Free Cows by Matthew Stokoe

in their sadism.
    The men started to make loud mooing noises, shaking their heads and bellowing deep in their chests, bringing their lips into tight O’s. Steven did the same and they all moved faster and the cow’s guts began to slosh.
    When he came, spurting into the soggy viscera of the cow, he wanted to scream. He wanted to scream in a white-hot burst words that would burn away this sin he had so greedily allowed himself to participate in. But his lungs were childhood-nightmare-paralyzed as the monster races in from the hole in the wall and heads slavering for the bed and you want to yell but your body just won’t do what you tell it to and you’re gonna die if you don’t make some sort of sound so you arch yourself until only the back of your head and your heels still touch the mattress … but it doesn’t do any good.
    So Steven flipped back onto the floor and blacked out.

CHAPTER SEVENTEN

    I t was dark. Consciousness crept back in tattered gray rags, a piece at a time, worn thin during its absence. His eyes were closed. He felt the weight of his back on the cold concrete floor, felt the weight of a black waiting silence pressing him into it. Time passed, large bodies shifted and made the air around him move, deep voices muttered vaguely. He opened his eyes, blinked, pushed himself up on an elbow. The muttering grew louder and shadows closed in. A soft hoof prodded his hip.
    “Told you it’d fuck you up.”
    The cow from the vent.
    Steven stood up in a circle of cows, lightheaded and dizzy, while a single set of hooves clopped away to the edge of the slaughter room and made the lights come on. Cow faces pushed at him, a dozen, brown and pied and black. Trying to see into him like there was something they needed to know.
    He squinted in the sudden brightness. The rest of the slaughter room was empty. It was late night, the men had gone. The brittle halogen light filled the room with memories of killing. He felt ill.
    “You have a good time this afternoon? Do what Mister Cripps wanted you to?”
    He bent at the waist and vomited.
    “Oh dear. Thought it was going to make you a big strong man like all the other guys. Don’t look like it right now. Tell me, man, did you enjoy killing us?”
    Steven didn’t answer.
    “You’re lucky we got the charity to dig up reasons for what you did. We could take your life away, motherfucker.”
    The cow rocked sideways, breathing heavily through its nose, but Steven did not feel threatened. There was more to this gathering than retribution.
    “Come on, man, climb up, we’re going for a ride.”
    “Where to?”
    “Just get on.”
    What choice was there in the middle of this posse? Steven swung himself weakly over the Guernsey’s wide back and lay flat, close to its neck, as if the life in this animal could warm away the deaths of the others.
    They clattered past the empty holding pen to a vent with a grille that hung open on a single screw. Each cow got down and slid through the hole on its stomach, grunting and cursing, heaving its bulk into the space beyond. The lights in the slaughter room went out and the last cow pulled the grille back into place.
    The group moved fast along the duct. Shiny sheet steel bounced their reflections back at them in ripples, golden from the low-watt maintenance bulbs that poked into the gloom every ten yards. Steven clung to the Guernsey, the breeze of their passage blowing his hair. The cows moved with a loping synchronization, gathering momentum, merging to a single kinetic mass. There was joy in their motion, revelry in speed, grace for big bodies clumsy at rest.
    Two hundred yards on, the group turned through a rent in the steel cladding and plunged like a roller coaster down a crudely gouged tunnel, into a labyrinth of passages and chambers. Hooves rang loud on stone floors and the cows ripped out long trumpeting bellows.
    Despite the still clinging horror of the slaughter room, Steven was awed.
    “What is this place?” He had to