World War Moo

An Apocalypse Cow Novel

St. Martin's Press

General Carter was standing on the seventeenth tee of the Augustine Golf Club, using his wood as a leaning post and stifling a laugh as his Russian counterpart shanked a ball into the rough, when the call came in. General Kuzkin broke off from his incomprehensible cursing, and General Zhang turned from where he was sifting through his clubs. They looked at the American expectantly as he listened. He nodded once, said, "Understood," and hung up. A broad grin sprang up so quickly that it set his pockmarked jowls wobbling.

"Good news, gentlemen," he said, adjusting his red golf cap to a jaunty angle. "Our glorious leaders have finished their little powwow, and they've finally had enough of waiting on this multilateral UN crap. This time next year, I'll be teeing off at Gleneagles again."

"Lovely course," said Zhang, miming a swing with his delicate hands.

"Yes indeed. I laid out five thousand bucks for my membership last year and only got to play once before those goddamn zombies shut down the country. Didn't even get a refund. Eight months without a round at the best course in the world. That, my friends, is a tragedy."

"How soon do we move?" Kuzkin asked.

"They want us ready to go in twenty days. No warning. Catch them with their pants down and their pasty British asses dangling in the breeze."

Kuzkin threw his club back to the caddy. "We should go to the clubhouse to start planning."

"Hold your horses," Carter said. "We've still got two holes to play. I do my best thinking on the course."

"In Russia, we do our best thinking in the dacha with a warm fire and a bottle of vodka. This is a stupid Western game."

"Hey, it's team building. This is our first joint mission: Russia, China, and the U.S. working together in the interests of humanity. It's a brave new world, my friend. We need to understand each other's cultures."

Kuzkin's pale blue eyes peered out from beneath a canopy of shaggy eyebrows. "Culture is literature, classical music, and art, not hitting a stupid little ball at a stupid little hole you can't even see with binoculars."

Zhang slid a wood from his bag and pointed it at the Russian. "You only want to stop because you are losing."

"I don't care if I lose. You can have my money now. Or we can go double or quits and play Tiger Has Come in the clubhouse."

"What is that?" Zhang said.

"Russian drinking game. I am the army champion."

"You are the top general. They let you win."

"Nyet. I have the stomach of a bear. Every day I drink bleach and disinfect the urinals in headquarters with my piss."

"A bit of focus here, gentlemen," Carter said. "Before we do anything else, we've got to take care of the most important part. We need to name the mission."

The Chinese general whacked his ball hard and true down the fairway, prompting a disgusted snort from Kuzkin. The three men climbed into their golf cart and trundled off, the caddies following in their own vehicle.

"How about Operation E-limey-nate?" Carter said, letting out a chuckle as he steered. The others offered up blank expressions. "It's a joke. We used to call the Brits 'limeys,' and we'd be ... oh, forget it."

"We need a strong Russian name. Operation The Great Terror would make them quake in their boots."

"You can't make it sound like there's killing going on," Carter said. "You may as well call it Operation Mass Murder. It has to be evocative. Woolly enough so folks can pretend what we're doing in their names isn't all that bad. Like Operation Desert Storm, that was a great name. Geographically appropriate, dynamic, and suggestive of a force of nature."

"But we will be killing a lot of people. There should be honesty, no?"

"Hell no. The first rule of any military campaign is that you lie your ass off to the folks back home. And, you can't refer to them as people. Always call them zombies, especially in public."

"They are not zombies."

"They're near as dammit. Look, we can't have the public thinking of them as people, or they might start feeling sorry for them. As it is, we're damn lucky we've had all those zombie films and TV shows swimming in blood and guts for the last few years. Actually, we're even luckier the Brits didn't turn into vampires. If my daughters are anything to go by, we'd have every pubescent girl that's ever read Twilight trying to get over there and find some sparkly five-hundred-year-old teenager to tongue wrestle."

Zhang, who clearly hadn't been listening as he stared off into the distance, held up his closed fist and opened his fingers. "Operation Unfurling Petal," he said.

"That's too far the other way. We're not dropping flowers on them. It doesn't even make any sense."

"We call it after my president," Kuzkin said.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Hurricanes get people's names, not military campaigns. And we're doing this jointly, not under the command of a man who can't seem to keep his top on."

"He has a manly body, not like your scrawny president. Why should he not show it?"

"No man I know gets his bitch tits out when he's fishing or horse riding. It's borderline homoerotic. But if you insist, we can call it Operation Topov."

"His name is not Topov," the Russian said, frowning.

Carter sniffed. "Damn language barrier's killing my puns. Let's just move on. Any other suggestions?"

"Operation Flaming Wind," said Zhang.

"Sounds too much like the gas you pass after a hot chili."

"Operation Deliverance," offered Kuzkin.

The American shook his head. "We've had that one already. Canada in Somalia, 1993. Made everybody think of banjos, buggery, and Burt Reynolds."

They fell silent, faces scrunched up in concentration as the buggy shuddered to a halt in the general area where the Russian's ball had skittered into the long grass.

"How about Operation Excision?" Zhang said as Kuzkin clambered out and gestured to the caddy to find his ball.

"What's that mean?" Carter asked.

"It is the surgical procedure of cutting out a diseased organ or tissue. Very appropriate, since we will be stopping this disease from spreading."

"You know, I think that might just work," Carter said. "It sounds clean. Precise. Tidy. Agreed?" The other two men nodded. "Excellent. Now we just need to draw up a plan. Twenty days, gentlemen, and the fireworks commence."

Kuzkin stood over his ball, which the caddy had located, and slashed at it. It curved into the trees a few dozen feet ahead.

"If we are off this course by then," Zhang said.

Carter gave up trying to hold in his spiteful mirth at Kuzkin's golfing ineptitude and released a guffaw that startled a swan dozing on a nearby water hazard. The bird spread its great wings and took to the air. It flew overhead, casting a dark shadow like a bomber, and unleashed a stream of white shit to splat on top of the buggy.

"I just hope our boys are as accurate," Carter said, and laughed again.

The waters of Loch Long lapped at Ruan Peat's ankles like a slobbery and cold-tongued dog as she crouched in the shadows, entranced by the siren song of soft light spilling from the bar. A glowering mountain stabbed its peak into the pale moon slung low over the village, and the wind blew strong and cold into her chafed face, setting her body shivering. She imagined walking into the low white building, where the awesome power of her breasts would warp the barman's pitiably fragile male mind and stop him noticing she was far too young for a vodka and coke. She would then defrost before a crackling fire, sipping her drink and listening to the local yokels' boring small talk as the crackle and spit of frying fish and chips drifted through from the kitchen.

She blinked rapidly to dispel the dangerous fantasy. The welcoming façade of the bar was as genuine as the bogus Facebook profiles her teachers used to warn her about — behind which fourteen-year-old Jenny, who "hearted" chatting about boys with her online mates, was really a dough-faced pedo who typed with one clammy hand. Within that bar lay monsters — probably wearing comfortable shoes and 1970s Noel Edmonds jumpers from the look of the place, but monsters all the same.

No sixteen-year-old girl, especially one once so painfully hip that she almost qualified for replacement surgery, should have been as intimately acquainted with the life of one of British TV's most persistent unflushables. However, Ruan's mum had nursed a crush on the hamster-faced presenter and kept a scrapbook spanning thirty years of the most egregious knitwear known to humankind. Ruan's dad, a facial-fuzz offender himself, hadn't seemed to mind. Ruan considered her regular subjection to the book far worse abuse than anything skulking beneath Facebook's veneer of chumminess. At one point she'd threatened to call ChildLine. Now she longed to sit in their spacious apartment in Edinburgh's New Town and leaf through the album one more time, rolling her eyes as her mum advised her to "find a nice man like Noel when she grew up."

Ruan again blinked five times in quick succession, the physical cue she'd picked up from a sports psychology book to change unhealthy thought patterns. She then employed her other technique to ward off this miserable reality, which was to fill her mind with ridiculous images. She pictured the bar full of bearded and smirking Noels cavorting in Christmas pullovers so garish they should have carried an epilepsy risk warning, playing pranks on each other and grinning smugly. Not that she could mock anybody's clothing choices these days. The ankle boots, skinny jeans, and designer tops she wore before the virus had long been ditched. She sported hiking boots, cargo pants, and a thick fleece — all of them black, to help her dissolve into the night, and tattered from countless miles of hard traveling. She wore a WWI-era saber across her back under a stuffed rucksack. A Glock handgun was strapped to her right hip. All these items had been salvaged from abandoned homes, hundreds of thousands of which now gathered dust across Britain.

Even with the harmless images playing in her head, she knew she should return to where she'd left her mountain bike on the outskirts of the village, a few hundred meters down from a roadblock where an indistinct figure held what looked like a shotgun. Instead she edged closer, drawn in by the faint chance of pilfering some hot grub. Her boots emitted a worryingly loud crunch on the loose scree of pebbles as she crossed the beach. Coming through the trees would have provided better cover, especially since the moonlight glittering on the lake's surface framed her creeping shadow, but the dark woods held worse dangers. Water dulled her scent, and in the open she could at least spot incoming trouble at a distance and scarper. Seven months spent as a mobile buffet for every living creature on this forsaken island had developed her acceleration to the point where it would startle a cheetah.

She grabbed the edge of road, which was raised six feet above the beach, and pulled herself up. Streetlights shone sodium orange light onto the deserted road. She'd been to Arrochar, a small village huddled on the northern tip of the loch in the west of Scotland, once before on a school trip. Then it had been a dinky hamlet with a population of a few thousand. As in every village, town, and city across the U.K., the carnage would have slashed that number. She would never forget the bonfires of bodies, animal and human alike, which had cast a smoggy pall of organic matter across the land for months after the outbreak.

Don't go there, she thought, blinking so hard her eyes hurt.

She refocused on the seam of flavorsome odor that had attracted her in the first place. If she wasn't mistaken it came from a freshly cooked beef stew. Warm saliva slicked her lips. She hadn't eaten a proper hot meal in months, living on increasingly scarce tins retrieved from cupboards in empty houses and scraps raked from bins in the dead of night. Nor had she touched a morsel of fresh meat. What little meat remained was infected, but anything that passed her lips couldn't harm her. She had no idea why the virus slipped off her like an overly moistened spitball from a distracted teacher's back, didn't even know if it could be called good fortune considering the life it forced her to lead, but there was nothing she could do to change that.

She glanced along the road one more time and hauled herself over the guardrail. Her long legs swiftly carried her to the shelter of a thick tree trunk. Beyond lay an overgrown lawn strewn with tables that in summer months gone by would have been packed with hikers slapping at swarms of midges nibbling on the pale legs that protruded from khaki shorts. She scuttled to the wall of the building and chanced a peek through the closed window. Five men ranging from teenage to late sixties were gathered around a rectangular wooden table, staring at a flat screen fixed to the rustically bricked wall. Weirdly, they did all look rather like Noel Edmonds. Either Noel had gone on a sexual rampage in his wild years and impregnated every woman within a twenty-mile radius, or the village's gene pool wasn't deep enough to wet the shins of a toddler and had created a weird anomaly.

The window was thin enough for her to hear a former Big Brother contestant called Amy something-or-other tongue-trip her way through a news bulletin presenting the government propaganda line that "all was, and would be, well." Keep Calm and Carry On. God, she hated that phrase, which was plastered on banners and advertising hoardings in every town and city. In her experience, calm was in as short supply as razors seemed to be in this town.

"Another round," said one of the Noels, a stocky 1980s model with thick chunks of hair curling from behind his ears like warthog tusks.

"No bother," said the barman, who bucked the trend by being clean-shaven and wearing a plain white T-shirt. "That'll be 140 quid."

"The last round was only 120!"

The barman shrugged. "Hyperinflation. Blame market forces."

"Who do you think I am, Richard Branson?" the first man said, his fingers curling up into a fist.

"Aye, well. You're a dick with a beard so that's close enough."

"Just sell us the bloody beer."

A sneer crossed the barman's face. "Wait a minute. Prices have gone up again. A hundred and sixty quid or you can find another pub that's open. Oh wait, there isn't one."

The youth kicked back his chair, lunged at the counter, and slammed his fist into the barman's face. Every man in the room threw himself into the fight, teeth bared through bristling beards. A woman came running through from the kitchen and shouted at the combatants, although she stopped short of wading in to separate them. Given the empties strewn around the table and the all-male rural Scottish company, Ruan couldn't be sure if the fight was down to tempers inflamed by the virus or business as usual. It made no difference to her. She'd learned to take her chances when they presented themselves, so she quick-stepped to the kitchen and glanced around the doorframe.

Steam curled up from a casserole dish, seeming to form a hazy beckoning finger. She scampered in and slipped on the oven gloves next to it. Just as she was about to snatch up her bounty and disappear into the night, a growl rose beneath the bawling, clattering, and profuse swearing from the bar area. She froze as a creamy white Alsatian raised its head from a basket in the corner. Its hackles rose and the growl turned into a bark — and not a friendly "can I have some stew" one at that. Ruan was out the door, not even giving herself time to curse her stupidity, before the dog got to its feet. Even so, she heard the sounds of the fight die away. Every living being in the bar would be on her tail in seconds.

She ate up the ground with the intention of hurdling the guardrail. She'd been a serious modern pentathlete before her life fell apart, so she could ride, shoot, fence, and swim as well as she could run. She could lose her pursuers out in the loch, although that would mean ditching the rucksack. Unfortunately, the road was no longer deserted. Beneath the streetlamp were two men, again in beards and jumpers. The wind was at her back and blowing toward them. They looked at her and took simultaneous deep breaths through their noses. Lines of shadow slashed across their orange faces as muscles bunched, the viral rage seeming to open a vortex that sucked all their features toward one gnarled point between the eyebrows. Lips pulled tight across teeth clamped together by straining jaws. Their bodies snapped rigid as though their clenched hands were clutching high-voltage wires.

At the beginning of her ordeal she'd tried to conjure up silly images to soften the impact of this change, which she'd witnessed more times than she cared to remember. She'd imagined them as sufferers of extreme constipation straining on the toilet or woeful community theater actors overemoting in a desperate attempt to engage an audience of bored school kids. After a near miss, she'd realized this was one thing she shouldn't allow her imagination to gloss over: she needed the fear to put her body into fight-or-flight mode.