Apocalypse Cow

by Logan, Michael

  ‘What do you have in mind?’ she asked Terry.

  David hovered briefly by the doorway and then walked out. The stairs creaked and then the bathroom door clicked.

  Lesley glanced over at Terry, who was frowning deeply.

  ‘All I know is we need to get out of the country. But the airports and ports are closed, and the roads are probably blocked. I was thinking if we could get to the River Clyde, we could steal a boat and sail to Ireland or something.’

  ‘Can anybody sail?’ Mary asked.

  There was silence.

  ‘That’s out then, unless anybody is keen to end up bobbing about on the Atlantic,’ Lesley said.

  ‘We could head for the Chunnel,’ Mary suggested.

  ‘The trains are off. Plus it’s a long way away,’ Terry objected.

  ‘We could drive down the railway lines, no traffic to deal with, and then drive or walk through the tunnel to France.’

  Terry leaned back in his chair and rubbed his jaw. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’

  ‘Do you have a car?’ Lesley asked Mary.

  ‘Yes, a BMW. But we’d have to go into our house to get the keys. I’m not sure that’s safe.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have to do it. There are eight of us, assuming David’s coming and we can talk Geldof into it, so we’ll both need cars.’

  ‘The twins and I are coming,’ Mary said. ‘What David does is up to him.’

  ‘Fine. I suggest we leave first thing tomorrow morning,’ Terry replied. ‘We need the rest of the day to get organized.’

  Mary got up to go to speak to the twins, leaving Terry and Lesley seated at the table. Lesley thought the plan sounded feasible. If they were in the car, the animals couldn’t get them and they could be in Paris in a few days. She could march into the offices of the International Herald Tribune, offer them the story, and then wait for the awards to start flooding in.

  Her thoughts of journalistic acclaim were interrupted by Terry. ‘Let’s get the body into the cellar.’

  ‘Why? We’re leaving tomorrow anyway.’

  ‘Let’s just say I’d rather she was out of sight. Less temptation.’

  Lesley remembered David’s solution to their food problem. ‘You don’t think he was serious, do you?’

  ‘Remember the hamster, that’s all I’m saying.’

  Terry went through to the living room, and Lesley followed. She took the ankles, which were so thin she could have used one hand to grab them both, grimacing at how cold they felt. As they lifted the body, she caught movement in the corner of her vision. She looked over her shoulder and saw David, sitting at the top of the stairs. There was hunger in his eyes.

  14

  A midnight snack

  Terry lay in the bath, which he had laboriously filled with water heated on the gas stove, scrubbing at his armpits. He had hidden the last piece of soap inside a crack in the bath’s plastic sheathing two days before, with little guilt. After all, he was the smelliest of the group and was really doing everyone else a favour. It was well after dark, and he really should have been sleeping since they were planning to hit the road at dawn. But this might be his last chance to wash for a few days.

  The afternoon and evening had been spent preparing for the journey: packing their meagre food supplies and planning the logistics. Terry wondered to himself if they would make it out alive. Both cars had at least half a tank of fuel, so they would have time to figure out how and where to fill up again. He wasn’t sure if pumps were going to be working and was nervous about the safety of standing exposed on a forecourt while the tank slowly filled. The alternative was sucking petrol out of abandoned cars, which would likely be even more time-consuming and dangerous.

  He at last pulled himself out of the bath, dried off and pulled on a fresh pair of James’s boxers and a T-shirt. He was creeping downstairs, trying not to wake the others, when he heard a rhythmic rubbing, like sawing without the rasp. Terry didn’t like the wet undertone to the sound. He crossed to the armchair, stepping over the sleeping twins, and picked up the poker. The kitchen knife was gone. He had a horrible feeling he knew exactly where it was.

  He tiptoed to the hallway. The cellar door was ajar, allowing the ominous rubbing to float up to the ground floor. A faint light flickered from below. Terry slipped through the door and felt for the first step. He inched his way down and edged his head round the corner just as the rubbing gave way to a wet rip.

  There, in the middle of the cellar, was a scene right out of a satanic ritual, albeit one involving an anally obsessed occult group. Constance’s body was lying face down on the dusty concrete in the middle of a circle of tea-light candles. Her skirt, tights and pants were yanked down to her ankles, exposing a scrawny buttock blotched purple with pooled blood. Where the other one should have been was a bloody hole. David knelt above the body, kitchen knife in hand. From his other hand dangled the severed cheek. Terry let out a soft grunt of disgust.

  David snapped his head up. Terry couldn’t read his expression – his eye sockets were buried in shadow.

  ‘I’m going to cook it,’ David said hoarsely, as if fifteen minutes of vigorous frying and a dash of salt made eating human flesh a completely reasonable thing to do.

  Terry descended the last step, feeling he was entering a vortex of madness, and crept towards his cousin, who backed away, clutching the hunk of meat to his chest. There was a cornered look in his eye. Terry knew from experience that cornered animals could do desperate things – as though slicing off an old woman’s stringy buttock didn’t already classify as pretty damn desperate. Terry suspected their faux-family connection wasn’t going to cut much mustard with David, who had gone very wrong.

  ‘Come on, David: hand over the knife and the bum cheek,’ Terry said in the babying voice he employed to entice particularly frantic pigs to sit still and be stunned.

  ‘She doesn’t need it,’ David responded, his fingers digging further into the chunk of meat. ‘Her sitting days are over.’

  ‘Come on. We’re leaving in the morning. In a few days we’ll be in France and you can eat a whole horse if it takes your fancy. You don’t want to do this.’

  David backed out of the circle of candles into the shadows. All Terry could see was light dancing on the knife blade and a faint image of bared teeth.

  ‘It’s too dangerous out there,’ David said. ‘We’re staying right here.’

  ‘What do you mean: “we”?’

  ‘What kind of father would I be if I took my boys out into that fucking madhouse? This …’

  He wafted the slab of meat out into the circle of light.

  ‘… and the rest of her can keep us going until the army arrives.’

  Terry shook his head. ‘You think turning the boys into cannibals is going to win you a Father of the Year award? Give me the knife, or I’ll take it.’

  When David didn’t respond, Terry took several fast steps forward. The knife slashed out of the shadows, whipping inches past the end of his nose. It was probably only intended as a warning, but Terry decided to end it before things got out of hand. He leapt into the shadows, gauging the location of David’s forearm from the glint of candlelight on steel, and whacked the poker down. The blade clattered to the floor as David let loose a scream and lashed out instinctively with his other hand. Several pounds of old lady buttock slapped Terry across the ear. Stringy or not, the cheek was chunky enough to momentarily knock him off balance. He recovered quickly and grabbed the meat from David’s raised hand, trying and failing not to think about what he was holding, and threw it over his shoulder.

  David dropped to all fours and scuttled along the ground in pursuit of the steak, giving Terry the opportunity to leap on his back and twist his arm.

  ‘Give it up, nutbag,’ he told David.

  ‘You’ll get it dirty,’ David wailed, twisting his neck to see where the buttock had landed. When he couldn’t stretch round far enough, he flopped face down in the dust and began to cry.

  ‘I rea
lly don’t need this shit,’ Terry said. He released David’s arm and picked up the kitchen knife. ‘I’m going to forget I saw this, and you are getting some serious counselling when we reach civilization.’

  Just as he was bending over to help David to his feet, the whisper of footsteps sounded behind him. He turned to see the twins, both carrying planks of wood scooped up from a pile of timber near the bottom of the steps.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s all over,’ Terry explained. ‘Your dad was just—’

  Terry didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence, in which he was going to gloss over the insanity by claiming David and he had been fighting off infected rats, which had neatly nibbled off the professor’s left cheek before scampering away in face of the two men’s heroic efforts to preserve the dead woman’s dignity.

  ‘Help!’ David, the ungrateful bastard, yelled. ‘He’s trying to kill me!’

  Terry realized he was standing over his prostrate cousin with a bloody kitchen knife in hand and a carved-up corpse three feet away from him. He was also aware the twins had a penchant for mindless violence – they were almost expelled from primary school when they discovered that if you soaked a cat in petrol, set fire to it and hurled it yowling into the air, it served as a cheap replacement for fireworks. This was a perfect opportunity for them to indulge their hobby.

  He had just enough time to roll to the left and dodge the first blow. The second plank was already whistling through the air, though, and he could do nothing to stop it crunching against his skull. He fell sideways, staring into Constance’s dead eyes as his consciousness drained away.

  When Terry’s eyes opened, grey morning light was seeping in through the barred window that let out onto the small front garden. Memories of the struggle flooded back. He groaned.

  What am I, Captain Fucking Captured? he thought.

  He tried to lift a hand to his head, only to find his wrists had been tied behind him. His legs were similarly bound. The only sign of the professor’s body was the streaky mark left where her cheek had landed during the tussle. At least Terry was not alone during this particular return from unconsciousness: Geldof and Lesley were sitting with their backs against concrete pillars. The boy had a black eye, still in the early stages of blooming, while Lesley looked as though she was ready to scratch somebody’s eyes out. They were both trussed.

  ‘I guess you’re not the rescue party then,’ Terry remarked.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ Lesley asked. ‘One minute I was asleep, the next those evil little twins were tying me up – and having a sneaky fondle at my tits while they were doing it, might I add. Bloody teenage boys.’ She turned to Geldof. ‘That means you as well!’

  ‘What did I do?’ he asked.

  ‘Never mind,’ she muttered.

  ‘What about James?’ Terry asked. ‘And Mary?’

  ‘James was still doing a great impression of a cabbage last time I checked. I didn’t see Mary. Somebody want to tell me what’s going on?’

  Terry sighed. ‘My cousin has gone mental.’

  He related what he had witnessed in the night. The anger drained out of Lesley’s face as the details unfolded. She looked positively queasy when Terry pointed out the remaining traces of Constance’s buttock.

  ‘Do you think he’s going to eat us too?’ Geldof asked.

  ‘That’s not something I want to think about,’ Terry replied. ‘We need to get out of here.’

  Terry examined the bonds around his ankles. They had used twine, which would have offered an excellent chance of escape had they not wrapped what looked like twenty metres of it around his legs and fastened it with a bewildering array of knots.

  ‘There must be something sharp down here,’ he said, scanning the cellar.

  His gaze fell on a wine rack, which contained five dusty old bottles. He nodded towards it. ‘If we can get one of those bottles to fall, maybe we can use the broken glass to cut through the ropes.’

  ‘Great idea,’ Lesley said. ‘You’re closest.’

  Terry shot her a dirty look, but nevertheless humped along the floor, getting a healthy mouthful of dust, dirt and cobwebs as he did so. He lay beneath the wine rack, a flimsy-looking home-assembled job, and gave it an exploratory kick. The frame wobbled and three of the bottles jiggled.

  ‘Hit it again,’ Lesley said.

  Terry kicked harder, and the three bottles fell. Unfortunately they tumbled down the back of the rack, which had been loosely tied to nails embedded in the wall, and landed on an old carpet stuffed behind it.

  ‘Try pulling it towards you,’ Geldof suggested.

  ‘Feel free to join in at any point,’ Terry replied as he lay on his back and hooked his feet into two empty slots.

  The bottles slid forward. At the last minute, Terry realized he was directly underneath them. He tried to free his feet, succeeding only in giving the rack one last jerk. The first bottle landed on his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. The second bounced off his shoulder and rolled across the floor, coming to rest against a cardboard cut-out of Bob Geldof on a stick, with a voice bubble saying, ‘Give us your fucking money.’

  When Terry got his breath back, he was miffed to see Lesley trying to hide her laughter. ‘Yeah, real funny. Now we don’t have anything to cut the ropes with.’

  Lesley stopped laughing.

  ‘Anybody else have an idea?’ Terry asked.

  ‘Maybe you could head-butt the bottles until they break,’ Geldof said.

  ‘Do you think that will work?’ Lesley asked.

  ‘No, but watching him try would pass the time.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Terry, who was getting rather sick of being the one who ended up having to do everything, and he caterpillared across to the laughing pair.

  He sank his teeth into Geldof’s calf, prompting an alarmed yelp, and then gnashed them in Lesley’s direction.

  ‘He’s got the virus!’ Geldof exclaimed, warding Terry off with his feet.

  ‘I don’t have the virus,’ Terry snapped. ‘I just felt like biting you.’

  ‘We’re getting a bit hysterical here,’ Lesley said. ‘Let’s calm down and think.’

  Geldof glared at Terry, who had managed to haul himself into a sitting position and was panting with the exertion.

  ‘Does anybody have any real ideas?’ Lesley asked.

  They looked around again. The cellar was filled with random pieces of fabric, paint pots and blank placards. There was nothing they could use. Bob Geldof stared impassively down at them, exhorting them to hand over their cash to charitable causes. Beyond that, he didn’t seem to have many ideas. From upstairs came the occasional footfall and the scraping of chairs. Terry fancied he could hear the sizzle of meat on the pan and what might have been the clink of cutlery.

  ‘Who do you think they’ll eat first?’ Geldof asked.

  ‘That’s a bit morbid,’ Lesley remarked.

  Geldof shrugged. ‘I’m a teenager. I’m supposed to be morbid.’

  Lesley smiled. ‘Fine, let’s play.’ She ran an appraising gaze over Geldof. ‘Hmmm. Skinny legs, skinnier arms, and knees so knobbly they could burst a water bed. Not you.’

  Then she checked out Terry. ‘Muscle boobs, at least a B-cup, big strong arms and buttocks that could crack walnuts. Too tough. So not you either.’ She looked down at her own body. ‘Dinner lady arms, thunder thighs and bum cheeks you could lose a remote control in. I guess I’m it.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Terry said. ‘I might be a bit chewy, but I still smell of meat. That’s bound to attract him.’

  ‘Where do you get that idea from?’ Lesley asked. ‘You don’t smell of meat.’

  ‘Yes, I do. You heard David yesterday. He said he could smell meat everywhere. That was from me.’

  ‘No, it was because he’s a complete lunatic,’ Lesley observed.

  ‘Whatever. I’m like a walking fillet steak. He’d munch me up with a nice pepper sauce.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Geldof
butted in. ‘You’re both much older than me. Everybody knows young flesh is tender. He’ll definitely want to eat me first.’

  They all fell silent.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,’ Lesley said.

  Terry prepared to caterpillar once more. ‘Let’s have another go at those bottles.’

  Half an hour later, they huddled together, spent. They had tried kicking the bottles against the wall, but found it impossible to get enough force with their legs bound. They then tried two of them kicking a bottle from different directions, which only ended up hurting the soles of their feet. In sheer frustration, Terry even tried head-butting a bottle. Considering he had recently been walloped with a large plank of wood, it wasn’t his best decision. Escape seemed unlikely.

  Despite the fact that David and the twins had imprisoned them, Terry didn’t really believe they were on the menu. Eating an already dead woman was one thing. Actually murdering someone for food was something else entirely. Terry knew what it took to end a life. Killing was something easily done in the heat of the moment, when a knife could be slipped into a heart or a trigger pulled while rationality was looking the other way. To kill in cold blood, when you could take note of the pleas of your victim, took real resolve.

  Unbidden, the memory of the first cow he had slaughtered came to him. He thought he had long forgotten her, but now he saw her soft brown eyes, imploring and panicked. He suspected his colleague had deliberately failed to stun her properly as some kind of initiation rite. He remembered how his arms had felt like lead as he raised the trembling knife to her throat. He felt again the slight resistance to the razor-sharp blade and heard the spatter of blood on concrete. He remembered watching the light go out of the cow’s eyes, feeling some of the light drain out of his own soul.

  Suddenly it hit him. He had been so sure his job was not affecting him, but he had been fooling himself. The years of horror he had been storing in some dark corner of his consciousness broke free and the animals he had slaughtered came to him, their body parts borne along on a river of blood that washed over his head. He thrashed, trying to shake off the ghosts and keep afloat. He was vaguely aware of somebody calling to him. He tried to swim through the blood to the voice. Severed cow heads bobbed past. An eviscerated pig whirling in an eddy grinned and pointed to the juiciest parts of its flesh, inviting Terry to carve it up. He had just about reached the far bank when a flock of sheep surrounded him, their open throats flapping like lips as they called his name.