‘God is supre—’
He realised this one was not Chosen and cut the blessing short.
He pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled smoothly.
Hiss. Clunk.
They all looked so similar.
Bob Torrance was incensed at the speed of the chain. Something was going on in the crowd pens but he couldn’t tell what.
He bawled as he descended from his steel balcony:
‘What’s the problem?’
A stockman with a cattle prod shouted back from the pens:
‘Delivery from Magnus, boss. It’s taken care of now.’
Torrance nodded to himself as he reached the factory floor. Magnus’s deliveries always fucked with the chain speed but there was nothing he could do about it. Tomorrow he’d move the new boy further along the chain and get Ice Pick back on the bolt gun to make up lost time. Every second counted. The demand for meat rose every day as the population of the town grew and it was up to Torrance to see they got what they needed. At least, that was what everyone believed. Torrance was paid to believe it too.
He marched past Jones to the bleeding station. There was always a backlog here. Between stunning and exsanguination cattle were hung by their ankles in loops of chain that hung from a giant steel runner. The runner was like a well-greased curtain rail suspended from the factory ceiling. The cattle swung upside down along this runner from one station to the next as they were broken down into food and by-products. The first port of call was the bleeding station.
The bleeder’s job was to sever the neck of each cow from throat to neck-bone and push it along the runner. A broad trough caught the drainings from the Chosen and funnelled it into collecting vats. Later the blood was used in making MMP black pudding. The delay between stunning and reaching the bleeding station sometimes resulted in the Chosen regaining consciousness before their throats were cut but there was no way around this. It had always been a weak area of the chain.
Of the seven Chosen that were hanging waiting for the bleeder’s knife three were twitching. The movement reminded Torrance of escape artists that hung upside down in straight jackets and chains, trying to get free within a time limit. The cattle were going nowhere though. It was merely residual impulses travelling down the nerve pathways from brain to body and was a sign that death had occurred. It was when they started to breathe again – making their rhythmic hisses and sighs – that was the sign of the bolt gunner getting it wrong or sometimes just a particularly strong animal refusing to die quickly.
A fourth carcass shuddered and its ribcage expanded and contracted spastically. Torrance shrugged; it wouldn’t last long after the knife. Looking more closely he saw the damage on the reviving animal. Its finger stumps were black and red and castration could only recently have been performed. The heel tag still trickled blood back towards its knee. So, this was the Magnus delivery. The thing, neither Chosen nor human, began to struggle by pumping its pelvis backwards and forwards. It nudged the stunned cattle on either side of it causing ripples through the bodies. The swaying caused the body to turn on its chain and Torrance saw the thing’s face.
He knew the man, of course, though it was difficult to place him now that he was bald. The hole in his forehead had bled freely so there was a slick of gore drying both above and below it making a mask of the face. Torrance thought back and remembered the rumours that had been coming out of the dairy for the last few weeks. Someone there had been getting a little too close to the milkers. Now he remembered. Greville Snipe; the best dairyman MMP had employed for years. Torrance shook his head to himself. What a shame the man had overstepped the boundaries. Devaluing stock was the stupidest, most dangerous thing anyone – MMP employee or otherwise – could do. It was suicidal. Snipe appeared to have found that out for himself. Well, almost; he wasn’t quite finished yet.
Snipe’s shocked eyes focussed on Torrance but the slow spiralling of the chain twisted his strange gaze away. The sound of runner bearings sliding in their housings brought Torrance back from his musings. The bleeder was pulling Snipe into position. Snipe hissed at the man – it was Burridge on the bleed this shift – and Burridge drew the knife across his muted throat. Torrance watched Snipe’s eyes widen, white orbs surrounded by blackening blood, and the hissing became a bubbling. Burridge swung Snipe away to bleed out over the trough. There the motorised section of the chain caught hold of his loop on the runner and hauled him, gently swinging, onward. By the time he reached the scalding vats that would loosen his skin for removal, he would be eight pints lighter.
His struggles continued.
Fascinated, Torrance forgot his inspection tour and followed Snipe’s progress across the trough. What had begun as a gushing fountain was already slowing to a leak. Snipe’s body was as pale now as the milk of the Chosen. Steam rose and bubbles burst on the boiling surface of the scalding vats. Snipe’s eyes still swivelled in his head. The only place in his body that could possibly contain blood now would be his head. That, thought Torrance, was the only explanation for why Snipe was still alive. Could any creature – man, Chosen or otherwise – be so terrified of death that it would will itself to survive through all this? Snipe tried to bend away from the roiling water below him but there was no strength in his muscles.
The automated runner dropped him headlong into the vat. Torrance stepped back from the splash. Four seconds later, the runner drew his body up again, the skin now reddened and loose. Snipe’s boiled eyes no longer moved in their sockets but here and there, his muscles twitched and jumped and Torrance knew it was no simple nerve impulse.
The wide wound in his neck had congealed in the water, the blood turning grey and gelatinous. Snipe’s head flapped from the end of his body and the wound looked like the mouth of an inverted puppet.
Torrance had stopped walking.
Now it will be over. Now. Surely.
Snipe had reached the spinning blade that would remove his head. Torrance didn’t care what kind of willpower the ex-dairyman had, when the steel slipped through the vertebrae of his neck that would be the end. Unusually, Torrance felt a wash of relief. He massaged his forehead with one rough hand and marched along the rest of the chain to make his hourly inspection.
He found it difficult to concentrate.
That night Parson Mary Simonson ate tripe to ease the pains in her stomach.
For a while they abated but less than an hour after her meal, the stabbing returned. She felt that the Father was punishing her for something but she could not understand what it was she had done, or not done, to deserve his ire. She followed the flesh codes as written in the sacred texts; she enforced Welfare upon as many in the town as her working days would allow. It hadn’t been easy recently with rumours of a heretical messiah coming from every quarter. All this she did faithfully and still the Father sought to make her suffer. The pain in her stomach was a ball of jagged glass. Thrusting her fist deep into the flesh there seemed to quell it a little.
She lived alone, as all Parsons of the Welfare were required to do and so her evenings were her own to do with what she pleased. She liked it that way. Something about the idea of a man lounging in the house from night until morning and the incessant tug of noisy children made her uncomfortable. Better to be alone. Better to serve the Father in every moment that she was able.
That night, instead of embroidering, she sat down with her books and read the scriptures. Perhaps, she thought, I’ve been embroidering too much after work and not spending enough time meditating on the sacredness of the flesh. Perhaps that is the reason the Father gives me this pain.