Apocalypse Cow (5 page)

They had been forced to pose by Lesley’s mother, who was
delighted
her daughter was following in Charles’s illustrious footsteps. When her mother dropped the picture off at the office a week later, Lesley had dumped it straight into the drawer. She didn’t want anyone to think she was trading on her father’s reputation. She had known he’d put in a word for her, but had been determined to show she deserved the chance. Now she had blown it, he would try to bail her out. As soon as the news of her redundancy reached the old sod in his retirement villa on the Kenyan coast, he would be on the phone to his cronies. Not because he cared about her; the famous McBrien name, renowned through generations of journalism, must not be besmirched in such a way. She didn’t want him to save her. If she was going to make it, she wanted to do it herself. And if she was going to fail, which at the moment appeared the more likely scenario, she wanted to do so with dignity.

Lesley closed the drawer and headed out for a smoke. Colin’s ridiculously phallic quiff protruded over the top of his cubicle as she walked past. She briefly considered setting fire to it – with the amount of hairspray he employed it would go up like a torch – but decided a few months in jail was not a price worth paying for the brief burst of savage pleasure she would derive from watching him run to stick his flaming head under the water cooler. All the same, she could not resist aiming a slap at the mound of hair, prompting an ‘Oi!’ in protest.

‘Urgent newsflash: You’re a wanker!’ she told Colin, who had stood up to glower at her.

‘Seriously, Lesley, what the hell’s up with you today?’ he asked, readjusting his hair.

‘Like you don’t know.’

‘Look, whatever paranoid fantasy you’ve cooked up, leave me out of it,’ Colin responded.

The apparently genuine confusion on Colin’s face gave her pause. What if the story was real and she didn’t look into it because she thought she was being mocked? That would be far worse than taking a ribbing. She turned away from her nemesis and thumped downstairs. What she did know was her head was buzzing and she was in no condition to make a decision. She needed time to think, and to listen to the recording a few more times. Then she would decide whether to chase the story or make good on her threat to skewer Colin’s nuts.

4

In the belly of the beast

Terry fought his way out from the deep morass of unconsciousness that kept trying to suck him back down into its murky depths. When he hauled open his eyelids, a sterile white ceiling greeted him. He vaguely wondered if he had overindulged, which would explain the stinking headache, and ended up getting lucky. He groped around for a warm body, and found he was alone in a single bed. Despite the unfamiliar surroundings, his first feeling was one of relief. While he desperately needed to end his eighteen-month spell marooned in the love desert, he didn’t want it to be through a one-night stand – particularly given his disastrous last two flings before the barren patch began.

After the first of those one-nighters, he’d woken to the morning sunlight glinting off the facial fuzz of a snoring heavyset woman with a tattoo of Pocahontas on her shoulder. He had a horrible memory of cuddling up to her in a corner booth at Clatty Pats nightclub, where such characters were ten a penny, while she explained she had changed her name to
reflect
her love of the Disney character, and an even worse memory of being pissed enough to find it endearing. He’d tiptoed out of the bedroom, trying to ignore the accusing button eyes of the crude home-made Pocahontas dolls littered across the room.

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.