Parson Mary Simonson’s trip to the far end of the records office took her deep into territory where the dust had remained undisturbed for years, possibly decades. There was rarely a reason for anyone to go back there and very few Welfare workers had clearance in the first place. White-haired Whittaker, the records officer, and his clerk, Rawlins, were paid to keep accurate records not clean the place. It showed. Her feet scuffed trails in the dust and her robes swept the linoleum. She had to lift up her hems to keep from taking all the grime with her.
It was no different with the cardboard archive boxes. Disturbing them created clouds of irritating particles that made her choke and sneeze. Following the spasms of her airways, more clouds were created. She wanted to give up. There was dust in her hair and in her eyes and ears. Dust all over her clothes. But by then she’d found the box containing surnames beginning with S in the year that she was curious about. There was no reason not to continue. She could satisfy her question and get out of there. Get away and get clean. She put her thick red sleeve across her nose and mouth and removed the lid from the archive box.
Inside, the manila folders became the brightest, newest things in the entire records hall. They almost glowed. Glad she’d persevered, she walked her fingers through to Shanti and pulled the file. Inside there was no birth entry as she’d expected. Instead, the record of the death of a child named Richard Arnold Shanti. The boy had suffocated during labour and was stillborn to his mother Elizabeth Mary Shanti.
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.