, he could feel it burning straight through his insides, but then his heart and his brain shut down and he settled into the shallow grave he had dug for himself.
Chapter 23
Aram didn’t waste a second after Derby jumped out of the pickup, drawing the cow god’s attention. He reached under the driver’s seat, hoping to God that McCoy had stashed a gun there. Of course, the old man hadn’t. He wasn’t much of a gun guy. Bows and crossbows, the old coot, as if he was afraid of gunpowder. Didn’t matter. The old man was dead, along with all the rest of them, the bulk of the Western Wisconsin Militia. They had been stupid, to some extent. But Aram couldn’t think of any way they could have properly prepared for this.
His fingers traipsed through old candy bar wrappers and grimy pennies under the seat, until they landed on something big. At first, he thought he had been wrong and he had indeed found a gun. No such luck. It was too thin. He pulled it out anyway. A bowie knife in a sheath. He stepped out of the truck and attached it to his belt. Then he took off through the cornfield after the distracted cow god, catching up to it and climbing one of its hind legs like a tree, pulling himself up one handful of coarse fur at a time.
