Cows Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    “Look around you, boy.” Cripps spread his arms. “It’s quiet now, but you can feel the power of the place. Think of the deaths it has seen, the fantasies that have been lived and released in here. God, that smell …”
    Cripps walked along one of the alleys to the holding pen and stroked the forehead of a cow. He raised his voice and the animals shifted uneasily.
    “These are your future, if you have the courage. They grow them in concrete boxes under ultraviolet light, they feed them on pellets of their own dead. These are urban cows, boy, manmade without mystery, and they have a gift for us far more important than meat or leather. It isn’t a gift they like to give, though. Not at all.”
    “What gift?”
    “The experience of killing. Of blowing out their brains and taking away their most precious thing. It smashes the walls you put around yourself, the walls other people put around you to stop you doing what you want. Do you understand me? The things you would do if there was nothing to stop you. Killing is an act of self-realization, it shows a man the truth of his power. And when you know this, boy, the pettiness they try to shackle us with falls away like shit.”
    Cripps threw his arms out like he was on a cross.
    “Killing frees you to live as you should.”
    Out in the hall the horn blasted.
    “Back to your station, boy. Back to where the cows are only meat. But remember what happens in here, remember the secrets that are to be had. And one day soon perhaps we shall see what a little killing can do for you.”
    At the grinder Steven humped meat and dreamed of quick access to the future. Cripps was significantly fucked in the head, no doubt about it, but could it happen like that? Was there something you could do that would make you different than you were? If it was that simple, how easy it would be to deal with the Beast.
    His head swam a little and the mist of blood from the grinder began to irritate him. Lucy with her compacting of unhappiness into removable physical deposits, Cripps and his instant command of life through killing … Such new ideas. Steven had not thought that there might be ways to force happiness into being. It had always seemed a matter of luck, something beyond his control that happened outside in the world. To all the other people.
    He moved about, uncomfortable in the late-afternoon slaughter. Someone was watching him, he could feel it. But he was apart from the other process hands and Cripps had not left the slaughter room since lunch. He looked over his shoulder. In the darkness behind the ventilation grille two softly gazing eyes blinked once then vanished. He jumped from his stool, but it was too late, the space behind the grate was empty. He pressed his head close and from somewhere along the duct’s length heard a sound like lazily trotting hooves.

CHAPTER NINE

    D inner looked normal that night—junk out of a can. The Hagbeast ate silently but watched him closely. The first mouthful told Steven she had laced the meal with salt. He forced himself to eat without reaction.
    “Is it nice where you work?”
    “No.”
    “When I was a girl I worked on a goose farm. That was bloody work too. They put them upside down in tin cones with holes in the bottom. There was nothing in the sheds but rows and rows of goose heads hanging out of cones. We had to run along with a knife cutting them off and the blood went everywhere. We were always soaked. They looked like cocks, those heads did, with their long necks, lying all bloody on the ground.”
    Steven’s stomach jerked. Her words had no effect on him—he had heard all her stories before he was eight years old, how she used to stick the necks inside herself—but the salt was building with each mouthful and his guts were going to empty sometime soon. He forced more food down to spite her.
    Out in the hall Dog dragged itself up for a shit. Steven flicked back to the Hagbeast.
    “Don’t bother, I’ve heard