Grab The Bull By The Teeth

"What percentage have we achieved?"

"Forty two."

The first voice sighed. "We're not going to make the deadline."

"What are our feasible options?" Asked the second voice.

"Failure." Began the first.

"That's not a reasonable option." Interrupted the second.

"...Or, we break procedural recommendations."

From the outside, it looked like a normal bull. It smelled like a bull. It sounded like a normal bull. It even defecated just like a normal bull did.

As an Angus bull, it weighed nearly twenty four hundred pounds and stood taller than a man. Just its sack weighed enough for a middle aged housewife to use to tone her arms as she watched the diverse array of reality TV where fat people fell in love, and both gained and lost weight.

If a butcher were to cut open the bull, at first, he'd find normal meat, tendons, and even bone.

But, if he were to cut into the bone, and if he had a good eye, he might spot a near transparent, metallic mesh running throughout the marrow.

If he was particularly curious, and decided to cut the bone down the middle, he'd find a polymer tube, only a quarter of an inch across, running through the center of every bone in the bull's skeleton.

If all that were to happen, under just the right circumstances, and that butcher was uncommonly intelligent for a butcher, if he could have been an engineer or a doctor, but chose to cut meat because he genuinely loved the trade, he'd open the bull’s skull, and find their control room.

The inside of the skull would be a web of cables and flashing tiny lights, at the center of which, two fluffy, insect-like creatures, each only an inch and a half tall, at most, with enormous eyes would be sitting at their console, operating the cow.

If asked their names, the first would have vocalized a faint 'cheep', and the second would have made a noise nearly identical to the first.

The clumsy, oafish ears of a human lacked the intricate refinement to decipher the complexity of their language. To them, those noises were interpreted by their tiny advanced brains as, 'Romby' and 'Julien'.

Julien was quiet for a few moments. "If we broke the procedure, would they know?"

"I'm confident that I can cover the evidence." Assured Romby.

Head down, the bull continued to quietly graze, collecting the necessary organic matter that the pair needed to complete their mission.

But, the pace at which the biological ship collected was too slow. There was less than a day left before the harvest and the pair needed more than double the organic matter that they currently possessed.

"What do you suggest?" Asked Julien.

"The crux of the problem is that while sequestered within this fence, with only the tiny vegetation blades to collect, the time required to complete our mission is greater than the total allotted time for the mission."

"Yes. Yes." Coaxed Julien as he held his seventh leg up to his mouth clicker.

"Naturally, the solution is to leave our enclosure. We require organic matter from this planet, but precisely what organic matter we harvest is unspecified and irrelevant."

"Ahh, I see... does this model have an omnivore or predator mode?" Julien asked with a raised antennae.

"No." Admitted Romby. "But I believe I have a workaround for that." The little bug immediately busied himself, typing on the holographic display with his seven legs.

The bull stopped chewing grass, and raised its head, mouth wide, eyes empty and without expression. Its teeth dropped an extra inch and a half below the gums and began to vibrate.

Blood poured from the bull’s mouth as the teeth began to cut through the gums, moving around its mouth like a swarm of busy ants.

Soon they were moving so quickly that there was a buzzing whirring noise, like a blender.

"I think that will be sufficient." Julien noted, as he observed the display.

Romby clicked his clicker in satisfaction.

"There's one point I'd like to make though." Julien said as he raised a furry, many jointed leg and pointed at the cow's mouth on the holographic display. "Will it not create quite a ruckus in the human world, if one of their cattle suddenly becomes carnivorous and begins eating other animals and possibly humans as well?"

Romby thought for a moment. "I'd guess it would be a point of concern for them, but I do assume this sort of thing happens from time to time. I can't fathom that it would be thaaaat inconceivable of an event."

Julien nodded. "Yes. It probably happens quite frequently on their planet."

"Absolutely." Romby reassured.

"Shall we then?" Julien asked.

"Be my guest."

Bloody mouth, full of spinning, rotating teeth, with blank wide eyes, the bull lurched over to the nearest heifer and clamped down on her side. Meat and blood sprayed in the air. The cow's bellows were barely audible over the sound of the grinding, whirring teeth.

By the time she fell, the bull had bore a hole through her and was already liquifying her organs.

Within minutes, she was gone.

The rest of the herd, moaning in fright, had retreated to the far side of the pen, placing as much distance between themselves and the blood-soaked, gore encrusted bull as possible.

"What's our percentage?" Romby asked.

"Forty four." Replied Julian.

"Excellent."

The bull oriented on the rest of the herd. Spasming with every step, mouth agape, intestines swinging from its horns, it quickly closed the distance between them.

************

Willow Corliss lay in bed, quietly scrolling. It was late, nearly two am. It was normal for her, being awake in the middle of the night, playing pointless time wasting games on her phone, stalking the profiles of the half dozen boys she currently had crushes on.

Often, she would wake between her sleep cycles and spend forty five minutes or so wasting time before she finally drifted back off. Most would call it a terrible habit, but late at night, knowing she was the only one awake, she cherished the time to herself. It was personal, intimate, magical.

Willow was set to turn seventeen in a few months, but she had never had a boyfriend. For years her mother assured her that her chubbiness and 'baby fat' would disappear when she became a woman, as it had happened for all the women in their family.

But, for Willow, womanhood came, and the 'baby fat' remained.

She sighed as she turned off her phone screen.

Would she ever be pretty?

She knew there was a pretty face under the fat, her mother was beautiful, dark red hair, freckles that had lasted into her forties, slim figure, but would she, Willow, ever look pretty, ever be… skinny?

There was a sharp crack, and another followed by an endless procession as the bull quickly stomped and bashed its head through her bedroom wall.

It exploded into her room, covered in blood and gore with empty eyes and a hanging jaw full of blender teeth.

As the bull stripped away her baby fat, its vibrating teeth grinding it to an emulsified paste which it sucked quickly down, for a moment, Willow was mostly muscle and bone.

For a moment, she was skinny.

Then the bull ate the rest of her.

"Ninety nine point eight percent!" Romby cried in celebration.

"Just a little more!" Julian assured his partner.

Willow's parents came crashing into her room. At the sight of the horror show, the mother went pale and began to scream. Running on autopilot, her father left the bedroom to retrieve his shotgun. That was what he was supposed to do if there was an intruder, or an animal had gone mad or rabid.

He didn't really have any self imposed contingency plans for what to do if he awoke in the middle of the night to find that a bull had devoured his only daughter.

He hadn't even acknowledged yet that that's what actually happened.

All the blood, the scraps of meat with little bits of skin still attached, skin, that was the exact same color as Willow’s, there was no reason to think that was what was left of his only daughter, of the baby he'd held in his arms, the baby who used to fall asleep on his chest as he watched TV.

There was no contingency plan for that, so he deferred to the next closest scenario. He would put down the rabid animal.

It was just a rabid animal.

His family could still be ok after it was over. They could still be whole.

By the time Willow's father had returned with his shotgun, all that was left of his wife was a bloody plop lying on the floor, something he could have fit in his hand.

His wife had just fled.

She'd left the room, a smart move. There was no way that little lump on the floor could be what was left of her.

"Ninety nine point nine!" Julien excitedly announced just as Willow's father fired, hitting the bull in the center of its chest. To his dismay, the spray didn't slow it down.

The bull leaned down and slid the man's foot into his blender mouth. Within a two second span, all that was left was a squirting, bloody stump.

Willow's father shot again, this time aiming at the head. The spray tore the muscle and hide from the bull's face, so that when it started on his second leg, it was mostly a bull skull devouring him.

It was just as Romby and Julien screamed "One hundred!" in complete unison, that the second leg disappeared. Shaking, pale as a ghost, screaming incoherently, Willow's father leaned forward, putting the barrel of the gun against the bull’s skull.

He pulled the trigger, and the cow tumbled to the floor. The room was silent except for the quiet moans of pain and the sound of blood squirting on the wood floor.

The bull's skull had been split open, and Romby and Julien lay outside the bull, each rent beyond recognition.

Their little console lay between them, projecting the hologram which flashed ‘Complete’ in their language.

There were a few moments of stillness before a bright light shone through the window and into the room. A metallic, cigar shaped object the length of a baseball bat and the width of an average man's thigh passed through the closed window, without disturbing the glass.

The ship hovered over the bull, as a laser split open its carcass. Inside, there were no organs, only a series of interspersed orbs. A beam of light swept over every orb in the body, extracting them one by one as they were drawn up and into the ship. The metallic object finished by taking the bull’s eyes, which each housed one of the orbs at its center.

Their compression technology allowed the litany of organic matter that Romby and Julien collected to be stored efficiently. Even the overwhelming weight of the collected samples were temporarily negated as long as they remained compressed down into the little spheres.

Once the ship had finished harvesting every orb from the bull, it left, shifting through the window pane.

It then went on to disappear into the night sky.

The tiny console flashed 'Complete' once more and then went out.

The house was silent except for the sounds made by Willow's father. It was an anguished wailing noise, something that sounded like it better belonged to some mixture between woman, child, and the mad.

It was an old noise, older than humankind, inhuman but uniquely human. It was the type of thing a person would recognize immediately and solely by instinct, something they wouldn't be able to imagine until they've heard it, a resonance that most people have been blessed to never hear and even fewer have been cursed enough to make.