Exclusive Excerpt from Apocalypse Cow

Mad cow disease is nothing compared to an epidemic that turns Britain's livestock into flesh-eating zombies. This is the story behind Michael Logan's recently released novel, Apocalypse Cow, and we've been provided with an exclusive excerpt to share with Daily Dead readers. 

"It began with a cow that just wouldn't die. But it would become an epidemic that transformed Britain's livestock into sneezing, slavering, flesh-craving four-legged zombies.

In Michael Logan’s APOCALYPSE COW (St. Martin’s Griffin; 1-250-03286-5; May 21, 2013; $14.99; Trade Paperback Original), the fate of a nation seems to rest on the shoulders of three unlikely heroes: an abattoir worker whose love life is non-existent thanks to the stench of death that clings to him, a teenage vegan with eczema and a weird crush on his math teacher, and an inept journalist who wouldn't recognize a scoop if she tripped over one.

As Britain descends into chaos, can they pool their resources, unlock a cure, and ultimately save the world? Dear God, help us all."

To learn more about Apocalypse Cow, visit: http://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Cow-Michael-Logan/dp/1250032865/

Exclusive Excerpt from Apocalypse Cow

by Michael Logan

Chapter 4

In the belly of the beast

Terry fought his way out from the deep morass of unconsciousness that kept trying to suck him back down into its murky depths. When he hauled open his eyelids, a sterile white ceiling greeted him. He vaguely wondered if he had overindulged, which would explain the stinking headache, and ended up getting lucky. He groped around for a warm body, and found he was alone in a single bed. Despite the unfamiliar surroundings, his first feeling was one of relief. While he desperately needed to end his eighteen-month spell marooned in the love desert, he didn’t want it to be through a one-night stand – particularly given his disastrous last two flings before the barren patch began.

After the first of those one-nighters, he’d woken to the morning sunlight glinting off the facial fuzz of a snoring heavyset woman with a tattoo of Pocahontas on her shoulder. He had a horrible memory of cuddling up to her in a corner booth at Clatty Pats nightclub, where such characters were ten a penny, while she explained she had changed her name to reflect her love of the Disney character, and an even worse memory of being pissed enough to find it endearing. He’d tiptoed out of the bedroom, trying to ignore the accusing button eyes of the crude home-made Pocahontas dolls littered across the room.

The aftermath of the next fling was worse. He’d woken next to a pretty young thing, all silky skin and long legs. Elated, he’d kissed her neck, hoping to kick-start some more rumpy-pumpy. She’d arched her back deliciously and then wrinkled her nose, which was no longer drink-addled and thus able to inform her brain she had slept with someone who smelled like a hunk of rancid beef, not a hunk of love. She was then the one to make the quick exit, claiming she had to work. On a Sunday. Terry was left disconsolate, the stink of the abattoir strong even to his nostrils, amidst his rumpled sheets.

For the first seven years of his life as an abattoir worker, there had been no appreciable smell of death on his skin. His ex-fiancée Kirsteen was the first to notice it. At first, she simply insisted he take numerous showers. Then sex became less frequent. After that, it was separate beds. Terry began job-hunting, hoping to save the relationship, but his very specific skills of killing and body disposal only qualified him as abattoir worker or assassin. There weren’t many adverts for contract killers down at the job centre. Going on the dole wasn’t an option, as they were saving to get married. Kirsteen wanted the big wedding: white dress, hundreds of guests and a towering cake. They had been saving for a long time.

Three months after the stench was first detected, Kirsteen turned vegetarian. Two weeks later, she announced she couldn’t live with a murderer and ran off with the animal rights activist she had been shagging behind Terry’s back for six months. She left him with the apartment and ten thousand pounds in the bank. He stopped the futile search for another job and settled down into a smelly existence.

Terry saw her in the paper a year later, pictured in handcuffs after a failed attempt to free brain-damaged primates from a university psychology lab. On her clenched fist, held aloft in defiance, was a wedding ring. In a fit of rage, Terry donated the savings, which he had held on to in case she came back, to AIDS researchers, who Jimmy down the pub assured him carried out nasty experiments on monkeys.

The stench got steadily worse. He tried to counter it with incessant showers and a commensurate increase in the application of deodorant and aftershave, to no avail. The one-nighter with the girl who fled marked the moment the stink of death became so strong that no woman, no matter how drunk, could overlook it. His latest doomed crush was on Dorota, the Polish barmaid in his local. No matter how hard he scrubbed with scented soap or how much Old Spice he slathered on, she kept her distance, only darting in long enough to serve him, her nose twitching all the while.

It wasn’t as if he was ugly. He was a healthy 33-year-old, sheathed in muscles developed by physical labour rather than moulded by long hours in the sweaty embrace of gym machines. He had a square jaw – well, the kind of square a toddler armed with a crayon would draw – faded blue eyes surrounded by just enough crow’s feet to lend him an air of experience, and a crop of brown hair that required only minimal creative combing to look as though it covered his head fully. He had broken his nose one night while drunkenly chasing the last bus home. That was OK, though: lots of women liked the rough look. When asked what happened, he would hint at some mysterious, heroic past rather than admit he had taken a headlong drunken dive.

But good looks counted for nothing when you smelled like intestines.

He longed for the day he would meet an intelligent, funny and beautiful woman whose nostrils had been seared closed in a curling tong accident. He wasn’t holding out much hope and, truth be told, he had become so used to waking up alone he didn’t really mind it any more. Provided, of course, he woke up alone in his own bed or in one where he could remember going to sleep the previous evening.

Terry looked around, squinting against the headache. The bed sat in a small room, bare except for a table with a glass of water on it and a single door, firmly closed. In the corner, the red light on a security camera blinked in sync with his throbbing head. There was no bleeping equipment, no IV drip, and no nurses bustling in and out of the room. Clearly he wasn’t in hospital.

When he tried to sit up, a bout of dizziness forced him back onto the hard pillow. His stomach flipped over and he retched. Nothing came out: the bacon and egg sandwich he had eaten for lunch was already plastered over the floor of the abattoir.

The abattoir, he thought. Something happened in the abattoir.

He touched his head and, beneath a thin layer of bandages, encountered a lump. The snapping teeth, rivers of blood and screams of the dying rushed back. His heart thudded in his chest and, now uncaring where he was, he began to scream.

*   *   *

Apocalypse Cow, as the media would later dub the beast that heralded Britain’s descent into ruin and infamy, pitched up in Terry’s stunning pen just after lunch. The animal was the first in a batch of worn-out dairy cows, whose udders dangled like sopping wet socks. These cows usually looked so exhausted Terry felt he was carrying out euthanasia rather than depriving an animal in its prime of many more carefree days chewing the regurgitated contents of its own stomach – as was the case with animals bred purely for their flesh. After a lifetime of having their teats pummelled red-raw by insatiable mechanical suction cups, Terry figured the old moos were probably grateful to be heading to the big McDonald’s in the sky.

This cow was the exact opposite of grateful.

Terry had seen a lot of cattle during his ten years in slaughterhouses, but he had never come across a mad cow. He had never even met a slightly miffed cow. Generally, their big, slow faces displayed only docility, fear or panic. Even Steven Seagal had a wider range of facial expressions. When Terry looked into this cow’s rolling, twitching eye, he understood it wasn’t just mad; it was crazy apeshit bonkers. As Terry stood agape, the cow gnashed its jaws, sending its lower incisors repeatedly plunging into its upper dental pad, which was already a bloody mess. Despite further shredding its maw, the beast appeared oblivious to the pain.

Terry overcame his shocked inertia, stepped back smartly and hung the bolt gun back up on its hook just as the cow sneezed. A long rope of red-tinged snot smacked him in the face like a boisterously flicked wet towel. It hung there, still connected to the nostril from which it had been fired, and quivered as the beast whipped its head around. He swiped at the mucus, only succeeding in transferring most of it to his hand.

‘That’s nasty,’ he said, keeping a careful eye on the animal as it let out a deep, shuddering moo.

Up until then, it had been just another day of monotonous slaughter. The first three truckloads of cows had shuffled in through the holding pens, unaware that up ahead lay a future bristling with razor-sharp knives, circular saws and other implements of bovine doom. Only when an animal emerged into the stunning pen and saw the carcasses strung up ahead did it suspect it might have grazed its last. Before it could do more than let out a single pleading moo, Terry would have hammered a bolt against its forehead, chained it up by the ankles and sent it along to the next station to have its throat cut.

Terry was always happy to be placed on stunning duty, as it was the least gory job in the abattoir. In the short spans he served there, the smell of death always faded slightly. The stunning job still had blood-splattered moments: when he accidentally took out an eye or pulverized a nose, leaving the poor cow in ululating agony until he managed to stun it properly. And there had been times when an animal he’d thought he’d rendered senseless proved conscious enough to feel the knife. When that happened, Terry could only stare mutely as it died, a meaty, thrashing bauble spurting out blood in spiralling arcs.

Heart-rending as such incidents were, they were still not enough to give Terry nightmares, or at least none he could remember. Sure, sometimes he woke sweating and panting in his small flat in the southern Glasgow district of Cardonald, although he could never recall what had disturbed him. A vigorous wash under a hot shower always scrubbed away the unease – although not the smell, which was strangely more pungent on such mornings.

For most of his career, the lack of nightmares had not been an issue. In Terry’s experience, most abattoir workers considered suffering psychological trauma from the job to be as appropriate as a tofu stall at a butchers’ convention. They were of the opinion that a nice steak hit the spot, so until scientists invented a beef tree, poor old Daisy was for the chop. In one slaughterhouse up north, the brawny highlanders even held an annual Punch-Out-A-Cow contest (which usually resulted in little more than bruised knuckles and a bemused cow). That had all changed last year, when Terry took up his current job with McTavish & Sons.

McTavish & Sons was tucked away among the trees in the suburbs so Glasgow’s meat-eaters need not have their consciences pricked by the wild screams of the pigs, which unlike cattle were smart enough to know what was coming and feisty enough to put up a fight. Somehow, Mr McTavish had performed the improbable feat of rounding up every one of the few bleeding hearts in the business and putting them to work in his abattoir. Each morning at tea-break, Terry’s workmates would relate their nightmares in wavering voices: cow eyes blinking accusingly from the middle of a stew; half-skinned lambs that morphed into their own children and began to plead for mercy; arriving beyond the pearly gates to discover that God was in fact a giant pig with an Old Testament thirst for vengeance against the men responsible for turning his children into bacon and pork sausages.

At first, Terry had been nonplussed by the soul-searching. Yet before too long, an urgent need to share bubbled up inside him as his peers doled out consoling pats with blood-streaked hands. His back remained unpatted, however, for when he trawled the depths of his mind for some buried manifestation of his own guilt, he met only an insistent blankness. He began to feel his lack of night terrors revealed a gaping hole where his conscience should be, so to prove to himself he wasn’t completely heartless, he had developed the habit of furtively feeding every animal a sugar cube before popping it in the head.

But there was no way he was going anywhere near the crazed cow with the sugar cube he had pulled out of his pocket a few minutes before. It looked as if it would rather snack on his fingers, rubber gloves and all.

Terry turned to his workmate Peter, who had a vivid recurring dream that come the day of the cow revolution he would be the first to be strung up by the ankles and gutted. ‘Come here a sec.’

Peter, his navy-blue apron streaked with dark bloodstains, turned from the twitching body of the cow whose throat he had just slit.

‘You’ve got snot on you,’ he said helpfully.

‘No, it’s hair gel. Want some?’

Peter warded off Terry’s extended hand with his bloody knife. ‘Come near me and I’ll cut your knob off and pack it with the chipolatas. It’s about the right size.’

Terry flicked the blob of snot at Peter. The gooey missile sailed over Peter’s shoulder, and with magnificently bad timing plopped onto the apron of Mr McTavish, who liked to roam the floor of his family business to keep everyone on their toes.

‘Sorry, Mr McTavish,’ Terry mumbled, his face reddening. ‘I didn’t see you there.’

The boss strode forward, running a palm across his apron. He stopped beside Terry and slapped him on the back, returning the reddish slime to its rightful owner. Terry forced a smile.

‘No worries,’ Mr McTavish said, the massive jowls created by overindulgence in his own produce wobbling. ‘Snot a lot you can do about it now.’ He paused. ‘Get it?’

The cow rattled its head off both sides of the narrow steel pen like a clapper in a bell, and let loose a cracked bellow.

‘Even the cow knows that was a shit joke,’ said Peter, who had more than once indicated he would love to be fired just so he could get a good night’s sleep.

Mr McTavish ignored him. ‘So what’s up with this bugger?’

‘I think it might have cow flu,’ Terry replied. ‘It’s acting funny.’

As Terry spoke, he realized the weirdness didn’t stop with the cow that had just decorated him like a snotty Christmas tree. The abattoir was always a noisy place – the whine of bone saws, the clanking of the overhead pulley and the constant moos created a hellish racket – so it was no wonder he hadn’t noticed. Now he listened, the din coming from the animals waiting their turn for the chop didn’t have the usual confused, aimless timbre. The moos, punctuated by sneezes, sounded angry.

‘Maybe we should call the vet,’ Peter suggested.

‘Don’t be daft,’ Mr McTavish said. ‘Bird flu, swine flu, fine. But there’s no such thing as cow flu.’

‘I’m just saying it’s possible,’ Terry responded. ‘There wasn’t any such thing as swine flu a few years ago.’

Mr McTavish sighed. ‘Look, another four lorryloads just pulled up outside. You’re holding up the line. Stun it and get it up on the pulley.’

Terry took two steps towards the bolt gun, wondering if he was fast enough to snatch it up and pop the cow like a gun-slinger of old. The animal had other ideas. As soon as Terry lifted his arm, it craned its neck forward and chomped its jaw closed, spraying bloody foam up into the air. Terry scuttled backwards. No job was worth losing fingers for.

‘I vote we wait for it to starve to death,’ he said.

Mr McTavish, who was himself two feet further back than he had been a few seconds before, squared his shoulders and marched towards the cow, which had lifted its chin up onto the metal rim of the pen and was still snapping in Terry’s direction.

‘I’ll bloody do it,’ he barked.

Before the animal could redirect its ire, the boss grabbed the bolt gun, jammed it against the cow’s forehead and pulled the trigger, sending the metal bolt designed to render the animal unconscious hammering against its skull. The cow wobbled and dropped.

‘Job done, you big pansy,’ he told Terry. ‘Now get on with it.’

Mr McTavish opened the side of the pen. The cow flopped out. Authority asserted, he spun on his heel and prepared to recommence the patrol of his dominion. The cow, which was down but definitely not out, lashed out a hoof with apparent intent, and caught the abattoir owner flush on his right shin. There was a loud crack. Mr McTavish looked down at the odd shape protruding from his leg, and then crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.

Peter ran towards the stricken man. Terry didn’t move. He was too busy staring at the cow, which had lifted its head and was looking at Mr McTavish’s leg, its nose twitching as if it smelled something tasty, which for cows normally meant dandelions, not open wounds.

‘Jesus. It’s snapped like a twig. Ring an ambulance,’ said Peter, who was bent over his prone boss with his back to the cow.

When no answer came, Peter looked up. Terry, his vocal cords paralysed by the improbability of what he was witnessing, pointed to where, tottering on all four legs, loomed the cow. It did not look stunned, even though Mr McTavish’s aim had been true. If anything, it looked more furious. Peter had no time to get up. The cow lurched forward, crushing him against the side of the pen. His eyes bulged as he beat his hands ineffectually on the hulking beast’s broad back. The cow lowered its mouth and, as though it were grazing in a sunny field, began to worry at the wound on Mr McTavish’s leg.

‘Please tell me that cow is not eating my boss,’ Terry said, and then shouted, ‘I need some help over here!’

Terry didn’t wait for the cavalry to arrive. His primary concern wasn’t for Mr McTavish, since it would probably take some time for the cow to do any real damage with its herbivore incisors. He was more worried about Peter, whose lips were turning blue as the cow’s meaty body squeezed the air from his lungs. Terry grabbed the largest knife within reach and hacked at the cow’s flank. It remained immobile, focused on tearing at the leg.

Terry was half up on the animal’s back, trying to get close enough to stab it somewhere more vital without endangering himself, when Mr McTavish came to. His eyes were barely open before he began to scream, sounding just like one of the thousands of pigs he had sent to their deaths. He tried to haul himself away, but the cow’s hold on his leg was firmer than Terry thought possible. While man and beast were engaged in a tug of war, Terry jammed the knife as far down as he could into the back of the animal’s neck. It paid no attention, instead following the squealing Mr McTavish, who had managed to pull his leg free.

What signalled bad news for the abattoir owner, who could not outrun the cow on his bum, brought relief for Peter. With the crushing weight gone, he fell to his knees and took a rasping breath.

‘It’s happening,’ he said. ‘They’ve come for me.’

‘Get a knife and help me kill this bloody thing,’ Terry bawled at Peter, who was already scrabbling away on his hands and knees, casting bug-eyed glances behind him.

‘You’re not getting me up on that hook,’ he told the cow, then got to his feet and ran.

Peter’s belief that his bad dream had come to pass prompted Terry to wonder if he was finally having a nightmare of his own. He felt a brief happy jolt. As his workmates arrived, jostling past and launching themselves at the cow with knives, chains and crowbars, their solid physicality snapped him out of his stupor. The reinforcements hammered and slashed until the cow took notice. It bellowed and lashed out, dashing one of the new arrivals against the wall. Another slipped under the enraged animal, which put its hooves to work on his head. Terry saw his moment and sank his knife into the cow’s throat.

The cow staggered to the side, spouting arterial spray across the two animals hanging at the next station, and then fell to its knees in the middle of the semicircle of panting men. A flicker of movement at the next station caught Terry’s attention. He spat out a mouthful of blood, walked over and stood before the two dead cows. A series of twitches had seized the first animal. The chain securing its feet began to sway as the intensity of the quivering picked up. Suddenly the cow fell still. Its eye rolled in its socket and it looked at Terry.

‘I don’t believe this,’ he said.

The animal began to rock again, more violently. Then the next supposedly dead cow joined in. Their heads knocked together as they swung to and fro on the chains. From behind Terry, there came a collective gasp. He turned and saw the cow, which should have been well past standing, breathing or doing anything vaguely cowlike apart from being eaten, regain its feet. It took one staggering step, and then fell for the last time. Its hindquarters thumped against the button that opened the hatch to the holding pens.

‘Holy shit!’ Terry shouted as the rest of the cows burst out.

A brown, white and black tsunami ploughed into the workers. Those not affected by whatever madness had seized the first beast thundered past. Others stayed behind. Hooves stamped, teeth ripped and knives slashed in the maelstrom. More blood flew, splattering those animals caught behind the battle.

Terry, who had bought himself some room with his move to the next station, had spotted the pattern and decided not to wait for those cows now being treated to a shower of blood to change from placid grass-munchers into flesh-crazed lunatics. He clambered onto the gate and hauled himself up a chain. He was just far enough away from the suspended cows to avoid their snapping jaws, which were starting to slow down as the animals seemed to lose their brief lease of new life. He climbed to the catwalk, pausing to survey the carnage and chanting a disbelieving mantra (This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening).

Fewer of the cows streaming from the hatch were joining the panicked exodus. Either they chose to stay and enter the fray, or they slipped in the red lake that was forming beneath the swirling mass of bodies. Out of the corner of his eye, Terry saw Peter on the telephone, babbling into the mouthpiece. Blood was streaming from his nostrils.

As Terry crawled towards the exit on his hands and knees, the sound of tearing flesh, cries of agony and, worst of all, the contented smack of cow lips followed him. He sprawled face down and let the vomit pour through the iron grille of the catwalk and into the empty holding pens.

The walkway ended ten feet away, near enough for Terry to make a run for it. He stood, intending to slide down the ladder and sprint out of the abattoir. His foot landed on the vomit-slimed section of walkway and he fell sideways, smacking his head first on the handrail then on the grille itself. The last thing he saw before he passed out was a despairing hand reach out of the boiling mass of cows, then slide downwards. Then all was black.

*   *   *

It didn’t take long for someone to come running down the corridor in answer to Terry’s screams. He pulled back the covers, vaguely registering that he was clad in a flimsy robe and had been scrubbed clean of gore, and staggered towards the door. Before he got there, he heard a key turn in the lock. Two burly men dressed in black trousers and green T-shirts stepped in. Terry gaped at them.

‘Cows,’ he shouted. ‘Big crazy cows.’

His legs turned to jelly, and he would have flopped to the floor had the newcomers not grabbed his arms.

‘Take it easy,’ the man on his right said.

Terry let them lay him down, and closed his eyes until the dizziness passed. When he opened them again, the men flanked the bed. The one who had spoken had a long, jagged scar running down his face from hairline to chin. His left eye was dead, clearly glass, the real eye probably gouged out by whatever weapon had caused the facial wound. His companion, by contrast, had an angelic little-boy face perched incongruously atop a muscled chest that made Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pecs look like burst balloons. Even in his agitated state, Terry noticed they had assumed a casually alert, almost military pose.

‘Where am I?’ he asked.

‘Somewhere safe,’ Baby-face replied.

‘Who are you?’

‘Nurses,’ Scar-face answered. ‘Want a bed bath?’

Baby-face let out a snorting laugh.

A short, middle-aged man entered the room. He wore a navy-blue suit, with a handkerchief teased into a perfect triangle poking out of the top pocket. He was completely hairless, revealing a skull that rose up to a sharp ridge along the middle. Behind wire-rimmed glasses, he had the eyes of a man who would strangle his own mother in order to get his hands on the inheritance early. Had Terry met him under different circumstances, he would have assumed he was a banker.

The corners of the newcomer’s mouth ratcheted up in jerky stages, rather like a sail being hoisted. Only when the process was complete did it become apparent he was attempting to smile.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘How are we feeling today?’

Terry’s heart rate was slowly returning to normal. As the adrenalin rush of his freak-out faded, a deep unease settled over him.

‘Who are you people?’ Terry asked.

The smile fell from the bespectacled man’s face with far more ease than it had been plastered up there.

‘You can call me Mr Brown. Think of me as someone with your best interests at heart. I need to ask you a few questions about what happened yesterday.’

‘Yesterday? You mean I’ve been out for a whole day?’

‘We sedated you.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, we had all these spare drugs approaching their sell-by date,’ Brown explained. ‘We thought we’d better use them.’

‘Really?’ Terry asked, his befuddled mind trying to make sense of the surreal situation.

‘No, not really. It was for your own good. You seemed rather agitated when we found you.’

Terry had a brief recollection of lying on the catwalk, surrounded by white rubber boots. Below, white-clad figures with tanks on their backs were firing out whooshing jets of flame from long nozzles. There was a smell of burning flesh. Somebody was gibbering obscenities in a high-pitched voice rather like his own.

‘What about the others?’ Terry asked.

The man in the suit rearranged his features – he was probably aiming for sympathy but achieved constipation – before saying, ‘I’m afraid all of your colleagues passed away in the stampede.’

He patted Terry’s shoulder, bare above the robe, and drew his fingertips lightly across the skin, exhaling softly as he did so. Another wave of nausea gripped Terry and he leaned over the bed to retch dryly. When his stomach had once again realized it was empty, Terry flopped back onto the pillow.

‘There wasn’t a stampede,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Those cows just went for us. Biting, stamping, ripping. They meant to kill us.’

The three men exchanged significant looks.

‘So you remember,’ Brown said.

Terry found the strength to sit up. These men did not seem the slightest bit surprised by his bizarre assertion, as they should have been. Terry was even doubting the memory himself. Something was very wrong here.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘You’re not a doctor. Why am I not in hospital? Are you police?’

Brown leaned in so his nose almost brushed Terry’s.

‘You could say I’m a kind of policeman,’ he disclosed amiably, pushing Terry back to the bed with a surprising strength. His sidekicks grabbed Terry’s arms while he picked off a piece of fluff from Terry’s chest. ‘I’m the kind of policeman it doesn’t pay to shout at. Why don’t you lie there like a good boy and tell me what you saw.’

He held the fluff at Terry’s eye level and blew it towards him. The certainty he was in some kind of deep trouble gripped Terry. He related the whole story in a monotone, flinching from time to time as gruesome flashes popped up into his mind.

When he was finished, Brown, who had been sitting on the side of the bed, casually dangling one leg, raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m afraid you were unlucky enough to have been at the epicentre of a new wave of terrorist attacks in Britain.’

‘The cows are terrorists?’

All three men laughed. Brown seemed particularly tickled, dabbing at his eyes with the handkerchief.

‘I wish I’d thought of that one,’ he said mysteriously. ‘No, Mr Borders. The cows were not staging an insurgency. They were merely the tools of terrorists opposed to our way of life. We’re talking viral warfare.’

Brown stood up suddenly and gave a nod. Baby-face and Scar-face released Terry’s arms. His first instinct was to leap up and make a mad dash to safety, but even the thought of running made him feel dizzy. Murderous cows, terror attacks, viral warfare. It was like the plot from a B-movie, and far too much for Terry to take in. He was again beginning to feel the insistent pull of the drug-induced sleep from which he had emerged, its offer of refuge from the insanity.

‘When can I go home?’ he asked, fighting to keep his eyes open.

‘Oh, don’t worry about that. You need to recover here in our lovely health facility,’ Brown said, adjusting his handkerchief before training his gaze on Terry. ‘You can stay as long as you want. Maybe even indefinitely.’

Brown turned abruptly and swept out of the room. His two underlings followed without a word. The key turned in the lock with an ominous clunk.

Terry tried to sit up. His muscles refused to cooperate and his tongue felt thick and furred. Images of the carnage seeped into his mind as his thoughts unfurled. To ward off the horror, he tried to conjure up Dorota leaning over the bar to hand him a view of her lush Eastern European cleavage, a cool pint of lager and a big smacker on the lips. He couldn’t hold her together, and she mixed in with the dark memories crowding his dwindling consciousness. Her breasts became swinging udders, her face elongated and her skin turned a mottled brown. The beer fell from her hand, which had turned into a hoof, and her mouth, which had been moist and welcoming, morphed into a gnashing maw that followed him down into a reprise of his drug-induced stupor.