Apocalypse Cow

by Logan, Michael

  James’s squirrel army had disappeared, probably either eaten or infected and roaming the streets searching for flesh to nibble, but the dead animals attracted feasting crows in their dozens, which Geldof found morbidly fascinating – a scene from the African plains in suburban Glasgow. Oddly, it seemed the virus didn’t affect birds: while four-legged friends became four-legged fiends, the nation’s chickens continued placidly to lay eggs in battery farms, while the sparrows and seagulls got on with coating statues and parked cars in streaky white shit. The only winged creatures involved in any attacks were bats.

  But the corpses also brought round packs of infected cats and dogs, which had not lost their appetite despite the sores covering their bodies. That morning Geldof had been woken by the barking and snarling of dogs charging down the street in pursuit of something, or somebody. Geldof didn’t get up to look; he simply put his pillow over his head and cringed into the mattress.

  The TV showed thousands of desperate people besieging Heathrow airport, pressing up against the police barricade and demanding entry. The crowd was too big to be contained and the front runners burst through, cramming into the revolving doors, which were turned off. More people pressed forward, yet the doors stayed obstinately still. The glass caved in. Those who weren’t trampled sprinted across the concourse to deserted check-in counters.

  Fanny snorted. ‘What are they doing? They can’t fly the plane themselves.’

  ‘They’re panicking,’ Mary said.

  ‘Well, if more people lived like us, this wouldn’t be happening,’ Fanny responded.

  David let loose a mighty sigh. ‘Not everyone can be as virtuous as you.’

  Fanny sucked in her cheeks, sat up a little straighter and interlaced her fingers. Geldof sank deeper into the sofa as he realized that – after days of battling her addiction to lecturing David – she could no longer go without her fix.

  ‘Humanity is paying the price for its mistreatment of animals and the soulless way we rely on technology,’ she opined. ‘This virus is a product of technology. If everybody lived a simple life, growing their own produce—’

  ‘Oh, be quiet, woman,’ David interrupted. ‘We’ve had the good grace to let you come over here and watch our TV, a product of the modern world, and all you’ve done is moan. If you don’t like the modern world, piss off back to the Stone Age. I suppose you think terrorists are just misunderstood as well.’

  ‘Well, if the West hadn’t tried to spread its capitalist ideology in the Middle East, we wouldn’t be here, would we?’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, you stupid cow,’ David spat out. ‘They killed my cousin.’

  Fanny, completely ignoring the opportunity to display some sensitivity, turned to her husband in outrage. ‘James, are you going to let him speak to me like that?’

  Geldof looked at his father, who had sneaked in a few well-stuffed joints before they trooped over for the evening news bulletin. His only response to Fanny’s question was to open his half-lidded eyes a fraction wider.

  Fanny, who could slice an apple in half from fifty metres with her tongue and didn’t need anybody to defend her, jumped to her feet. ‘You, sir, are a capitalist meat-junkie who is just as much to blame as the people who put the virus out there.’

  ‘What? It’s not my bloody fault. In fact, I’d bet fifty quid this virus wasn’t al-Qaeda. I bet your animal rights mates invaded a perfectly safe lab somewhere and let out an infected monkey,’ David said, also climbing to his feet.

  ‘Who do you think infected the monkey?’ Fanny retorted. ‘I’ll bet you one hundred pounds a scientist sliced off the top of the poor thing’s skull, with no anaesthetic, and jammed a needle full of bugs into its brain.’

  ‘So what? I suppose you think we shouldn’t experiment on monkeys to save lives. That monkey would probably have just sat about scratching its balls and drinking its own piss. Why not do something useful with it?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ve established this monkey exists,’ Geldof piped up, trying to steer them away from collision.

  But Fanny and David had eyes and ears only for each other.

  ‘Why not experiment on you then?’ Fanny said. ‘You play with your balls enough and you certainly don’t do anything useful.’

  ‘My house, my balls. I’ll play with them as much as I bloody well want,’ David said, grabbing a handful of his family jewels. ‘And why’re you looking at my balls anyway? Do you want a shot?’

  The twins, who had been sitting at the table in the corner playing their PSPs, snickered.

  ‘Tell your mum to stop staring at my dad’s balls,’ Tony told Geldof.

  Malcolm’s laugh lasted only until his mother delivered a belt across the ear.

  ‘Do you see the example you’re setting?’ Fanny jammed her finger so close to David’s face it almost went up his nostril. ‘No wonder they’re brats.’

  ‘Don’t you insult my boys, you haggard witch!’

  The two adults were yelling at each other from close range, their voices and spittle intermingling in the airspace between their red faces. Even James was roused enough by the commotion to get to his feet.

  Geldof glanced at the window, half expecting a cow to come leaping through in a shower of broken glass and billowing curtains.

  ‘You might want to keep it down,’ he said.

  The shouting continued unabated, with a spot of jostling thrown in. James was now heading into the fray. Geldof hoped for David’s sake it did not come to blows. He had seen his father in a fight only once, when a parked motorist had opened his door just as Fanny, Geldof and James biked past. Geldof fell off, narrowly missing a truck coming the other way. James had first checked he was fine, and had then walked over to where Fanny was arguing with the driver – a burly type well over six feet. He calmly moved Fanny to one side and then, in a controlled blur of fists and feet, proceeded to batter lumps out of the driver. Two minutes later, they were on their way. James wasn’t even out of breath. Geldof had asked his dad to teach him how to fight, imagining how it would feel to kick Tony’s head off. James had simply shaken his head and turned his face away.

  Fortunately, at least for the purpose of defusing the argument, the electricity chose that moment to go off. The lights, turned on to combat the early-evening gloom brought on by the rain coming down in sheets, died. The raised voices and the TV, which had still been babbling on in the background, all fell silent. Nobody said anything, the plunge into semi-darkness killing the argument as effectively as a bucket of cold water. Even the twins put down their consoles.

  ‘Do you think they’ve cut the power?’ David eventually whispered.

  ‘They?’ Geldof asked.

  ‘The animals.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Mary said.

  She nonetheless crept over to the window and gently lifted back the curtain as if expecting to see a bovine battalion ready to launch an assault now the techie cows had done their job.

  Geldof checked his mobile phone. ‘The network’s still up.’

  There followed a flurry of calls. Geldof rang Stewart, while the others got on to their friends and family. From their collated information, it seemed the power cut had taken out half of Glasgow and significant areas of the west of Scotland.

  ‘Some animals must have got into a substation,’ Geldof said.

  ‘Do you think it will come back on soon?’ Mary asked.

  ‘I doubt the engineers will be keen to go out and fix anything with all those animals out there,’ Geldof replied. ‘And the army’s busy.’

  ‘But Celebrity Big Brother’s on tonight,’ Malcolm moaned.

  Geldof marvelled at his vacuity. The country was descending into chaos and all he wanted to do was watch a reality TV show. It hadn’t occurred to his pea brain that the zombie hordes might have reduced the chances of the show taking place.

  ‘Never mind that,’ Mary said. ‘All the food in the fridge and freezer will go off.’

  David looked as if he’d been told he was abo
ut to be executed. ‘What? You mean the steaks, everything?’

  His wife nodded.

  ‘You’d better get cooking then. Eat as much as we can.’

  ‘With what? Our oven’s electric.’

  David’s shoulders slumped, and for the first time since the chaos began he looked genuinely upset.

  ‘We’ve got a gas cooker,’ Geldof said.

  Fanny jumped in. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t allow you to cook meat in my house. Anything else, yes. But not meat.’

  ‘Hold on, you’ve got the wind turbine, so you’ll have power, right?’ Mary asked. ‘Maybe you could throw over an extension cord.’

  ‘We don’t have a cord that long,’ Fanny responded.

  ‘I think we’ve got a ten-metre cord in the attic,’ David said. ‘That should do it.’

  Fanny shot him a dirty look, and then sat down heavily on the sofa. ‘Well, the thing is, the turbine isn’t really working.’

  David glared at Fanny. ‘What?’

  ‘There isn’t enough wind here to generate a lot of power. It only gave us enough for an appliance or two. And then a part broke. We just didn’t replace it.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ David said. ‘So you’ve been using the grid all this time?’

  Fanny nodded, looking positively dejected.

  ‘Hypocrite,’ sneered David.

  Geldof felt a stab of pity for his mother. She had bragged the wind turbine would make them energy self-sufficient, a claim he had known from reading the technical specifications was false. Even after the turbine broke, she had let the paddles turn in the breeze to appear that they were generating power. Now she looked like a fool.

  ‘At least we tried,’ James said, putting a hand on Fanny’s shoulder.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Mary asked.

  ‘We hope the power comes back on,’ Geldof replied.

  The room fell silent and they all turned their eyes to the window, where the sky was growing ever darker behind the clouds. Now the animals could roam freely under the cover of darkness. If they chose to attack, nobody would see them coming.

  9

  Buns on the run

  Terry perched on his bed, staring at the blinking camera. He wasn’t sure how long he had been imprisoned: maybe six days, maybe ten. In the abattoir, he didn’t even need a watch to mark time. It took on average two-and-a-half minutes to process a cow. All he had to do was count the deaths. Here, with no daylight, no clocks and nothing to kill, he had lost track of time. What worried Terry most was that Brown had not returned. The only sign of life came when dinner, usually tinned ravioli and Coke or something of that ilk, slid through the hatch in the door.

  Over the previous days, as time wore on and boredom settled over him, he’d fretted over the life, or rather lack of one, he had left behind. His parents were long dead, he had no siblings, no girlfriend due to his meaty fragrance, and little contact with other family members. Now his friends in the abattoir were gone. As for the guys at the local, they were just old lushes who would take a free drink from anyone.

  When he pressed himself against the wall underneath the camera to have a sneaky cry, both for his lost friends and his predicament, he wondered if somebody would come running to find out where he was and give him a chance to escape. It worked in the James Bond movies now sitting abandoned in a box set beneath his TV, after all. He’d stayed there for an hour, long after the tears had dried up. Nobody came, no doubt correctly guessing he had not tunnelled out under the bed with his plastic cutlery.

  Terry had soon grown tired of self-pity. For a while he replayed his finest sexual conquests in minute detail. There were far fewer classic episodes than he remembered. Singing songs with an imprisonment theme – ‘Jailhouse Rock’, ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, ‘Chain Gang’, ‘Jailbreak’ – kept him going for a while, although he was forced to improvise most of the words. And the melodies. Once he got bored with that, he began pulling stupid faces at the camera and doing moronic dances. He wasn’t really sure why. He thought about a dirty protest, but couldn’t bring himself to take a dump into his hands and smear it over the walls.

  They didn’t even let him out of the room to shower. All he had was a sink in the corner and a small hand towel, which after two days was so smelly he had to drip dry for fear of making himself dirtier. While he washed himself as best he could, scrubbing every inch of his body with cold water, the stench of death grew ever stronger, mingling with the tang of his sweaty sheets.

  After what he guessed was the fifth day – or at least the fifth in determinately long period of sleep – Terry had pressed his mouth against the door as dinner was delivered.

  ‘Let me out!’ he’d shouted. ‘I don’t know what’s going on or what you want from me, but you can have it. Please, I haven’t done anything!’

  There had been no reply. Since then, Terry had simply sat quietly on the bed waiting for his food.

  Today, however, the hatch remained closed. The security camera light pulsed, and Terry found himself blinking in unison with it. He began to sway, like a rat caught in a cobra’s hypnotic gaze. His stomach rumbled loudly. Maybe they intended to starve him. At the thought of the final indignity of going hungry, Terry peeled off the flimsy robe, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it at the camera.

  ‘I told you I’d do whatever you wanted,’ he said. ‘What more do you want from me?’

  He tried to overturn his bed, even though it was bolted to the floor. After almost giving himself a hernia, he ripped half the stuffing out of his pillow and jammed the remains into the toilet. He flushed furiously, yelling obscenities. When cold water swirled over the rim and trickled around his toes, he had a brainwave. He gathered up the rest of the stuffing and blocked the plughole in the sink. Then he turned the taps on full blast. Soon water had slicked the floor and was running under the door. Somebody would have to come to turn off the tap. Then he could fight his way out. He hoped Brown would come too. Despite the story about the terrorists, Terry had a gut feeling Brown was responsible for the death of his friends. He wanted to smash those specs right into his smug face.

  A few minutes later, far sooner than he had hoped, a key scraped in the lock. The door edged open and Terry, still naked, charged at the widening gap. After four steps, his feet gave way beneath him and he landed hard on his back. The momentum he had amassed kept him going. He aquaplaned towards the door, which had opened to reveal an elderly lady clutching a brown leather satchel, and a startled-looking young woman. Terry’s onward slide – legs splayed – came to a stop with the pointy tip of the older woman’s black shoes millimetres away from his groin. He looked up at the newcomers, trawling his mind for an amusing, James Bond-style comment that would salvage his battered dignity.

  ‘Er, hi there,’ was the best he could manage.

  Sean Connery would have been ashamed of him.

  ‘Mr Borders,’ the elderly lady said, studiously avoiding looking at his exposed lower body. ‘We’ve come to get you out of here.’

  Five minutes later, Terry was jogging along a corridor, clad again in the robe, cursing himself as a witty quip finally came to mind. ‘Water way to meet’ would have been perfect, but it was now a bit late to toss it out there. He lagged behind his new companions, since his garment was flapping revealingly at the back. It was probably a moot point considering the nature of their meeting, but his last scrap of dignity would definitely be removed if they had to watch his hairy buttocks bobbing along.

  As Terry had regained his feet and hurriedly covered himself, the older woman, who introduced herself as a scientist by the name of Professor Constance Jones, had quickly laid it on the line for him. He had been held for a grand total of ten days in the government facility that produced the virus (Terry felt a brief stab of triumph at guessing it wasn’t al-Qaeda). During that time, the virus had spread across Britain, which was now under martial law and quarantined. Almost as disturbing was the news that Brown had been ordered to destroy the facility with Terry and the youn
g woman, a journalist by the name of Lesley McBrien, still inside. Now they hurried past deserted rooms full of microscopes, test tubes and banks of computers, turning left, then right, before coming to a set of stairs.

  Constance paused. ‘My car is outside, but this is going to be dangerous. Brown was setting charges in the basement. He might come up at any minute.’

  She prepared to climb the stairs. Lesley laid a hand on her arm to stop her. ‘How do we know we can trust you?’

  The professor stood with her back to them for a few seconds, then turned. The deep wrinkles under her eyes were sucking up tears, like parched riverbeds at the end of a long drought.

  ‘Three days ago, they were trying to evacuate families of the staff. They found my daughter and grandchildren dead in the garden,’ she said. ‘And I killed them with this infernal virus. The only way I can redeem myself is to tell the world what happened. I need you to help me.’

  Lesley nodded, seemingly satisfied. They crept up the stairs together.

  Constance leaned over the retinal scanner. The door clicked open and she peeked out. ‘It looks clear.’

  Terry raised his face to the sky and took a deep breath as he emerged. It was raining, typical freezing horizontal west of Scotland rain, but to him it was a cooling shower – at least for five seconds, before his bare bum felt like an alcoholic acupuncturist with the DTs was practising on it. He hurried to catch up as Jones fiddled with the lock of a battered old Volkswagen Beetle.

  They piled into an interior thick with the smell of old lady. As the engine chugged into life, a figure walked around the far side of the building. Light from the security spotlights glinted off a pair of spectacles.

  ‘Get going,’ Lesley said from the back seat.

  Brown ran to intercept them as the car crept forward and Terry made to open the door, intending to give him a proper kicking. When the running man pulled a gun out of his jacket, Terry took his hand off the door handle.