Free Apocalypse Cow by Michael Logan Page A

legs, formed an ever-closing semicircle around him. Ketchup, mingled with blood, dripped from sharp teeth that had grown on the top and bottom halves of the buns. The first burger, the one he had been so keen to eat, reached him and, with a wink, sank its teeth into his ankle.
    He woke with his own scream echoing in his ears, and lay on the bed until his heart rate had slowed down. All thought of sleep gone, he swung his legs off the bed and stared past the orange street lights strung up the road to the dark hills just beyond the end of the suburbs. Somewhere out there, the cows were waiting. And they were hungry.

6
     
    In the doghouse
     
    Lesley slouched at her desk, sluggishly typing up a story on road accident figures. It was the kind of dull piece she would normally churn out in an hour, but she had spent three on it. Even if the previous day had brought only redundancy, her motivation level would have been so low a cockroach would struggle to squeeze under it. But the tip-off was also pulling her mind away from the task at hand.
    She had played the recording at least ten times, constantly changing her mind about its authenticity. On the first listen, she heard chuckling in the background. On the second, the chuckles became rustling paper. On the third, she became convinced Professor Martin was Colin affecting an accent. And so on. She had to resort to quaffing a bottle of red wine to quell her buzzing mind and get some sleep.
    Colin’s scoop about the abattoir attack being a virus released by al-Qaeda had gone up on the website the previous evening, and was splashed all over the front page this morning. On the one hand, she could take the story as a sign the tip-off was real, since it matched the supposed fake information Colin was being fed. Then again, he could easily have slipped the terrorist angle into a fake tip-off to make her pursue the story.
    On top of that, al-Qaeda actually had claimed responsibility through an audio message on a renowned Islamist website. And the police had raided two mosques in the Shawlands district of Glasgow, arresting sixteen people. But al-Qaeda could just be opportunistically attaching its name to the incident to spread fear without having to go to the trouble of doing anything, and the government could just be looking for scapegoats, as Brown had intimated they would.
    It didn’t help that she and Colin had been exchanging looks all morning. Either he was looking at her to see if she had taken the bait, or he was looking at her because she was looking at him to see if he was looking at her to see if she had taken the bait.
    ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Just make a decision.’
    She walloped the full-stop key, and then rose to go outside for a cigarette.
    ‘PMT?’ Colin asked as she stomped past his desk.
    ‘Go stick your cock in a blender.’
    ‘I’ll take that as a “yes” then,’ he called after her.
    Lesley lit up in the alley, blew out a long stream of smoke and watched a stray tabby rake through the bin bags. The cat had unearthed three tins of Tennent’s Super Lager, a used condom and a jumble of shredded paper, but it wasn’t satisfied with its haul. It stuck its head deep between the bags. There was a squeak, and Lesley expected to see the little hunter emerge with a mouse between its teeth. Instead, the cat squirmed out and streaked down the alley. A rat the size of a rabbit burst from the rubbish, scattering the beer cans with a flick of its fat pink tail. It had cat fur stuck between its protruding front teeth. Lesley yelped and pressed herself against the wall as the rat raced off after the yowling cat.
    ‘I hate this city,’ she said, and took a long, mournful drag on her cigarette.
    Smoking usually helped her think, but the two packets she had puffed away in a nervous frenzy since the previous afternoon had only left her throat raw. She took another drag and let it out in a sigh that ended in a hacking cough. In her position, Charles McBrien