Cows by Matthew Stokoe Read Free Book Online Page B

halogen spot above the grabber. Steven could see the thickness of the paint, and the minute shadow this thickness cast on the scratched patches of bare metal. The slaughterman helped him guide it to a new cow, his hands were hard and crusted with blood.
    Everything narrowed down. Steven saw the muzzle of the gun and a tight oval of light brown hide immediately beyond it. There was nothing else. The activity of the slaughter room rolled away like stage scenery into some distant other world and he was alone with white noise hissing in his ears.
    In this blurring, roaring cocoon he felt the weight of the gun, and he felt Cripps against his back, arms circling to the front of his pants, unzipping, pulling down.
    Then Cripps was in him, pounding at his ass, whispering encouragements he couldn’t understand but which filled his head with a mounting pressure, and the gun felt more real than anything he had ever touched. He had both hands on it and Cripps’s breath hot on his neck, and he knew the cow was pissing on the floor with the agony of the stretching seconds and then … time … stopped … Until something sucked away every sound that had ever been made and the world zeroed to aching curled fingers and the shadow of the gun on the cow’s skull and he pulled the trigger as Cripps shrieked somewhere a long way off and sprayed seed into his ass.
    Slumped over the guardrail. The end-of-shift horn sounded dimly out in the process hall. Steven felt the flaccid length of Cripps’s withdrawal and opened his eyes to the twitching, fallen carcass of the cow and its dark collar of blood. Strong arms pulled him upright, tearing the white crepe of his half-faint, shunting him back to the din and the killing and the mad, channeled exertion of the slaughter room.
    “That’s it, boy, breathe deep, breathe deep.”
    Cripps’s voice was gentle as he led him to the observation platform overlooking the slaughter floor.
    “Lie down.”
    Steven curled himself on the concrete, looking down on the men who still appeared to be working despite the end of the shift. Cripps sat beside him, touching his shoulder.
    “The nausea is normal, it will pass. Your body is reacting to change. You have killed, you have started to learn.”
    The work on the slaughter floor had changed. The men stood close to a single cow held helpless in a grabber, passing around an instrument like an apple corer. Each in his turn used the serrated steel circle to cut a hole in the side of the animal. Blood ran down the curve of its belly and pooled between its feet, but it remained conscious and standing, bellowing its humiliation to unseen cow gods who couldn’t be bothered to answer.
    The room went dark at the edges and Steven felt again a tightening of vision that excluded everything but the spotlit cow and the crowding men. Gummy had appeared from somewhere and was bent close to the animal’s hindquarters.
    When all the holes were cut the slaughtermen pulled out thick, hard cocks and stuffed them into the wounds. Steven watched buttocks clench. Three men on either side, linking arms over the back of the cow to counterweight their thrusts.
    “Do you see, boy, that you still have some way to go? Your killing was a stumbling first step. These men have learned to run.”
    “Gummy … ?” Steven’s lips felt numb, it was an effort to speak.
    Cripps laughed quietly and sneered. “No, not Gummy. We give him this as charity.”
    Steven’s eyes were heavy but he kept watching. Down on the floor, while the men rammed in and the cow screamed, Gummy, his open mouth sucking the animal’s ass, slid a cattle prod into its cunt and triggered the electric charge. The cow’s rear legs lifted off the ground and Gummy fell backward under a blast of shit, vomiting in rapture.
    The slaughtermen hung on and moved faster, blood on thighs and stomachs, howling through corded necks until one of them fired a boltgun and made the beast close like a fist and all six of them shot seed