by Johnson, MP
When the cow god went down on all fours, it made things easier for Aram. He climbed the rest of the way up the leg and moved onto Bovikraaga’s back. Level ground, more or less. He was able to crawl forward on hands and knees. As he did, he tried not to think about Derby below, tried not to think about the young man being crushed underneath the cow god’s belly. Instead, he focused his sight on the giant’s neck.
He had a long way to go, but he had a Bowie knife and a plan. He couldn’t rightly say it was a good plan. Hell, it was a piece of shit plan and he knew it, but it was all he had, and as far as he could tell, he was the only one trying. The militia was gone, and the cow cultists—those that hadn’t already been mashed—ran through the cornfield screaming and melting. Surely the military was on its way, but how long would it take for them to arrive? Too long. So on hands and knees, Aram crawled forward.
Even though Bovikraaga moved on all fours now, it was not like any cow. Its legs were bent at the wrong angle coming out of its body, so that its knees were actually above it as it stomped, spider-like, over the Wisconsin farmscape. The cow god’s dragging udders collided with barns that had stood for more than a century, erasing them. Huge hooves stomped on silos and farmhouses. Acid milk poured from the cow god’s udders, leaving lakes behind, white lakes that bubbled and steamed and instantly fertilized the land. Snow dissolved and crops grew. Such strange crops.
Aram moved along the beast’s spine. He couldn’t see much of the smashing, but he could hear it. He could hear the distant screams of people watching everything they owned destroyed by this monster. Worse yet, he could hear those screams snuffed short as the cow god marched on.
Aram wanted to yank out brown fur by the handful. He wanted to pound on the giant’s flesh, but that would do no good. The beast had barely flinched upon being hit by the plow. Fists would do no damage. Aram hoped his knife would. But not yet.
Along the cow god’s upper back, barns grew, hundreds of them. These were not full-size barns. They ranged in size from doghouse to small garage. As Aram maneuvered around them, he could see that they were not merely constructed on the giant’s hide. They truly grew out of Bovikraaga, just like its horns. Veins bulged in the slats of wood. What looked from afar like chipped red paint was actually sparse red fur.
The barns seemed empty, having discharged the freak babies they had housed, sprinkling them all over to spray their cow crotch acid and further reshape the land. Aram’s curiosity got the best of him. When he passed one of these barns, a bigger one, he couldn’t help but peek in. What he saw made him clench tight to the cow god’s fur, as if to prevent his shock from flinging him off Bovikraaga’s back and up into the starlit sky.
Fur thinned out in the middle of the barn, revealing vertical folds of pink skin, parted in the middle by a long wet slit. A vagina, oozing white goop. That was where the babies had come from, and he suddenly realized, as the vagina throbbed and the goop bubbled, that there was another wave of them cooking. They would be ready soon. He backed quietly out of the barn, so as not to awaken them prematurely.
The cow god still moved on all fours. Cautiously, Aram released his grip on the fur and stood on two feet. Then he ran. The bulging spine was his path, and he followed it toward the beast’s head. He was almost there when his foot sank into a divot. He fell face-first and howled in agony.
Rolling over and sitting up, he reached toward the pain with trembling hands. Lifting his foot out of the hole, he saw that he had been gifted with a new joint, halfway between his knee and his ankle. He didn’t roll his jeans up to look at the wound. He could tell just from the blood soaking into them that his bone had slid out of his skin.
Without thinking, he attempted to wiggle his toes. The pain induced by this simple movement was so intense he considered taking his knife out and cutting the whole mess off just below the knee. There was no fixing this—not because it was medically unfixable, but because he was not going to get out of this situation alive.
This was a suicide mission, the kind of mission he had always romanticized when talking with the other members of the organization. He had no problem with helping cities out with floods, or picking up litter along Interstate Ninety-Four, or whatever else Morgan Durn told him to do to make Wisconsin a better place, or just to lend a hand to someone who needed it. But that wasn’t why he had joined the group.
Every now and then, Sera—the oldest Durn child, the poor girl who didn’t want anything to do with the militia and whose dead body was somewhere back at that damned farm—had gotten a bug up her ass and gone around the organization asking questions. The other guys referred to it as the “psych eval,” because the questions were clearly designed to determine whether the members were gun-crazy rednecks or legitimate do-gooders. She had been particularly curious about Aram. Some militias had white power ties. Seeing a black man in the group might have been reassuring to her, until he went on his tirade about why he had joined. “I’m just a good person who really wants to die. I have no family. Never had. Never wanted. All I have is this feeling inside that I’m on a path to death and the sooner I get there, the better.”
In his early twenties, when he was really messed up, he had talked to a priest about it. The priest had been blunt. He had said, “It’s a cold, dark feeling that a lot of people have. It won’t go away. You can fight it. The weak ones let it lead them on a path of destruction, lashing out at everyone around them. Best you can do is channel it. If you don’t want your life, at least have the common courtesy to benefit others with it.” So Aram had let the feeling lead him down a path that he liked to consider righteous.
Thankfully, Morgan Durn had been willing to help him accomplish that goal, dragging him from the homeless shelter where he had been both working and living, and letting him stay in a fixed-up utility closet on the complex in exchange for doing some janitorial duties. It was a nice life. Low impact.
But now he saw an end to his mission. He scanned his surroundings and found that he had made it close to his final destination: the neck, where the cow god’s furred, muscular body met the worm-covered, great-horned skull. With renewed determination, he clenched his teeth and started to crawl forward. Before he could get anywhere, he felt something wrap around his damaged leg and pain burned through him anew.
A tentacle reached out of a lesion in the cow god’s flesh. Aram simply punched it—once, twice, three times—and it withdrew, squiggling back inside the beast’s hide.
As if in response to the attack, the cow god trembled. It straightened its four legs, pushing away from the earth, standing like a natural cow for a moment. Then it rose up on its hind legs. Aram grabbed fistfuls of fur. He would not let this end with a fall to the ground. Desperately, he bit down on a mouthful of fur. His broken leg dangled while he kneaded the tip of his other boot into flesh, working for any footing he could get.
He was twenty feet from the beast’s neck. Then of course he’d have to maneuver his way to the front side, hoping that the cow god’s peripheral vision wasn’t too good. Maybe there was a reason he was the only member of the militia who had survived. The others weren’t quite as serious about their physical condition. They could drink beer and shoot guns with the best of them, but they had never been interested in joining Aram in the little makeshift gym he had set up in the compound, lifting barrels full of dirt and throwing tractor tires around. Of course, none of that had stopped him from busting up his leg. Still, he was the only one of them that would have been able to make this climb. Maybe God—the real God—had a plan for him. That gave him hope to press on.
While he let go with one of his hands and reached higher, he bit down harder on his mouthful of fur. It tasted dull and bitter, and seemed to swish around on his tongue as if trying to paint its flavor on his taste buds. One hand at a time, one bite at a time, he climbed closer to his destination, never looking down, only looking up.
He didn’t like the way the night sky seemed to be in cahoots with the beast, blowing hard and cold, even tho
ugh most of the snow had melted on the ground below. To make matters worse, Bovikraaga shook with every stomp. It was not merely taking steps. It was pushing down with force to crush whatever ended up under its hooves.
Soon, Aram’s hand landed on the curve of the cow god’s shoulder. Carefully, he pulled himself up and peeked over so he could see the world from Bovikraaga’s vantage point. He nearly plummeted back to the ground in the process.
A hodgepodge army had amassed at the cow god’s hooves. Farmers with shotguns, pitchforks and torches charged impotently. One had managed to wrap a chain around the cow god’s ankle and attached the other end of the chain to a tractor. Perhaps he had thought the tractor would be strong enough to pull the cow god’s hoof out from under it. Now though, Bovikraaga dragged the tractor and chain in its wake, no more burdensome than an untied shoelace.
The mob ebbed and flowed. Bovikraaga stomped indiscriminately. Although Aram was too far up to see details, he could see blood spray every time the cow god caught a few dozen people under its hoof. Vehicles approached in the distance, by dirt road, by highway, their headlights bright like the eyes of children and equally naïve, all eager to be slaughtered, and Aram knew that was exactly what was going to happen: a slaughter. Unless his plan worked.
Foregoing safety, he shoved himself onto the beast’s shoulder, gritting his teeth. He balanced precariously on his one good leg and gave his mangled one only the weight it could take. He drew his knife and practically dove at the cow god’s throat. With his left hand, he clung onto fur. With his right hand, he stabbed and sliced with such fury his elbow busted. He ignored the wound and, as best he could by rotating his torso and putting his shoulder into it, he kept swatting at his target with his blade.
His attack didn’t even draw blood. Maybe there was no blood to draw. Maybe cow gods didn’t bleed. It was like cutting steak with a needle. He kept going though, kept stabbing and swatting. He would not relent.
But then his fingers went numb and the knife fell. He was about to go with it, when the tentacles emerged from the wound he had opened in the cow god’s neck. They wrapped around Aram’s throat, his torso, his wrists. They crushed him slowly. He could hear his bones breaking one at a time, and he got the sense that the tentacles were enjoying themselves, like a kid bursting bubble wrap.
The sharp tips of the tentacles stabbed into him. One slapped past his mouth and he bit it, still fighting. He tore off a piece of it. He chewed it and he swallowed it and he laughed at it. He kicked at the tentacles and he laughed at Bovikraaga.
“You’re not my god, motherfucker,” he screamed.
Then the tentacles pulled him into the knife wound, into the meat of the cow god, and he realized he had failed.
Chapter 24
Bovikraaga stood still, silent except for an occasional snort that blasted writhing worms from his bare-boned nostrils. The worms knitted themselves together on its skull, excreting ooze and eating the excreted ooze, growing larger, dividing, thriving, moving, living. They were happy. The humans gathered around the cow god’s hooves were not.
They schemed and growled and speculated. Some knew that Bovikraaga had been summoned for them, for the land. For the land! The cow god had not come uninvited. But others didn’t know and made up their own stories. Radiation. Pollution. Alien. Just noise to the cow god. Irritating noise. The cow god waited and let them crowd together, so they would be easier to crush.
Beneath its furred flesh, its offspring gestated. Offspring that looked like the infants of those gathered around. As they reached the peak of their development and pulled themselves from their wombs with their deceptively agile little fingers, Bovikraaga savored the sensation. It tingled, not just in the cow god’s flesh and bone, but in its very essence. The feeling caused its udders to harden and spray milk for miles. The offspring dive-bombed from their barnlets, latching onto people below. Hundreds of cow-crotch babies fell into the crowd, shooting burning muck into human faces, bringing much needed silence so Bovikraaga could listen to the land.
The land was confused. It had been simultaneously cherished, cultivated, flattened and destroyed. Bovikraaga would give it new life, whether it liked it or not. Spreading its arms wide, the cow god roared. This was no mere animal roar. This was a sound so deep, so full, so powerful that it shook the night sky and most certainly the earth below. Marshaled by this roar, the cow god’s face worms shot forward, some going miles, some going hundreds of miles, all dripping their white acid ooze. Milk burst in rivers from Bovikraaga’s massive udders. These rivers flowed through the starlit sky, soaking it before falling down to the earth in a flesh melting rain.
As the rain poured, the cow-crotch infants crawled on the ground below. They splashed through the puddles of milk and melted flesh, as they themselves were impervious to their father-mother’s discharge. They grabbed bones with their tiny hands. They used tibias and femurs to bat out a rhythm on the wet earth, cajoling plants to erupt from the dirt. More corn stalks heavy with unhatched worms. Pea pods filled with writhing somethings. Gourds of all shapes and sizes, purple and orange and black gourds that throbbed and cracked and launched threads that looked like unwound brain matter that draped the slowly reshaping land like streamers.
And the cow god stomped on.
A helicopter cut through the darkness, heading straight for the cow god’s face. It fired rockets that disappeared into the flesh of Bovikraaga’s chest. They burst somewhere inside of the cow god. Worthless, but annoying. The cow god slapped the copter out of the sky. Just like that. Bovikraaga struck it so hard it seemed to evaporate.
This attack was good. It showed Bovikraaga that the humans were persistent, and although the cow god did not think, did not reason, only did what it had been called to do, it appreciated that the population of the land would not all die in the rebirth. There would be some left to worship the land and the cow god.
But those in the helicopters, the tanks and other war machines that now flocked toward Bovikraaga—the aggressors . . .
They would not remain.
Chapter 25
Renny did not die.
The cow god had lurched forward, and its hoof touched down far from where Renny lay. At first, Renny was angry. Death had been so close. But then he realized he did not, in fact, want to die. He might not have wanted to live in that world, the old world, but in this new world there was a place for him. He had been given a gift. Perhaps there was a reason he had lived. Perhaps he had not lost everything he thought he had.
He watched Bovikraaga stomp away. Men had come to fight. They would fail. They would either die, or they would come to accept that a new world was here. He wanted to tell them, but they had to learn on their own.
The ground around him was wet with melted snow. On hands and knees, he scurried past meat. He accidentally put his palm in some. Veiny, it clung to his fingers like seaweed in a pond. He shook it off and noticed a piece of eyeball. A reminder.
He crawled on, through the stalks of corn, moving toward the heat of the fire.
He found Black Bull crouched and crying. Tears came from the cattle eyes, now the old farmer’s only eyes. Through the bull’s mouth, he blubbered wordlessly. Around him lay his mangled counterparts. Some had been melted by milk. Some had been attacked by the barn babies, which still crawled around, cooing innocently while shoving their vicious cow cocks into the faces of the men, tearing those faces away.
The fire had died down. Renny reached into it and grabbed a burning log. Black Bull remained balled up in an almost fetal position, not noticing or not caring about Renny’s approach. Renny stood behind the man who had killed Sera. He savored this moment, appreciated the power he now had. Then he bashed Black Bull on the back of the head with the burning log, again and again. He bashed through fur, through cattle skull, until he reached the human inside, soft and mushy. Then he bashed some more. It felt good to watch Black Bull shake and scream and die. The cow-crotch babies liked it too. They gathered around and giggled, clapping th
eir little hands together.
When finished, Renny dropped the flaming log, noticing he had burned his palms. He dropped to hands and knees again, finding one of the few remaining patches of snow to cool his wounds. Would this be the last snow he ever saw? Maybe it would still snow, but the snow would be different now, like everything else, like the worm corn, like the purple streaks that shined in the night where Bovikraaga had emerged.
Renny stripped off his gunnysack, crawled into the moat of meat and started to dig. He scooped away ears and noses. He moved past fingers and kidneys. He looked into the eyes of every head he found, whether it was attached to a body or not. So many innocent eyes. As he searched, the blood washed away the shit that had accumulated on him. He felt cleaner than ever before. Clean for the new world.
And finally he found what he was looking for.
He brushed her blood-soaked blonde hair out of her face, her still-beautiful face. The black holes where her meadow green eyes had been forgave him immediately. He took her hand and pulled her away, dragging her now legless torso through the cornfield as the stalks bowed around him, heavy with their wormy fruit.
“I love you, Sera,” he said.
There was nobody he would rather enter this new world with.
