Apocalypse Cow (24 page)

‘That might attract more animals,’ Lesley said.

‘Dump her in the cellar then,’ Mary replied.

‘That would buy us time,’ Terry acknowledged, ‘but our next
problem
is food. We’ve maybe got enough to last a few days. After that, we’re screwed.’

Now they have to realize it’s time to split
, Lesley thought.

David wasn’t going to play ball. ‘I’ve got an idea that solves both problems.’ He walked over to the doorway and nodded towards the shrouded body. ‘We eat her.’

‘David!’ Mary scolded. ‘That’s foul.’

‘Is it?’ he asked. ‘She’s dead. It’s not like we’re killing her. Loads of people have had to eat their dead to survive.’

‘People trapped in the mountains after a plane crash or stranded on a desert island!’ Mary exclaimed. ‘We have options.’

‘You mean starve in this hippie shit-hole or be ripped apart in the streets?’

David stared at Constance as though sizing up the prime cuts. ‘Nobody would blame us.’ He turned to his wife to make a direct appeal. ‘If I had died, I would want you to eat me.’

Suddenly Mary was on her feet. ‘What’s wrong with you? You’re ready for cannibalism after a week without meat?’

‘I can smell it everywhere,’ David said. ‘I get sick if I don’t have it.’

Mary narrowed her eyes. ‘Really? Do you know how many times I’ve slipped veggie mince into your shepherd’s pie and lasagne without you noticing?’

‘You didn’t.’

Mary nodded deliberately. David’s face went redder than a British tourist’s beer gut after a day passed-out drunk on a Spanish beach.

‘That’s out-fucking-rageous,’ he shouted. Even six feet away and shielded by Mary, Lesley had to lean back to avoid
getting
a saliva shower. ‘How could you do that to me?’

‘I had to do something to stop you clogging up your arteries. I wanted my boys to have a father when they were older.’ Mary’s voice turned frosty. ‘Now I’m not sure you’re the right man for the job.’

David lifted his hand, and for a split second Lesley thought he was going to slap his wife. Instead he reached out imploringly. Mary turned away and sat down.

‘What do you have in mind?’ she asked Terry.

David hovered briefly by the doorway and then walked out. The stairs creaked and then the bathroom door clicked.

Lesley glanced over at Terry, who was frowning deeply.

‘All I know is we need to get out of the country. But the airports and ports are closed, and the roads are probably blocked. I was thinking if we could get to the River Clyde, we could steal a boat and sail to Ireland or something.’

‘Can anybody sail?’ Mary asked.

There was silence.

‘That’s out then, unless anybody is keen to end up bobbing about on the Atlantic,’ Lesley said.

‘We could head for the Chunnel,’ Mary suggested.

‘The trains are off. Plus it’s a long way away,’ Terry objected.

‘We could drive down the railway lines, no traffic to deal with, and then drive or walk through the tunnel to France.’

Terry leaned back in his chair and rubbed his jaw. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’

‘Do you have a car?’ Lesley asked Mary.

‘Yes, a BMW. But we’d have to go into our house to get the keys. I’m not sure that’s safe.’

‘Well, we’ll have to do it. There are eight of us, assuming
David’s
coming and we can talk Geldof into it, so we’ll both need cars.’

‘The twins and I are coming,’ Mary said. ‘What David does is up to him.’

‘Fine. I suggest we leave first thing tomorrow morning,’ Terry replied. ‘We need the rest of the day to get organized.’

Mary got up to go to speak to the twins, leaving Terry and Lesley seated at the table. Lesley thought the plan sounded feasible. If they were in the car, the animals couldn’t get them and they could be in Paris in a few days. She could march into the offices of the
International Herald Tribune
, offer them the story, and then wait for the awards to start flooding in.

Her thoughts of journalistic acclaim were interrupted by Terry. ‘Let’s get the body into the cellar.’

‘Why? We’re leaving tomorrow anyway.’

‘Let’s just say I’d rather she was out of sight. Less temptation.’

Lesley remembered David’s solution to their food problem. ‘You don’t think he was serious, do you?’

‘Remember the hamster, that’s all I’m saying.’

Terry went through to the living room, and Lesley followed. She took the ankles, which were so thin she could have used one hand to grab them both, grimacing at how cold they felt. As they lifted the body, she caught movement in the corner of her vision. She looked over her shoulder and saw David, sitting at the top of the stairs. There was hunger in his eyes.

14

A midnight snack

Terry lay in the bath, which he had laboriously filled with water heated on the gas stove, scrubbing at his armpits. He had hidden the last piece of soap inside a crack in the bath’s plastic sheathing two days before, with little guilt. After all, he was the smelliest of the group and was really doing everyone else a favour. It was well after dark, and he really should have been sleeping since they were planning to hit the road at dawn. But this might be his last chance to wash for a few days.

The afternoon and evening had been spent preparing for the journey: packing their meagre food supplies and planning the logistics. Terry wondered to himself if they would make it out alive. Both cars had at least half a tank of fuel, so they would have time to figure out how and where to fill up again. He wasn’t sure if pumps were going to be working and was nervous about the safety of standing exposed on a forecourt while the tank slowly filled. The alternative was sucking petrol out of abandoned cars, which would likely be even more time-consuming and dangerous.

He at last pulled himself out of the bath, dried off and pulled on a fresh pair of James’s boxers and a T-shirt. He was creeping downstairs, trying not to wake the others, when he heard a rhythmic rubbing, like sawing without the rasp. Terry didn’t like the wet undertone to the sound. He crossed to the armchair, stepping over the sleeping twins, and picked up the poker. The kitchen knife was gone. He had a horrible feeling he knew exactly where it was.

He tiptoed to the hallway. The cellar door was ajar, allowing the ominous rubbing to float up to the ground floor. A faint light flickered from below. Terry slipped through the door and felt for the first step. He inched his way down and edged his head round the corner just as the rubbing gave way to a wet rip.

There, in the middle of the cellar, was a scene right out of a satanic ritual, albeit one involving an anally obsessed occult group. Constance’s body was lying face down on the dusty concrete in the middle of a circle of tea-light candles. Her skirt, tights and pants were yanked down to her ankles, exposing a scrawny buttock blotched purple with pooled blood. Where the other one should have been was a bloody hole. David knelt above the body, kitchen knife in hand. From his other hand dangled the severed cheek. Terry let out a soft grunt of disgust.

David snapped his head up. Terry couldn’t read his expression – his eye sockets were buried in shadow.

‘I’m going to cook it,’ David said hoarsely, as if fifteen minutes of vigorous frying and a dash of salt made eating human flesh a completely reasonable thing to do.

Terry descended the last step, feeling he was entering a vortex of madness, and crept towards his cousin, who backed
away
, clutching the hunk of meat to his chest. There was a cornered look in his eye. Terry knew from experience that cornered animals could do desperate things – as though slicing off an old woman’s stringy buttock didn’t already classify as pretty damn desperate. Terry suspected their faux-family connection wasn’t going to cut much mustard with David, who had gone very wrong.

‘Come on, David: hand over the knife and the bum cheek,’ Terry said in the babying voice he employed to entice particularly frantic pigs to sit still and be stunned.

‘She doesn’t need it,’ David responded, his fingers digging further into the chunk of meat. ‘Her sitting days are over.’

‘Come on. We’re leaving in the morning. In a few days we’ll be in France and you can eat a whole horse if it takes your fancy. You don’t want to do this.’

David backed out of the circle of candles into the shadows. All Terry could see was light dancing on the knife blade and a faint image of bared teeth.

‘It’s too dangerous out there,’ David said. ‘We’re staying right here.’

‘What do you mean: “we”?’

‘What kind of father would I be if I took my boys out into that fucking madhouse? This …’

He wafted the slab of meat out into the circle of light.

‘… and the rest of her can keep us going until the army arrives.’

Terry shook his head. ‘You think turning the boys into cannibals is going to win you a Father of the Year award? Give me the knife, or I’ll take it.’

When David didn’t respond, Terry took several fast steps forward. The knife slashed out of the shadows, whipping
inches
past the end of his nose. It was probably only intended as a warning, but Terry decided to end it before things got out of hand. He leapt into the shadows, gauging the location of David’s forearm from the glint of candlelight on steel, and whacked the poker down. The blade clattered to the floor as David let loose a scream and lashed out instinctively with his other hand. Several pounds of old lady buttock slapped Terry across the ear. Stringy or not, the cheek was chunky enough to momentarily knock him off balance. He recovered quickly and grabbed the meat from David’s raised hand, trying and failing not to think about what he was holding, and threw it over his shoulder.

David dropped to all fours and scuttled along the ground in pursuit of the steak, giving Terry the opportunity to leap on his back and twist his arm.

‘Give it up, nutbag,’ he told David.

‘You’ll get it dirty,’ David wailed, twisting his neck to see where the buttock had landed. When he couldn’t stretch round far enough, he flopped face down in the dust and began to cry.

‘I really don’t need this shit,’ Terry said. He released David’s arm and picked up the kitchen knife. ‘I’m going to forget I saw this, and you are getting some serious counselling when we reach civilization.’

Just as he was bending over to help David to his feet, the whisper of footsteps sounded behind him. He turned to see the twins, both carrying planks of wood scooped up from a pile of timber near the bottom of the steps.

‘Don’t worry, it’s all over,’ Terry explained. ‘Your dad was just—’

Terry didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence, in which
he
was going to gloss over the insanity by claiming David and he had been fighting off infected rats, which had neatly nibbled off the professor’s left cheek before scampering away in face of the two men’s heroic efforts to preserve the dead woman’s dignity.

‘Help!’ David, the ungrateful bastard, yelled. ‘He’s trying to kill me!’

Terry realized he was standing over his prostrate cousin with a bloody kitchen knife in hand and a carved-up corpse three feet away from him. He was also aware the twins had a penchant for mindless violence – they were almost expelled from primary school when they discovered that if you soaked a cat in petrol, set fire to it and hurled it yowling into the air, it served as a cheap replacement for fireworks. This was a perfect opportunity for them to indulge their hobby.

He had just enough time to roll to the left and dodge the first blow. The second plank was already whistling through the air, though, and he could do nothing to stop it crunching against his skull. He fell sideways, staring into Constance’s dead eyes as his consciousness drained away.

When Terry’s eyes opened, grey morning light was seeping in through the barred window that let out onto the small front garden. Memories of the struggle flooded back. He groaned.

What am I, Captain Fucking Captured?
he thought.

He tried to lift a hand to his head, only to find his wrists had been tied behind him. His legs were similarly bound. The only sign of the professor’s body was the streaky mark left where her cheek had landed during the tussle. At least Terry was not alone during this particular return from unconsciousness: Geldof and Lesley were sitting with their backs against
concrete
pillars. The boy had a black eye, still in the early stages of blooming, while Lesley looked as though she was ready to scratch somebody’s eyes out. They were both trussed.

‘I guess you’re not the rescue party then,’ Terry remarked.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Lesley asked. ‘One minute I was asleep, the next those evil little twins were tying me up – and having a sneaky fondle at my tits while they were doing it, might I add. Bloody teenage boys.’ She turned to Geldof. ‘That means you as well!’

‘What did I do?’ he asked.

‘Never mind,’ she muttered.

‘What about James?’ Terry asked. ‘And Mary?’

‘James was still doing a great impression of a cabbage last time I checked. I didn’t see Mary. Somebody want to tell me what’s going on?’