There was never a dull moment in the small town of Wooroloo, especially at Dave’s house, because it just so happened to be one of those rare gems that was  geologically located smack bang in the middle of a whole bunch of fun and adventurous landmarks. Take for instance the old hospital-come-tuberculosis-clinic, where back in the good old days the poor souls that met their demise were carted off less than a kilometer away to the local cemetery where they were dumped into their final resting places only to be afforded nothing more than a numbered piece of metal for their identification. Many times had Dave walked down the rows and looked at the numbers like he was some kind of factory worker putting away stock for the day in a warehouse. It was a saddening sight, seeing the many small mounds that were slowly being eroded away, untouched from the moment the last spade of dirt had been cast upon them, and the people underneath them that had become nothing more than decaying meat, with no one to keep the memory of their life alive.
Some of these metal tags bore the symbol of the rising sun, and it was to these Dave had really been drawn in the first place when he was just a small boy. Certainly he did not know of any family members that had served in the army, but school had taught him enough about the symbol Diggers wore on their hats during the two great wars, and he had been taught to respect those who fought and died under the name of ANZAC. But this cemetery, he thought, did not cater to the honors in which one deserves in death when giving their life for their country.
There was nothing here to say that the people burying the corpses appreciated how those corpses had been rendered lifeless; no carefully polished marble walls or plaques with sprouted trees to memorialize the fifty something soldiers filling the graves, nor were there any elegantly laid tombstones with towering angels like there were over in the Catholic section. Just a stingy piece of rusted iron plating that differed from the TB unknowns only in that it had the mark of the rising sun and a name to go with it. If you were really special you got two extra letters stamped to the bottom of yours; VC.
Dave thought that it was very fitting that they built an abattoirs just up the road from here, speaking of people not giving a shit about that which died to keep them alive. Respect was quickly being sucked out of the world, and replaced with convenience. No one wanted to associate that the piece of steak they shoveled into their mouths had actually at some point breathed the same oxygen and probably had similar emotions to them before the men over the road jammed a taser in their neck and released the life from their jugular.
He had seen his fair share of roosters make it to the chopping board at his grandma’s place and wondered how many people would still buy fried chicken if they remembered seeing a headless cock running full sprint in circles while its nerves decided to stop functioning, spurting blood from it’s severed artery like it was some sort of broken water main; wondered how many people would still love their lamb if they could smell the hot, sweet and stifling odor of a sheep’s gut’s when you pull them through the skin and left them to sit in a wheelbarrow to fester while you jointed the meat before it spoiled; wondered who would still eat pork if they were forced to scold the hairs off the skin themselves.
Dave had heard stories about the way business was done over there in the rooms with the hooks that hung above the conveyor belts. His brother in law, Paul, was a current employee, and his auntie, Trudie, had been a supervisor there at some point, and both figured such stories made for jovial table conversation during Christmas dinners.
Paul had told him that one of the best ways to beat boredom whilst on the job would be to grab the bile duct of a freshly killed heifer and squirt its contents down the gumboots of your neighbor when he wasn’t looking. When the bile ran out there were always a good haul of heads that could be used in variety of different ways spanning from soccer to bowling. He’d witnessed incidents where a guy had embedded a knife into his nose because he was using too much force to carve up a carcass, and one other that had had his forearm chopped off after being careless with an automated cutting machine.
Toilet time was always fun, because there was a certain ethnic group that preferred to squat over the bowl with boots that had been stomping around on floors full of blood, fat and bile, and if any of them got really lucky they would find a gal stone they could flog off to the “Easteners” for a pretty penny. Some sort of delicacy, as Paul had said.
He'd even pissed off a large Maori who came up behind him in the showers one evening, thrusting his balls upon Paul's bare arse when the skinny man had been bending over to pull up his boxer shorts. And what had spurred on this wierd homoerotic act of intimidation in a place surrounded by hanging, dripping animal carcasess? Some bile juice in the Maori's gumboots of course. All Paul had seen were carcasses swinging from their hooks as the Maori appeared out of the chill rooms fog like Predator had in the jungle. Paul had tried running but kept slipping in the cocktail of bodily fluids that lined the floor, so he threw  a sheeps head and tripped the Maori over to buy him some more time.
"Don't do it again" The Maori boomed so loudly that Paul could feel the vibration of the man's family jewels rattling around somewhere near his.
"Yep, no worries mate." He replied, and quick as a flash had his boxers up and was legging it for his car, still half naked.
Dave couldn’t figure out what was worse, that people actually ate this shit without giving it a second thought, or that these employees were allowed to integrate within society without even a basic psychological assessment. He knew his auntie was wierd, keeping a fridge full of dead animals in jars – everything from snakes to mice  floating in clear mineral turps – and he knew that Paul was far from being a model adult himself, but this sounded as if it was arts and crafts time at Graylands Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Hadn’t the murderer his mother helped catch by stumbling over his left over evidence worked at this place?
He laughed to himself, thinking of all those burgers the many fast food chains would dish up on an annual basis, all those barbeques  being lit up to cook the food that was coming from places such as these, all the people eager to grab the meat when it was going cheeep at the supermarket. People like Paul, after all, weren’t the sort of people that viewed washing their hands after a taking a dump as a priority matter. The world was one big fucking mad house and no one gave a shit, so long as they could buy their food pre-slaughtered, pre-skinned, pre-gutted, pre-boned and pre-packaged. And why should they? Why should they care that the thing they were eating probably had more sense of emotion than the people who butchered it? He doubted many of these people would give a shit about any of those graves with numbers and rising suns stamped on their plates either.
“But murderers and psychopaths have to make a living too, I ‘spose.” Dave thought as he placed a dragon ornament on his brother’s grave, and dusted off some leaves that had fallen on his grandfather’s the next row over. The elder had been claimed by lung cancer when Dave was nine, succumbing to the curse of nicotine addiction and winding up in the same hospital as the TB sufferers – and eventually the same graveyard – though he was lucky enough to have a family that could afford a nice, big white tombstone with all the usual identifying information and poetic words of remembrance. Even after having one lung removed, Kevin couldn’t beat his addiction, and so he took to the grueling and tortuous path of winding up in wheel chair coughing the other one up, wishing it would stop long enough so he could get another cigarette in his mouth to help him deal with the immense amount of stress he was under. It wasn’t until a few months, possibly even weeks before his death that he would realise smoking wasn’t actually helping his situation, but by then he had already been booked into the hotel of no return.
Dave saw him only hours before he went on his eternal holiday, lying in bed, nothing more than a piece of bony meat with tubes stuck to his frail body, his eyes open comprehending of nothing but fear, repeatedly convulsing  as if having a seizure that would never end. In the end, the boy begged to be taken home, the memory of the man that taught him respect of things that he would otherwise have taken for granted reduced to the definition of despair itself scarring him deeper than any anti cigarette campaign advert ever could. If you were serious about drilling such messages into your offspring, all you’d have to do is take them to a lung cancer ward.
Shaun’s grave, on the other hand, was too fresh to be allowed a tombstone – apparently the mound had to be left for quite a number of years for the dirt to stabilise, and Shaun had only been dead for two – but that did not mean it was anything like the ones on the other side of the yard where the forgotten folk were put. His mound had been decorated by his many friends with flowers and succulents of different varieties, including a marijuana leaf that had been laminated and placed at the top like it was some kind of lucky shamrock.
His last school photo had been etched into a metal plate with full color and this hung below a cross with his name, date of birth and date of death, and which also had inscribed into it “So close no matter how far”; the opening lyric to his favourite song. There were beer bottles with rusting lids and two biscuit tins overflowing with letters stating that people couldn’t believe he was gone. On the other side of town, on the main stretch of road, was the tree he’d hit in his Holden Torana, doing about 110kph, and nailed to that was another great, big cross, a Metallica flag and another assortment of flowers that could have kept a florist in business a whole year. Not bad for someone who used to tie the family cat up and poke a straw down its throat to make sure it got a full dose of that marijuana smoke being exhaled from his lungs; someone who probably could have scored a job across the road without even sending in a resume. He was certainly doing better than those fair few who had VC stamped underneath their rising sun, that was for sure.
Dave saw this accident a week before it happened; a brief flash of his brother lying as a bloodied heap at the steering wheel of his most prized possession, but it was hardly something he could have brought to the older sibling’s attention, neither was it something anyone else in the family would have taken notice of.
Though there was always talk of psychic happenings generations back in the family, no one really believed them. Not as much as Dave did.  And even when their mother was searching the world for the answer as to “why” her favourite was taken so early at the tender age of seventeen, spending countless amounts of money on psychics and mediums that spilled her the same bullshit that might come from a used car salesman-turned-light worker, she would take next to no notice of Dave when he’d told her he’d been speaking to Shaun in his many lucid dreams.
Not that it stopped at matters of the unexplained either. Dave had also told her that it was not the year of the dragon Shaun had been born in, but the year of the rabbit, as the Chinese calendar did not start and end the same times as that of the western one, but she had already bought a dragon, and as it was too inconvenient to admit she had made a mistake, she put the ornament proudly on her sons grave, where it would catch everybody’s eye.  Now others had taken her lead, scattering dragon ornaments all around the grave like it had been an obsession of Shauns. In the end Dave just went with the flow, knowing how pointless it was to try and bother changing collective ignorance. The world was a madhouse and no one cared.
Mat stood patiently in silence, waiting for Dave to carry out the ritual of kissing his fingers, then rubbing them on the photo of his brother, only to move on and do the same with the headstone of his grandfather.
Usually the boy was full of things to say, and ninety nine percent of the time they were abs-o-lutely hilarious; a jumble of all the best jokes from the eighties mixed with the humour of a seventeen year old – the sort of things you both laughed and frowned at simultaneously, then asked yourself if you were a bad person for thinking it was funny – but Mat did have a sense of respect. He waited for Dave to finish before asking him about the party.
“So how far is it to Nick’s place?” Mat asked, probably out of awkwardness more than anything else.
“Less than a k. It’s just past the death shed. Apparently he’s got a bouncy castle set up.” Dave laughed, looking at one of the beer bottles next to Shaun’s grave, and thinking how the two really didn’t go together.
“And who are you going to test this out on?” Mat asked, holding out the bottle he’d been carrying through the bush like it was some sort of highly volatile explosive. The label said Turkey, and it was filled with something that smelled remotely alcoholic, but that wasn’t Turkey.
When Dave had gone scouring through his sister’s caravan that her friend had been staying in, he saw this lying on the table, and after filtering out what appeared to be dirt floating in it using some old fly wire mesh that had been laying about in the yard, he had what he thought was going to be his and Mat’s buzz for the night. But the more he looked at the bottle and wondered where exactly the liquid had come from, and why it had dirt floating in it – if that even was dirt – the more he came to wonder if it was even safe to drink. Mat seemed to share his same sense of unenthusiasm, not at all convinced the home brew sanitiser he cleaned the fly wire with was going to do the job. Ah the perils of being a seventeen year old in a state where the legal age to buy alcohol was eighteen, and living in such a small town that the only people who sold it knew you weren’t as old as your fake ID said you were. Knew that fake ID in fact belonged to your dead brother.
“I’m not entirely sure. It’s a pity Redmond isn’t coming. If I could convince him to blow up a deodorant can in his face, I’m pretty sure I could get him to take a swig of this.” Dave grabbed the bottle off Mat, eyed it apprehensively for a moment, spun the cap off with a single flick of his fingers, then took a whiff of what was inside. He handed it back to Mat and gestured for him to do the same.
“Ergh. Smells like someone had a shot then puked it back into the bottle.” Mat decided the explosive was less volatile than first thought, either that or he decided he did not want second hand bile on him if the thing burst open – not that there was any logical reason why it should. Maybe bile exploded when it reacted with home brew sanitiser. Dave made a mental effort to ask Paul if he knew the answer the next time he saw him.
“Have you ever heard that story about the hills cat?” Dave asked as the two of them came into line with the abattoirs, but before Mat could answer, a machine started up, and chains clanged. Next there was a sound that could only be described as a very scared cow mooing while a saw decapitated its head, cutting off its cry which had now morphed into the sound of squelching liquid, followed by a loud thump as it hit the floor. Then, almost as quickly as it had started, the noise of the machine stopped, and the boys would have been left in silence had it not been for the still clanging chains.
“Why you gotta ask me about stuff like that right now, man?” Mat asked, smiling but clearly disturbed at the timing of the slaughter.
“I don’t know, something about blood and guts made me think of it. So you have heard of it then?” Dave tried to sneak a peek through the killing rooms windows, curious as to whether Paul was full of it or not.
“That the one about a Tasmanian tiger or something that mauls people’s sheep? I’ve heard some bits and pieces but not much.”
“Hahahah. Bits and pieces. Get it? No, not a Tasmanian tiger, dummy, they are extinct. This was apparently some jaguar or cougar or something – something black and big anyway....”
“Just the way you love em, ay Dave.” Mat chuckled and gave him a wink.
“Haha, you know it. Anyway, apparently there was some circus back in the sixties or seventies – I am really sketchy on the details if you haven’t noticed – and they kept these things as mascots. Then the circus went bust and were forced to release 'em into the wild, and they just so happened to be somewhere near the hills when that happened, though of course, no one really knows where that was.”
“Sounds like a load of crap to me.” Mat responded, flicking a bug casually off his shoulder as if the noise of the slaughter hadn’t even happened, his penis joke clearly helping to eradicate any sense of uneasiness he had been feeling. He told himself it was three o clock on Friday afternoon, after all, and it was perfectly logical for an abattoirs to be functioning. What time did they close anyway? Four thirty? Five? Maybe it was whenever the people like Paul and Trudie felt like they should. Or more importantly, people like the murderer Dave’s mum had helped put away.
“Probably is. But what keeps this myth in motion is all these random mutilations that keep popping up around the joint. Wundowie, Wooroloo, Chidlow, Mount Helena even as far out as Gidge, and probably even further south. I bet if you ask around long enough you’ll at least stumble upon someone who knows someone who has come out to feed their sheep and either been missing one or two, or been greeted by a pile of blood and guts. It doesn’t stop at sheep either, I heard somewhere a while back that one of these properties ...” Dave flung his arm out half heartedly pointing at no-where in particular but seeming to cover everywhere at the same time.
“...Had a cow that looked as though someone had thrown it through a mulcher. And – this one probably is nonsense – I heard that back in the day there were even a few instances of bushwalkers stumbling upon human corpses that had been hanging from their intestines in the trees.”
Mat looked at him doubtfully for awhile then finally said:
“Could just be a bunch of idiots with a shotgun and nothing better to do on a Friday night.”
“Could be, except shotguns – any guns, no matter how much you try and silence them – make a sound that would surely alert the farmers.”
“...Or some explosives.” Mat replied, as if this was a plausible solution to the dilemma of silent cattle mutilation. Dave looked at him quizzically, not sure whether he was being serious or not.
“Could be aliens for all we know, trying to shove a probe many sizes to big for them up their arses, like they did with Cartman.” Dave stopped walking, bent down and pretended to fart which could have been mistaken for the world’s worst case of diarrhea. Mat riposted with a homoerotic “Jesuth Chritht” gesture, that would not have been considered politically correct.
“More likely to be explosives.” he added once he’d finished with his routine.
“Speaking of explosives, apparently the forensic police were blowing up pig carcasses then gathering up all the bits and trying to work out which carcass they had come from.” Suddenly Dave felt a pang of anxiety come over him. It wasn’t the thought of a dead pig or its guts that had triggered it either. It was more a subconscious feeling that something was not quite right, but he could not pin point what it was. All he knew was that the sign saying Linley Valley Pork  at the entrance to the abattoirs amplified it by about a million.
His thought was broken once again by the sudden start of the machine and the dangling of the chains, which were now only very faint, now that the boys had put a decent distance between themselves and the kill room. This time the cow had gone out with less of cry than the last one, but for some reason it was even worse to bear. There was something about it that just seemed plain wrong.
Dave looked down to find a sheep’s skull looking back at him through eyes that had long since decomposed, and took it as an ominous sight. He glanced back up at Mat, and understood that his friend had been feeling that same sense of anxiety, probably reading it on Dave’s face, so he forced a smile and then pointed out the unmistakable balloons that had been tied to the gate of Nick’s drive way.
“Well, we have made it to our destination.” Dave remarked, taking one last glance at the abattoirs before heading through the gate.  
“…And didn’t get mauled by a lion or butchered by a meat saw either” Mat added.
There was already a small group of youths their age that had gathered around Nick’s outside table, getting ready to tuck into some sort of brown dish that Nick’s mother had just served them.
Two English twins named Emma and Faye sat next to each other on one side, and a boy named Zak sat at the other with a smug grin on his face, as if he were about to give one of his usual smart arsed, backhanded comments, that these days seemed only ever reserved for Dave. Maybe it was because they caught the same bus, or – more likely – because once upon a time Zak had been his best mate, and now the honor had fallen to Mat. Nick cut him off just as Zak opened his mouth, and Dave was delighted to see that smug look drain from the boys face. Having his dominance shat on was not something the alpha dog approved of.
“You guys want some? Mum makes the best curry this side of Wooroloo.” Nick asked when he realized Dave and Mat had just appeared out of nowhere at the table. It had become somewhat of a usual thing to this group of wayward school friends as to not bother with formal greetings – all that was saved for grown ups and job seeking. Instead it was if each had never parted company with any of the other and, more often than not conversations picked up from where they had been left off.
“Oh yeah can’t pass up an offer of free curry. What is it, mutton or beef?” Mat then went into some excuse about how he hadn’t eaten since breakfast time, conveniently forgetting the eggs on toast Dave had whipped up for him at his place before they set off on their journey to Nick’s.
“Beef!”
“Speaking of beef…heard a few cows get the chop just now.” Dave cut in, without even making the neural connection that Emma and Faye were still eating, and that they probably couldn’t stomach the image of a cow being decapitated whilst doing so, as well as he could. Even Nick, who probably had the most right to claim desensitization, given that he practically lived next door to the abattoir, decided against taking another scoop of meat out of his bowl. Zak just went about his business of doing whatever it was he was doing, paying no notice to anything Dave had said.
“Yeah, you get used to it. Right now is usually when it starts to die down though. Haha. I tell you what man, it’s the pigs screaming that will really chill your blood. You can hear it a mile away.” Nick shrugged, deciding he could use another spoonful of the curry after all.
But the screaming wasn’t needed, because a cold feeling had worked its way into Dave’s back sending a shiver down his spine. He looked at his arms and noticed all the hairs standing on end through the goose bumps that had formed. There was something about the word pig that was making him feel uneasy, but what was it?
Dave took another look at Nick, slumped back in his grandpa chair at the head of the table, content that his belly had been filled to the brim for the moment, and slowly his trepidations began to let up. If Nick could find reason enough to relax when he lived only a stone’s throw from the machines and the dangling chains and the sounds of pigs being slaughtered – not to mention both the minimum and maximum security prisons up the road – then surely he could find reason in the fact that he lived at least three kilometers from it.
“Ok I suppose we better go inflate this bouncy castle then.” Nick got up and began to lead them all around the back, where a massive piece of multicolored rubber lay draped across the lawn. At the back was a box that housed an air compressor that fed directly into it.
“HAHAHAH” Mat burst out laughing when he saw it.
“I thought that you were joking about this thing. Man, how much did this cost ya?”
“It isn’t mine. Dad rented it. Buggered if I know what they cost to rent, but it’s a helluva lot less than what it would cost to buy.”
Nick cranked the engine to the compressor, and slowly the castle started to fill with air. Half way through the hour or so it took to fill completely, Zak had told them, quite vaguely, that he “needed to go get something”, and before anyone could ask what, had jumped on his trail bike and sped off back in the direction of the abattoirs. It seemed Nick was right, as there had been no more sounds of machines starting up or dangling chains hitting themselves; no more sounds of death, or thuds of dropping cows.
“People probably won’t start getting here until seven, so I suggest you guys get in your fix of bouncing before someone like Chris  - or even you Dave – decides to vomit on the thing.” Nick lifted an eye at Dave, as if to question whether he planned on getting absolutely obliterated or not. He’d once seen his peer consume an entire six pack in the time it took to make a five minute phone call. The boy was a real Bob Hawke.
“Nah not me mate. I’ve only got a less than a full bottle of spirits, and I’m sharing with Mat. I’ll be lucky if this even gets me tipsy.” Dave lifted the bottle out of his bag, taking care not to let too much light fall on it so that no one would notice how unusually colourless the liquid was inside. He caught Mat looking at him, then the twins, as if to say “why don’t you offer them a shot”. Dave thought about this for about a second and decided against it; He liked Emma and Faye, and the last thing he wanted to do was poison them with some botched home made spirits – if that indeed was what this stuff was. Zak on the other hand, probably would have drank it even if he knew it was poisonous. Too bad he’d up and vanished like a fart in the wind.
It was dark when he returned, and Nick’s party had reached full swing. Cars filled the driveway and spilled out onto the verge, some lining the less-than-wide-enough shoulders of the small road.
Parking had been so hard to come by that the late comers were now resorting to leaving their cars in the abattoir car park and walking the small distance to the Nick's place.
“Damn pigs saw me coming onto Government Road. They chased me to Wundowie and back before I lost ‘em at the gravel oval.” Zak laughed as he brought the bike to a stop inside the perimeter of Nicks property. They had been friends a long time, and so it was that a space had been reserved for it, even when other cars were struggling to find a place to park.
Dave had been readying himself for a back flip on the bouncy castle – one of those ones ninjas do by running forward then spinning themselves through the air with their feet straightened –  when once again he heard that magical, anxiety inducing word spill from Zak’s mouth. It didn’t matter it had been used as a slang term for the police. As far as Dave’s sub conscious was concerned, it was good enough to cause the chemical reaction necessary to bring about the erection of those damned goose bumps. He faltered right at the crux of the jump and ended up landing on his head, almost breaking his spine in the process. A jolt of pain hit him and for a moment he couldn’t move.
“What’s the gravel oval?” one of the twins asked. He thought it was Emma, but not being able to turn his head was not too sure.
“It’s exactly what its name implies. A piece of dirt in the shape of an oval in the centre of town. You won’t hear any pigs squealin’ out there. Too close to the horse club.” Nick replied, diving into the castle and landing on Dave.
“Almost heard some swine squeal tonight.” Zak corrected, then walked off out of sight.
When the sensation released its paralyzing grip, Dave got up and walked off to grab the mysterious bottle of floating debris, head down like a wounded dog – though no one realized this was because he couldn’t actually straighten it. Not just yet.
Once again he looked at the bottle, but could not bring himself to drink it, when all of sudden there was a “Hey Dave” in his ear, and someone grabbing him in a bear hug from behind. It was a girl from school named Dani who had once agreed to go out with him on the condition Dave bought her some phone credit, to which Dave replied that his dignity cost more than thirty dollars. He was looking at the bottle as this memory unfolded before him.
“Hey Dani. Wanna drink?” he grabbed a plastic cup off the table and had poured out a decent serving of the liquid before the girl even had a chance to answer, not that it would have been anything but a yes. She drank down the home made spirits in one gulp, and this whole time Dave watched apprehensively, sure she was going to start gurgling and frothing at the mouth, or burst into flames, or perhaps even turn into a toad. When nothing happened, he let out a sigh of relief, yet he still couldn’t bring himself to take a sip. Just as he turned around to ask Dani what the spirits had tasted like, someone had whisked her away into the house.
“So much for that idea.” Dave walked around to the side of the house where he could hear jokes not quite fit for a politically correct party being told in a voice that was to eerily like Eddie Murphy’s considering its owner was white. When Mat had finished with his joke, he handed him the bottle.
“All yours mate. I tested it out on Dani, and it seems OK to drink. Not really up for drinking, myself. Hurt my neck on the bouncy castle and feeling a bit sick. Might head home soon. You staying here or coming with me?” Mat turned to him, still too enchanted by the crowd he had pulled with his jokes, to give in and call it a night just yet.
“Nah, Dave I’ll stay. I think that Jasmine girl is here somewhere.” He had told Dave about this girl before, and the story that went with it Dave couldn’t tell if it was romantic or desperate or a bit of both. Apparently he caught the bus with her back to the city and they just sort of started hanging out. And not in the way friends usually hang with each other either. The way Mat told it, they just started floating to each other like blowfish to burly in the river, not saying anything in particular, just having some sort psychic connection while they walked the common part of their route. Real, neutrality at first sight kind of stuff.
Dave shrugged and walked back around to the bouncy castle to find Nick had been one hundred percent correct in his prediction - kind of like Dave had been with Shaun. Chris had chugged down a bottle of Woodstock  and had regurgitated it back into the bouncy castle. Dave sat down on the furthest chair he could, noticing a couple of love birds stagger out of a row of shadow covered bushes. They took one look at him, and smiled – well, the male half of the beast with two backs did anyway. The female half went red – Dave could just make it out in the dim light – then each went their separate ways. He sat there for what he thought was half an hour, then checked his watch, thinking it was some time around 10 o clock. The time read 12:51AM.
Dave stared at it a moment, wondering how time had slipped away so fast, then decided he really should be going. He got up and went to look for Mat, just in case he had changed his mind, or in case his fish turned out to be a sinker instead of a floater.
Mat was merry, but not so drunk he couldn’t stand up. He was however, in that stage of inebriation where you go to say goodbye to someone and end up telling them your life biography instead, repeating every second chapter in the process. It turned out he had changed his mind about coming, but after Dave had waited patiently for him for another hour, his headache about to split his face in two, he decided to leave without Mat, as the boy was too caught up in conversation with some guy he’d never met before.
The air was cold, and Dave had forgotten any basic means of keeping him warm, so he trudged along at about half the pace he usually would of, his shins taking the brunt of the chilling wind that was starting to blow through him.
There was the faintest sliver of a moon in the sky, which added to the awkwardness of walking, and he had to take even more care lest he slipped on one of the gravel shoulders. He walked past the abattoir’s car park and noticed that there wasn’t a car left in sight – this took him a few moments to comprehend as his eyes needed to adjust.
He walked on feeling the cold of the bitumen road underneath him as if he were walking on a sleet of ice. It seemed as though his shoes were doing nothing to keep the cold away from his feet, and he found himself wondering why he hadn’t just rang his father and asked him to come get him.
He liked the walks, Dave told himself, always keen for a drunken – or in this case sober – adventure, to wrap up a good party. Always keen to be left alone with his thoughts, which centered around the death of his brother, and the premonition he had seen a week before it happened. Sometimes it would catch him unexpectedly, when he hadn’t even been thinking upon the subject, and so it was that such times as these when he was alone and walking that he could analyze it and ask himself why he had done nothing when he saw his brother, blood coming from his nose and ears in streams, face broken and beaten as his head slumped against the steering wheel, one eye open and the other welded shut from the bruising that wheel had caused.
He never saw this is in real life – that moment had been saved for Dave’s father – but he did see a similar image when he visited Shaun the day before he died; the day before Valentines day, when his heart and his brain decided the trauma had been too much. Saw him hooked up to all those machines like his grandfather had been, a tube stuck down his throat to help him breathe. Saw the reflexive spasms Shaun’s body would make every time a liquid went down the tube. Saw the definition of despair itself at the age of fifteen just as he had six years earlier. Saw the single tear roll down his older brother’s eye after he’d been rid of this world for several hours; a single tear that surmised all those things that brother had never gotten around to telling him when he was alive. This is was what Dave could not stand about all those ignorant of the sacrifice that was made for their food, because this was death; and death was…
A peircing coldness was what stabbed through the one already touching the surface of his skin, but unlike the chill from the outside air, this one permeated through him, and for a brief moment he could feel it freezing his muscles, his nerves, his bones and his mind. Perhaps it was some of that psychic intuition that had worked its way from the family into his DNA, perhaps it was the memory of anxiety he had felt in this same spot only hours earlier. Whatever it was it only lasted a moment, could only last a moment, because Dave's attention was soon drawn to the noise of dangling chains and a machine starting up, then the blood curdling moo of a cow that turned into a sloshing of liquid and breaking of bone as that the machine tore the cows head off. This time though there was no thump, neither was there the dangling of chains to reassert the fact that something incredibly creepy had just taken place at the abattoirs at two oclock in the morning.
The noise had stopped as abruptly as it had started, and Dave found himself left in total silence; a perfect horror storie's accompaniament to the pitch blackness that surrounded him.
But he could not move. Not yet, anyway, because although his common sense was screaming at him to run as fast as he could home - he didn't dare head back past the abattoirs to Nick's place - his logic was telling him that fast moving things were easier to see in the dark than slow ones. And why did this matter? Because it was that chilling moment of intuition that made him feel as though eyes were seeking him through the darkness; the kind of feeling one gets when they wake up in the early hours of the morning to have a piss.
So he walked, slowly to begin with, then, as Dave thought about why the word pig had been bringing him so much anxiety that evening his pace began to increase into something between a brisk walk and a jog. He stumbled over a gravel shoulder and fell flat on his face, but it did not matter because fear was driving him now, and fear had blocked off any sense of feeling his nerves would have given him when the skin came right off his cheek. It was fear that had initiated the survival protocol of his brain that made getting home a top priority because Dave had remembered why a cow being slaughtered in this neck of the woods was so out of place.
Why didn't he just wait for Mat? At least then he would have someone to share in this horror; someone to confirm that he wasn't just off his face, but Dave had to be insistent about getting home didn't he, and now the memory was stuck with him and him alone. Not something anyone would really believe if he told them, though then again, probably not something they would have believed coming from the world's most politically incorrect joker either.
When he got to the cemetary he ran, past his grandfather's grave, and that of his brother. Past the TB numbered plaques and those of the fallen soldiers, and into the Catholic section where huge concrete angels towered above him, the night shadow making them appear more like gargoyles. As he stepped into the boundary behind the sign with the cross, a strong gust of wind blew at him and almost knocked him over. This wasn't the first time such a thing would happen, and it was the reason he didn't like coming to this part of the cemetary, but the piece of fence that lined the prison farm was easier to climb here, as well as easier to see, and would save him several minutes of struggling at the side free from religious disapproval.
He vaulted the fence in one jump, and sprinted to the otherside of the farm, then ducked under that fence and made his way through the haunted bush, where it was rumoured several prisoners of the TB days had hung themselves.
Finally, Dave arrived at his fathers house, and without even bothering to try and be quiet, he wrenched open the door and made his way to his room. There he lie in bed unable to sleep, his heart racing as he remembered an article he had read in the local paper informing the residents that the abattoirs would no longer be slaughtering cow or sheep, and would be focusing solely on pig products under the name of Linley Valley Pork. He had read this article several years before Shaun had died.
Dave tried sleeping but couldn't shake that chilling feeling that something was watching him, though he felt somewhat safer now that he was under the covers of his bed. He had experienced some sort of otherworldly presence here before, during times of great sadness - sort of like a healing hand that was the antithesis of that coldness that had ripped through him - and had come to think that his grandfather was perhaps watching over him, hopefully his brother too. He waited for the first rays of sunshine to split through the sky before even allowing himself to try.
Paul was the only one in the house when Dave awoke around midday. The soreness in his neck had dissipated and the graze in his cheek had sealed itself closed during the night. He felt queerly refreshed despite the strange happenings of the previous night. Even they could not deter him from the smell of bacon wafting out from the kitchen.
The phone rang, and, being the closest to it, Dave picked it up. On the other end was a very distraught sounding Nick.
"Zak's just had an accident on his motorbike. He is being taken to hospital as we speak. A car pulled out in front of him as he was heading home from my place."
"Where did this happen?" Dave asked, but of course, the image flashed into his head before Nick had even relayed the information.
"The gravel oval. Apparently he has cut up his foot real bad, and the guy driving the car reckons if he didn't know first aid, Zak would have bled out within minutes. He's got a bit of nerve damage"
"I'll be right over." Dave declared, through the loud sobbing of one of the twins in the background.
"See ya then." And with that Nick's line went dead.
Dave would have walked, but thought better of it, given the morning's news and the events that had taken place at roughly two AM in the morning.
He turned to Paul and asked him if he would mind giving him a lift to Nick's house, using the news of Zak to help sway his decision.
"Where abouts?" Paul queried. He shovelled some bacon into his mouth. Knowing precisely how it had been dressed didn't deter him either though. He could have killed this pig, gutted it, then thrown it on the fire himself without thinking twice. He plucked another piece off the plate and wolfed it down, this time with an overdone egg.
"Down the road from the ab - the death house." Dave proclaimed, finding the name more fitting.
"Sure, no problem." Paul grabbed his keys, then they jumped in his car and headed off in the direction of the cemetary; in the direction of the abbatoirs, the abandoned hospital and the two prisons, one of which the driver would wind up in in several years to come - but not before his cousin from Wundowie would before him after stabbing him in the back of course.
"Hey Paul, do you still slaughter cows here?" Dave asked, when the abattoirs came into view, already knowing the answer, but hoping Paul would give him some small thread that could explain just what had happened last night.
"Nope. Haven't done them since the last time I worked there, which was over five years ago. Why do you ask?"
"No reason." And that was as close to telling someone about the two AM cow slaughter Dave got, until another five years later when Mat - after taking the other fork in the road that was life - came round to visit him and his new wife, Jess.

"How are you going, Dave? Hope you are getting along well. It's good to see you" Mat had said as he took a seat on the couch.
"Yeah, not too bad, just been writing a helluva lot lately." Jess was in the kitchen checking on a batch of bread she was baking, and so hadn't realised Mat had even arrived, though she knew he was coming.
"Writing? As in stories and things?" Mat asked with a raised eyebrow, as if he found this a most curious thing indeed.
"Yeah, I'm trying my hand at a novel. I've got an idea about a girl who kills people in their sleep, based on some experiences I had when I was little..." Mat's expression had turned into that of an awkward smile, as if he knew Dave hadn't actually killed anyone, but needed to pose the question all the same just in case he was wrong. Dave read it and the thought connected to it simultaneously then replied:
"Haha, no Mat I haven't killed anyone, and certainly not in my sleep. I am using my experiences of lucid dreaming as the basis for the storyline." Mat disguised his relief with a chuckle, took a swig of the coke he was holding, then set it down on the table. His body language had become serious, and this was reflected in the way he looked at Dave.
"I tell you what you should write about..." He said, gulping down some air as if the thought was physically choking him.
"That night we were walking home from Nick's party and heard that damned cow get slaughtered. Man, I still can't believe that really happened. I would chalk it down to that mysterious batch of home brewed spirits if you hadn't been with me."
Dave was half way through the act of taking a sip of coffee, and managed to spill half of it onto the floor in the process, at the revelation that Mat had in fact been with him.
"What the hell? I was sure I was by myself that night. I never told anyone about it because I had no way of proving it, and it's just the sort of story people make up around the place, like that one about the hills cat. I remember it clear as day, I even cursed myself for not waiting for you to come with me." Mat eyed him suspiciously, as if trying to decide whether or not Dave was having him on. In the end he figured there was no reason for his friend of many years to lie. He took another swig of his coke, then continued.
"Nah, mate. I was with you that night. We left Nick's around two in the morning because you hurt your neck on the bouncy castle. I mean, I was happy to stay, but I didn't want you to slip a disc or something and wind up paralysed in the middle of the bush by yourself. We were walking back to your house when that eery mechanical noise started, and those chains...those damned dangeling chains...then the noise of a cow sounding like it was being executed by one of Osama bin Laden's crew." Mat inserted some humour into the impersonation of a dying cow he was doing when Jess walked back into the room. She had been listening to the conversation in silent fascination, and now wanted to be part of it, but before she would she'd let the two boys compare notes.
"You know how I started feeling anxious when we heard it the first two times before we got to Nick's and I didn't know why? How there was something I couldn't quite put my finger on?" Mat nodded listening intentively, his attention lapsing for only a moment when Jess came and sat beside him.
"Well I figured it out that night after I got home - after we got home..." A vague memory worked itself to the forefront of Dave's mind, of Mat crashing in the spare bed next to him in his room, but it could have belonged to one of the many times he'd stayed over, and not necessarily that particular night they were talking about. He wondered if he had just suppressed the memory of his best friend being there, and imagined up some excuse of letting himself believe this, then decided that no, he, Dave, had definately been alone for this one. That had been part of the torture of the horror. But why was Mat convinced he was there as well? Did Dave forget that he had in fact told him of this occurence at one point in time? No, this again, was something else he was sure of. He told Mat about the newspaper article he had read before Shaun died, and the young man's eyes widened in disbelief.
"Maybe a worker decided to go in after hours and use the facility to butcher one of their pets." Mat offered, still holding onto the belief that there was a perfectly rational explanation to this tale.
"That's a good theory, Mat, but how many farmers - how many people for that matter - do you know that use industrial machinery to kill animals in total darkness, because there were no lights on anywhwere near the place. If there were I wouldn't have fell down one of the gravel shoulders and got this memento for my efforts." Dave pointed at his cheek, where an area of skin was very faintly whiter than the rest of his face. To this Mat had no answer, so he surrended adding anything further and finished the rest of his coke. Jess had been waiting avidly for this opportunity, and when she realised both of them had finished, she broke in.
"I heard that same noise one night as well when I was living in Wooroloo. It wasn't at one oclock in the morning, but it was definately dark and late enough to be out of place." This came off rather casually, as if Jess had got the wondering and fear out of the way long ago. Dave looked at her, bewildered and somehow dreading for her to continue, but he wanted to know all the same.
"Where did you hear this?" He asked, but he already knew the answer. Knew it like he'd known that somewhere in the darkness eyes were watching him that fateful night. It was more of that psychic ability that came through when he'd least expect it.
"Across the road from my ex's house...that haunted one I told you about, where his dad reckons he saw a UFO." Dave nodded, understanding that he had guessed correctly, and, Mat seeing this understood that they knew something he didn't. It was as if the word UFO hadn't even registered in his head.
"I don't get it. Was his house anywhere near the abattoirs?" He asked, figiting with his fingers now that he had no coke as a means of stress relief.
"Nope!" Jess couldn't help but chuckle when she saw the look on his face.
"Then where?"
"Gravel oval." Both she and Dave replied together, and with that Mat fell off his chair.