Meat

Twenty-eight

The Chosen, responding to the beats and breaths of the bulls and dairy herd, poured into the MMP yards.

Shanti saw astonishment on the face of every black-coat and stockman as the numbers of Chosen swelled. The mass of pale human cattle mushroomed towards the two groups of combatants. Armed men began to back away towards the gate. There was no hint of malice in the expressions of the Chosen but neither was there a dipped head among them or a trace of fear or subservience. Chins up and eyes meeting any and all gazes, the Chosen shuffled forward.

Almost simultaneously two scuffles broke out among the stockmen. At first Shanti thought they were fighting each other. Then, to the front of them came all the surviving followers and Collins himself, every one secured by a man on each side.

Torrance and Bruno stepped in front of them. He pointed his finger at the corner of the slaughterhouse.

At him.

‘This is all your doing, Shanti. I’ve been watching you, my friend. You can talk their language, can’t you? You’re controlling them.’

It was like having a spotlight turned on him. Everyone would hear his words.

‘This has been coming for years. If it hadn’t been me it would have been someone else.’

‘Bullshit. You and Collins are uniquely fucked up. If it wasn’t for the two of you, everything would be fine in this town. When we get rid of you, everything’s going to get back to normal.’

Torrance nodded to two of his men. They stepped away from Collins and Torrance whipped him in the back of the legs with a crowbar. He fell to his knees in the dirt. Torrance kicked him with the sole of his boot, knocking him onto his side. ‘Hold him down.’ He took a thin-bladed boning knife from a sheath at his side and held it up. ‘They’re all going to die, Shanti. Unless you call off the herds and send them back to the fields where they belong.’

Collins found Shanti’s eyes with his own. He closed them and shook his head almost without moving. Shanti was the only one to see it. Collins’s eyes were calm when he opened them again but somehow on fire with joy. Shanti could see the light inside him shining.

‘Look at the numbers, Torrance,’ said Shanti. ‘Even with your weapons, the Chosen outnumber you. A few may die but in the end, you’ll be overcome.’

‘You’re not listening, Shanti. Let me explain it another way.’

Torrance knelt behind Collins and pressed one knee down on his head leaving his neck exposed. Shanti noticed for the first time the faint scar that ran vertically between Collins’s Adam’s apple and the notch between his collarbones; the mark of an incomplete ritual procedure. He didn’t have time to think about it. Torrance laid the boning knife against the smooth skin of Collins’s neck and began to saw as if Collins were already dead.

Shanti saw his friend’s eyes widen in shock and terror. Torrance didn’t pause. He was already through the arteries and veins and had severed Collins’s trachea. A shocking, unbelievable out-rushing of blood covered Torrance’s hands and Collins’s face. The ground absorbed it. Collins tried to fight down his survival instinct but he couldn’t do it. He began to struggle knowing the rear part of the blade was already approaching his neck bones. Suddenly the tension in his body released, he slackened, eyes still wide, as Torrance’s knife slipped between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. The sawing, laboured now, continued until Torrance had the head off. There was no hair to lift it by so he stuck his fingers in Collins’s mouth and raised the head upside down.

‘Now do you see, Shanti? Now can you understand what I’m trying to tell you? This is over. You send the Chosen back to the fields. Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll do the others the humane way. I might even have you do it. You’re the expert, after all.’

Shanti was crying, nauseated despite his years in the slaughterhouse. He couldn’t allow Torrance to kill the rest of them like that. He could see the faces of the followers, each sallow with this new anticipation. Nor could he let the Chosen come this far and then return to their lives of sacrifice and subjugation.

He would send the herds in. It was time.

He raised his hands to the wall of the slaughterhouse ready to play the order and release the Chosen upon the stockmen and black-coats. He felt sure Torrance would believe he was giving in, sending them back to the fields.

His fingers never made the first tap, his throat swallowed back the first sigh.

His hands dropped.

Bruno pushed his way through the still panting mob.

He dragged Shanti’s daughters into view by the hair. He was grinning.

‘Look what I found.’

Torrance was delighted.

‘Perfect,’ he said, as he looked the girls over. ‘I think they’ve put on a bit of weight, don’t you, Shanti. Must be all the meat they’ve been getting recently. Healthy little girls, aren’t you?’ He pinched Hema’s rosy cheek. She was flushed with tears. ‘Your mama liked a bit of meat too, didn’t she?’ He looked back at the Chosen. They were shifting their weight from one foot to another. He’d seen this impatience in them before. Usually in the crowd pens where they wanted their deaths to be over as quickly as possible. ‘Better hurry up and give that order, Shanti. Or I’ll have to decide which girl to do first. Shouldn’t be too difficult, they’re both the same, aren’t they?’

Shanti stopped thinking then. All he could do was save his girls. A man had no choice in such a matter. He raised his thimbled fingers to the wall. The yard was quiet now; the rest of the herd had stopped signalling while the factions negotiated. The eye of every Chosen was on Shanti now. He knew it and he knew what they were waiting for. What they had waited generations for. The simple freedom to live as humans again, as they had before what the Welfare called the creation and what Shanti and many others secretly believed was the opposite: some kind of cataclysm that had ended a much larger world and left only the portion now known as Abyrne.

His first taps were swallowed by the sound of hundreds of running feet approaching and the noise made by a blood-hungry multitude. It approached quickly and grew louder. The stockmen and black-coats turned towards the gates and the road. They saw the last of the Parsons, led by the Grand Bishop, running and stumbling ahead of the townsfolk. Thousands of townsfolk. The fastest were at the front but many more were catching up. The column stretched out of sight towards Abyrne.

The Parsons, including the Grand Bishop, were all cut by the crowd’s improvised projectiles. Some of them had little strength left. For a moment they appeared relieved to have reached the gate of the plant. Then they saw that the yard was full of stockmen and black-coats and their faces fell.

But still they ran because death was right behind them. They did as Collins had done and ran past the edges of the armed workers and guards to put some barrier between them and the townsfolk. Only then did they stop and turn.

Bruno and Torrance took it all in as the front lines of the crowd came to halt at the front gate. Rapidly, their numbers expanded.

‘What the fuck is this?’ said Torrance to no one in particular.

The chant began again.

‘We want meat, we want meat.’

It gained volume.

Fast.

‘WE WANT MEAT! WE WANT MEAT!’

While the stockmen’s backs were momentarily turned, Parson Mary Simonson staggered through the herds and towards Shanti’s twins. The look on her face was one of crazed determination, the look of someone going beyond what was possible for their body.

‘No,’ said Shanti quietly. ‘She’ll get them killed.’

He didn’t really register that someone had pushed past him until he saw Parfitt racing to stop the Parson. He was younger and quicker but the Parson had too much of a start on him. She reached the girls and tried to pull them out of Bruno’s grasp. Of course, in her state, it was impossible, but there was some unrelenting strength inside her that would not quit. She took a hand of each girl and pulled. Bruno, facing the wrong way, turned and spiralled the girls closer. The Parson fell to her knees but wouldn’t let go.

Parfitt arrived having swiped a fallen chain from the ground. He raised it and whipped it straight down onto Bruno’s head. The grip on the girls released. The Parson fell back, letting go also. Bruno held his head in his hands and swayed. Torrance turned, his knife rising. Other men turned. Parfitt caught the girls’ hands and hauled them away, back towards their father and the Chosen. Torrance swiped and missed.

Outside the plant the chant grew angrier. The crowd could see the Chosen, many of them standing within the perimeter of the yard. They could see their meat. They assumed the stockmen were there to prevent them getting to it. They began to advance through the gate.

Parfitt had opened a gap between him and the men behind him. He was smiling as he brought Hema and Harsha towards the protection of their father and the vast herds of Chosen. Shanti willed him the speed to succeed. The smile turned to a look of puzzlement and then disappointment. Parfitt’s hands released the girls and they kept running to their papa. Parfitt couldn’t run any more. He stopped and wavered and collapsed forwards. Behind Parfitt was a grinning stockman, one who had let fly his cleaver to maximum effect. The heavy blade had somersaulted forwards through the air and sunk cleanly into the back of Parfitt’s skull.

The shock of it was erased when Shanti’s girls ran right into his arms. He didn’t allow the hug to last.

‘Get out of sight behind the wall here. No one will come near if you stay with the Chosen.’

The girls didn’t speak. They pressed themselves against the wall. There, for the first time, they saw bulls and cows in the flesh, up close. There too, they saw calves pressed close to their mothers. Some of the calves were the same size as the twins. Their eyes met. The twins saw the calves for what they truly were.

Children.

Parson Mary Simonson felt something tear inside her as she fell back to the ground.

It made her cold.

She saw Bruno finally succumb to the chain blow and join her in the blood-washed dirt. She saw Parfitt fall too but she watched the girls to safety. Soon the stockmen would take their weapons to her. There was no need. Whatever had given way within her abdomen would kill her, she knew it quite certainly. The details no longer mattered. The pain was no worse than the pain she’d lived with for the past many weeks. The inner breaking felt like a release.

From the ground she saw angry, vicious men above her but she could not hear them. She saw their knives and clubs fall upon her body, but she felt none of it. Now she would return to darkness and unknowing. She would stay there forever. It didn’t matter. The question she’d been asking was answered in the martyring of the Prophet.

She lay facing his severed head, looking into his eyes as silent blows crashed down upon her. Collins bore a scar at his throat. Shanti was missing one thumb. Arnold Shanti had committed a crime of interference, a crime so grave it could never be acknowledged. He’d liberated twin male calves. He’d raised one as his own but both had grown up as townsfolk, neither knowing the other existed.

‘Brothers…’ she whispered to John Collins.

‘…Chosen.’

She gave herself to the nothingness that came for her.

‘Ha, Suu. HAH, SSUUUUH.’

Led by BLUE-792, ten thousand pairs of hands tapped out their message. They tapped it on their own thighs, upon each other’s backs, they padded it against walls and fenceposts; they beat it on the ground. As one, they breathed.

The noise was greater, more penetrating than the shouts of the townsfolk or the retorts of the stockmen and black-coats holding them back. It was like soft thunder and a rising wind. The crowd lost its voice. The armed factions stopped their threats.

Everyone listened.

But only Richard Shanti understood.

Your time comes. Surely it comes. May you go forward into your time with great dignity. We who gave will give no longer. We have seen the distant tomorrow. We have seen the land where pain is not even a memory. A land where what we gave will never be asked for again. We follow the man of peace to this land. He is one of us. He has given. We who gave salute you. Ha Suuh! Now your time comes.

The herds moved forward as one. Shanti led them.

At first Torrance stood fast. He held up the boning knife in one hand and a crowbar in the other. Beside him and behind him, stockmen and black-coats were stepping back, stepping away. He looked right and left.

‘Come on you fucking cowards. You’re not going to let your dinner push you around, are you? Hey, you! Stay with me. We’ll send them back to the fields in pieces. We’ll carve them up and hand out steak to the townsfolk right now.’

No one stood by him.

They backed towards the Parsons and the Grand Bishop who in turn backed further into the yards of the plant. Outside the gates the crowd of townsfolk realised the size of the approaching herds. Most of them had never seen the Chosen alive and up close. The hairless bodies and stumpy fingers. The pale limbs. They stood like people. But for their damaged feet, they moved like people. A ripple of unease spread through the crowd. They began to retreat. Further back the crush caused others to fall over or be pushed into the ditches and hedges of blackthorn.

Shanti breathed and tapped his fingers on his head. BLUE-792 peeled away from the herds with a couple of hundred other bulls. They passed the Grand Bishop and his bleeding Parsons. He watched them in disgust. He couldn’t hold his thoughts in.

‘This is an abomination. It’s the deepest heresy Abyrne has ever witnessed.’

‘This town is the abomination,’ said Shanti ‘The crimes committed here for generations are unforgivable.’

The Grand Bishop laughed incredulously.

‘But they’re animals, man. They’re God’s gift to us. His sacrifice to prove His love for us.’

‘The Book of Giving was written by men. It contains no truth about God or anything else. It merely serves those who wield it.’

The Grand Bishop saw it as an opportunity to hold forth once more in front of the townsfolk. To show them his superiority.

‘How dare you speak such blasphemies? I will see to it that your status is revoked forthwith. You, Richard Shanti, are no longer among the townsfolk. You have become meat.’

Behind the exhausted Parsons, the bulls began to reappear. They came from the veal yard and on their backs they carried the weak, blind calves.

The Grand Bishop exploded.

‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing, Shanti?’

‘You’ll see soon enough.’

When all the bulls had rejoined the herd, Shanti walked out of the front gates of the plant.

He turned right. Away from the town.

No one understood. Not the stockmen, not Magnus’s black-coats, not the Parsons, not the townsfolk. Shanti smiled. Without him and Collins, without the followers, without the Chosen, they would never understand. He was glad.

No one dared interfere with the herds as they passed.

The surviving followers patrolled the edges of the herd as it left the front gate and followed Shanti. If anyone made a move against the Chosen, Collins’s followers would die defending them.

The Chosen passed through the gate in droves for a long time.

The Grand Bishop panicked and ran after Shanti. He caught up to him beyond the dump where so many Chosen lay rotting. Not much farther, the road became broken beyond usefulness and after that it disappeared.

‘Shanti,’ he panted as he caught up. ‘Where are you going?’

‘The Chosen are free now. We’re leaving.’

‘Leaving? To where?’

Shanti pointed into the wasteland.

‘But there’s nothing out there, man. You’ll all starve.’

Shanti permitted himself to look at the Grand Bishop one final time. There was dried blood caked to the back of his head. It looked like dirt. His robes were filthy, his face an expanse of worry and questioning. This was the man who would go back to the townsfolk with the job of explaining what had happened. Shanti doubted there was anything in the town’s religious books that covered the exodus of the Chosen.

He smiled at the Grand Bishop, turned and kept walking.

Some of the gathered townsfolk shouted to the stockmen and black-coats.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Why don’t you stop them?’

‘Quick, before they’re all gone.’

‘Just grab a few from the back.’

But no one made a move.

By evening, all the Chosen had stepped from the road into the wasteland. Behind them came the last of the followers.

The Chosen walked with the great dignity that they often spoke of to each other. They were no longer afraid to hold up their heads and let their eyes scan the horizon. It was hard on their mutilated feet but they did not falter. The land was like no land they’d ever seen; black glass sculpted into razor-backed dunes. Across these solid obsidian waves a black dust blew at the will of a constant wind. Where the dust came from or where it blew to, none of them knew.

They only knew that they were free now and that with Shanti’s knowledge and the knowledge of the followers, they would survive until they reached a land where pain was no longer a memory, a land where what they had given would never be asked for again. They knew it existed.

The town of Abyrne lay distantly in the west now while the Chosen walked eastward.

Not one of them looked back.