Meat

Nine

‘What have you been telling the townsfolk, Collins?’

No hesitation.

‘The truth.’

Magnus closed his eyes for a count of ten.

‘You’re not making things any better for yourself by being a clever dicky. What exactly have you told them?’

‘I’ve told them that they don’t have to eat meat to survive.’

This much Magnus knew. Reports had been coming in about Prophet John for months. He hadn’t believed them at first. No one could talk such nonsense for more than a few days without being laughed bleeding into a gutter somewhere. But the rumours and stories had persisted and Magnus had sent out his feelers. People came back telling him about the lock-up meetings, how they were full every week, how word was spreading around the town that meat, the very basis of all life, was not necessary in the diet. Even then, Magnus couldn’t believe it was a serious problem. So there was a lunatic spreading cow shit about what people should and shouldn’t eat. So what? No one was going to fall for that kind of idiocy.

But they did. In substantial numbers.

For the first time in MMP’s history, in the history of Abyrne, supplies of meat had been greater than the demand for it. A few cuts of meat went unsold in butchers’ shops around the town. A few cuts of meat browned, greyed and spoiled. Magnus had never known the like of it. Steaks rotting in their displays while poor people all over the town starved.

What were these non-eaters of meat eating instead? The vegetables and grains that the town farmers grew and sold were poor quality at best. A few people grew their own food, albeit reluctantly, to supplement their diets. What they really craved was meat. Meat would keep them strong for work. Meat would help their children survive to adulthood. The ability to afford and eat meat gave you status; it meant that you weren’t meat yourself. It meant that you were above cattle. The townsfolk ate meat to stay human. For someone to come along and tell them they didn’t need meat, that eating it was wrong; it was the most outrageous and insulting thing Magnus had ever heard. And some of the townsfolk were swallowing it the way they’d swallowed mince and stew the previous week.

John Collins was responsible for all of it. John Collins was going to pay.

The rumours were unbelievable but they were true. Magnus had to accept it as a fact when orders from butchers and other meat processors went down. He didn’t want the workers at MMP to know so he kept the chain speeds high, told his managers that demand was climbing just as it always had. And then he sent unmarked vans with loads of un-saleable meat to be dumped out near the wasteland where no one could see or smell it.

The rumours carried a supernatural element too. If the idea of not eating meat was lunatic and unbelievable, the other aspect of the rumours was suicidal. How sophisticated people could believe in such self-destructive lies, he had no idea. But it revealed people’s nature. People were weak. People were stupid. People were gullible. People were corruptible. Upon such truths he had built his empire.

Now that the man was here, before he beat him to a pulp of blood and bones in the pointless fight he was picking, and before he carved him up, he wanted to know what muck Collins had been spreading.

Maybe, he thought, maybe I’ll make his a public slaughter. The first Abyrne has ever seen. He smiled. The idea made him feel a lot better. It would be the kind of execution that no one would ever forget. The kind of drawn-out death that people would write down and tell their children about. Collins would be the meat on his table for weeks and Magnus would be feared for eternity.

People would eat meat gladly. Obediently. The way they were supposed to.

From time to time Shanti passed through the herd of new mothers to check on the progress of WHITE-047 and her new calf. The calf was male and as stock from BLUE-792 there was a good chance it would become a bull and avoid the meat herd. Shanti was quietly delighted about this. It almost fitted with his fantasy of the calf growing up as a child. The reality, of course, was that the young bull would face all the same mutilations as any other young male except for castration. However, instead of being taken for slaughter when it reached maturity, the new bull might have years of successful mating to prolong its life. It was the best any of the Chosen could expect and Shanti was glad for that tiny mercy.

The mothers and calves were kept together until the calves could be safely separated and given ordinary feed. The mothers would then rejoin whichever herd they had come from, assuming they were still healthy enough following calving. WHITE-047’s calf would be raised in a separate bull enclosure. Other male calves would enter the meat herds to be matured and fattened for slaughter as soon as possible. Female calves would join the regular herds to become milkers or breeding stock for a few seasons before entering the crowd pens themselves.

The shortest-lived of all, barring those born weak or sick, were the veal calves. These young males would be chosen randomly from the newborns and taken away to a warehouse full of small, darkened crates. Here they would be fed a special mix of feed and their movement would be restricted by the dimensions of their enclosure. Prolonged darkness ensured that by the time they were old enough for slaughter, they were practically blind. The veal calves were kept in crates allowing them enough room to sit or lie down but never to stand to their full height. Very soon, each veal calf learned that standing up was a waste of effort and from then on they would remain seated or reclined. When they reached maturity, still much younger than any other cattle, they were taken for slaughter on canvas stretchers because they didn’t have the strength to walk.

Veal slaughter took place in a smaller facility but with very low chain speeds owing to the rarity of the stock. It was one aspect of MMP processing that he had never been involved in and had no wish to be. Fortunately, his skills were required in the main slaughterhouse where the pressure of maintaining high chain speeds was a constant consideration.

As the weeks passed, Shanti watched WHITE-047 and her calf’s progress. The calf looked strong and fed ravenously from its mother. One by one the rituals of the Chosen were performed on the calf and its kind. Their fingers were docked, their big toes were removed, they were dipped. Teeth were extracted as they appeared, to be pulled again when adult teeth arrived. At each new procedure, the mothers became agitated and the sound of sighing and hissing grew loud in the pens and feed lots. Calves were taken by the stockmen and returned minutes later, altered by their tools. The time came for tagging and Shanti watched carefully to see what WHITE-047’s calf would become.

He passed by one day and saw WHITE-047 cradling her calf to her udders and rocking it. The calf was sighing and sucking alternately. Its chest hauled in huge gasps and released long hisses that Shanti knew would have been screams if it still had a voice box. Tears and milk smeared its blotched red face. A thin rivulet of blood still dripped from its right heel and there, finally, Shanti saw its fate sealed by a steel bolt and a coloured tag.

WHITE-047 saw him watching but did not turn away. Unusually, the cow met his gaze from among the hundreds of others. She inclined her head fractionally. Shanti checked for stockmen that might be watching before he returned the gesture as subtly as he could. He smiled in spite of the obvious pain her calf was suffering and he thought he saw her lips change shape too.

The tag was bright blue. Not faded and cracked like its father’s. Its number was 793.

‘We shouldn’t. Not now.’

‘I’ve brought you everything you asked for. And more. Look.’

Maya looked into the bag, saw the wrapped shapes of chops and black pudding. There were other things too. Hand-raised pies and still warm pasties. Saliva flowed beneath her tongue.

‘The girls will be home from school soon.’

‘How soon?’

‘Any moment.’

‘Don’t you want the meat? I know plenty of people who do.’

Fear of malnourishment yanked her like a fishhook. Now that she was plumping the girls up, seeing the rosiness of their cheeks, it was difficult – no, it was impossible – to entertain thoughts of them losing weight again. She must keep them well. That was her task. It was her duty. The only thing a mother could give in the world was love and nourishment to her children and she wasn’t going to allow anything to prevent her. She loved them. They came before everything else. No matter what the cost.

Torrance had her pushed up against the sink, her back to the window where she watched for her family to return each day. His breath smelled of half-digested steak and diseased gums. His teeth were broken or discoloured and kissing him was almost enough to make her vomit. He moved closer pushing cracked lips out through his greasy beard and the stink of his stomach and mouth filled her nose.

But she didn’t have to kiss him. She only had to satisfy him. The quicker she did that, the sooner he would leave. Before he made contact she sank to her knees on the kitchen floor and unbuttoned his trousers. She reached in, found the panel in his underwear and guided his penis through it. Already he was gasping. Before she took it in her mouth she studied it briefly. There wasn’t much to it. In its way, it was very much like a fat, short sausage. The only difference was the musky hair that surrounded it and the hole in its end. Anything was better than kissing him though.

Anything at all.

‘Keep your eyes open and let me know if you see them coming. They mustn’t know. And they must never see me like this.’

Torrance pushed his penis into her face without answering. It fit easily inside her mouth. Even though he thrust with all his strength it never reached the back of her throat. There was very little she had to do, seeing as he wanted to be in command. So she let him pump away at her face and kept her mouth open for him. The worst part was the way her head banged back against the kitchen cupboards.

It was a small price to pay.

When it came right down to it, a bull’s life was a lot easier than a stockman’s.

It was easier than the life of most of the townsfolk of Abyrne. Aside from the quarterly mating flurry, which obviously exhausted the bulls – the stockmen joked about how they’d like a reason to be similarly worn out – there was little else for them to do but feed and rest. Shanti made a point of stopping by BLUE-792’s enclosure regularly, especially in the lunch break when there was likely to be no one else around.

At first he’d hidden from the bull, not letting it know that he was observing it. As the number of visits increased, Shanti let the bull glimpse him through the cracks in his panelled pen. Sometimes he whispered to the bull:

‘I’ve seen your son. He’s beautiful.’

Or:

‘He’s going to be a bull. A special one, just like you.’

Did BLUE-792 understand him? The Chosen listened daily to the chatter and banter and shouts of the stockmen. Maybe they could interpret some of the words even though they couldn’t speak. Shanti didn’t care one way or the other. He wanted to let the bull know that he thought about him. That he watched him. That he cared.

These were ideas and feelings he could never share with anyone if he wanted to stay alive and keep his job. He knew he should have been frightened to have such notions but he wasn’t.

That was what really scared him.

Occasionally, when BLUE-792 was resting, Shanti would tap a soft beat on the panels. He would peer through a crack or even stand in plain view on the outside of the enclosure’s gate. The bull watched him but that was all.

The morning was an agonised parade of last-second glances.

Placing the muzzle swiftly and correctly required unbreakable concentration. The sound of breached crania and pressure-shocked brain tissue was blotted out by the noise of the bolt gun. Its air supply hose looped up behind Shanti like a black viper draped from the ceiling. The pneumatic snake fired its pointed tongue every time Shanti touched its trigger. Its bite was deadly.

‘Ice Pick! Chain speed, please!’

Shanti could hear the delight in Torrance’s voice. It was because Torrance knew that Ice Pick Rick Shanti was annihilating the Chosen like a machine.

‘One thirty-one, sir.’

‘Outstanding, Rick. You know how to make an old stockman very happy. No one’s going hungry in Abyrne when you’re on the stun. And, hey, don’t let this conversation slow you down.’

He didn’t.

At the same time he knew that sooner or later he would slow down and that it had nothing to do with anything Bob Torrance said.

Snatches of their language had come to him. He didn’t understand how exactly, only that it must have been the same way he picked up language from his own family as he grew up – because he needed to know it.

In front of him the access panel slid open and he shared a split second of eye contact with the Chosen before him.

‘God is supreme. The flesh is sacred.’

He placed the bolt gun to the centre of its forehead, pulled the trigger.

Hiss, clunk. The light in the eyes of the Chosen went out. He hit the completion button. The access panel slid shut.

It was intuitive perhaps that the beginning of each message would be some kind of greeting or possibly the name of the Chosen ‘speaking’ and that the end of each communication would be some kind of farewell. That wasn’t enough of an explanation for how he’d picked it up so easily, though. Shanti thought he knew the meaning of taps and breaths because they were so familiar.

On a subliminal level he heard the sounds every day. All the stockmen did. Therefore, in some way, the sounds the Chosen made must have become, at the very least, a ubiquitous part of MMP life. Such sounds would have been prevalent in every part of the factory, penetrating the unconscious mind of every worker. Shanti surmised that it would only take a little extra effort to begin interpreting the sounds and rhythms the Chosen made, translating them into the language of the townsfolk. He had worked there for ten years. It was no wonder that, once he’d decided it was language the Chosen were using and not just random noise, he’d come to understand it so quickly.

The panel opened. New eyes. The same eyes. Eyes he’d seen a hundred thousand times. Their colours differed, their bloodlines varied. He knew them all. He loved the Chosen in a way he could not communicate.

‘God is supreme. The flesh is sacred.’

Hiss, clunk.

Hit the button.

He thought about the language all the time, trying hard in his waking hours to make connections between groups and types of taps and the accompanying hisses and sighs. It was at night, however, that the real leaps came to him. He would dream that BLUE-792 was signalling to him and then speaking the meaning of each phrase. In the morning Shanti would remember every nuance and he would run harder to work, keen to test his new knowledge.

Eyes. Beautiful eyes.

‘…supreme… sacred.’

Hiss, clunk.

Red button.

It took only a few days of this for his excitement to turn to a deeper dread of the plant than before. He could not unlearn what the Chosen were saying to each other. The meanings of many pattered exchanges became clearer and Shanti found himself heartsick over what he heard. Manning the bolt gun, what everyone loved him for, had become a new nightmare. Far worse than before.

‘…supreme.’

Hiss, clunk.

‘…sacred.’

Hiss, clunk.

Sacred.

Hiss, clunk.

One by one he dropped the Chosen, sent them to the bleeding station knowing none would recover consciousness on his shift. His part was done and done well. But he heard them now in every part of the plant. There was very little he no longer understood about the nature of the Chosen. They were noble in a way that few in Abyrne could ever understand. Except John Collins and his followers.

In the crowd pens that led to the restrainer they spoke a prayer to each other. Shanti now heard the prayer hundreds of times a day:

Looking into their eyes, pulling the trigger of the bolt gun became harder and harder to do. The gun itself seemed heavier than before, a gun made of lead. He believed he’d been a man of peace all these years. Doling out the inevitable with true compassion and skill. Never allowing a morsel of meat to pass his lips. But here he was, performing his duty still and fully conscious now of what it meant. Here he was listening to the gentle Chosen prepare for their premature, violent deaths with the grace of saints. No Parson of the Welfare could come close to their purity of heart. The townsfolk did not begin to understand the manner of evil that ruled Abyrne. The town was rotten, and everyone in it, save just a few, were the worms that fed on its foulness.

Shanti knew he was the rottenest worm of them all. He was the stun man, the bolt gunner, the stockman every MMP worker respected for his death-dealing talent. Shanti was the killer that made the way the town worked possible.

Everything began and ended with him.