Apocalypse Cow

by Logan, Michael

  The aftermath of the next fling was worse. He’d woken next to a pretty young thing, all silky skin and long legs. Elated, he’d kissed her neck, hoping to kick-start some more rumpy-pumpy. She’d arched her back deliciously and then wrinkled her nose, which was no longer drink-addled and thus able to inform her brain she had slept with someone who smelled like a hunk of rancid beef, not a hunk of love. She was then the one to make the quick exit, claiming she had to work. On a Sunday. Terry was left disconsolate, the stink of the abattoir strong even to his nostrils, amidst his rumpled sheets.

  For the first seven years of his life as an abattoir worker, there had been no appreciable smell of death on his skin. His ex-fiancée Kirsteen was the first to notice it. At first, she simply insisted he take numerous showers. Then sex became less frequent. After that, it was separate beds. Terry began job-hunting, hoping to save the relationship, but his very specific skills of killing and body disposal only qualified him as abattoir worker or assassin. There weren’t many adverts for contract killers down at the job centre. Going on the dole wasn’t an option, as they were saving to get married. Kirsteen wanted the big wedding: white dress, hundreds of guests and a towering cake. They had been saving for a long time.

  Three months after the stench was first detected, Kirsteen turned vegetarian. Two weeks later, she announced she couldn’t live with a murderer and ran off with the animal rights activist she had been shagging behind Terry’s back for six months. She left him with the apartment and ten thousand pounds in the bank. He stopped the futile search for another job and settled down into a smelly existence.

  Terry saw her in the paper a year later, pictured in handcuffs after a failed attempt to free brain-damaged primates from a university psychology lab. On her clenched fist, held aloft in defiance, was a wedding ring. In a fit of rage, Terry donated the savings, which he had held on to in case she came back, to AIDS researchers, who Jimmy down the pub assured him carried out nasty experiments on monkeys.

  The stench got steadily worse. He tried to counter it with incessant showers and a commensurate increase in the application of deodorant and aftershave, to no avail. The one-nighter with the girl who fled marked the moment the stink of death became so strong that no woman, no matter how drunk, could overlook it. His latest doomed crush was on Dorota, the Polish barmaid in his local. No matter how hard he scrubbed with scented soap or how much Old Spice he slathered on, she kept her distance, only darting in long enough to serve him, her nose twitching all the while.

  It wasn’t as if he was ugly. He was a healthy 33-year-old, sheathed in muscles developed by physical labour rather than moulded by long hours in the sweaty embrace of gym machines. He had a square jaw – well, the kind of square a toddler armed with a crayon would draw – faded blue eyes surrounded by just enough crow’s feet to lend him an air of experience, and a crop of brown hair that required only minimal creative combing to look as though it covered his head fully. He had broken his nose one night while drunkenly chasing the last bus home. That was OK, though: lots of women liked the rough look. When asked what happened, he would hint at some mysterious, heroic past rather than admit he had taken a headlong drunken dive.

  But good looks counted for nothing when you smelled like intestines.

  He longed for the day he would meet an intelligent, funny and beautiful woman whose nostrils had been seared closed in a curling tong accident. He wasn’t holding out much hope and, truth be told, he had become so used to waking up alone he didn’t really mind it any more. Provided, of course, he woke up alone in his own bed or in one where he could remember going to sleep the previous evening.

  Terry looked around, squinting against the headache. The bed sat in a small room, bare except for a table with a glass of water on it and a single door, firmly closed. In the corner, the red light on a security camera blinked in sync with his throbbing head. There was no bleeping equipment, no IV drip, and no nurses bustling in and out of the room. Clearly he wasn’t in hospital.

  When he tried to sit up, a bout of dizziness forced him back onto the hard pillow. His stomach flipped over and he retched. Nothing came out: the bacon and egg sandwich he had eaten for lunch was already plastered over the floor of the abattoir.

  The abattoir, he thought. Something happened in the abattoir.

  He touched his head and, beneath a thin layer of bandages, encountered a lump. The snapping teeth, rivers of blood and screams of the dying rushed back. His heart thudded in his chest and, now uncaring where he was, he began to scream.

  Apocalypse Cow, as the media would later dub the beast that heralded Britain’s descent into ruin and infamy, pitched up in Terry’s stunning pen just after lunch. The animal was the first in a batch of worn-out dairy cows, whose udders dangled like sopping wet socks. These cows usually looked so exhausted Terry felt he was carrying out euthanasia rather than depriving an animal in its prime of many more carefree days chewing the regurgitated contents of its own stomach – as was the case with animals bred purely for their flesh. After a lifetime of having their teats pummelled red-raw by insatiable mechanical suction cups, Terry figured the old moos were probably grateful to be heading to the big McDonald’s in the sky.

  This cow was the exact opposite of grateful.

  Terry had seen a lot of cattle during his ten years in slaughter houses, but he had never come across a mad cow. He had never even met a slightly miffed cow. Generally, their big, slow faces displayed only docility, fear or panic. Even Steven Seagal had a wider range of facial expressions. When Terry looked into this cow’s rolling, twitching eye, he understood it wasn’t just mad; it was crazy apeshit bonkers. As Terry stood agape, the cow gnashed its jaws, sending its lower incisors repeatedly plunging into its upper dental pad, which was already a bloody mess. Despite further shredding its maw, the beast appeared oblivious to the pain.

  Terry overcame his shocked inertia, stepped back smartly and hung the bolt gun back up on its hook just as the cow sneezed. A long rope of red-tinged snot smacked him in the face like a boisterously flicked wet towel. It hung there, still connected to the nostril from which it had been fired, and quivered as the beast whipped its head around. He swiped at the mucus, only succeeding in transferring most of it to his hand.

  ‘That’s nasty,’ he said, keeping a careful eye on the animal as it let out a deep, shuddering moo.

  Up until then, it had been just another day of monotonous slaughter. The first three truckloads of cows had shuffled in through the holding pens, unaware that up ahead lay a future bristling with razor-sharp knives, circular saws and other implements of bovine doom. Only when an animal emerged into the stunning pen and saw the carcasses strung up ahead did it suspect it might have grazed its last. Before it could do more than let out a single pleading moo, Terry would have hammered a bolt against its forehead, chained it up by the ankles and sent it along to the next station to have its throat cut.

  Terry was always happy to be placed on stunning duty, as it was the least gory job in the abattoir. In the short spans he served there, the smell of death always faded slightly. The stunning job still had blood-splattered moments: when he accidentally took out an eye or pulverized a nose, leaving the poor cow in ululating agony until he managed to stun it properly. And there had been times when an animal he’d thought he’d rendered senseless proved conscious enough to feel the knife. When that happened, Terry could only stare mutely as it died, a meaty, thrashing bauble spurting out blood in spiralling arcs.

  Heart-rending as such incidents were, they were still not enough to give Terry nightmares, or at least none he could remember. Sure, sometimes he woke sweating and panting in his small flat in the southern Glasgow district of Cardonald, although he could never recall what had disturbed him. A vigorous wash under a hot shower always scrubbed away the unease – although not the smell, which was strangely more pungent on such mornings.

  For most of his career, the lack of nightmares had not been an issue. In Terry’s experience, most abattoir workers
considered suffering psychological trauma from the job to be as appropriate as a tofu stall at a butchers’ convention. They were of the opinion that a nice steak hit the spot, so until scientists invented a beef tree, poor old Daisy was for the chop. In one slaughterhouse up north, the brawny highlanders even held an annual Punch-Out-A-Cow contest (which usually resulted in little more than bruised knuckles and a bemused cow). That had all changed last year, when Terry took up his current job with McTavish & Sons.

  McTavish & Sons was tucked away among the trees in the suburbs so Glasgow’s meat-eaters need not have their consciences pricked by the wild screams of the pigs, which unlike cattle were smart enough to know what was coming and feisty enough to put up a fight. Somehow, Mr McTavish had performed the improbable feat of rounding up every one of the few bleeding hearts in the business and putting them to work in his abattoir. Each morning at tea-break, Terry’s workmates would relate their nightmares in wavering voices: cow eyes blinking accusingly from the middle of a stew; half-skinned lambs that morphed into their own children and began to plead for mercy; arriving beyond the pearly gates to discover that God was in fact a giant pig with an Old Testament thirst for vengeance against the men responsible for turning his children into bacon and pork sausages.

  At first, Terry had been nonplussed by the soul-searching. Yet before too long, an urgent need to share bubbled up inside him as his peers doled out consoling pats with blood-streaked hands. His back remained unpatted, however, for when he trawled the depths of his mind for some buried manifestation of his own guilt, he met only an insistent blankness. He began to feel his lack of night terrors revealed a gaping hole where his conscience should be, so to prove to himself he wasn’t completely heartless, he had developed the habit of furtively feeding every animal a sugar cube before popping it in the head.

  But there was no way he was going anywhere near the crazed cow with the sugar cube he had pulled out of his pocket a few minutes before. It looked as if it would rather snack on his fingers, rubber gloves and all.

  Terry turned to his workmate Peter, who had a vivid recurring dream that come the day of the cow revolution he would be the first to be strung up by the ankles and gutted. ‘Come here a sec.’

  Peter, his navy-blue apron streaked with dark bloodstains, turned from the twitching body of the cow whose throat he had just slit.

  ‘You’ve got snot on you,’ he said helpfully.

  ‘No, it’s hair gel. Want some?’

  Peter warded off Terry’s extended hand with his bloody knife. ‘Come near me and I’ll cut your knob off and pack it with the chipolatas. It’s about the right size.’

  Terry flicked the blob of snot at Peter. The gooey missile sailed over Peter’s shoulder, and with magnificently bad timing plopped onto the apron of Mr McTavish, who liked to roam the floor of his family business to keep everyone on their toes.

  ‘Sorry, Mr McTavish,’ Terry mumbled, his face reddening. ‘I didn’t see you there.’

  The boss strode forward, running a palm across his apron. He stopped beside Terry and slapped him on the back, returning the reddish slime to its rightful owner. Terry forced a smile.

  ‘No worries,’ Mr McTavish said, the massive jowls created by overindulgence in his own produce wobbling. ‘Snot a lot you can do about it now.’ He paused. ‘Get it?’

  The cow rattled its head off both sides of the narrow steel pen like a clapper in a bell, and let loose a cracked bellow.

  ‘Even the cow knows that was a shit joke,’ said Peter, who had more than once indicated he would love to be fired just so he could get a good night’s sleep.

  Mr McTavish ignored him. ‘So what’s up with this bugger?’

  ‘I think it might have cow flu,’ Terry replied. ‘It’s acting funny.’

  As Terry spoke, he realized the weirdness didn’t stop with the cow that had just decorated him like a snotty Christmas tree. The abattoir was always a noisy place – the whine of bone saws, the clanking of the overhead pulley and the constant moos created a hellish racket – so it was no wonder he hadn’t noticed. Now he listened, the din coming from the animals waiting their turn for the chop didn’t have the usual confused, aimless timbre. The moos, punctuated by sneezes, sounded angry.

  ‘Maybe we should call the vet,’ Peter suggested.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Mr McTavish said. ‘Bird flu, swine flu, fine. But there’s no such thing as cow flu.’

  ‘I’m just saying it’s possible,’ Terry responded. ‘There wasn’t any such thing as swine flu a few years ago.’

  Mr McTavish sighed. ‘Look, another four lorryloads just pulled up outside. You’re holding up the line. Stun it and get it up on the pulley.’

  Terry took two steps towards the bolt gun, wondering if he was fast enough to snatch it up and pop the cow like a gunslinger of old. The animal had other ideas. As soon as Terry lifted his arm, it craned its neck forward and chomped its jaw closed, spraying bloody foam up into the air. Terry scuttled backwards. No job was worth losing fingers for.

  ‘I vote we wait for it to starve to death,’ he said.

  Mr McTavish, who was himself two feet further back than he had been a few seconds before, squared his shoulders and marched towards the cow, which had lifted its chin up onto the metal rim of the pen and was still snapping in Terry’s direction.

  ‘I’ll bloody do it,’ he barked.

  Before the animal could redirect its ire, the boss grabbed the bolt gun, jammed it against the cow’s forehead and pulled the trigger, sending the metal bolt designed to render the animal unconscious hammering against its skull. The cow wobbled and dropped.

  ‘Job done, you big pansy,’ he told Terry. ‘Now get on with it.’

  Mr McTavish opened the side of the pen. The cow flopped out. Authority asserted, he spun on his heel and prepared to re commence the patrol of his dominion. The cow, which was down but definitely not out, lashed out a hoof with apparent intent, and caught the abattoir owner flush on his right shin. There was a loud crack. Mr McTavish looked down at the odd shape protruding from his leg, and then crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.

  Peter ran towards the stricken man. Terry didn’t move. He was too busy staring at the cow, which had lifted its head and was looking at Mr McTavish’s leg, its nose twitching as if it smelled something tasty, which for cows normally meant dandelions, not open wounds.

  ‘Jesus. It’s snapped like a twig. Ring an ambulance,’ said Peter, who was bent over his prone boss with his back to the cow.

  When no answer came, Peter looked up. Terry, his vocal cords paralysed by the improbability of what he was witnessing, pointed to where, tottering on all four legs, loomed the cow. It did not look stunned, even though Mr McTavish’s aim had been true. If anything, it looked more furious. Peter had no time to get up. The cow lurched forward, crushing him against the side of the pen. His eyes bulged as he beat his hands ineffectually on the hulking beast’s broad back. The cow lowered its mouth and, as though it were grazing in a sunny field, began to worry at the wound on Mr McTavish’s leg.

  ‘Please tell me that cow is not eating my boss,’ Terry said, and then shouted, ‘I need some help over here!’

  Terry didn’t wait for the cavalry to arrive. His primary concern wasn’t for Mr McTavish, since it would probably take some time for the cow to do any real damage with its herbivore incisors. He was more worried about Peter, whose lips were turning blue as the cow’s meaty body squeezed the air from his lungs. Terry grabbed the largest knife within reach and hacked at the cow’s flank. It remained immobile, focused on tearing at the leg.

  Terry was half up on the animal’s back, trying to get close enough to stab it somewhere more vital without endangering himself, when Mr McTavish came to. His eyes were barely open before he began to scream, sounding just like one of the thousands of pigs he had sent to their deaths. He tried to haul himself away, but the cow’s hold on his leg was firmer than Terry thought possible. While man and beast were engaged in a tug of war, Terry jamm
ed the knife as far down as he could into the back of the animal’s neck. It paid no attention, instead following the squealing Mr McTavish, who had managed to pull his leg free.

  What signalled bad news for the abattoir owner, who could not outrun the cow on his bum, brought relief for Peter. With the crushing weight gone, he fell to his knees and took a rasping breath.

  ‘It’s happening,’ he said. ‘They’ve come for me.’

  ‘Get a knife and help me kill this bloody thing,’ Terry bawled at Peter, who was already scrabbling away on his hands and knees, casting bug-eyed glances behind him.

  ‘You’re not getting me up on that hook,’ he told the cow, then got to his feet and ran.

  Peter’s belief that his bad dream had come to pass prompted Terry to wonder if he was finally having a nightmare of his own. He felt a brief happy jolt. As his workmates arrived, jostling past and launching themselves at the cow with knives, chains and crowbars, their solid physicality snapped him out of his stupor. The reinforcements hammered and slashed until the cow took notice. It bellowed and lashed out, dashing one of the new arrivals against the wall. Another slipped under the enraged animal, which put its hooves to work on his head. Terry saw his moment and sank his knife into the cow’s throat.

  The cow staggered to the side, spouting arterial spray across the two animals hanging at the next station, and then fell to its knees in the middle of the semicircle of panting men. A flicker of movement at the next station caught Terry’s attention. He spat out a mouthful of blood, walked over and stood before the two dead cows. A series of twitches had seized the first animal. The chain securing its feet began to sway as the intensity of the quivering picked up. Suddenly the cow fell still. Its eye rolled in its socket and it looked at Terry.