Cows (13 page)

For long floating seconds Steven lay where he was and watched the colliding animals, feeling other people’s blood soak the back of his clothes. He was safe and warm and free of doubt, recharged by murder.

When the inertia of the stampede was spent, the cows picked themselves up and stood in a dripping curve before him, waiting for some indication of what to do next. Off to one side the Guernsey was alone, treading on a body and turning it to paste.

Steven rose and touched the red-stained heads of those closest. They nuzzled his palm gratefully, but their eyes strayed to the dead people behind him. He lingered on the small roan female, stroking the underside of her chin.

The herd quivered impatiently.

“What do you want? Right now, without thinking, what do you want?”

When she answered her voice was loud and Steven knew she spoke for them all. “I want to know always that I was able to do this. I want to carry the smell of their blood deep in my hide.”

The cows shouted agreement and Steven shouted with them, goading, exhorting, whipping them into a frenzy. When a gap came in the noise, he told them to do what they wanted to do and jumped safe to an angle of walls away from the pile of bodies.

The herd fell on the heap of flesh, smearing blood and piss and excrement over as much of themselves as they could. They rolled in the mess and drove it through hair to deep layers of skin.

Steven watched as bodies were rent. This wild fulfillment of cow desire was a reflection of the power he felt raging within himself.

A presence at his side—the Guernsey, face, chest and forelegs bloody, but uninvolved in the platform brawling. This animal’s own bloodletting had occurred before the sanction that had freed the rest of the herd to action. The implication was not lost on Steven—for this one, his permission was of little consequence.

“You think they needed you for this shit? Jesus, the men I led them to in the sewer weren’t any different. They like you, but they’ll find out you’re the same as Cripps and one day soon you’ll be history. Hear what I’m saying? I can lead them just as well as you.”

On the platform the herd, exhausted now, and sticky with blood and pieces of flesh, were lying down.

“A few raids to get me some cash and they’re yours.”

“Don’t pull my dick. You’re getting into this killing thing. You got Cripps inside you and he’s waking up. You’re a bad man.”

“How can you know anything about me? I’m a human, you fucking animal.”

The Guernsey’s eyes narrowed. Things were out in the open now. Each was a threat to the other, and each knew it. Steven felt no fear, though, the thrill of the woman’s head exploding in his hands was too fresh.

“There’s a train around this time, better find someone else to ride, motherfucker.”

The animal moved off to rouse the cows from their dozing. They obeyed its commands but their eyes flicked to Steven. When they were ranked and ready to move and he still had not joined them, the roan female broke from the group and approached him.

“It’s time to go, there’s a train coming.”

“I know.”

“I will carry you.”

Steven stroked her head, scratching gently in the thick curling hair that grew like Persian lamb’s wool between her ears. Then he called to the herd: “I will follow. Go.”

The Guernsey bellowed and for an instant the herd froze to absolute silence. Striations of locked muscle cast light webs of shadow across shoulders and legs, full-capacity lungs bled oxygen into frothing blood, and in every animal brain switches clicked to action mode. Time started again with a snap and they rocketed along the platform, swirling litter into mini-tornadoes with the wind of their passing.

Steven watched them disappear into the dark oval of the tunnel mouth, then moved to the carpet of plastered flesh and began peeling pieces from it. He found a T-shirt still clinging to something that looked like a lung and used it as a sack. He chose meat that looked soft.

The roan was getting nervous and somewhere, far off, the whistling roar of a train began to grow. She whinnied, but Steven pushed it to the last few seconds, stuffing his bag full, collecting meat until the dim glow of the coming train’s lights fanned against the black curve of the far tunnel.

Then they ran, Steven at her side for a few seconds then swinging up, Pony Express–style, onto her back. His makeshift sack was heavy and it thumped against his thigh. Behind them the train blundered into the station and sent hissing clicks along the rails under their feet. The roan flattened her ears and stretched into a gallop, sure-footed on the sleepers and gravel, straining to do service to the man she carried. Time flowed perfectly, it opened up and made space between them and the danger behind.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

T
he roan skidded sideways in a shower of small stones and they slid into the damp quiet of an intersecting passage that had led them to the underground line earlier that night. She paced on a few yards, winding down, catching breath, then stopped, sweating, dull-gleaming in the dim light. Steven dismounted but stayed close, running his hands along her sides, forcing out small rills of perspiration with the edge of his palm. Her damp heaviness excited him and his cock went hard.

“We’re safe now.”

Behind her. She shook her ass. He used both hands to stroke the insides of her thighs, exploring the curves of muscle, bouncing his fingers over veins brought to the surface by her running. Up to the dark folds between her hips. Then into her vulva, parting it with his thumbs, bending close to catch its woody smell, pressing his mouth against it and swallowing what he found there. He ran short dreams of pushing his head all the way inside.

But he didn’t want to hide himself in her. He wanted to command and control her, to slam himself in like his cock was a weapon, again and again until something ruptured or they both blacked out. He wanted to pump her so full of come that she burst.

So he made a pile of stones and climbed up on it and fucked the living shit out of her. She didn’t resist because she wanted it as much as he did, and their moans tumbled along the walls and spread out under the city in a vicious cadence of dominance and submission.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I
n the chamber the Guernsey was back on its hill. The herd was agitated, moving restlessly in knots of five or six that wove in on themselves, tightening until they fragmented and split to join other knots. The cows had emerged from their killing session unhappy. The satisfaction of the station had dimmed during the rush back to the central chamber and they were left wanting some undefined further experience to complete their journey toward self-realization.

Steven slid from the roan like an Indian, flipping one leg over her neck and landing with knees flexed. He shouldered his bag of human scraps and strode through the milling cows to the base of the mound. The Guernsey watched him hatefully.

He waited on flat ground, letting seconds pass. Above him the Guernsey stood set and heavy, gathering menace, as though with enough of it he could build a wall around Steven and blot him out.

Finally the animal spoke: “You failed us, man. You didn’t bring us more than we already had. You’re a nigger down here, you don’t belong. The herd should be led by one of its own.”

Steven rested the bag of meat against his foot. “You can’t do it without me. You haven’t learned to carry your killing inside yourselves.”

“Early times yet, man.”

“Time won’t do it. What is it that you think I have shown you?”

“That we can kill men same as they kill us.”

Steven laughed across the words. “I am not teaching you to destroy men, but to become like them.”

He lifted the sack of flesh above his head and addressed the herd.

“Here is my final gift. Here is the last thing you need to escape the weakness that binds you to your past. It will leave you no choice but to seek experiences that free you from yourselves.” He raised his voice. “When you stampede are you not free?”

They bellowed.

“When you feel bones break and flesh tear beneath your hooves are you not living as you wish to live? Strong and free of the uncertainty that has dogged you since the death of Cripps?”

The cows bucked and yelled and tossed their heads. Steven had them.

“Come forward and be blessed.”

Before the first cow could move the Guernsey pounded down from the top of the mound and planted itself in front of Steven. Its eyes were bloodshot and there were deposits of dry spit in the corners of its mouth. It stood there, grinding its teeth, twitching, pushing against the line that marked the end of antagonism and the beginning of violence, wanting to cross over and crush Steven flat. But it did nothing, just breathed until its leg muscles relaxed enough for it to strut to the side of the mound and look on malevolently.

Steven reached into his bloody sack and took out a small piece of flesh.

“Who will be the first?”

The roan moved close and ate from his hand. She kissed him with lips stained red from the meat and moved away. Then the others came.

So it went. Cows filing by in the gloom of the cavern, taking their taste of a food that would drag them into their future.

Back in the shadows the stream made wet noises and the rock of the walls ticked with the strain of hiding these fast becoming dangerous animals from the city.

The Guernsey was the only one who would not eat.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

L
ucy lay on the floor. The flat was empty, the windows were open and it was cold. She looked down at herself, past her breasts to the dome of her belly. She couldn’t see the hair on her cunt because it got in the way. Before he left that morning, Steven said he could feel the child kicking. But it wasn’t a child, she knew that.

In the months since her periods stopped she had pretended she believed what Steven told her, had let him believe the thing she was carrying was his. But today she stopped pretending. Today, flat on her back with her skin goose bumping and tightening around the thing in her belly, she let herself see it for what it was—a hard black stone of poison that had grown and grown until her body had to stretch to hold it. And the fucking thing was going to keep growing until it killed her.

Earlier that morning, squatting naked, she had tried to force her hand up through her cunt and into her belly. She used lubricant and corkscrewed her fingers until spots of blood fell on the new linoleum between her feet, but she couldn’t get further than her knuckles. It was after that that she had lain down on the floor.

She opened her wallet of scalpels, buried at the back of a drawer since the move to Steven’s, and cut slits in her cunt, up through the clitoris and down almost to her anus. When she woke from a few moments of unconsciousness her neck and breasts were spattered with vomit, but pain was a small price to pay for the removal of poison.

Her hand went in much easier this time, but even with the new looseness and the slipperiness of blood she couldn’t force it in much past her wrist. The angle was awkward and the inside of her forearm jammed against her slashed clit. She groped with her fingers but she couldn’t reach anything.

The pain from her cunt spread out like acid over her thighs and pelvis, but the stone inside felt worse. She reached for the scalpel again.

When she made the long grinning incision around the base of her stomach, things started to get cloudy. Her ass felt like it was floating half an inch above the floor, bumping softly up and down. There was an awful lot of blood and somehow it must have got in her eyes because everything was hazed red. It was a kind color and it wanted her to sleep, it lay on her arms and made them heavy to move. But there was something she had to do, something under the blanketing pain that couldn’t be ignored.

She dropped the scalpel and shoved herself up onto her elbows until she could see the gouting slice across her guts. The red lips parted as she moved and she was happy that her body was open to her at last.

Her hand moved surely through the cut skin into the wet heat of her womb. She felt it immediately. A hard thing, a thing of solid form that no one could call an imagining. She smiled to herself and closed her fingers around it. It was oddly shaped—she had expected something smooth and oval—and it was slightly rubbery. But it was there and that was enough.

The red was thicker in her eyes now and she was weak, so weak she had to lie back on the floor. She took deep breaths and braced herself, gathering strength. She couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed, but it didn’t matter because she was going to do it. She was going to empty herself of a lifetime of pus.

She made sure her grip was tight, sucked in one last lungful of air and dragged the thing out through her wound. It was too heavy for her to hold so she dropped it on the floor. Her eyes had ceased to function but she pictured it there, lying black and stinking, and felt waves of relief wash away her pain, taking her away from herself into the soft darkness of freedom.

She died feeling clean, the happy weight of the poison resting outside her, pressing against her hip.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

I
n the streets, high up on the surface of the city, Steven moved through a twilight of scattered stars—cars, lights, people, all of them carried a warm nimbus of intensity that illuminated but did not threaten. Everything was safe now, the herd and its potential as a mechanism to fund life was his. The sacrament of human meat had zapped cow cells and completed a mutation that had started with their escape underground. They were changed and they were happy with the change. The tearing anxiety of the intermediate period was over and they knew themselves for what they were—beasts with drives and the ability to satisfy them. They were no longer the frightened, hiding property of men. They had become hunters, able to abandon themselves to any action that advanced their well-being.

Their future was cast in iron and their gratitude would be as enduring. He was God to them now, the giver of life, for they would have perished without him. The price they paid for survival, if it was a price, was an ongoing hunger for human flesh.

In his street the sky was clear and the sodium vapor lamps burned like suns. The shadows they cast were pure and sharp.

He climbed the stairs to his flat, picturing Lucy’s cunt spread warm and waiting just for him, and afterward the drifting hours in bed next to her before she rose to feed him. TV side by side, time passing without danger because of her presence, arms around him, fingers on his skin … warmth, comfort, safety.

But there was no warmth when he entered the flat.

He found Lucy in a lake of blood on the kitchen floor, a hole two inches above the tuft of her cunt and a yellow fetus corpse snuggled against the outside of her thigh.

He started to puke but it died in his throat and his stomach went still and cold. Lucy was gone and she had taken everything that only a moment before had seemed so unassailable. Without her he would be alone—no soft body to lose himself in, no breasts to mother him, no movement in other rooms as he slept or watched TV. Only emptiness.

The cold spread out from his guts to the walls of the flat, icing them, freezing the recently applied paint, dulling color and texture. It devoured even the light. Peripherally he saw the skeleton of the flat show through, a superimposition of the place as it had been before the Hagbeast left.

Every night spent alone and frightened in the creeping dampness of his room hit him in an overwhelming pulse of memory. He fell to his knees under its weight, crying out against the fear of having to return to such desolation. No wife, no child, no perfect family. Not even a dog this time around.

He stirred the blood on the floor, it was thick and clots of it stuck to his fingers. His tears made milky-pink splashes on its congealing surface.

Thieving brainless bitch. Stealing his new life and taking it with her, over into the dead space where the Hagbeast waited cackling for him. It wasn’t fair that after a lifetime of pain such a small thing as happiness could be taken away from him by one mad cunt.

He kicked at her head for a while, but the impact of his feet didn’t change anything.

He lifted the rubbery fetus corpse from its sticky bed beside Lucy’s leg and nailed it to the wall at head height, this thing that was almost all head, with a couple of pointy knives from the kitchen drawer. It didn’t look like Jesus. It looked like what it was—dead, deformed hope. It was never going to grow sandy-blond hair or wear faded dungarees, it was never going to play in cornfields, and it was never, ever going to be something to love. On the wall it was a badge that screamed,
Idiot, sucker, deaf dumb and blind motherfucker. Did you really think you’d get more than this?

Steven ran away from it, out into the hall and down to his room … into the room that had held him in its grim arms through all those long nights when the Beast had raged in the corridor outside. The new paint and the fresh fabric meant nothing, the walls that had watched over his horror were there still, under all of it, and they closed their old darkness about him like a revolting but familiar narcotic.

He turned the TV on, but he lay on the bed with his back to it because it was a liar. It held up pictures and said you could be like them, but it didn’t tell you how easily everything fell to pieces.

Night wore on and the TV smeared the walls with its deceitful colors. Steven hunched into himself on top of the blankets and thought of nothing.