Joseph D'Lacey - Meat

She stood staring through the record card for several long moments, no longer taking in the information typed there. A little layer of the disturbed dust settled on the gleaming folders and when she returned the file to its proper position the dust was trapped there by her replacing of the box lid.

A small delivery truck took Snipe back to the MMP factory. There was nowhere to sit and the space was not high enough for him to stand. These were the smallest of his discomforts.

The stumps of his fingers and the spaces where his thumbs had been were cauterised shut by Cleaver’s white hot irons. If nothing else, the man had worked with tremendous speed, clipping digits at the knuckles and sealing them in seconds. The pain had been a revelation. Where his testicles had been, metal staples held the remains of his scrotum closed. Pinkish drool seeped from his mouth: he had no teeth left.

He could see the clear plasma that still welled at his finger joints, and the drips of still warm blood that dropped from his crotch to the floor of the wagon. Staples also held closed the wound in his throat but that was the least painful of them all. The dirt from the bed of the truck was getting into the blackened ends where his big toes used to be and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

The truck bounced over the barely maintained country roads that led out to Magnus’s plant, swerving to miss potholes and lurching over lumps and subsidence. Snipe was thrown against the walls and dashed to the floor many times and there was no way to stop himself without causing more agony.

The truck slowed and turned and he knew he had arrived at the main gate. He heard voices outside – the driver showing his card to the security guard. And then the truck moved on more slowly.

When the back doors opened he was looking into the slaughterhouse crowd pens. A ramp led from the truck to the slaughterhouse floor and a larger ramp led from there down into the pen. It was full of the Chosen, milling and jostling very gently, almost caressing as they swirled among each other.

Cattle. Cows. How swiftly we are made the same.

Some of them saw him and stopped moving. Soon the entire herd was still.

A burning electrical sting on his buttock sent Snipe stumbling down both ramps and he was amongst them. Their eyes took him in. Their noses testing the air he brought with him. Many of them shrank away. He saw their eyes differently now. These were eyes like his.

My God, what’s behind them? What are they thinking?

It was impossible to tell.

He was frightened to move forward but gates closed behind him, forcing him on. He limped on incomplete feet to be among them but they parted whenever he came near and turned their backs to him. Hundreds of smooth bodies, fatter than his and somehow more beautiful. They stayed away from him, would not let him touch them. He looked at his own body and then looked at theirs. They were larger, more whole-looking even with their amputations. They were serene.

He heard the hissing, sighing sounds they made and it sounded like language in a way it never had before. He tried to speak to them but at the sound of his hissing, their faces became twisted and ugly as though he’d done no more than scratch a fork across a blackboard.

My name’s Snipe. Greville Snipe. I work … I used to work in the dairy. I took care of the cows there. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.

They backed away, his whispers making no impression.

Dear Father, I am not even worthy of cattle. They will not accept me as their own. What am I Lord? What have I become?

The steel gates pressed against his back and he could not resist. The metal pushed him into the ranks of animals. Yet still they parted, none of them allowing closeness. He was alone among the Chosen for he was not Chosen.

Out of their ranks, a bull appeared. It dwarfed Snipe in height and width. As a dairyman he’d never been so close to one before. He knew their reputation though. Between the bull’s legs a huge pizzle swung and below it the biggest pair of testicles Snipe had ever seen. The bull was layered with fat but the giant musculature was visible beneath it. It locked eyes with Snipe and he looked down and away. He wasn’t even as alive as this creature now. The bull’s bulk was terrifying, even through the pain of his trauma and injuries.

It gestured to Snipe with a flick of its enormous bald head. The meaning was clear.

Snipe edged forward and the cattle in the crowd pen opened before him. The bull stepped in behind, giving him no choice but to keep moving. His body, remembering only the intrusion of blades and the biting of clippers and the yanking of pliers, moved onward. He had no strength to turn and fight the bull and even if he had he no longer felt the self-worth it would take to stand firm. The crowd pen narrowed until it became a corridor and then a chute. He saw a cow step forwards into an alcove and then the alcove slid out of view. An empty one appeared in its place.

Snipe hesitated and turned. The bull was right behind him. Nowhere to go but forwards. He took a few more hesitant steps and stopped again, his body refusing to do what was required of it. The alcove disappeared and another took its place. And another.

A shout came from somewhere outside the pen.

‘What the fuck’s going on in that crowd pen? Get these fucking animals moving. That’s two – no, wait – three misses in a row. Come on, lads, keep them moving.’

A new alcove appeared. The bull stepped forwards and pushed Snipe into it.

He saw the blood on the floor as the alcove began to move forwards leaving the bull and the crowd pen behind. A steel frame settled over him, locking him into a standing position and preventing him from turning his head. The alcove stopped with a jolt.

A small rectangular hatch slid open and he saw the face of a man he vaguely recognised from the staff canteen. The man’s eyes were somehow blind. He lifted a gun to Snipe’s forehead.

I am meat.

Jones was a new bolt gunner and it was an insult that he had to put up with empty restrainers. How was a guy supposed to get a bonus if the filers didn’t do their job? The panel opened and finally he had a cow to whack. He glimpsed the eyes for a fraction of a second and thought they looked familiar.

‘God is supre—’

He realised this one was not Chosen and cut the blessing short.

He pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled smoothly.

Hiss. Clunk.

They all looked so similar.

Bob Torrance was incensed at the speed of the chain. Something was going on in the crowd pens but he couldn’t tell what.

He bawled as he descended from his steel balcony:

‘What’s the problem?’

A stockman with a cattle prod shouted back from the pens:

‘Delivery from Magnus, boss. It’s taken care of now.’

Torrance nodded to himself as he reached the factory floor. Magnus’s deliveries always fucked with the chain speed but there was nothing he could do about it. Tomorrow he’d move the new boy further along the chain and get Ice Pick back on the bolt gun to make up lost time. Every second counted. The demand for meat rose every day as the population of the town grew and it was up to Torrance to see they got what they needed. At least, that was what everyone believed. Torrance was paid to believe it too.

He marched past Jones to the bleeding station. There was always a backlog here. Between stunning and exsanguination cattle were hung by their ankles in loops of chain that hung from a giant steel runner. The runner was like a well-greased curtain rail suspended from the factory ceiling. The cattle swung upside down along this runner from one station to the next as they were broken down into food and by-products. The first port of call was the bleeding station.