Meat

Twenty-seven

Parfitt unlocked another gate.

Skidding from one bullpen to the next, he slammed open the bolts, bruising his palms with each new impact. He was sweating, panicking. There wasn’t enough time. Halfway around the pens he realised there was no movement. No bulls were coming out of their pens.

Too frightened.

What to do?

Come on, Parfitt, think.

No use, he had to get all the gates open first. He sprinted to the next one. Within two minutes he’d opened every bullpen. Still no movement. It was then that he heard the tapping. It sounded like the idle noises the herds sometimes made on the panels and fence posts but this was much louder, more staccato. It didn’t mean anything to him, though. He had to get the bulls out; that was all he could think about.

‘You’re free! Run away! Fight them!’

He pounded on the walls of the nearest bullpen. Then he looked inside.

It was empty.

He ran to the next one in the row.

The same.

‘Shit. Oh, shit no. Already?’

He sprinted along to another row, turned the corner and ran straight into a huge naked form. The gut repelled him like a rubber wall and he fell on his arse in the straw. Looming in front of him was the giant figure of a bull that everyone knew well: BLUE-792; the father of the herds, the strongest bull among the Chosen.

Behind him, others were emerging. Not quite so magnificent, not quite so imposing but all of them dangerous. Each three times the weight of a good-sized stockman and a whole head taller.

Parfitt laughed.

‘Fucking brilliant.’

The laughter dried up. He was a lone stockman with zero bull experience lying on the ground in front of a dozen of the brutes. He remembered the way the fighting bulls had stamped on each other’s heads to finish their opponents. BLUE-792 advanced and the others fell in behind him. The barn was silent. The tapping had stopped. All he could hear was his own hammering heart and the shuffle of four-toed feet across straw.

He began to babble.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I’m the one who let you go. You don’t want me. It’s them out there you want. Down by the gate. You’ll see ’em. Can’t miss ’em.’ He scrabbled backwards across the floor and tried to stand up at the same time. He came up against a pair of legs.

‘Did you let them out?’ said the owner of the legs.

Parfitt twisted to look up and saw Rick Shanti, the Ice Pick. All he could do was nod.

‘Then you’ve bought us a few extra minutes. Come on, let’s go do the rest.’

Parfitt gestured to the advancing bulls.

‘What about them?’

‘Oh, they know where they’re going.’

When all the bulls were loose Shanti led Parfitt to the corralled dairy herd. One bolt was all it took to set every one of them free. Parfitt never stopped looking over his shoulder to see what the bulls would do. So far they’d followed Shanti as though he were the biggest bull among them. When they saw the cows flooding out of the corral, they tensed at first. Then the bulls were among the dairy herd, touching frantically and sighing in the most urgent tones. He saw BLUE-792 make straight for WHITE-047 and the calf that had been allowed back on her since the power outage. Parfitt had never seen the Chosen hug before. It made his soul shiver. He clasped a hand over his mouth.

‘There’s no time for that, son,’ said Shanti. ‘We have to get the gates to the fields open. We’ve got to let them all out.’

Parfitt nodded, unable to speak.

Shanti went to one of the railings of the corral and began to tap there with his thimbled fingers. The rhythm tinkled brightly and penetrated the air. Shanti breathed his hisses and sighs. The Chosen fell silent and listened. It was something Parfitt had never believed possible. Shanti was talking to them and they were taking it all in. When the tapping stopped, Shanti ran, keeping to the rear of the plant. Parfitt struggled to keep up with him and the herds fell in behind them.

When they reached the last building, the slaughterhouse, Shanti held up a hand. They all stopped behind him. He leaned his head around the corner of the slaughterhouse to check no one was watching. Out in the yards, the fighting was chaotic. Two huge hordes of armed men were attacking the two tiny groups of followers. As Shanti watched, the larger mobs encircled each small knot of followers so that they could attack from all sides. For the moment, the followers appeared to be dropping stockmen and black-coats as efficiently as ever, taking little or no damage. Shanti still hoped there would be time to change the odds before Collins and his people ran out of power.

But there was no way he and the herd behind him could cross the space between the slaughterhouse and the fields without being seen. Nor did he think he could run alone without being spotted.

He drew back and leaned against the wall.

‘What now?’ asked Parfitt.

Shanti shook his head.

‘I don’t know. We could risk one of us running to the fields to open the gates, maybe. Or we could deliberately take the herd across as a distraction.’ Even as he said it, he knew he wouldn’t do it. The herd was unarmed, could not even hold weapons in their foreshortened hands. He would never put any of them at risk of the stockmen so needlessly. What they needed was divine intervention and Shanti knew the God that created Abyrne would not be keen to provide it. But perhaps there was a greater God than that, a benevolent, merciful God that wanted peace as much as he and Collins wanted it.

He looked around the corner again to see if there was some other way of crossing the gap. That was when the first of the followers fell. Through a gap in dozens of heads and shoulders, he saw a meat hook rise high and drop fast. It took one of Collins’s followers full between the neck and the shoulder. Shanti heard the cry of triumph after what must have been a thousand useless blows against them. The moment the hook caught the ragged figure, the wielder hauled the man into the morass of stockmen. Blades reflected dull in the afternoon gloom, first ashen then bloody.

Shanti closed his eyes and made ready to run.

A figure moved awkwardly towards them from the fields. She was dressed in red, though that was hard to see because there was so much filth and mud clinging to her. She was gaunt and pale of face, not at all how he remembered her. Behind her, streaming slowly and confusedly up from the fields were the herds of the Chosen.

All of them.

Bless you, Parson Mary Simonson, he thought.

He turned and began to tap on the wall of the slaughterhouse. He nodded and hissed at the bulls and cows beside him and one by one they joined him. Thousands of finger stumps padded in unison the message that Shanti wanted the rest of the herds to hear. Hundreds of throats rasped out coded sighs. There wasn’t enough space along the slaughterhouse wall for all of them, so many pattered their rhythms on the metal fences further back, others on the corrugated iron walls of storehouses and lean-tos.

Parfitt watched the response of the arriving herds as they heard the rhythms that suddenly sounded to him like a strange kind of music. He saw the Parson collapse near the perimeter and saw the smile on her face; a sadder expression he hadn’t seen. The herds flowed forward and he lost sight of her.

Ten thousand Chosen flooded through the fence into the yards.

The fighting stopped.