Apocalypse Cow (14 page)

While the television was not showing the violence in all its glorious Technicolor horror, internet users showed no such restraint. For every animal attack, there was an army of witnesses eager to record the carnage on their mobiles and upload it to YouTube or Facebook. Geldof watched as many of the shaky recordings as he could stomach, filling in the information gaps with Twitter, blogs, online newspapers and the news.

The virus quickly escaped the quarantine zone. Geldof viewed the most popular clip first, which had over 80,000 hits in two hours, most likely due to the relative fame of the victim: a keeper in Glasgow Zoo who had once been the subject of a National Geographic documentary on the close relationship he had built up with a twelve-year-old male tiger named Raja. The relationship ended abruptly when Raja charged his keeper, who was entering the cage for the daily public tickle and roughhousing session, and knocked him to the ground with an effortless swipe. Raja then leapt onto the unconscious man’s back and finally consummated their long love affair with frantic pumping of the hind legs and a throaty roar. The tiger then munched on the keeper’s face for a while before pushing open the unlocked gate. At this point the person filming the attack wisely skedaddled, but news reports revealed that Raja charged around the zoo, fatally mauling an ice-cream vendor and two Hungarian tourists before police marksmen managed to fill him with enough bullets to kill him.

The next clip Geldof watched was filmed in the centre of Glasgow, where a guide dog ran wild on Union Street, dragging its master behind it and snapping at passers-by. The owner only let go of the lead when the dog dragged him under the wheels of a bus. The dog then attempted to grab a baby from a pushchair before a mob kicked it to death, still clutching their Primark and Marks & Spencer shopping bags.

Geldof could not help but enjoy the next clip. Somebody perched on the balcony of a high-rise block in Easterhouse filmed a battle between five youths, dressed in tracksuits of varying hues, and four pit-bull terriers they had been forcing to fight on a patch of wasteground. Geldof had received plenty of grief from such characters, who sometimes hung around the chip shops and street corners near where he lived, looking to pick up a posh girl or kick the shit out of a posh boy. The last time it happened, Geldof only got away because the inbred trio were too wasted on jellies and Buckfast – a cheap fortified wine made by monks, which was ironic since it fuelled much of Glasgow’s violence – to chase him very far. So Geldof allowed himself a little smile as the pit-bulls made short work of their owners, despite liberal use of carpet knives and empty Buckfast bottles as defensive tools, leaving bloody scraps of Kappa-clad flesh scattered over the yard.

It went on and on, an ever-growing parade of attacks involving every animal imaginable. Geldof stayed on YouTube for three hours the first day, finally signing off with a clip of rats streaming out of the River Clyde. The brown swarm scampered across the mosaic paving stones of the walkway and headed for the high-end flats reclaimed from the former docks. They climbed the walls and blue metal stanchions, throwing themselves against plate-glass balcony doors until they found an
open
window on a second-floor flat and poured in. Thirty seconds later a man came crashing through the glass in what seemed to be brown Y-fronts, although it was hard to tell since he was covered head-to-toe by rodents, allowing only occasional glimpses of pale Scottish flesh. He flipped up over the balcony and fell, shedding rats as he hit the concrete. There was no sound on the clip, but Geldof could almost hear the meaty thud.

By day two, the attacks had spread outside Glasgow. The most high-profile incident came when a cattle truck, destabilized by the animals’ thrashing about in the back, tipped over and crushed a Mini Metro on the M74. The resultant pile-up went back four miles. The battered and bloody beasts went on the rampage, killing a dozen drivers who had left their cars to rubberneck, before disappearing into the woods. Geldof also began to notice a pattern to the attacks. Many of them involved a bizarre inverse bestiality, with humans on the receiving end.

At first, the quarantine zone expanded to keep up with the virus, which news sites represented as a ripple spreading outwards at an exponentially increasing rate. The expanding front of the virus carried panic, and racial hatred, before it. Jittery police officers shot dead a Somali on the London Underground when he ran away from them holding a container that looked as if it could contain a virus. It turned out he was late for work and trying to catch the tube. The container was a thermos flask full of tea. Many of Britain’s immigrant population barricaded themselves at home as racial attacks rose, carried out by right-wing loons who thought anyone with a slight tan was a terrorist. Nadeem and his family had already left to stay with relatives in New York after a gang of baseball-capped thugs lobbed bricks through their window.

People split into three camps: those who rushed to the supermarket to frantically fill their trolley, prompting brawls over the last loaf of bread; those who hunkered down and hoped for the best; and those who piled into their cars and fled. The only silver lining came for airlines and the manufacturers of face masks, who saw business go through the roof. Across the land, Britons turned into Japanese tourists. They scurried to work with small white masks covering their noses and mouths, as though a flimsy piece of cloth could hold back such a monstrous virus should it mutate.

By day three, the government gave up trying to stay ahead of the virus, and instead sealed off Scotland with a new Hadrian’s Wall of armed forces ordered to blast the crap out of anything that tried to cross the border. All cattle were to be culled and people were urged to kill their pets, although Geldof couldn’t imagine pet-owners plunging bread knives into their furry little friends. He presumed most would do what his neighbours did and kick the animals out onto the streets, thus adding to the problem.

The army tried to evacuate as many people as possible from the area of the outbreak but often, as had been the case on Geldof’s street, ended up fighting pitched battles with slavering animals as the would-be evacuees dived for cover. And despite the army’s efforts to keep the main roads and motorways clear for themselves through roadblocks at on-ramps, there were too many vehicles to divert. Lines of cars stretched back for miles, caught in gridlock. The drivers were marched under escort to the nearest camp. Once the occupants had departed, bulldozers pushed the cars off the roads where possible, leaving tens of thousands of bashed and crumpled vehicles lying on their sides in fields and gardens.

As soon as it became clear that sealing Scotland had failed, all airports and ports in Britain were closed and the Prime Minister announced the pre-emptive evacuation of all major cities in England and Wales. From London to Cardiff, cities began to empty into camps the UN refugee agency was helping to set up. With the aid of Wikipedia, Geldof discovered that the idea for the ‘rest and reception’ camps had come post-9/11, when the government began to fear the possibility of a chemical or nuclear attack on a major city. But the plans had been designed to handle only one city at a time. Now a whole nation had to be corralled. There were just too many people.

There were also too many animals. After a little research, Geldof drew up a picture of the opposing forces. In the animal corner, there were 8.5 million cows, 36 million sheep, 5 million pigs, 1 million horses and ponies, 8 million dogs, 8 million cats and 60 million rats. Then there were other animals, wild and domesticated: deer, badgers, weasels, foxes, rabbits, wildcats and God knew how many exotic creatures kept in zoos and homes across the land. He popped in a conservative estimate of around 10 million for the unknowns, giving a total of 133.5 million animals on mainland Britain.

In the government corner, there were 113,000 regular soldiers, 35,000 Territorial Army and around 150,000 police, although less than five per cent of these officers were armed. Given that around 10,000 soldiers were in Afghanistan alone and others were stationed elsewhere around the world, Geldof optimistically put the total number of soldiers in Britain at around 100,000. Adding 7,000 armed cops – he didn’t see the others doing much damage with their truncheons – gave 107,000.

His final calculation revealed there were precisely 1,247.62
animals
for every armed member of the security forces. Even though the animals would not be carrying automatic weapons, the odds struck Geldof as skewed. In addition, many of these troops would have to be deployed at the camps, further weighting the ratio in favour of the animals. The UN Security Council was discussing sending in peacekeepers, but the British government wasn’t keen on having foreign troops on its soil. The speed the UN worked at meant half the country’s population would be dead by the time reinforcements arrived anyway.

Geldof was starting to get very depressed, so it was just as well that on the fifth day, as the virus reached the suburbs of London, the plug was abruptly pulled on his information source.

They were all gathered round the TV in the Alexanders’ living room, glued to the news. Their street had been relatively quiet for a few days. Sporadic gunfire, sometimes near, sometimes distant, continued – although the army had not returned – and half the neighbours had slipped away in their cars. The dead cows lay bloating in the street, releasing an acrid stench even ten sticks of Fanny’s super-strength sandalwood incense could not disguise.

James’s squirrel army had disappeared, probably either eaten or infected and roaming the streets searching for flesh to nibble, but the dead animals attracted feasting crows in their dozens, which Geldof found morbidly fascinating – a scene from the African plains in suburban Glasgow. Oddly, it seemed the virus didn’t affect birds: while four-legged friends became four-legged fiends, the nation’s chickens continued placidly to lay eggs in battery farms, while the sparrows and seagulls got on with coating statues and parked cars in streaky white shit. The only winged creatures involved in any attacks were bats.

But the corpses also brought round packs of infected cats and dogs, which had not lost their appetite despite the sores covering their bodies. That morning Geldof had been woken by the barking and snarling of dogs charging down the street in pursuit of something, or somebody. Geldof didn’t get up to look; he simply put his pillow over his head and cringed into the mattress.

The TV showed thousands of desperate people besieging Heathrow airport, pressing up against the police barricade and demanding entry. The crowd was too big to be contained and the front runners burst through, cramming into the revolving doors, which were turned off. More people pressed forward, yet the doors stayed obstinately still. The glass caved in. Those who weren’t trampled sprinted across the concourse to deserted check-in counters.

Fanny snorted. ‘What are they doing? They can’t fly the plane themselves.’

‘They’re panicking,’ Mary said.

‘Well, if more people lived like us, this wouldn’t be happening,’ Fanny responded.

David let loose a mighty sigh. ‘Not everyone can be as virtuous as you.’

Fanny sucked in her cheeks, sat up a little straighter and interlaced her fingers. Geldof sank deeper into the sofa as he realized that – after days of battling her addiction to lecturing David – she could no longer go without her fix.

‘Humanity is paying the price for its mistreatment of animals and the soulless way we rely on technology,’ she opined. ‘This virus is a product of technology. If everybody lived a simple life, growing their own produce—’

‘Oh, be quiet, woman,’ David interrupted. ‘We’ve had the
good
grace to let you come over here and watch our TV, a product of the modern world, and all you’ve done is moan. If you don’t like the modern world, piss off back to the Stone Age. I suppose you think terrorists are just misunderstood as well.’

‘Well, if the West hadn’t tried to spread its capitalist ideology in the Middle East, we wouldn’t be here, would we?’

‘Oh, fuck off, you stupid cow,’ David spat out. ‘They killed my cousin.’

Fanny, completely ignoring the opportunity to display some sensitivity, turned to her husband in outrage. ‘James, are you going to let him speak to me like that?’

Geldof looked at his father, who had sneaked in a few well-stuffed joints before they trooped over for the evening news bulletin. His only response to Fanny’s question was to open his half-lidded eyes a fraction wider.

Fanny, who could slice an apple in half from fifty metres with her tongue and didn’t need anybody to defend her, jumped to her feet. ‘You, sir, are a capitalist meat-junkie who is just as much to blame as the people who put the virus out there.’

‘What? It’s not my bloody fault. In fact, I’d bet fifty quid this virus wasn’t al-Qaeda. I bet your animal rights mates invaded a perfectly safe lab somewhere and let out an infected monkey,’ David said, also climbing to his feet.

‘Who do you think infected the monkey?’ Fanny retorted. ‘I’ll bet you one hundred pounds a scientist sliced off the top of the poor thing’s skull, with no anaesthetic, and jammed a needle full of bugs into its brain.’

‘So what? I suppose you think we shouldn’t experiment on monkeys to save lives. That monkey would probably have just sat about scratching its balls and drinking its own piss. Why not do something useful with it?’

‘I don’t think we’ve established this monkey exists,’ Geldof piped up, trying to steer them away from collision.

But Fanny and David had eyes and ears only for each other.

‘Why not experiment on you then?’ Fanny said. ‘You play with your balls enough and you certainly don’t do anything useful.’