Joseph D'Lacey - Meat

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.