They took each ready calf from its crate and laid it on a stretcher. None of them had the musculature necessary to stand straight or walk. They could barely support the weight of their own heads. The only strength they had was in the four short fingers of each hand, fingers that had become their tongues. Because the calves were kept in near blackness every day, the lights in the veal yard were always dimmed. Even so it must have been like looking directly at the sun for them. Two stockmen would haul them out onto the sawdust and then roll them onto a stretcher face up. The calves would struggle to hide their half-blind eyes. The low hissing and tapping would increase all around the yard as the stockmen ferried the helpless calves to Shanti.
All it took to stop the calves struggling to protect their head or wriggle away was a couple of weighted belts laid over their arms and legs.
One thing was the same:
The bolt gun.
Same design. Same recoil. Same noise.
A wedge on either side of the head was enough to stop the calves from shaking Shanti’s target. He was fairly certain that after only a few seconds in the light they could still not see. Therefore they could not see him. This was scant consolation because he could see them. He could look into their eyes as he killed them. All he saw were the curious, trusting eyes of children.
He couldn’t stand there thinking about what he had to do. He couldn’t allow the other stockmen to interpret his hesitancy as a sign of fear or weakness. Nor could he allow the calves to suffer the torment of anticipation a second longer than necessary. All the same every muscle in his body resisted his mind’s programming to apply the pneumatic gun to the centre of the forehead and pull the trigger. But he did it for the sake of speeding the little ones on their way and for the sake of saving his own skin a little longer.
‘God is supreme. The flesh is sacred.’
Hiss. Clunk.
Immediate rolling of the eyes to show pure white. A tension tightening up their soft, fatty bodies followed by the spastic jerks of confused, dying muscles working against each other. Then stillness. And with it relief.
At least for Shanti.
But it didn’t stop then. One calf an hour meant that Shanti accompanied the calf on its journey from wholeness and life into dismemberment and disembowelment. His stockmen hauled them up by their ankles and Shanti bled them with a sure, single stroke of steel across their voiceless throats; between the juvenile Adam’s apple and chin, straight back to the neck bones. A single small vat collected the blood for very holy Welfare rituals.
Shanti walked the hoisted, bled calf down to the scalding vats to remove their skin. He pulled their bodies on motorless runners, assisted in the skinning, beheaded them by hand, helped to gut them, quarter them and bone them out. Shanti even knew how to create the most prized veal cuts from either side of the lumbar vertebrae. Other stockmen dealt with the hands, feet and heads. He let them sort the offal themselves too. But he was still with the calves when there was nothing left but bones to one side and fresh cuts to the other.
All the while the veal yard was filled with low percussion on steel panels and harsh, muffled breathing as row upon row of calves fed, grew, waited their turn. He could hear them.
He learned their tongue.
We are soft for their points and edges, they said.We yield before them and we give ourselves. We are brothers through walls, brothers in darkness, prized above all others. Then one might speak alone. Brothers, I feel the fear that we all will one day feel. Surely my time comes. Strengthen me, brothers, for I go to give. And all would reply. Brother you go to give and truly we go with you. For, in time, we shall all go. We are with you brother. Trust those we serve for they will give you swift release. We have all heard it come, the end. A sharp hiss here followed by an abrupt tap mimicking the noise of the bolt gun. Then a shivering, faltering beat upon the panels as stumps of fingers imitated the nerve shudders of the brain-shocked calves. A soft scraping to mark the sound of chains hoisting a body, a HHHaaa, signifying the sweep of the bleeder’s blade. Incomplete digits pattering first the gush and then the dwindling trickle of blood from the calf’s neck wound.
And so it went. Their trusting acceptance of their situation and their deep commitment to each other’s emotional safety in all matters. They used their language to touch each other because their hands and arms could not.
We are with you. Here we are.
They said that so often.
None of it escaped him. He lived in the world of the Chosen veal calves while the stockmen around him lived in the world of the plant, their workaday jobs, their top wages and their families.
Vile.
Every last one of the meat-eating townsfolk was ignorant, vicious filth. They were the ones who should be slaughtered – at two hundred an hour, if only that were possible.
Yes and Bob Torrance should be first in line.
At three in the morning by the town bell they moved, silent as shadows yet full of light.
He took them all with him, wanting their numbers to be worth more than their might. He knew the best place to enter the facility’s grounds, far from the main gates where the truckloads of stinking intestines arrived for processing. They slipped through the badly maintained fences and he led them from one station to another, fairly certain which would be manned at night and which would not. They padded between storage tanks and chimneys, under wormlike ducts and around the edges of industrial blocks.
Where they found men they silenced them with non-lethal blows. The control room demanded more skill as they were forced to enter single file. The followers were strong, the struggle brief. When the operators lay quiet John Collins cut the power.
In the yards of the facility they took what tools they could find – wrenches, axes, cutters, screwdrivers and hammers and wreaked as much chaos as they could. Metal on metal made more noise than flesh on flesh. Time was short. He made sure he voided the stored gas tanks and cut every power line. They moved the unconscious operators out to the safety of the main gates, set a fire in the control room and left.
They were back in the depths of the Derelict Quarter with dawn yet to break when the first tanks exploded.
When she first regained consciousness she didn’t understand where she was. Why was she lying on a cot in a bare room with stained white walls? What was the last thing she could remember? Who she was – even that presented a problem.
Slowly, it came back.
The rows and rows of shelves and stacks of cardboard boxes, the smell of dusty decay, the feeling that there was something important she needed to find. This filmy recollection was interrupted by anxiety. Why didn’t she recognise this room? How had she come to be here? Her mind had lost its flexibility, pathways of memory hit sharp corners or dead ends. She started to remember and then found herself back at the beginning.
Here, in this dirty white room.
Each trip into memory brought her a little closer, though. She was a Parson. Parson Mary Simonson. She was investigating something.
Someone.
‘Damn it.’
It wouldn’t come.
She was surprised to find the mere effort of trying to think had caused a sweat to break on her upper lip, under her arms. Her face felt hot.
She tried to sit up but her head was a weight her neck barely supported. She managed to get a small way up and tried to use her elbows to push up further. The attempt made her triceps shudder with strain. Halfway up she was overcome with dizziness. Her elbows slid from under her and she collapsed back. Nausea followed the dizziness. The bed inverted itself. She gripped the thin, damp mattress with shaking hands. Over it turned until she was upside down, the ceiling the floor. She did not fall but she felt she would at any moment. She cried out, a gasp of desperation.