Meat

Twenty-one

Maya Shanti was a little too willing for Magnus’s liking. He preferred women who fought. Women who struggled and cried out before giving in to him. The problem was she wanted it too bloody much. Her husband had neglected her for far too long.

She slept now, naked beside him in his huge bed. Magnus couldn’t sleep. The sex hadn’t been enough for him and there were other things on his mind. Shanti hadn’t responded yet. Why hadn’t he come? Didn’t the man care about his family? It could be argued that he didn’t care much about his wife judging by her willingness to betray him. But what about the twins? Didn’t he worry about what might happen to his two beautiful little girls? The thought was enough to make his groin tingle and his cock stir.

He pulled the cord for the maids. Far off in the mansion a bell rang.

He slipped from the bed making sure not to wake Maya. It would be better if it was a surprise. He crept to the bedroom door and waited outside for his maids. Two of them came, still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. They were used to his demands, however, ready to be of service day or night. It was their duty.

He jerked his thumb towards the bedroom.

‘Go in there and tie her up. Gag her and blindfold her. Do what you want with her. Enjoy yourselves. When she looks like she’s stopped having fun, you come and get me. Then we’ll all take our time. I think I could go on until morning. Tomorrow we’ll start on the twins.’

He sauntered to the lavatory, pulled down his pyjama bottoms, sat down on the toilet and lit a cheroot. The smoke couldn’t mask the scent of his filth.

‘What a fucking stink,’ he said.

She toured the plant in silence. The closeness of her own end made it a cathedral of nightmares.

In the dairy, the men struggled to milk the cows. Extra restraints were necessary now that automation was no longer available. When things didn’t go well, the dairymen brutalised the cows. In the past such a treatment of the Chosen would have been a serious offence. Now, no one seemed to care. Even her presence in the various barns and houses of the MMP plant didn’t affect the workers. In the past they’d have made sure to follow religious procedure to the letter whilst observed by Welfare.

In the veal yard, calves were dragged instead of carried. The barn was filled with a pulsing rhythm of fingers and sharp breaths. The slaughter men proceeded straight to the slitting of the calves’ throats without stunning. When she challenged one of the workers about this he merely said:

‘They’re practically dead anyway.’

‘But you’re not following the code of the Gut Psalter.’

The man shrugged.

‘Townsfolk need to eat. We have to supply them. It’s all about efficiency and now that there’s no power, we’ve had to cut a few corners. But believe me, Parson, it’s for everyone’s benefit.’

She’d left them to it, unable to watch.

In the main slaughterhouse conditions were slightly better but not by much. The crowd pens were still being used to hold cattle until their turn for slaughter arrived. However, the machinery that had propelled them into the single file chute and then the restraining box was unusable.

Now, the Chosen were led from the crowd pens directly to the bleeding station and the hoists. They would see the mess made by the blood of their own kind as well as seeing the bodies being swung manually along the runners to each successive station. This was unheard of. Six men would hold each of the Chosen down and two would administer the bolt. Without the pneumatic gun, the bolt was now a pointed chisel with a lump hammer to back it up. Some procedures did conform to the old ways. The slaughtermen would lay the creature with its feet facing the west – the setting sun – and the man with the hammer would speak the blessing:

‘God is supreme. The flesh is sacred.’

Then he would stun the animal.

Unused to the unwieldy equipment, the stunner mis-hit the chisel at least once for every four he got right. She saw one poor animal receive three successive hammerings before the bolt did its work properly. The atmosphere in the crowd pens was different to anything she’d encountered before. The Chosen milled and jostled like an angry crowd. They seemed half-terrified and half-enraged by what awaited them. In the past she’d never seen them anything but passive and accepting. It was as though they too had ceased to believe in the surety of their masters’ hands. They sensed more than just a worsening of their conditions. They sensed a crack in the perfection of those that husbanded them.

Further sickened, she escaped to the bullpens where no slaughter was taking place. In the past she had always taken a little pleasure in watching the huge males swagger around their pens or sleep in the straw or eat their meals as though they’d starved for a whole month. In the barn where the bullpens were, there was only one stockman in evidence. He looked young and nervous. Many of the pens were empty when in fact the whole barn should have been full.

‘Where are the rest of them?’ she asked, thinking that they’d been put out to pasture or else were being prepared for mating.

The timid stockman looked embarrassed. Obviously he knew the answer he gave was a bad one.

‘They’re slaughtering them.’

‘What? All of them?’

‘Yeah. I mean, not at the same time, but they’ll all be gone in the next few days.’

She looked through a crack in a panelled gate and saw a bull tagged as BLUE-792. This particular bull was like royalty. His stock was the best and his reputation had spread far beyond the walls of MMP.

‘Even this one?’

‘Yep. Even BLUE-792. Hard to believe really.’

‘But why, for God’s sake? Where are the next generation going to come from?’

‘Torrance has got it all worked out. We’re culling now because we’ll never have the capacity to process as many as we used to. The herds’d grow out of control. What we’ll do next is raise a new generation of bulls from existing stock but not as many as we’ve got now. If the gas plant ever gets back to working again, we can always increase the numbers then. For the moment, though, we’ve got to stop reproduction or at least slow it down.’

The Parson eyed the bull and it eyed her back. This was something strange. No Chosen, bull, steer or heifer ever made eye contact. The bull looked away. Immediately she knew she’d imagined it. Imagined the look of mistrust and hatred on the face of an animal that had always been well treated; better treated perhaps than any other Chosen in the town’s history. And not only mistrust, but something else. Dissent. It wasn’t possible and she put it from her mind.

It was dark outside and much colder too but she couldn’t bear to be indoors a moment longer. Pulling her red cloak around her she walked across the yard and down towards the fields and outbuildings where most of the Chosen spent each night. Somehow, she believed she’d be more at ease there than among her own kind.