Dairy, Aftermath
By Changer
The last few months had been odd, thought Phil. The EVENT, as it had become know, had occurred just under a year and a half ago, and the world was still struggling to come to grips with the implications of it. No one knew what, or who, had caused the EVENT, or (except in the fuzziest manner so far) even how it had produced the results it had, but the effects touched the lives of everyone on the planet to some degree. Some, like Phil, in a very personal way. The human species was extremely adaptable and innovative, however, and would undoubtably work around the EVENT as it had so many other interruptions to daily life for millennia.
Every scientist and research organisation on Earth was involved with studying the aftereffects of that peculiar hour-and-a-bit, and an enormous amount of information had been compiled regarding arcane effects of quantum fluctuations on consensual reality, quirks in the fabric of the universe, and so on. Even with the difficulties of communication across great distances the EVENT itself had caused, this knowledge was propagated around the world, and, very slowly, a picture was building up. A picture that made some fundamental changes in the view of the way the universe worked that mankind had painstakingly built up over centuries of work.
These changes were beginning to show that the previously held views of the stability of reality weren't wrong, as such, but missing some fairly critical if obscure bits. Even with this painfully and slowly acquired new information, though, it was clear that a full understanding of the EVENT would take many years, and some way of reversing some of the more troublesome effects, if indeed possible at all, would take much longer.
However, for non-technical people like Phil, much of this was a total mystery. What was clear, though, were the actual effects of the EVENT. The most obvious one was that during that period of just over an hour, every form of powered transport on the planet had changed in some strange manner. Why this one very specific facet of reality had been singled out was as much an unknown factor as almost everything else surrounding the EVENT, but almost nothing else could have been chosen to cause so much chaos without really adversely affecting the majority of the world's population.
The change had been extreme, although pretty consistent. The end result in the majority of cases was that most forms of ground-based transportation had turned into something based around the common horse. Mostly this affected cars and trucks, which generally became some form of cart attached to one or more horses, sized appropriately to the load being carried at the time. Armoured vehicles such as tanks and APCs usually transformed into some form of horse-drawn artillery, reminiscent of those depicted in battle scenes from the late 1800s and early 1900s, although with up-to-date weaponry and electronics.
The EVENT was still active, in some way. A new vehicle of any type could easily be built but as soon as it was actually finished, in a functional state, it changed in the same manner as all other vehicles had during the main EVENT. People fairly quickly stopped trying to find ways around it directly, preferring a more subtle approach. Many, in fact, at first praised the change as a positive one, having at a single swoop removed a major part of the world's pollution-causing machinery, directly and indirectly.
Most of these people began to grumble when it became apparent that the reduction in air-borne pollutants had been replaced by a massive increase in animal output at ground level, which rapidly led to major sewage disposal problems in most cities, and in several cases was responsible for epidemics of diseases such as cholera. It soon became clear the the world had outgrown animal-based transport on a large scale, due mostly to the vastly larger number of people since the last time such things had been common. Feeding and caring for the new animals was grew to be a major irritation as well. Unfortunately the problem wasn't going to go away any time soon, and so people had to get used to it for the time being at least.
The changes to less common vehicles, such as buses and trains, were less predictable, and in many cases very strange. Aircraft and watercraft produced even odder results. However, the final product was almost always logically consistant with its precursor vehicle, even though at times the logic was most odd. A lot of the results were recognisable from mythology, which gave a lot of people something to think about.
One of the more puzzling effects was the way a certain percentage of the transformations differed considerably from the normal result, if 'normal' was a word that could be applied to a situation like this. The atypical changes seemed to be affected by the subconscious expectations of certain types of people, usually with bizarre results. This gave a lot of people even more to think about.
The really unpredictable thing was the way people in the vehicles were affected. Not a single verifiable death was DIRECTLY caused by the EVENT, but quite a few casualties were recorded immediately after the vehicle changed. For example, a car changing into a horse while travelling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour would, fairly obviously, produce a rather messy effect which was unlikely to be survivable. Oddly, in almost every case where a vehicle carrying more than a certain number of people, usually around six or more, was transformed, the transformation was such as to maximise the probability of survival of the occupants.
This did, however, produce some of the strangest results, since it always seemed to involve the transformation affecting the people as well, in some way. Again, the effects were reasonably self-consistent, but this came as small consolation to the people who found themselves turned into part-human, part-animal creatures. Many, in fact, were apparently completely transformed into animals, usually horses. There was no other way to account for the considerably larger number of horses than donor vehicles, or the lack of bodies.
Phil was the unfortunate recipient of an EVENT interaction of a stranger than normal kind. He was the manager of a large dairy and had been out on a milk delivery round, due to a shortage of milkmen because of illness, early on the morning when the EVENT happened. It didn't all occur at once, taking place over a noticeable time period. He'd been driving slowly down the road on the electric milk delivery trike, enjoying the rare early-morning peace and quiet and listening to the milk bottles clinking in their crates in the back. A mile or so from the dairy, at around 5am, he was passing a row of parked cars when he saw one of them shimmer slightly, in a peculiar manner.
He slowed down as he got near it, and watched in amazement and not a little fright as it rippled like a computer animation, blurred, and stretched into a horse and buggy right in front of him. Shaking his head in disbelief, he closed his eyes for a moment, hoping that he was seeing things. However, when he looked again, the horse, a large black one, was looking curiously at him as he moved past at a crawl. He gulped, and looked straight ahead, just in time to see another car a few yards away start to change as well. He stopped the trike in the middle of the road, and stared wildly around.
As far as he could see, every car in sight was beginning to ripple and change. As he watched, dozens of new horses popped into existence, and shook themselves. A couple of parked motorcycles two hundred yards up the road quickly changed into ponies. He was just sitting there, his mind nearly a blank from the totally unexpected events happening around him, when he felt dizzy and blacked out. When he regained consciousness a few seconds later, he shook his head. He still felt rather wobbly, and looked around unsteadily wondering whan had happened. Suddenly realising that he couldn't see the windshield of the trike anymore, he quickly looked down, puzzled about how he could have fallen off it. However, his eyes beheld a sight that was so alien to him it took several seconds for his mind to grasp what he was looking at.
The trike was gone, as if it had never existed. What was really upsetting was that his body below the waist was also missing. Not only that, but his missing bits had been replaced by what he gradually realised was the body of a cow! Looking down, below his waist he saw the chest and front legs, covered in black and white sploched fur, of a full-grown Holstein. He reached down with a shaking hand and gingerly touched the fur where his groin had been a few short seconds ago, and yanked it away sharply when he not only felt the fur under his fingers but also felt the touch of his fingers through the fur. Trembling, he slowly turned around at the waist as far as he could and saw the rest of the body of the animal stretching away behind him, supported by the hind legs and with the tail flicking around involuntarily.
As if this wasn't bad enough, he also saw he was standing in front of a small two-wheeled cart full of crates of milk bottles, recognisably the same as the ones that had been in the trike before this had happened, although there seemed to be less there than he remembered. The cart was attached to his new body by some sort of harness, connected to the shafts running along his flanks. Straps from the harness passed low down around the chest of his cow body, and around its torso behind his front legs, but all the fasteners were some distance back. When he reached back to attempt to undo the harness, he found it was out of his reach. It could only be removed by someone else, apparently.
Raising his hands to his face he felt it carefully, and realised that it didn't appear to have been changed. He was still wearing his shirt, and dairy uniform jacket and hat, although the clothes below his waist were among the missing. Apparently the only changes had occurred from the waist down. Looking back down at his absent groin he suddenly wondered if his lower body was that of a bull or a cow. He tried tentatively walking forward slowly, and found his new body responded as easily as his former one had. He also answered his own question, as he felt a large weight he hadn't noticed before sway around between his hind legs, bouncing slightly. When he stopped in renewed shock he felt his udder swing back and forth for a few seconds. It was an extremely unsettling and somewhat painful sensation, and in some respects was the worst shock of the past couple of minutes.
After standing there for some minutes, trying to calm his whirling thoughts a little and decide what to do, he finally came to the fairly obvious conclusion that he was achieving nothing out here, and his only real option was to return to the dairy. At least there he wouldn't be visible to any gawkers, who were bound to turn up sooner or later if he stayed out here in the street. Perhaps he'd be able to call someone for help, although at the moment he had no idea what help anyone could offer.
He looked around once more, realising that in the few minutes he had been involved with his own problems every vehicle in sight had turned into a horse of some sort, and most of them were watching him curiously. He shrugged slightly, still in a bit of a daze, and started to walk back to the dairy. At first he tried to simply turn around, until he found the cart he was harnessed to had a turning circle too large for the width of the street. After some effort, he managed to move forwards and back several times until he was pointing in the other direction, and started off.
Phil found it a very odd sensation, walking on four legs. He could hear his cloven hooves clopping on the road surface, and was conscious of the drag of the heavy cart he was pulling. It had pneumatic tyres, and appeared to be made of aluminum and fiberglass, so it wasn't too difficult to pull, but it had quite a lot of inertia. He suspected that as a normal human he would have had a fairly difficult time pulling it, but this strange body was a lot stronger than his old one had been.
The oddest thing of all was the dangling weight of his udder, which moved fluidly in several directions at once, bouncing up and down with every step. When he started walking, or stopped, it swung back and forth several times, and it swayed from side to side as he walked. The thing was heavy, and hung down to his hocks. He could feel it brushing against his hind legs as he walked, and after several minutes came to the sudden unwelcome conclusion that he needed to be milked. Looking back he couldn't see the thing, and wasn't able to bend down far enough to look underneath his cow body. It was apparent that he was completely unable to reach his udder on his own, and would require help to empty it. This embarrassed him horribly, and he blushed at the thought. He was trying not to thing of the fact that he was now, presumably, technically female, despite the fact that his face and torso were unchanged. He had no idea what he was going to tell his wife, although this would defini! tely affect their plans for childr en.
After a few minutes of walking, he began to see some signs of life as early risers began to open their doors to retrieve their newspapers and milk bottles from the front door. Bottles that he'd delivered himself, less than half an hour ago. He was suddenly struck by the thought that delivering the milk had taken on a whole new meaning to him now, and had unpleasant visions of stopping at each house in turn while the occupants took their required milk from his udder. He shuddered, and increased his pace. Shortly he was moving at a fast trot, with the cart rolling smoothly along behind him. The faster movements made his udder flop around vigorously, but he ignored the pain in his wish to get safely back behind the gates of the dairy, where people wouldn't be staring at him.
As the city began to wake, the number of people on the streets slowly increased. He was out in the suburbs, so there still weren't a lot of people around, and most of those that were were looking in disbelief at the horses that had replaced their cars, but a growing number turned to watch the peculiar sight of a half-man half-cow creature trot past towing a milk cart with the logo of the local dairy on the side. A couple of passers-by recognised him, and stared in complete shock. An acquaintance of his, one John Fairfield by name, called out in a tone of stunned amazement "Phil? What the hell happened to YOU?"
Phil turned his face away from the man, embarrassed once more to be out looking like this in public, especially among people he knew however vaguely. Increasing his speed a little more, he hurried on, turning the corner at the end of the road slightly too fast and nearly running over a woman crossing the street. She turned and started to yell at him until she got a good look at what had nearly hit her. Her shout gurgled unformed into silence as she gaped.
Nearly a quarter of an hour after the event that had changed his life, he came in sight of the gates to the dairy yard. Behind an eight foot high brick wall he could see the tops of the milk storage tanks and the refrigeration cooling stacks, and the low roof of the main garage and office building. He slowed to a walk, suddenly assailed with doubt. Was this the correct action? What would his coworkers say, never mind the company owner. Mr. Smith was an irritable old guy, although in all fairness he treated his workers very well on the whole. He stopped a few yards from the gates and thought.
After thinking it over for a few seconds he came to the same conclusion as he had earlier, which was that he really had nowhere else to go. Taking a deep breath which made his furry flanks bulge, he began walking again, suppressing a wince as his mistreated udder swung painfully against his hind legs. It was becoming obvious to him that cows, especially ones that were in need of milking, weren't designed for trotting for extended periods of time. Something would have to be done about the contents of his udder very soon or he was going to be in a lot of pain. This raised another question, that of who he was going to ask to milk him. It seemed a rather personal thing, really.
He slowly walked through the open gates towing his cart behind him. Looking around the yard he could see no trace of the other trikes or milkmen, and assumed that they hadn't finished their rounds yet. Hearing something that sound for all the world like incredibly deep breathing coming from the garage, he moved a bit closer out of sudden curiosity and looked in through the partially open doors. He gaped at the contents of the garage, and rubbed his eyes. What he saw was a bit much, even after all that had happened recently.
Placidly looking back at him was an almost unbelievable creature. It was basically a cow, but was absolutely HUGE! At least ten feet at the shoulder, and a good twenty-five or twenty-six feet long, it had numerous legs ending in enormous cloven hooves. He counted six pairs in something of a daze and also noticed the incredibly large udder that stretched from just under the front pair to the back of the animal. It looked like it probably had a capacity of a couple of thousand gallons at least. Trying to think what it could possibly have been before the transformation took place, he finally remembered the milk tankers. Looking past the strange tanker-cow, he counted and groaned. Sure enough, the other four tankers had changed in the same way.
Bending down a bit he looked at the dozen or so huge teats hanging down from the udder of the one in front of him and saw with some surprise that they looked nothing like a normal cow's teats, such as the ones he presumably now had. In fact, they almost looked like the fittings on the hoses from the main milk pumps would fit them. As he straightened up the tanker-cow behind the one he was watching suddenly mooed, with a noise like a sex-crazed foghorn. It was so loud and deep he nearly had a heart-attack on the spot. After staring at the things for a few moments more, he shrugged and turned towards the office.
The brief interlude had almost made him forget for a moment his own situation, so great was the surprise. But when he started walking slowly towards the door of the office again he was brought back with a jolt to the strange version of reality he seemed to be inhabiting now by the sensation of his udder swaying around again. He scowled, and continued on to the office. When he reached the closed door, he reached down to open it as usual then suddenly stopped. His new body would only fit with difficulty through the door, and the cart he was stuck with would never fit at all. How was he going to get in?
After a moment he pushed the door open and looked in. Behind one of the desks, sitting in a chair facing away from the door was William Smith, the owner's 22 year old son, who was learning the business. He'd come in that morning on powered inline skates leaving his car at home. Will was a decent young man, generally helpful and polite, and Phil had a fair amount of respect for him. At the moment he seemed to be bending over, closely examining something something on the floor, and didn't appear to have heard the door open. Phil called his name and the young man started violently, spinning his chair around.
"God, Phil, don't sneak up like that!" he said, and then stopped dead. He looked at the strange form filling the doorway and his eyes bugged in amazement. After a few incomprehensible attempts he finally managed to choke out "What the HELL...? I don't believe what I'm seeing. Phil, is that really YOU?"
"I'm afraid so," sighed Phil.
"What... What happened?"
"I have absolutely no idea. Everything seems to have changed. Have you looked in the garage yet?"
"No. I've been sort of... preoccupied."
Phil looked at him, puzzled. "Not as preoccupied as I've been, I'll bet."
"Well, not quite, but... Oh, hell, see for yourself."
With this comment he stood up and walked slowly and very unsteadily around the desk, waving his arms a bit for balance. Phil watched this with some curiosity, then looked down as the man's feet came into view. His eyes widened, and he stared. William's legs now ended in what appeared to be horses' hooves, and his ankles and legs below the knee had changed as well. It seemed that his powered skates had counted as motorised transport and thus had been affected by the change. He was having obvious difficulty balancing on the strange appendages. Phil looked wordlessly for a moment at the evidence of another person having been personally involved with the inexplicable events of the morning, then transferred his gaze back to William's face.
"I see. I think I can beat that, though."
He backed up, and waved Will out into the yard. The young man came out of the office, watching his hooves carefully to ensure he didn't stumble. When he made it out the door, he braced himself against the wall and looked back at Phil, who'd moved a few feet away and turned so he was side-on to the doorway.. William's eyes widened again and he stared without a sound. The full extent of the manager's odd transformation was revealed, and he found it difficult to comprehend all at once.
"Oh my god." he finally said quietly.
"Yeah, that's about how I feel," replied Phil. "Anyway, can you give me a hand and unhitch me from this cart? I can't do it by myself."
"Um, yes, of course." Will managed to say. He walked carefully across to the transformed manager, and nearly fell when he stumbled. He lunged forward and grabbed instinctively at the nearest support, which was Phil's cow body. Phil grunted slightly from the impact, and William apologised, then turned his attention to the straps holding the harness together. The fasteners were very simple although strong, being the same sort of heavy-duty plastic catches used on backpacks and the like. Within a couple of minutes he'd managed to undo all of them and remove the harness. He lowered the shafts of the cart to the ground, finding it was well balanced in the process, and placed the harness inside the back of the cart.
Phil took a couple of steps forward, somewhat surprised at the sudden lack of effort it took now the weight of the cart was missing. He hadn't really realised how heavy it was, and not having to pull it was something of a relief. "Thanks." he said.
"You're welcome," replied William. "Now what do we do?"
"I don't really know." Phil related to William the events of the last forty minutes or so, and told how all the vehicles he'd seen had changed into horses, whith the exception of himself and the tankers. The pair of them went over to the garage and Will saw for himself the tanker-cows. They entered and examined the animals more closely, and then returned to the office. Phil only just made it through the doorway, and moved over to his desk. Looking at it for a moment, he pushed the chair off to one side. "I certainly don't need that anymore," he remarked. He mulled it over for a moment, then cautiously tried kneeling down like he'd seen real cows do in the fields.
He winced as he neared the ground, and rolled his hindquarters to one side with his hind legs out. "Now I know why cows lie like this," he muttered. At Will's enquiring look, he gestured back at himself and said ruefully "My udder gets squashed under me if I don't lie down like this, and it's damn painful."
"Oh," replied William, looking curiously and with a little embarrassment at the offending body part. Phil followed his gaze. It was the first time he'd actually seen his udder, and he was shocked at how large it was. The four nipples were sticking out some distance, and the whole thing looked very full.
"Oh god," he moaned. "I just don't believe it. What the hell am I going to tell Marie?" He'd been in a mild state of shock for the last half hour, which had enabled him to function more or less normally even under these bizarre circumstances. This was wearing off now, though, and the reality of his predicament was starting to really sink in. He had the sudden realization that he might well be spending the rest of his life like this, and moaned again. William looked at him sympathetically. He liked the older man, and found his own problems paled into insignificance next to Phil's.
"Where are the rest of the guys?" he suddenly asked. "You don't suppose that something like... this... happened to anyone else, do you?"
Phil looked startled, drawn for a moment away from his situation. "I have no idea. I don't know how this could have happened to ME, never mind if it could happen to anyone else. I left some time after the rest of the men, so they're undoubtably considerably further away. I suppose it'll take them a while to get back, whatever's happened."
"I guess you're right. So we just wait?"
"Yes, we might as well. What I saw out there makes me think that everyone else around here at least has their own difficulties, and we're probably not going to get any help for a while." Phil paused for a moment, feeling awkward, then said slowly "Will, can you do me a... rather personal favour?"
"What did you have in mind?" William asked cautiously.
"Well, this is difficult for me to say, but... I sort of need to... to be milked."
William looked rather shocked. This hadn't really occurred to him, although it seemed obvious now that Phil mentioned it. "Um..." he said, not sure how to reply.
Phil hurried on, "I can't reach my udder on my own, and it feels like it's going to burst."
"Oh, hell, I suppose I'll have to, then," William said reluctantly. "I've never milked a cow before, though."
"That's OK," replied Phil, "I've never BEEN a cow before."
William chuckled slightly, and asked "How do we start?"
"I guess the best thing would be to go outside and find a bucket or something. I don't want several gallons of milk all over the yard. It'll stink when it goes off." He heaved himself to all fours, and walked out of the office with William following. William went into the garage and poked around for a while, then came back with a large yellow plastic five-gallon bucket. He was apparently getting used to his hooves, Phil noted, and wasn't stumbling as much.
Approaching the manager, Will bent down and placed the bucket under his udder. He had to lift the udder slightly to get it over the rim of the bucket, and Phil jumped in surprise at the touch. It was the weirdest sensation yet. William gingerly grabbed a teat and pulled gently. Phil started again, and made a small sound of surprise. The teat was very sensitive, and William's hands were cold. After several attempts William was getting more confident, and pulled quite hard on the teat. Phil didn't say anything, too embarrassed by the sensations this action generated to speak. However, almost no milk was coming out, and after a minute or two William stopped.
"I don't seem to have the knack of this, Phil," he said ruefully. "I can't make anything happen."
Phil looked back, and said "Try again. You must have seen farmers do it before."
"Not really. All the farms I've visited have milking machines. No one really does it by hand nowadays, Dad says." He thought hard for a moment, then his face lit up. "I have an idea! Don't go away." He clopped back to the garage and opened the door to the storage room to one side of the main doors. Disappearing inside, he made clattering noises for a few minutes, then reemerged pushing a small trolley. On it was a something covered in an old dusty tarpaulin. Wheeling it up to Phil, he whipped off the cover with a flourish. "This should do the job," he exclaimed with satisfaction.
Under the tarpaulin was revealed an elderly portable milking machine. Phil vaguely remembered that it had been hanging around in the workshop for ages some years ago, for some reason, but had disappeared quite a while ago. He realised it must have been put away in the storage room when someone decided it was in the way. "I wonder why we have that?" he mused. "We've never had any cows here to milk."
"I think it was given to Dad by one of the farmers who went out of business about ten years ago," William replied. "I don't know if it still works, but it looks OK." He unreeled the power cable and plugged it in to an outside power point beside the door of the office. Returning to the machine, he squatted down beside it and checked it over. Finally locating a switch on the back, he flipped it and was rewarded with a hum and a faint smell of burning insulation. After a moment, the vacuum pump started to run, chugging quite loudly. The machine picked up speed and settled down to a steady rhythmic put-put noise. They watched it for a few seconds, then William turned it off again.
"Seems to work." he remarked with satisfaction. Pulling a rag out of his pocket he dusted the thing off fastidiously, revealing a couple of sight glasses on the two stainless steel milk cylinders. He also found a small booklet wedged down behind one of the cylinders, and pulled it out. Opening it he saw it was the instruction manual for the machine. He read it carefully while Phil waited impatiently. His udder was really beginning to hurt, it was so full.
"Hurry up, will you?" he requested. The full sensation was like needing to urinate, only worse. The worst thing was that he was dependent on outside help to do anything about it.
"Hold your horses... er... cows," said William absently, still reading the booklet. "I want to make sure we do this right. I wouldn't want to electorcute you or anything." After a few more minutes, he finished reading, and slipped the manual into his pocket. "OK, I see what we have to do." He unreeled the suction hoses from the machine and separated out the four teat fittings. Removing them from the ends of the hoses, he remarked "The manual says several times that these should be sterilised to prevent cross-infection between animals. I guess I'll wash them off with boiling water, since we don't have any sterilising fluid. Hang on a moment." He went into the office for a couple of minutes, and Phil soon heard the sound of the electric kettle boiling.. After a short while, William came back, drying off the four stainless-steel fittings with a piece of paper towel.
He reattached them to the hoses and wheeled the machine within reach of Phil's udder. Kneeling down, he fumbled around for a moment, until he workd out how to attach them to the nipples. He then flipped the switch on the machine, which chugged into life. Turning a small valve wheel, he watched the transparent hoses carefully. After a few seconds, the machine started to suck rhythmically on the teats, and milk began to flow down the hoses and into the collection cylinders.
Phil shuddered briefly all over at the peculiar feeling of milk flowing out of his udder. It was a most unsettling sensation, but not actually unpleasant. After a little while he got used to it, and stood there patiently as his udder emptied. The feeling of relief was wonderful, and he relaxed a little. It seemed to take a long time, but was actually only a few minutes before all the milk was drained, and William turned the machine off. Disconnecting the hoses from Phil, he coiled them neatly on top of the machine and wheeled it over to the wall. Bending down and looking at the graduated sight glasses, he said with amazement, "A little over five gallons. That's nearly as much as a really good dairy cow produces."
Phil looked irritated, and replied "There no reason to look so pleased about it. I'm not really enjoying this, you know."
"I guess so. Anyway, we'll proably have to do this again tonight. Most cows need to be milked twice a day."
"Oh hell, you're right. I don't want to have to do this morning and evening for the rest of my life," moaned Phil, depressed again. He was starting to feel hungry, on top of everything else, and suddenly wondered what he now ate. Grass like a cow or normal human food? Looking back at his body, he thought with a sinking feeling that it was almost certainly going to turn out to be grass.
As he was pondering this latest insult to his dignity, they heard several sets of hooves clopping down the road outside the gate. It was the first sign of life they'd heard so far this morning, and looking at his watch Phil saw with a sense of shock that it was still only just 6am. The last hour felt like it had lasted for days. The hoofbeats grew closer, then stopped just outside the gate. After a moment, while Phil and William looked curiously at each other, they started again and half a dozen odd figures entered the yard.
They were recognisably some of the milkmen that worked at the dairy, but every one of them had been changed in the exact same way as Phil had. He looked at them in shock. It hadn't seriously occurred to him that his situation wasn't unique. They in turn stared back at him, and slowly approached. He had not been able to see himself fully, and watching the other transformed people get closer realised just how odd he himself must look.
The others had all transformed into the half-human half-cow type of creature he was, complete with udder and cart, but the lower cow body was different in each case. Some were black-and white Holsteins like he was, some were brown or black Jerseys, and so on. The six odd figures drew up in a line and looked at him, then turned their attention en masse to William, noticing his new feet. They looked at each other, then one of them stepped forward a little.
"The union's definitely going to hear about THIS," he said, gesturing at himself and his co-workers. "It's not in the contract AT ALL."
Phil watched him in some bemusement. "Harry," he said after a moment, "THIS isn't something anyone even THOUGHT of when the contract was drawn up. Give it a rest for a moment."
Harry and the other five muttered darkly among themselves, and Phil turned to William and asked quietly "Do you suppose that every one of them has changed?"
An hour later, the question had been conclusively answered. An entire herd of angry milkmen was milling around in the dairy yard. They had all been unhitched from their carts, which had been moved into the garage. The load of milk would go bad for sure, but that seemed to be of little real importance at the moment. The tanker-cows surprised the hell out of the men, some of whom refused to enter the garage. The tankers were obviously getting hungry, and were starting to get a little restless. One or two of them had relieved themselves as well, and the amount of processed grass on the floor of the garage was almost beyond belief.
The men had all been milked, the overworked machine's contents having been poured into one of the empty refrigerated holding tanks for want of a better solution. After a while, a few of the men had drifted over to the small field behind the garage, and one or two cautiously tried a handful of grass for edibility. The experiment proved that the changes extended to a cow's appetite and presumably metabolism, and everyone including Phil had eaten quite a lot of grass, since they were by now all ravenously hungry. It came as yet another shock to them when, about half an hour after eating the grass, they started regurgitating lumps of cud. Obviously their digestive systems were completely bovine.
Some during this period, Harry had phoned the local Milk Workers union representative, who finally arrived ineptly driving a small two-seat buggy pulled by a small grey pony. He pressed the bell by the gate, which had been close to prevent curious people staring at the changed workers. When he was admitted by Harry, who had been waiting for him, he came in bemoaning the fact that his new sub-compact had turned into a 'damn animal and something from the Victorian age'. He stopped abruptly and stared at Harry, then the other workers visible in the yard, and then simply fainted from shock.
After he'd been revived and placed in a chair in the office, with a scotch and soda to calm him down a little, Harry as spokesman for the thirty-two milkmen outside began to list their grievances. The poor fellow was almost unable to keep up with the fast-talking irritated milkman, and was still looking stunned. After several minutes of increasingly louder argument, he gave up and phoned the union offices. He relayed the requests of the men to the official on the other end of the line, who apparently was having a hard time understanding what was wanted.
"That's right, they say they want to claim milking machines on the medical coverage... I keep telling them that it's not something they can ask for, but they're pretty insistant... I know, but... Yes, and they want their houses modified with bigger showers and new toilets... Well, I didn't believe it either, but you only have to look at them... They're half cow, for god's sake!"
He was silent for a moment, listening. "No, I'm not drunk, you idiot. Come down here and see for yourself!" He slammed the phone down and looked at Harry. "He'll be here in a while. Now about these new beds..."
Phil had been listening with a half-amused expression on his face to the argument. The phone rang repeatedly, and after answering it several times in growing irritation, then hanging up, he finally recognised the voice of the dairy owner. After a rather surreal conversation, he hung up and called Harry over. "Mr. Smith says that he'll pay for milking machines for everyone, assuming you still want to work here. In addition, he'll buy the milk from all of us at the going rate."
Harry looked slightly surprised, and said "I'll tell the rest of the guys, and see what they have to say." He left the office, followed by the union rep, and a short while later a new argument could be heard going on. The dairy owner arrived on his recently acquired horse half an hour later, by which time the union had given in on everything but the milking machines. The eventual decision from the workers was in favour of everyone continuing to work at the dairy, since they seemed uniquely suited to the job now. The one thing everyone insisted on was that the milk cart harnesses be modified so they could be removed with outside help, which the union also agreed to pay for.
When Phil finally called his wife, she took the news about as well as could be expected. They were deeply in love, and even something as strange as the events of this peculiar day couldn't shake that love. The problem of children was solved in a unique way several months later, by his wife. She'd been thinking about the problem for a long while, and finally took a decision, based on love, that she knew would be hard for her. A quite large number of the other workers wives also made the same decision eventually.
Having given the matter some lateral thought, Marie realised that although her husband couldn't be changed back, there was another solution to the problem. Contacting the former manufacturer of the electric milk carts, she managed to persuade them to ship her one as spare parts. These were delivered to the home of a sympathetic and understanding friend, who provided the other required material from a bovine artificial insemination company. They assembled the cart in the friends garage, leaving off the final parts needed to make it functional and therefore change as a result of the EVENT. Loading it with several containers of frozen bull semen, she sat in the seat and looked at her friend.
"Are you really sure you want to do this?" her friend asked. "There's no way back."
"Do it," she said, taking a deep breath. The woman made the final assembly, and the cart shimmered. A few seconds later, she was staring in amazement at the sight before her. Marie now had the body of a bull from the waist down, and was the complement to her husband. She looked down at herself in satisfaction tinged with fright, and stepped forward. "Well, at least we can have kids now, although I don't think this was they way either of us expected to do it when we married." She giggled, and hugged her friend, who hesitatnly hugged her back.
"Good luck," she whispered, and opened the garage door. Marie returned home, to be greeted by a husband who was even more shocked at first than he had been on the day of the EVENT. However, after a long argument, he realised how much his wife loved him to make such a sacrifice, and accepted it gratefully.
A couple of months later Phil was expecting a child, or calf as some of his friends had half-jokingly said. He wasn't very amused, mainly because he had secret worries himself about just what the eventual result would be. In the end, it turned out to be a perfectly normal bovine centauroid boy with same mix of genders as his parents. As more of the transformed workers families made the same decision, the evidence showed that the mixes were most often cow-male and bull-female, although a smaller number were cow-female and bull-male.
It had turned out in the months following
the EVENT that Smith's Dairy wasn't alone in having such transformations
among its workers. The latest estimates showed that there were probably
more than a million bovine centauroids world-wide, 99% of them working
in the dairy industry at the time of the EVENT. This eventually led to
the International Bovine Dairy Workers Union being set up, to protect the
rights of the people so affected. Eventually, life settled down, more or
less. At least until next time.
Copyright 1998, Changer. Please do not reprint without permission.
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