Chapter 15: So Rare It’s Still Mooing

9 min readDec 12, 2020

In which Jerry seriously considers taking up veganism

Author’s note: this is an ongoing serial story. You can read from the beginning here and find the index here.

I let Maggie tug me along, but once outside, I made sure she saw my inquisitive look.

“I wanted a chance to talk to you,” she said, “before Rafe lays his own proposition on you.”

That raised more questions than it answered, but I let her speak when she felt ready. In the meantime, we descended the stairs from the wooden porch. Maggie looped her arm through mine as we set off walking in the direction of one of the barns.

It felt nice, I had to admit, walking with her on my arm. The sun had dropped until the bottom of its circle just graced the top of the horizon, painting the sky in brilliant orange, red, blue, and purple. A chill was starting to grow in the air, the highland air making it cut deeper than it might have at home. Maggie’s arm was warm, even through her coat, and I felt further warmth as she leaned a little closer to me.

I glanced down at her. “Recruit me to what??”

She clicked her tongue. “I keep forgetting that you don’t know the basics of this world,” she said. “But let me take a step back. The Breach that’s hunting you, and the poor guy whose laptop you accidentally looked at to get you into this mess-“

“Ronald,” I filled in.

“Ronald, yes,” she went on, “all belong to a group called the Agency. Think of it as the official government sanctioned Elder God exploiting group. But it’s not the only player out there.”

“These others are how information leaks out,” I guessed.

She nodded. “Some of them are government agencies from other countries. The Laundry, for example, operates out of England. There’s another that’s in mainland Europe, the Russians have their own, and a couple very powerful orders in the Middle East. China’s been pouring a ton of resources into their own group, called the Thousand Paths.”

“I guess that makes sense.” With this much power, it wouldn’t just be the United States that tried to exploit it, I figured with a touch of bleakness.

“But there are others that aren’t being backed by a government,” Maggie went on. “One of those that’s based here is called the Cabal. It’s driven by a group of necromancers, but it focuses on the idea that this information should be used by people who aren’t in the pay of our government.”

There was something different in her tone when she mentioned the name of this new group. I looked down at her, seeing wisps of red hair floating away from her face.

“Is this the one that you belong to?” I asked, trying to make my voice soft.

She still flinched a little. “Used to,” she corrected me. “I left, which is why Rafe was so surprised to see me show up.”

“So he’s part of the Cabal, too.”

“Yes. And I’m sure that when he suggests a purpose for you, it’s going to involve joining the Cabal in some way.”

We’d reached the barn, the large doors standing slightly ajar. The slit between them showed darkness of the interior. “Why did you leave?” I asked.

She bit her lip instead of answering. “Come inside,” she said. She tugged her arm out of mine and stepped forward, into the darkness.

I hesitated for a moment, but I trusted her, didn’t I? Taking a deep breath, I followed her in.

“Give your eyes a second,” she said, her voice drifting out of the blackness. I blinked, and I saw that it wasn’t truly dark. There were faint lights mounted on the walls, emitting a blue-green glow that, although sickly, provided enough illumination as my eyes adjusted.

It was a cattle barn, I saw, and occupied — although something seemed off. Pens stood in neat rows along the walls, with metal bars so that each animal could stick its head out and eat from food shoveled into a long trough. The pens were occupied, I saw, by rows of cows who stood silently, seemingly waiting for the next helping of food to be doled out.

They stood very silently, I thought after a second. The nearest cow to me had its head through the bars but didn’t move. Even the ears were still. I didn’t know much about cows, but weren’t they supposed to twitch?

Wasn’t the animal supposed to blink? Or breathe?

I stepped a little closer as my eyes adjusted. The animal didn’t look dead, just… frozen. As though someone with a remote control had pressed pause-

-no, when I got closer, I saw movement. An eye swiveled in its head to look at me, shifting to track me as I stepped back towards Maggie.

“Okay, that’s freaky,” I admitted. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s dead,” she answered.

I frowned at her. “Dead? But it’s still standing up…” it slowly clicked. “Oh my god. They’re zombie cows? Is that a thing?”

“Reanimated constructs can regenerate tissue,” Maggie said. “In fact, they’re more efficient at it, since they use next to no energy for things like breathing, or blinking. Or thinking.”

“Can regenerate tissue,” I repeated. I looked over at the cows again. One of them a few rows down caught my eye. Something about it seemed off, patches of it hidden in deeper shadow. I took another step closer.

At first, it didn’t make sense. I felt like I was looking at an optical illusion. A large chunk of the cow’s side and belly seemed to be missing, hidden in shadow as if there was a smudge on my vision. I moved laterally to one side and realized that I wasn’t looking at a smudge; I was looking at a hole.

“Regenerate,” I said again. Horrified understanding spread through my brain, a truth that I hoped was false. “Rafe does this? Since they can regenerate, he can keep cutting meat from them and… what? They just grow it back?”

I looked over at Maggie, my fears realized when she nodded. “Just because it’s dark, eldritch power doesn’t mean that it can’t be used to make money,” she said, sounding almost wryly amused.

I felt a bit of bile rise in my throat. Maybe it was just Rafe, just one producer — but there were people out there who might be eating the meat from his herd, meat grown from dead animals. Meat harvested in chunks, hacked from a creature that still stood and ate, implacably regrowing it in a horrifying cycle of harvest.

“Is it safe?” I asked. “I mean, it’s dead, right? Would it have diseases?”

She shrugged. “Probably no more than other meat. Just slap a sticker on the package warning to cook it thoroughly and no one cares enough to trace it back to Rafe.”

I looked back at the cows. It made a sort of sense, and at least the animals didn’t seem to be in any pain, but the sight still made me shiver. It seemed unnatural in a way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but I suddenly found that I’d lost my appetite for whatever meat-based food Rafe might be rustling up for dinner.

“Why are you showing this to me?” I asked.

Maggie pulled her arms around herself. Was she hugging herself for some comfort? “I said that Rafe would want you to join with him,” she answered after a moment. “I want you to know what you’re joining. The Cabal may be positioned to act against the Agency, but it’s not as simple as good guys against bad guys.”

Part of me wanted to challenge that — reanimating cows to sell their necrotic meat to consumers was immoral, certainly, but it didn’t compare to the Agency’s Breach willing to blow up my apartment without care for anyone else who may be around. Another question, however, pushed its way to the front of the line.

“Is this why you left?” I asked.

I tried to make the tone of my voice soft and unthreatening, but Maggie still flinched. She looked back at me, however, and I saw no trace of weakness in her eyes.

“I had ideals, although they weren’t well thought out back then,” she said. She held her head high, eyes like frost. “I wanted to make a better world for everyone, to spread the power and take it away from entrenched elites.” She scoffed, a laugh with no humor in it. “It turns out that it wasn’t elites who held the power. Whoever held the power became the new elites.”

“Rafe doesn’t seem that elite,” I pointed out.

She shook her head, took a step closer to me as if she could reach out and show me. “Rafe might not be wearing suits or driving fancy cars, but he’s out in the middle of nowhere for a reason,” she said. “He’s out here so that he can conduct his experiments without anyone else interfering. He’s ranked high in the Cabal, and he had to wade through rivers of blood to get there.”

Her face fell at that last sentence, turning inward. I felt her pulling away, caught by the hooks of some past memory. I crossed the remaining stride between us, put my hands on her shoulders.

“Tell me,” I said, as her face tilted up to look at mine.

She blinked, and I saw the struggle warring across her expression. “It’s too much for now,” she said softly, as tears formed at the corners of her eyes. “But it’s not just Rafe. It’s too much blood to wash off.”

“You’re not a bad person,” I insisted.

She closed the last bit of air between us as she pressed her face into my shoulder. My arms tightened around her and I felt her sob.

“You’re helping me,” I said into her hair as it caressed my chin and cheek.

I felt her head shift as she nodded, but my shirt grew damp from her tears, and she didn’t pull her face away. I stood there, arms wrapped around her. Dead cows occasionally shifted slightly in the dimness around us, but they were a world apart from us. She was warm as she pressed against me, different from the chill of the barn — I supposed that undead cows didn’t need, nor produce, any heat. I held her and wished that we’d never need to move or speak again. I wished this moment could just go on forever.

I knew it couldn’t last forever, though. She stirred in my arms and it broke, more fragile than a strand of thread.

“So what do I do?” I asked her.

I loosened my arms slightly, but although she lifted her head from my shoulder, Maggie didn’t pull away. She leaned back just enough to look up at me, my arms still around her waist. It was a good feeling, almost distractingly so. I pushed the thought aside.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. Her eyes were a little red, but the worry lines on her face had cleared. “I wish I had answers for you, Jerry, but I don’t.”

“What would you do?”

She sighed. “No one is perfect. I think you have to figure out what level of compromise you’re willing to accept.”

“And if none of them are good enough?” I asked.

“Then you’ll have to take your own path.” Finally, almost regretfully, she released her arms from around me and stood back. I immediately felt a chill as her warmth left. “Come on,” she added. “We should go back to the house.”

I followed after her, unable to resist one last look back at the reanimated cattle. They stood in their pens, unmoving, gazing out at the world through dead eyes. I wondered how long they’d stand there if the rest of the world vanished, if civilization itself ended.

Would they last forever?

Chapter 15: So Rare It’s Still Mooing

Written by Tarazul khan