Head Cheese

THE GROUND WAS LITTERED WITH HOOF FILINGS. Anthony Nathanson swept the ones in his direct vicinity away with his heel, considering the large caltrop-like clippings littering the ground, and recalling what little he knew about cattle. Ungulates walk on what to humans would be toenails, yes, and paring these down could be done in swathes. These lay here, thick and crusty, against the spongy brown, sun-dried ground of the caked layered manure. The part of the barn he'd entered at must have been a medical area of some sort.

The dusty sky was a pale golden yellow, tinged with red like an egg yolk that had had a blood vessel burst in it. Nathanson shielded himself with his hand against the sun, and surveyed the killing field before him, recessed about 20 feet into the ground at a sloped curve. He stood at the top of a cement ramp down into the pit, slick with dust and decorated with the odd plops of manure. Before him the large field was populated with toy-figure-sized workers and cattle, as well as odd-shaped lumps, nearly cattle shaped but just off enough to be disconcerting. No wonder why this place has been flagged as a safety violation, he thought. 

Four people had gone missing, without a trace, and he'd been sent to investigate. People drowned in manure pits all the time, he'd read- sure enough, to the west left of him, he could make out the lagoon-like silage pits. He would have been able to smell it from here, but the whole place smelled like that. A digestive tract, the whole place, with no difference between any one part of the alimentary canal. It was all the same here. What difference was it, then, to have the sewage entering your nose and mouth, making its way down to your lungs?

As Anthony pondered these things, he heard someone approach behind him. He turned. A well-tanned man with leathery skin and light tan coveralls humped up the incline from the pit, up the hard dirt ground to the right of the ramp, and walked amiably toward Anthony, right hand thrust forward for a shake. He accepted it, over the railing that ran around the ramp. 

"Detective Nathanson?" the man asked, still shaking Anthony's hand.

Anthony nodded curtly and withdrew his hand. Hopping the railing, he made identity confirmation of his own. "Mr Fowler?" 

"Call me Iggy," Fowler grinned. His teeth were small and evenly spaced. "I'm afraid we're going to have to walk-and-talk. Shall we go down?"

They descended, Anthony following Fowler. Anthony steadied himself with his left hand on the rail at his side, but Fowler needed no such handicap. As they walked into the sun-baked pit full of cattle and workers, Iggy describing the process in an unmodulated tone, audible above the thrumming din of the activity below.

"This here facility is what we like to call a holistic ranch. That means whole, as in, um, Whole Foods. You know the old uu--uu--uuhh--hh American Indian, Native American, um, process, proverb of using the whole buffalo?" Anthony waved his free hand. "Not sure if that's true. Saw a Far Side cartoon once- well anyway, that's what we do here at least. Leather, milk, bones, and meat. Meat especially. Intestinal skin is washed out and goes onto become sausage casings. These processes can be done with the corpses of any mammalian animal. Cattle are used because that's the animal that people are most comfortable with," Iggy explained. "We eat them all the time, drink their milk, and that's the only function they serve in society." 

They slowed as they reached the place where the plane leveled out. "You have any leads, in regards to what happened to those men?"

Anthony shrugged. "Figure they drowned in liquid fertilizer. Any idea if they'd have any reason to be over there?"

Iggy did the scratch-and-shrug, a classic sign of someone pretending to think. "We're not so sure that's it. If you're positive that that's what happened, we can rake the silage pit, but my bet is on the methane harvesters. Cattle produce an asston of methane, and we harvest that here. Squeeze out their guts like squeezing air from under a, laminated, bit of lamination. It's automated, mostly, but accessible. Breathe in a little of that an' you're toast."

Anthony nodded, doing the scratch-and-shrug himself. "But the fourth man who disappeared was an OSHA worker. You figure he'd know the protocols for entering a methane-rich environment. And it still doesn't explain what happened to the bodies."

Iggy, who had made as if he were going to walk on, turned back at this. "You do know what happens when methane catches fire, though, right?" 

Anthony was silent at this, so Iggy continued.

"It's a pit, a big, pit. Like a nuclear silo, you know? Blows up all the time. There's so much methane that comes through here. So much methane. I'm not sure why those three men only disappeared recently, with the OSHA guy come tumbling after, but smart money is, look there. DNA test the soot on the walls. I don't know."

Anthony nodded, Iggy seemed to relax, and they recommenced walking. They went further, closer to the workfield, where workers herded cattle through a complex maze of rails, gates, and open areas. Those workers, their faces curiously white, were still in the distance somewhat. Before them lay the almost-cow-shaped lumps that Anthony had seen from above. And as they walked forward, all at once, the identity of the lumps revealed itself.

The lumps were cow-shaped because they were cattle, or had been. The cattle had been split in half, bones all been popped out. Iggy led Anthony through, and they wove around the corpses: hollowed-out shells of cows, split in half like pistachios, the interiors emptied out leaving only the stiff felt-textured leather. The shells were far too thick to be just the leather- looking closer the meat itself was also intact, but molded over with brown fuzz, like the leather was a culture that grew to encompass the entirety of the corpse. Tawed, Iggy explained. Injected with salt or alum as a preservative. And then just left out in the sun, in the very fields they'd been slaughtered in. There was nothing intrinsically unhygienic about it.

The bones would go on to be ground up and made into gelatin; the rest of the shells, in this area at least, was dried out and turned into something that could function as both or either leather or jerky. Iggy gave a name for it, which Anthony tried to hold onto, though with frustration he found a few minutes later that he'd forgotten it. Leathermaking as a process, Iggy explained, usually involves stretching out the hide in the sun, applying a caustic agent and scraping the fat and meat off; this was an experimental process delivering good results. It all seemed rather strange to Nathanson, but the way Fowler carried on about it seemed to chide him that he wasn't the expert here.

Still, something seemed off. Something was nagging at him. Instead of turning to go back up to the sewage-methane area, Nathanson hung doggedly to Iggy's side as he went to oversee more work, walking to a new area, with swarms of workers. And things got stranger and stranger.

Here the workers themselves wore masks resembling bulls' skulls, the peaked nosey bits sticking out in the front like the beaked masks of renaissance-age plague doctors. Their coveralls here were dark, coarse, assembled from odd cuts of leather, as opposed to the denim coveralls Nathanson had seen the workers above wear. Their movement was odder, here, too. These were the men who slaughtered on a regular basis. As a detective Anthony saw death all the time, but how must it affect you, he thought, to see that much death, not only see it but participate in it, as a job? He looked back up to the workers' masked faces and shuddered in the Arizona heat. Those weren't masks, he realized. Those were real cattle skulls.

Something moved in the midst of the workers, as it traveled through the maze of rails. The workers prodded it along in the right direction, into one of the open areas right before where Nathanson and Fowler were standing. Something was odd about the way the bull moved. Blindly, drunkenly, stumbling this way and that, dancing like a puppet on strings to the zaps of the cattle prods on all sides of it. It entered a pen in front of a gate into the open area, and at first, for half of a second, Nathanson mistook it for one of the workers. All at once he realized what it was and why it had been moving so oddly.

"Its face is gone?" Nathanson asked, with as even a voice as he could muster.

"You ever hear of head cheese?" Iggy asked, a slight smirk to his tone.

Nathanson said nothing at this. "But why before death, why not wait till after you kill it?"

This time it was Fowler who said nothing. Fowler talked too much, usually. Didn't allow for any lulls in conversation. Nervous? Garrulous by nature? But now he was silent. Nathanson decided, from the way that he shied back when prodded about certain subjects, that he must have been hiding something. Methane explosion my a--

The bull burst the gates open, and charged forward blindly, and Nathanson could see it more clearly as it got closer. The face had been peeled off cleanly, bloodlessly, leaving only the white skull beneath, and ragged strips of flesh around the face. The only blood on the face pooled out from the eye sockets, where some meat still remained, mostly congealed and crusted over- the eyes themselves were gone, also taken out, and the sockets hollowed out like balled melons, leaving only their deepest recesses meaty. Blinded and faceless, the beast could only sway its head back and forth as it listened to its surroundings, flinching back and twitching at any brush against it. The white-skulled workers repositioned themselves around it.

What must it be thinking, Nathanson thought, staring hard at what was going on before him. What must that feel like. He should have been repulsed, but by this point he was numb.

The workers, working in tandem and in one swoop, lowered down a simple mechanical apparatus around the bull's head. Deftly, not touching any sides of the head until the sides touched the sides of the neck equally on both sides. Like a giant grotesque game of Operation. The apparatus looked like a giant cigar guillotine, with white red-stained plastic covering on the far part, and the cutting blade and metal exposed. The bull felt as its sides clamped around its neck, and threw its head up and down violently, flinging spittle-like flecks of blood from its sightless sockets and thick mucusy saliva from the open hole in its skull, above the mouth where the nose cartilage would have been.

A second later, it was all over- one of the workers flipped a release on his handlebar, and the blade sliced silently through the bull's thick neck. The guillotine lifted up and out with the same motion, and the bull fell with only a soft groan and a few spurts of curiously clear blood.

The head, still living, twitched with what little it had- the jaw clattered together as though cold, and the large rough tongue protruded thickly through the gap in the skull where the nose cartilage would have been, licking the caked dust of the velvety ground. With a final spasm, the jaw fell open and the tongue came to rest lolling out of the skull, empty eye sockets staring forward at nothing.

Further white-skulled workers, previously waiting out of the side, came with hooked poles, each pole manned by two workers, each pole grabbing a foot with its hooks. The corpse was lifted, rear legs higher into the air, the remainder of the blood drained out into a recessed basin at the side. Nathanson looked on all this with impassivity that surprised him; it was just too surreal to affect him beyond a slight pressure at the inside corners of his eyes.

He had to get out of here. Clear his head. He looked back up at the workers again, their thoughts impenetrable behind the empty eye sockets of their bulls' skulls. Amet, the Egyptian god of death. Had a bull's head. Or at least, that's how Anthony thought the myth went. How must it affect you, he thought again. How must it affect you.

He asked for the break room, and made his way to the area that the white-skulled workers indicated, a wide grey building made out of cinder blocks. He navigated through the halls until he found a place to rest.

Drained, Anthony slumped at a counter, and mentally reviewed the facts of the case. Three workers disappear, followed by the OSHA worker sent to investigate. No traces of where they went, or what happened to them. Fowler had suggested something about the methane pits, but there would have been no way that wouldn't have left any trace. Unless...

No part of the animal is wasted, Nathanson recalled. Every part is used, eaten up... without a trace. Nathanson jerked to sobriety as the full implication of the idea hit him. These processes can be done with the corpses of any mammalian animal. 

No. He had to get out of there. As soon as he'd started to panic, though, Anthony heard an alarm sound, somewhere distant. Great. They must have been watching him, knew he was onto them. The way they must have done to the OSHA worker.

He knew why they'd kill and butcher the OSHA worker, for having realized what was going on, but what had the first three workers done to deserve the fate? Nathanson tried to reason it out as he ran. Not out that door, they'd be expecting that. He turned a corner. There must have been some accident, Nathanson decided, that they tried to cover up, and--

Bursting through the exit, Nathanson shrunk back. Before him, a few yards away and walking in his direction, were three workers, one leading the others. At first it looked like their faces had been peeled off and turned into head cheese like the bull's face had been, but Nathanson realized the truth as soon as he thought about it. Instead of wearing cow skulls like masks, they were wearing the front halves of human skulls. And instead of dark strips of leather, their coveralls were made of tan strips. 

With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, Anthony recognized the gait and body dimensions of the lead figure as being Iggy Fowler's. The figures continued to approach him.

No. Anthony slammed the door shut, desperately scrambling to lock the door, but the lights turned off behind him, sending the world into pitch blackness. There were three figures out there, Anthony realized, and four people missing. He felt something grab his shoulders roughly. Fingers wrap around his neck. He tried to struggle as his windpipe was squeezed shut, but he felt himself grow weaker and weaker. Until he lost consciousness entirely.

...

Anthony woke up. But as he tried opening his eyes, he felt no eyes to open. It was like a bad dream, or being awake while still under sleep paralysis, but Anthony suspected the real reason. He stumbled out over the ground, blinded, rough electrical shocks prodding him on from both sides. No. No, no, no. He reached up to his face- rough and slimy, and further in than it should have been. A face that didn't feel back. A face that wasn't there. Hands trembling, he reached his fingers up to his eyes, and into his sockets. He could feel the squishy parts of the backs of what were once his eyes. Feel a slight pressure there. No no no NO no no no. He felt around, realized he had been led into a pen of some sort. Realized the gate was in front of him. Realized what was about to happen next. No. Found the latch to open the gate. Flipped it. Ran. 

But he felt something snag around his ankle, and the something around each of his wrists. And then around his head, and down to his neck.

And, as the apparatus closed around his neck, but before the blade came slicing through it, a strange thought passed through Anthony's mind. The first coherent thought ever since his coming to. His last thought at all.

So, Anthony thought. This is what this feels like.