Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Read online

  The crow didn’t answer. “You have the talent,” it said instead. “Because of that, I’ll choose to ignore the staggering lack of due respect you’re showing.”

  “Ach thanks,” he said. “I appreciate that so much. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “I shall allow it,” the bird said graciously, unruffling its feathers and taking the opportunity to stick its beak into a particularly thick knot of them that had been caused by all of its enraged hopping during Danny’s taunts.

  That was when Danny lunged.

  The bird never saw it coming. It squawked, a proper bird aaaaawwwwrrrrkkk and not a recognisable word, and it tried to launch itself up and away to safety, but his sprawl across the few feet that separated them had been timed to coincide with the bird sticking its beak into his feathers and for a crucial fraction of a second the attention of even one of its beady little eyes had been away from him; time enough for him to clamp first one hand, and then two around the bird’s meagre little body.

  The crow’s head went crazy, pecking him this way and that, until he increased the pressure on his clamping hand enough for him to let go with his other hand and use two of his fingers to pinch that wicked little beak shut.

  “My question is,“ he said, everso slightly out of breath, and starting to bleed from a few shallow puncture wounds on his left thumb and right palm, “why shouldn’t I break your scrawny fuckin neck?”

  WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING!!!

  He nearly released the bird from sheer shock. The words had come at him in his own inner voice. It was like hearing your own subconscious rebel against you, and for a long moment he actually wondered if he had finally, somewhat understandably, snapped under the strain.

  No. No, the voice wasn’t his own, despite coming from inside his head; it smelt different. It smelt of dirt, and blood, of this strange place he’d found himself in.

  “I’ll tell ya what I’m doin,” he replied, vocalising because it was easier to structure his feelings that way, “I’m getting sick of all this shit that’s been happenin to me this past week, and you were just the talkin crow that broke the camel’s back.”

  I am trying to help you. You have no idea what sort of place you’re in. No mortal has been here in-

  “Aye,” he broke in, “hundreds of years. Inexcusable magics or some shit. Blahiddy-blah fuckin blah. And I have some sorta talent. So you said. Whoo-pee-fuckin-doo. Look. All I wanna know is how I make this all stop. How I go back to the way things were. That so hard? That so much to ask, aye?”

  There’s so much you don’t know. So much you don’t understand.

  The voice was almost pitying now. He felt like squeezing his hand around the little black body currently occupying the interior of his fist until it exploded. If one more person pitied him, just one more-

  The landscape around him turned blood red so quickly and so completely that he was left stunned by the speed of it. He looked up, and saw that massive overhanging Moon had shaded itself crimson - just like in the…

  …dream…

  Rrrrroooooo.

  Like the crow’s thoughts, this sound arrived in his head uninvited, but it didn’t come from the goddess aspect busily crapping itself into his palm.

  Let me go. Let me go now.

  He complied, not quite knowing if he did so willingly or from some hitherto unknown power of compulsion the crow had just demonstrated. The bird fluttered up and away, but it didn’t abandon him; it hovered about twenty feet above his head. Crows were particularly ungainly things, he could see that now. Little wonder they’d never sank into the public consciousness as cute little critters merrily chirping musical interludes in Nature’s endless majesty, as much as they had as the grim eyeball-guzzling harbingers of death. They radiated menace.

  “It’s coming,” the crow called down to him. “One of their soldiers. One of the elites, by the look of it. Behind you. Look.”

  He rotated and saw it almost immediately, lurching across the plains toward him on his vantage point on top of the small hillock. It moved like the crow flew; in a way that looked clumsy, but was filled with power; it came at him across the ochre-tinted grass in a stop-start way that put him in mind of those scary fuckin skeletons in the Jason and the Argonauts movie he’d loved as a kid.

  “Well! Don’t just…! Do something then!” he shouted up at his airborne companion.

  “Who? Me?”

  “Yes you!” he said, his voice hoarse with terror, as the thing began to rumble on the upward incline, now no more than two hundred feet or so away. “You’re the fuckin Morrigan aren’t ye?”

  “Should I shite on it? Or wait til tonight, perhaps, and keep it up all night cawing like a…what was it…?”

  He glared death at the crow. The crow, who had evolution on its side, did the same and won. “What do I do?” he cried out, taking one step backward, then two, testing the surface beneath his feet, trying to judge how quickly his feet would spring off it, estimating the running speed of the thing moving at him. Knowing it was moving faster than he could hope to match.

  “Fight it.”

  Memories of his father’s dream-tussle with one of these fuckers refused to go away. His Da had shown some surprisingly agile moves for a guy with a dog’s tail stickin out of his arse, but he couldn’t swallow the recollection of how powerfully the wolf-thing had ripped the tail clean out of its socket, or the taste of warm blood as it sprayed from the wound…

  He was still moving backward, his steps turning to bounds turning to almost full-out backward jogging, because the one thing he could imagine being worse than seeing this fucker coming at him would be turning and running from it with the knowledge that between one foot landing and the other it would be closing on him, closing and gaining, thenpouncing and sinking its teeth-

  A glance up overhead. The crow was gone. Fucker. Same couldn’t be said for the wolf-thing. He could hear it now. The ground was shaking every time one of those legs hit the ground and ate a little more of the distance away, which was far too often.

  He had retreated far enough that he was descending the far side of the hill, and for a few moments it had slipped from view around the curve of the summit. But no longer; here it was again, coming down now to him, gravity assisting its descent. It wasn’t going to slow down to talk to him or to impart some cryptic message, he saw - it was going to keep bounding until it went right through him and scythed him neatly in two.

  There was always something, wasn’t there? Some spear or some sword or some piece of the landscape that came to the rescue. He’d seen these movies before. He was the hero, right? He’d just been dropped in the magic world, yeah? He wasn’t gonna get eviscerated within half an hour of arriving. Not unless he had two younger brothers who’d get progressively better results than him.

  Stop. Stop thinking about this like it’s a fuckin story or a Peter Jackson film. His mind raced. Nothing was going to present itself to him.

  Thirty feet. Twenty. He could see the muscles in its shoulders ripple. It must have been fifteen feet long from nose to tail. Fifteen feet. Each leg was as big as a large dog, and the head was all red eyes and bobbing jaw line revealing a thin white line of teeth, though he knew that the brief glimpse he could see of those teeth was like the one-tenth of an iceberg visible above the surface of the sea.

  If he was going to survive, he was going to have to save himself. He planted his back foot in the soil and stopped his retreat and made his move, the only gambit he could think of.

  “Here. Stall a wee minute,” Danny said.

  It took every ounce of self-control he had to get his voice the way he wanted it, because the voice was the key to this. If he’d sounded like a man pleading for his life, he knew – somehow, he knew beyond all doubt – that this thing wouldn’t stop, it would just plough through him and his intestines would be making some interesting geometric shapes on the grass below.

  His voice was icily calm. It was conversational. There wasn’t a trace that th
e speaker had the slightest inkling he was in danger.

  Hearing him, the single-minded head-down killing stance the wolf-thing had adopted dissolved and it tripped; it actually tripped up over its own legs and went to ground in a tangle that he had to quickly sidestep, lest the creature achieve its original objective of cutting him down entirely by accident. His heart was pounding in his chest but he forced an aura of calm to persist as it unwrapped its massive legs from underneath itself and raised itself back up on its haunches barely a few feet from him, red eyes glinting, a nightmare thing coiled in the semi-darkness and preparing itself to strike-

  “Alright?” Danny said, and managed a cursory nod. His chest was a pinball table and his heart was racking up a high score, but outwardly he looked about as intimidated as someone asking for a light from the guy beside him outside a pub.

  Again it stopped. Again that look of confusion. “Aaaaalllllriiiiighhhhttt?” it echoed, snapping at the air as if wanting to bite the word itself.

  “Ach aye, not so bad. So what’s the craic with this place then? This the Netherworld is it?”

  The wolf-thing reared back up, then shook its head violently, a move which if it hadn’t been for the size and ferocity of the fucker would have put him in mind of a sodden dog trying to dry itself. “Ssssstttttoopppppp tttttaaaallllkkkkiinnnngg!” it said angrily.

  He cocked his head and frowned. “Stop talking?” he echoed. “Sorry I don’t mean any offence like but I didn’t really catch ye. Tell ya what. Try saying the words a wee bit quicker. Try movin from one letter to the next a wee bit faster. How’s that work?”

  The thing’s breathing was incredible; it was like hearing two dragons go at it doggy-style. “Llll…liii…likeee thhhhiss?”

  Danny clapped his hands together once and grinned. “Now you‘re cookin wi’ gas! Now, don’t suppose ya could direct me to the oul…” he looked around and gestured, “…palace or hideout or secret dungeon or whatever?”

  “I ammm tooooooo eattt yooou…?” it replied, and that slight querulous tremor in its voice, that note of puzzled bafflement, was his only hope of coming out of this alive.

  “Nah,” Danny said. One word. If he’d said anything more, the little foetus of illusion born of verbal trickery he was nursing to life would have died stillborn around him. Keep the big lies short. Keep them simple.

  The wolf-thing paused to mull this over. “Nnooo?” it said.

  “Mix-up, lad. Sure think about it,” he kept on quickly, not giving the thing a chance to stop and dwell on anything he was saying, knowing he was balancing his life on a knife-edge, “I’m the first mortal to be here for fuckin ages, am I right?”

  “Cennnnturies!”

  Danny snorted. “So what’s the use in eatin me? Doesn’t it sound more likely you should bring me to the boss and let them decide what’s to be done? That’s what they’re for, isn’t it like? Imagine they says to ye - ‘well what was the craic out in the oul endless wastes of eternal despair tonight, same oul shite?’ and you went ‘no, saw a livin human, so I ran at the fucker and ate him’ - they’d be ragin! They’d be sayin - ‘fuckin hundreds of years we’ve been waitin on somethin different happening and you go and eat the fucker!’. Then what’d happen? You’d be in the shit, that’s what’d happen. Not that it’d be your fault like. Sure we all know what the bosses are like. Heads up their fuckin holes most of the time.”

  If he’d had a cigarette he would have offered it ceremoniously at that moment.

  He’d struck a nerve with that last sentiment. The wolf-thing nodded its massive head in enthusiastic agreement. “Theyy instructttted us we couldddd no longerrrrrrrr consummme our own offssssspring!” it said, adding a mournful little awwwrrrlll at the end for emphasis at the depth of the injustice of this.

  “The bastards.”

  All business. He had to keep being all business. It was like walking through an office with a clipboard; you could walk through just about any office in the world unmolested and unchallenged so long as you looked like you belonged there. He walked forward and right up to the thing and gave it a companionable thump on the side of its midriff, where he imagined its shoulder muscles might have begun.

  “Right, c’mon, let’s be away then,” he said. And he rolled his eyes in an exaggerated way. “Wouldn’t wanna keep the mucky-mucks waiting now would we? Tch.”

  To his utter astonishment, the thing squatted down on the grass, flattening itself to the surface. He hesitated for a moment, almost a fatal moment, before quelling his fear and hopping up onto its massive broad back, swinging his legs over. The thing raised itself up and he could feel himself settle in between two groups of muscles that formed a makeshift saddle.

  “I am gladdd I did not consummmmmee you,” it rumbled, and then they began to move off, swaying forward and back rhythmically as they began to lope in that start-stop motion across the landscape.

  He held on grimly, his fingers grabbing onto the loose fur matting the things’ back, but it didn’t seem to mind (or likely notice) his tight grip. His balls were being banged around a little bit, but apart from that it actually wasn’t too bad…assuming you overlooked the fact that he was trapped in the worst nightmarish scenario imaginable, riding into an even worse one; what in the name of Jesus fuck was he going to do when they reached the “boss”?

  “What’s yer name?” he asked.

  “I am withooooooout naaaaaaaaaame. Itttttt issssss not considerrrrrrred necesssssary.”

  “Isn’t that just typical?“ he said, packing as much disgust as possible into his tone. “Well we’ll soon fix it. How bout…Wily?”

  They stopped, and he feared for a moment he wouldn’t have to worry about his fate upon reaching Thing Central and that he’d made some sort of horrible faux pas by naming his unexpected new proletariat sympathiser. But that unimaginable head swung back to look at him and when the teeth flashed this time, it almost looked like he was on the receiving end of a smile.

  “I liiiiiike it,” said Wily, and they set off again a moment later.

  Danny pitied the Road Runner that fucked with them.

  A shadow landed in front of him on Wily’s back with a disorganised flurry of wings. “You…ye wee cunt,” he hissed, wishing he could let go of his handholds to lunge forward and wring that little neck.

  “Me?” the crow said innocently, riding Wily’s back with no apparent effort. Wily seemed not to have noticed the extra weight settling on him.

  “You left me!”

  “You seem to be doing okay. Better than okay. Naming a soldier faerie and turning it into a mount? Not exactly what I had in mind when I said fight it, but I have to give you points for originality. What‘s next? Get it to form a Union and loiter outside some standing stones howling We Shall Overcome?”

  “You seriously wanted to me fight it?” he said. “Are you out of your fuckin mind?”

  “Yes. I am. That’s what an aspect is. Isn’t that where we came in?”

  He narrowed his eyes. Make the connection. See past the surface. Since stepping on that tablet, doing that seemed easier. “You can’t get back in,” he said. “You’re trapped as a crow.”

  Wings fluttered. “Astute. And accurate.”

  “Who are you?” he asked. “I need to know, I mean really know, what all this is about. What I’m goin into. What I need to do. All of it, the truth. Or I’m gonna be dead in about two seconds flat and I think,” he said, fixing those little beady eyes with a level stare, “that’d be as big a disaster for you as it would for me…?

  You really want to know?

  “Yes.”

  It’ll be quite the journey. Unlike anything you’ve ever taken before. Be warned.

  He didn’t break the stare. Didn’t speak. Show me.

  The crow hopped forward. He felt a wing brush his face-

  The world exploded into fire, and oil.

  **

  Belfast, 24th September, 2000 AD

  FFFFFSssssssssshhhhhhhh. The oil sizzled around the load
that just been dumped into its midst, heating the captives within to hundreds of degrees in seconds.

  “Ma?”

  Linda Morrigan didn’t have time to look back to where her son sat. The chips had gone on. Right. That was that done - a few minutes before they’d need to come out. She wished they’d been able to afford one of them deep fat fryer that had the wee bleeper instead of this Poundstretcher special. The bread was frying on the pan; she flipped it and it sizzled angrily, adding to the chip-sizzle; the whole kitchen sounded like a snake farm being toured by the Mongoose royal family.

  “What is it Danny son?” she said, affording him as much of her attention as she could. He was only ten, God love him, and he hadn’t yet learned when was a good time to try and attract his Ma’s attention and when, for the sake of his digestive system and its continued health, he should let her get on with things.

  “What does my Da do?”

  She did glance back at that, only because of the unexpectedness of the question; truth be told she’d expected it to be a plaintive inquiry about whether Steve could stay the night (yes, so long as the television in the room stayed off Channel 4). “He works for Ordnance Survey, love,” she said. “He’s a cartographer…am…“ she fumbled for a term that he’d probably find more descriptive, “…a map-maker. Sure I thought ya knew that?”

  Danny looked a bit dubious at that. “But like…hasn’t all Ireland been discovered already?”

  Taking the grill tray out to inspect the bacon, she couldn’t help but laugh as she turned the rashers over. God love him. “He’s not going anywhere people haven’t been already, son. He goes around with a wee special camera and he…” she struggled here, because she’d never really taken a blind bit of notice of what Tony did for a living, so long as it brought in the wage (which it had) and paid the bills (which it did), “…well he measures distances and heights and stuff. And they make wee maps from it. Or big maps. You know that big map of Ireland you have on your bedroom wall? The lovely big one? He helped make that!”