Completely Folk'd Page 14

  ‘It’s all right,’ Cal told her for what seemed the millionth time.

  She looked up at him with an expression that said Give me a break. The platitudes died in his throat.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I was in here last week. Had a Flame Grilled Whopper.’

  He glanced at the sweaty and morose crowd, all trying to avoid one another’s eyes. Before being shepherded inside by the enormous wolves that had appeared on the streets, most of those present had seen horrors none could have previously imagined were possible. Looking at each other, seeing that reflected on someone else’s face, would have only made this bad dream seem too real. No-one seemed quite ready for that yet.

  ‘Fancy something?’ he asked her.

  It was a weak joke, even by his standards. She offered him a smile for it anyway, seeming to prefer the attempt at humour to the attempt at meaningless comfort. But then, she had always laughed at his jokes – it was what had first tipped him off that she might have been interested in him.

  ‘Where the fuck are all the peelers?’ Alice wondered aloud.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cal admitted. That had been gnawing at him too. Thousands of armed police in the country and so far, not a one to be seen.

  Moans of fear came from those closest to the large window at the front of the building. The crowd pressed back against him, and he remembered a programme he’d watched once, where scientists had calculated that humans plus terror plus a crowd equalled drastically reduced IQ. Right now he’d have bet on a sheep solving a crossword puzzle before this terrified mob could.

  ‘Owwww!’ Alice gasped, as she too was pushed back. She was holding his hand and he felt, slowly, terribly, their grip begin to separate.

  He was looking frantically around, desperate to get them both to safety, when he saw it. Like many fast food restaurants there were a series of booths on the ground floor, each divided by a partition wall of about four or five feet. One of these partitions was just to his left. He tightened his grip on Alice’s hand, knowing he was probably only to get one good, proper shot at this and hardly daring to think of what might happen if he didn’t get it right. He pulled with everything he had, dragging her toward him through several fellow crowd members, while at the same time bracing himself against the nearest booth. She was now crying out in pain but he kept pulling and bracing.

  She came free of the crowd in a sudden rush. He scrambled up onto one of the seats then onto the partition itself.

  ‘Come on!’ he told her. ‘Climb!’

  She followed him, pain still written on her face. Now with a vantage point, he could begin to see what was causing the crush. The attacks outside had stopped a while ago, right around the time the wolves – it hardly seemed appropriate to call them wolves, the size of the fuckers, but even so – had finished herding them inside.

  A few had remained outside to guard the doors; a few of the panicked humans inside had tried to bolt past them and been firmly made to U-turn. One wolf had been forced to land a blow to the side of a terrified teenage boy’s head in order to knock him out – he’d been insensate with horror, screaming that he had to get home, he’d heard his sister screaming on the phone and he had to get home …

  Cal had thought of his own family then. His phone was out of credit. Alice had tried to phone home with her own mobile, but no sooner had she taken it from her pocket than it had been snatched away by someone in the crowd, gibbering that he had to make a call. He’d vanished into the refugee masses and been swallowed up. Since then neither of them had tried to think too much about what might be happening to their loved ones. Naturally, both had failed.

  Now, it seemed the cessation of hostilities outside had come to an end. Their guards were gone. Where, he didn’t know, couldn’t see. He saw a wolf retreating slowly, as if it were backing away from something. Anything that could make those huge fuckers think twice was something he didn’t want to think about. Those people nearest the doors, those with a clear view of whatever was going down outside, were backing up as far as they could, little caring for the chain reaction behind them.

  They couldn’t stay here. Climbing the partition wall had given them a temporary respite, but it wouldn’t last. Already, others had seen what they’d done. Hands were reaching up, grabbing, pleading for him to reach down and pull them up. He knew if he did that he’d be pulled down amongst them, and once that happened–

  The doors were only about twenty feet away. They may as well have been twenty miles. The sea of faces below him, all pressed far too close together … the hands raised above heads … he’d seen nothing like it since the last concert he’d been to.

  Concert …

  He looked at Alice. ‘D’you trust me?’ he asked her, feeling her hand in his, making sure his grip on her was tight.

  She looked at him with not a little incredulity. ‘You’re asking me this now?’ she replied.

  ‘Yes. I’m asking now! Yes or no, do you trust me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ he replied, and Alice’s scream rose briefly above the frantic hubbub of the crowd as he threw them both forward, into the panicked mass below.

  OTHERWORLD, 1992 AD

  She watched the crow fly away. Sometimes it would be days before it returned, but it would always, always come back to her. Loneliness was a condition against which even hatred eventually foundered. Carman knew this. In this place, she could control the very fabric of existence. She had control of its space, and time. The latter she had used against her ancient enemy. Even an immortal could be made to feel the crushing futility of aeons passing with no sense of change or progress, or hope.

  The crow was gone now. Gone back to watch over the hibernating Tuatha Dé Danann – now hundreds and hundreds of stone statues, spaced with supernaturally perfect evenness about a great plain. The Morrigan would watch over her stone fellows: a vigil kept when the loneliness had ebbed. When it returned, she would fly back to Carman and they would talk and argue and watch the humans in the world above.

  Meanwhile, Carman’s children were busy. Always busy.

  When the Morrigan was here, they worked at her place of vigil.

  In the beginning, Carman knew, when their imprisonment here was still fresh, her adversary would have noticed the smallest changes to her silent charges. But now …

  ‘It’s here,’ Dub said.

  They brought it in. Set it before her. She descended from her throne and walked around it, running her fingers lightly over its surface.

  ‘You’re sure?’ she said. ‘It’s him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve been wrong before,’ she said.

  Dub winced as the memories flitted across his mind. Memories of wrath and screams. His mother and failure did not see eye to eye. ‘This time we’re sure,’ he said firmly.

  Seemingly satisfied by this, she inhaled deeply, drawing on parts of herself that she called upon only rarely. Stepping forward, placing both hands flat on the stone pillar, she exhaled and shuddered. Her brow creased with effort. This was not easy, despite the long centuries of practice with many hundreds of seemingly identical monoliths.

  Carman removed her hands from the pillar. The imprints of her palms burned briefly, and then were absorbed into the rock. The stone began to dissolve, from the top down. As it did, the figure inside was revealed. At first it seemed like no more than a corpse, but after a few moments the figure’s limbs began to twitch. A minute or so later, and its eyes had opened to take in its surroundings, and the one responsible for its awakening.

  ‘Dagda,’ Carman said in cordial greeting.

  The ancient god regarded her. A glance at his surroundings informed him how utterly alone and completely outnumbered he presently was.

  ‘I seem to have awoken early,’ he observed.

  ‘My fault, I’m afraid,’ Carman admitted. ‘What can I say? It’s been too long. Thousands of years too long. A girl gets bored of waiting.’

  ‘The Morrigan�
�’

  ‘She’s around,’ Carman said airily. ‘Flapping this way and that. Not quite the girl she used to be, though. Thanks to you.’

  His attention fell on the cauldron that lay before her throne. ‘You still have it.’

  ‘Call it an extended loan.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  There was no point in lies. No time for them. ‘Revenge.’

  He didn’t seem surprised. He cocked his head up and to the side, as if listening to something. ‘They have moved on,’ he said. ‘The humans. They are beyond us now, Carman. You must see that.’

  ‘I’m not asking for the world,’ Carman smiled. ‘Just my piece of it, Dagda. My way of life.’

  ‘She will stop you. She always does. Kill me if you like. I’ll simply return. The same goes for the rest of us. This is futile, Carman. Sleep. Sleep like us. One day, perhaps, the world will be ready for our return. Humans won’t last forever.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Carman said. She gave a signal. Several of her larger and more monstrous children moved until they loomed over the Dagda from all sides. ‘Killing you will only bring you back. Sooner or later, you will return …’

  She pointed. The Dagda had time for one scream, curtailed abruptly as Carman’s elite minions each grabbed an arm, a leg, a head, and literally tore him apart. The pieces of him they threw into the Cauldron that he had created.

  ‘I’m counting on it,’ she said.

  OTHERWORLD, 1994 AD

  ‘You were always the pretty one. I hated you for that.’

  Ériu said nothing.

  ‘You scampered about with your flowing dresses and your luscious hair and your big come-hither eyelashes. Goddess of Sovereignty. Huh! What’s that even mean? Well I’ll tell you what it means. Goddess of cliques! If our canoes had landed in America instead of Antrim, you’d have invented shoulder pads two thousand years early. And they go and name the place after you, even after you hook up with that complete dickhead Elatha and give birth to that wanker Bres who, last I looked, tried to grind our entire race under his heel because he didn’t have the stones to admit he wasn’t kingly material! And you Goddess of Kings! So on top of everything else you’re guilty of staggering levels of job-related negligence!’

  Ériu never said a word.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ the Morrigan snapped. ‘Don’t think I can’t see that look you’re giving me.’

  The crow hopped up and down a few times on its perch, a few feet from the stone pillar that had once been Ériu. It was Ériu’s pillar, she was sure of it. She had known who each and every pillar had once been ever since her people had led themselves down here and petrified themselves. She had flown amongst them. Perched on them. Talked, as she was doing now, at great length to those she had known; to Nuada and to the Dagda, of course. From time to time, though, she came down and talked to those she visited less often – those like Ériu.

  Tactfully, when speaking to Ériu she failed to mention the small, grey-white stains that pockmarked her pillar. When a crow had to go, it had to go.

  ‘Anyway,’ she carried on, because the sound of her voice was the only sound here and any sound was better than nothing at all, ‘I’m going to bring you all back. Yes, even you. You wait and see, sister of mine.’

  She trailed off. Try as she might, she couldn’t think of anything else to say. Nothing new. Her voice faded and there was only silence, as there always was in this place.

  ‘I’ll bring you all back,’ the Morrigan said, over and over, into the silence around her.

  BELFAST CITY CENTRE, NOW

  ‘Impossible,’ the Morrigan said, over and over.

  Her people had come back. One by one the stone pillars had dissolved into the Tuatha they had once been, flashes of white light illuminated the Belfast night as the magic rolled back the confinement spell placed so many centuries ago.

  After only a few, she had known something was wrong, terribly wrong. As the first of her people had awoken, she had rushed to their side, embraced them and, throwing her arms around them, the people she had waited an eternity to see, the people she had sacrificed so much to bring back, they had felt wrong. Looked wrong. Smelled wrong.

  And when they had opened their mouths to speak …

  Impossible. Impossible. Impossible. Impossible!

  ‘Happy to see me, sister?’

  She spun. Her stomach felt knotted. Were she human, she might have thrown up on the well-kept lawn in front of the great Portland stone building that was City Hall.

  ‘Ériu?’ she said weakly.

  It looked like her long-lost sister, that much was true. You could imagine, perhaps, that once it had been Ériu, renowned for her beauty. When the moonlight caught her now, at a certain angle, you would have been close to swearing it was her. The effect was strongest when she stood still. But when she moved …

  She had, in her years of observing the human world and its obsessions, seen their fascination with the end of things, with imagining their own demise. She had watched their projections of what might happen if they unleashed their atomic weapons en masse, of what terrible once-human creatures might emerge from the ruins. Mutants, they called them. Once people, now transformed, degraded into something horrible.

  That was how her sister appeared to her now. A shambling, degraded, disgusting perversion of a Tuatha.

  ‘You spoke to me. You spoke to me often.’

  Despair was rising within her, complete despair. All that she’d done, all that she’d betrayed, was for this, for the reclamation of her people who were shambling toward her now from all sides, no life in their eyes, their faces a twisted mockery of their former visages. All of them had, somehow, been transformed. Into this.

  ‘I,’ her voice was dry in her throat. Her feet felt like lead. She knew they were all around her, scores of them now. A mutant multitude. ‘I wanted to bring you back.’

  ‘You did,’ Ériu replied with a stiff, rictus smile. ‘But you were not the first to do so.’

  The Morrigan felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned, and for the first time in many hundreds of years, she screamed – a cry of rage and loss and sorrow. By the time it faded, she had already sunk to her knees in front of the figure before her.

  ‘Morrigan,’ slavered the Dagda.

  ‘No,’ she sobbed helplessly. ‘No, you can’t be like this. I brought you back! I saved you all!’

  With jerky, unnatural movements, what had once been the Dagda moved his great head to look down at her. ‘She woke us first, one by one. Killed us while you slept. Put us into the Cauldron and tainted us with her own filth.’

  Tears burned her eyes. ‘Why? All she talked about, all she wanted, was to go back to how it was. Us against them. That was our agreement.’

  ‘She lied. To you. To us. To the humans. To herself. She wants to be noticed, Morrigan. She wants the whole human world, every Pantheon, to sit in awe of her.’

  ‘Kill her!’ Ériu hissed.

  The Dagda shook his head. ‘No! I cannot–’

  He tried to fight it, that much was clear. He even managed to turn, make a half-hearted swipe against one of his former warrior caste. Some of the faerie mutation seemed to fall away, and for a moment she glimpsed the Dagda of old, come to her aid, come to help save the day.

  The Tuatha ripped him apart.

  A hand with fingers like claws grabbed a fistful of her hair. She was picked up like a rag doll, spun and forced to face the snarling, too-wide mouth of Ériu. Shimmers ran over the once-beautiful face of the woman she’d always envied, revealing the monster racing to the surface.

  ‘Don’t worry, sister,’ Ériu growled, as she brought her free talons to bear on the Morrigan’s exposed neck, ‘when we’re finished with the humans, I will name this masssacre in tribute to you.’

  Her human body freshly restored to her, the Morrigan could have tried to stop her sister. In her prime, she could have snapped Ériu’s pretty little neck like a twig for daring to lay a hand on her, fa
erie-monster or not. Now, she found that she simply didn’t have the strength of will to resist.

  Luckily, she didn’t have to. From all around her, with a sound like the world ending, the ranks of the Named leapt upon the Tuatha. Battle was joined.

  *

  Steve swung himself off Larka’s back, taking in the battle before him. Her fellow wolves were locked in mortal combat with scores of what seemed, at first glance, to be humans.

  Only at first glance.

  Maggie nudged his shoulder. ‘Steve, look. Those people, they’re trapped.’

  He tore his gaze away from the carnage directly ahead with some difficulty. To his left, the nearby branch of Burger King was heaving with people. Faces were pressed up against the windows which were starting to crack under the pressure. Though, judging from the crush that must have been going on inside, that was probably no bad thing … if you discounted the semicircle of inhuman figures advancing on the front doors.

  ‘Larka!’ he said urgently.

  ‘I see it.’

  ‘Maggie, go. Somewhere,’ he added, anticipating her next question. ‘Anywhere but here. I’ll find you.’

  Her hand tightened around his wrist in response and making a snap judgement, Steve turned, kissed her and shoved her away all in one smooth movement. She half-fell into the doorway of a shop, sheltered for now.

  He hefted the flail and, with Larka at his side, he charged.

  *

  Crowd-surfing over a crush. Not the most orthodox method for avoiding a particularly painful death but, under the circumstances, Cal was pretty sure the poor bastards beneath him and Alice weren’t going to part sufficiently for them to slip between the cracks.