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

He stepped aside and revealed a fourth member of the Formorian party who had previously been shielded by the formidable bulk of his companion.

  Danny blinked. “Where’d they get him from?”

  The newcomer was normal in every way, insofar if you expanded your definition of “normal” to include annoyingly perfect male specimens. Danny immediately felt himself resentfully fidget in the way men always do when someone with perfect pecs, a lantern jaw and a thousand-watt smile enters the vicinity.

  “I am Elatha,” said the beefcake. “Hail to you Prince Nuada, and to your beautiful daughter.”

  Danny glanced sidelong at the Morrigan. “Fuck. Oul Mitch Buchanan there has an eye for ye. I almost feel like stickin an oul yeoooooo in there just for th-”

  “He’s not talking about me.”

  She was right. As he looked back, it was Ériu who skipped forward, floating over the grass separating the two parties. He looked past her for a moment to the nineteen-year-old version of The Morrigan, who had her gaze fixed on Elatha…and then on Ériu…and he watched her hands grind and twist around the massive spear as if trying to rip it in two.

  “Ah,” he said delicately.

  “My lord of the noble Formorians!” Ériu was exclaiming. “I am Ériu, of the line of Nuada of the Tuatha. You grace us with your presence here!”

  “It is I who am ennobled by your presence, Ériu” Elatha returned graciously. “Tell me, are all the womenfolk of your race so heavenly in countenance?”

  Ériu considered this. She cast a glance back at the Morrigan. Danny felt like ducking to get out of the way; by all rights anyone caught between the two poles of that glance should have dropped dead, pincushioned out of existence through death by daggering.

  “No,” Ériu replied. “No my fair Elatha, I fear not all are.”

  Elatha laughed. It was a musical laugh, and when Ériu joined in she seemed to match that musical pitch perfectly so that their laughter joined in a symphony of mirth.

  Danny leaned in to his travelling companion. “Is that the Spear of Destiny you’re holding?” he asked. He’d flashed back to the Lircom narration immediately upon seeing it. “The non-killing Jesus one, the Tuatha one?”

  “Yes.”

  “The third treasure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the fourth treasure an enchanted bucket, perchance?”

  “A bucket? No? Why would you…” and realisation dawned on her face and she began to laugh. It wasn’t a musical laugh like that which had just burst forth from the lips of Elatha and Ériu, but it had something theirs lacked; authenticity.

  Negotiations began between the two parties and there was much talk of tribute and land and trade. Danny yawned. It was all a bit Phantom Menace for him. He was more interested in the spear-carrying maiden. He kept comparing her to the older version standing beside him and wondering what had happened; the older self possessed all of the confidence and bearing of the younger version, but the younger self seemed to have a spark in her eyes that had been extinguished in the Morrigan he could interact with.

  It was familiar. That was what was itching him. That spark versus that lack of spark. He had seen it before.

  In Ellie.

  Yes. God, he could see it so clearly now. The younger Morrigan, the one narrowing her eyes at the monsters she was forced to negotiate with, the one who kept the retinue of warriors in line with little more than a clipped word here and there…he knew her sort alright.

  **

  The Attic bar & nightclub, Belfast, 2010 AD

  “I said I know your type alright.”

  Danny put a hand on his chest, aghast. “How could you?” he said, as the Attic’s Saturday night revellers gyrated, gently and not-so-gently bumping him this way and that. “I’ve not known you five minutes, I’m offering to get you a drink, and here you are making assumptions about me and my character.

  Ellie put on an equally oh-so-sincere face of contrition at her unforgivable slur. “Oh, oh my stars,” she said, “I didn’t mean to offend. But you should know, kind sir, that I’ve had bad experiences in the past with free drink. As a child I was savaged by a diet Coke and vodka .”

  Steve appeared at Danny’s elbow, holding two pints and a smaller glass filled with black liquid. He handed a pint to Danny and proffered the black-filled glass to Ellie, who after the merest pause accepted it graciously and nodded her head to Danny in gratitude.

  Steve sulked at this. “Aye he bought it but I’ve just had to queue for the past twenty minutes for the fuckin thing!” he said indignantly.

  Ellie raised her glass in appreciation, even as another girl appeared at her elbow. “Sorry,” she said, “thank you as well…” and she paused, obviously waiting for someone to fill in the blanks in terms of names.

  “Cuthbert,” Danny supplied, indicating his wingman.

  “Steve,” corrected Steve, catching Danny with a clip on the back of the head just as he was taking a draught of his pint and causing the head to foam in a graceful arc up and over the rim of the glass.

  “Shame. I think you suit Cuthbert,” Ellie observed, taking a reserved sip from her glass. They were on the outskirts of the dancefloor and had to regularly swing outward and inward like two poles of a magnet to allow others access and exit to the heaving mass of biomatter.

  “This here’s Maggie,” Ellie introduced her friend.

  “Alright,” the boys chimed to her in unison. Danny jerked his knee into Steve’s thigh fractionally and caught his friend’s eye for a microsecond, all the communication that was required to say -

  I like the one I was talkin to. Do you like the other one?

  Yep.

  So I’ll go for my one and see what I can do for you for the other one and you’re okay with that?

  Yep.

  You won’t fuck this up?

  Try my best lad.

  “Are yous at Queens?” Maggie asked. She was directing her questions at Steve primarily, Danny observed. Excellent. The cosmos was falling into place exactly as it should.

  “Yeah. I’m doin IT and fuckwit head here’s doin English,” Steve said, indicating Danny with a jerk of his head and a thumb-stab. Danny bowed with a flourish.

  “IT? So you’re the brains of this operation then?” Ellie asked Steve.

  “He’s everything above the waist, yeah,” Danny interjected. “Which reminds me lad,” he said, turning to ostensibly address his friend but still talking loudly enough for all four to hear, “I picked up that prescription you were after, but the label was a bit smudged…I have to ask ye - what the fuck are public lice? Are they the exhibitionist versions or somethin?”

  “What the fuck are you on about?” Steve demanded.

  “I think you mean pubic,” Ellie suggested.

  Danny allowed a penny-dropping expression to dawn across his face. “Ohhhhhh…” he said, “…well, that’d explain why I saw his Y-fronts makin a break for freedom out the windowsill the other day, right enough.”

  Maggie looked shocked. “You wear Y-fronts?” she asked Steve.

  “No!” Steve shouted, now two-nil down and struggling to catch up. “Just don’t listen to this fucker, whatever he says! He has to put that wanky English degree to some fuckin use!”

  Danny laughed. “Oy,” he said, “that’s below the belt that is, Cousin IT.”

  “Sure I thought below the belt was your home turf?” Ellie said, only her eyes visible as she was holding the glass to her face. It should have been ridiculous, using a glass of vodka and coke the way a geisha would have used a fan, but somehow with her it worked.

  “Oh, so that one stuck with ye did it?”

  “Did alright. Like chewing-gum on my heels.”

  “Oh stop, stop with your sweet nothings,” he protested. “It’s far too early for such poetry. You’re comin on too strong. Don’t crowd me.”

  “Oh?” she said, and slipped her arm around Maggie’s shoulders. “You heard the man, Margaret. Let us take our fine selves away somewhere else and
give the lads their space, eh?”

  “Alright alright, houl on,” Danny said, holding up a hand to admit defeat even as Steve’s eyes bugged in alarm beside him at the prospect of a buck turning tail and dandering off. “How about we have a wee dance. See how it goes,” and seeing Ellie was pondering this, he jerked a thumb at Steve, “it’ll save me dancin with him.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with him?”

  “Handsy.”

  “Aye? I like handsy,” Ellie replied.

  Danny set down his extinguished pint on a nearby surface, extended a hand, which she took. “In that case, I think I’m in love,” he said with a grin.

  They danced off into the crowd, and somewhere in the melee, much gyrating and finger-pointing and him rotating through the four dance moves he actually knew later, as they were pressed together in the crush of bodies, he leaned into her in the hot press of flesh and he kissed her on the lips with his eyes closed and his mouth slightly open. Her tongue was like a shot of caffeine straight to the heart; with every brush of it upon his own he felt alive, validated and whole.

  She tasted of purple.

  In the chaos of the dance floor he caught flashes of Steve and Maggie, together, and deep in the depths of his soul as he danced and kissed this girl with the spark in her eyes he knew one thing with a comforting certainty.

  This right here, this right now, this was a good night.

  Tomorrow could wait.

  **

  Mag Tuired, Ireland, 94 BC

  “Uh…”

  Another plain, but what must have been a different part of Ireland; he could tell by the pillars that littered the terrain on which he and the Morrigan now stood.

  “What…”

  The pillars were tall, at least fifty or sixty feet. They were arranged in a circular spread outward from a central point, as though someone had been marking out some vast dartboard and hadn’t gotten around to connecting the dots yet. He and the Morrigan were standing right where the bullseye would have been. It was impressive on a grand scale; it made Stonehenge look like a garden shed.

  “For fucks…!”

  It was high noon, in terms of the sun at least; it was directly overhead, and it beat down harshly, making him wonder if this really was Ireland, but there was that certainty again, the one he’d experienced before during the first vision she’d taken him to see.

  This was Ireland.

  And the hundreds, no, the thousands of heavily armed blood-crazed bastards rushing toward where he stood from all sides were intent on beating the living piss out of one another.

  “Do somethin!” he implored the Morrigan. She ignored him, standing there stock still, a statue, about to be hit from all sides by the onrushing armies. He felt like running to her and shaking her, begging her to get them out of here, but there was no time, there was no time for anything-

  He ran.

  He ran this way and that, dodging and skidding and ducking and jumping, as the two sides came together, hundred of bodies simply thwacking into one another with no finesse, no fine planning. Carnage ensued immediately. Axes swung. Danny watched a Tuatha warrior take on a Cyclops and with a swing of his sword lop off the Cyclops’ left leg with no more apparent effort than someone brushing away a cobweb. For his part, the Cyclops wasn’t terribly off put by this setback, and simply switched to the movement style favoured by his brothers the Unicycles, swaying back and forth and whipping his stupidly fuckin enormous axe around in a huge arc.

  The Tuatha blocked the first swing at the cost of his grip on his sword, which went spinning through the air - embedding itself up to the hilt in the back of one of his own - but could do nothing about the second, which ripped into his torso and all but cut him in two. Danny watched as what seemed like ten miles of intestines spilled out of the felled warrior and he slumped, blood pouring from his lips, nose and ears. He was still alive, and he was trying to call out for help.

  Another swing of the axe, this one down on his head, split his skull into an east wing and a west wing. The Formorian had to tug at the axe three times to remove it from the Tuatha’s sternum, so deeply was it embedded.

  At the third tug, the monster grunted in guttural triumph - and then squealed. Danny watched as a point of steel appeared from the monster’s stomach, as though some gross perversion of childbirth by C-section were taking place. The Formorian looked down and made a grab for the steel point, but by then it was far too late; the tip of the spear - for such it was - was jerked to the left and right, making a series of ripping and tearing noises as it went.

  When it was retracted, the Formorian was a nerveless corpse slumping to soil already stained red, red as the ground had looked back in the Otherworld under that crimson Moon and Danny spared a moment to wonder if he was looking at the origins of that colour scheme unfolding before him.

  The spear-carrier, who had just dispatched the Formorian, was standing facing him. It was the Morrigan. For a moment his heart jumped because she seemed to perceive him; she frowned, looking directly into his eyes as he stood, no more than ten feet away. But in an instant more she was gone, leaping across the battlefield from pillar to pillar in a series of impossibly nimble jumps, bringing death to her opponents every time she landed. The spear flashed this way and that. Formorian heads followed suit.

  “The battle of Mag Tuired,” the older Morrigan said, now freed of her paralysis and standing beside him. He realised that no matter where he went, he would be left unmolested by the warriors. “Where we took these lands from the Formorians, despite being outnumbered ten to one.”

  Danny watched the Morrigan’s younger incarnation hurl the Spear on a horizontal trajectory with such force that before it left her hand for more than a few seconds, there was what appeared to be a Formorian shishkebab impaled on its length. The Spear eventually embedded itself into one of the mighty stone pillars with a thu-crackk that echoed around the battlefield. The pillar cracked long and deep with the force of the impact.

  Unable to look away, unsure if it was horrified fascination or something deeper and darker that compelled him to keep his eyes trained on the scene, he saw the Spear then began to vibrate, faster and faster, until the Formorian corpses on it simply seemed to fall apart into shapeless piles of flesh.

  The Spear jerked, backward, once…then twice…and finally removed itself from the pillar and with a lazy 360-degree turn (that so happened to sweep another twenty or so Formorians advancing from their feet), it returned to the outstretched hand of its mistress, just in time for her to swing it around and behind her and with one forward-backward twitch, simply poke the head clean off the shoulders of a would-be assailant creeping at her from the rear.

  Ten to one. Jesus pole-vaulting Christ. It could have been a thousand to one and the poor fuckers wouldn’t have stood a chance. It was like watching natives with grass skirts go up against Marines, except the chasm between the two sides wasn’t in technology but magic.

  As if the Morrigan’s actions with the Spear weren’t enough, her mentor was proving himself none too shabby with a sword that made the spear look about as threatening as a toothpick. Danny felt himself tense like a plucked arrow-string; it had to be the Silver sword, the one with the power to rewrite reality. He knew it was key to everything that was going on; he could feel it.

  Nuada was despatching hordes of his attackers with ease. Danny watched the sword he wielded grow to thirty feet long to scythe through an entire division. He saw it hover in the air and dart this way and that to intercept arrows, before doing the returning-to-the-hand trick he’d seen the Morrigan’s Spear perform. On a few occasions Nuada would stand side-by-side with his star pupil and the two of them would perform deeds that defied description in their cheerful brutality.

  The Formorians seemed to catch the scent of defeat on the air. He saw them stop their waves of attacks, turn and shout and give orders to try and retreat back to the hills that ringed the east side of the great plain. But the Tuatha were too swift, their numbers too und
immed by the battle. They ran them down and ran them down, the Spear’s wooden shaft and the sword’s silver blade doing terrible damage.

  Awash in a sea of blood, he could stand it no longer.

  “This is slaughter.”

  “Yes,” the Morrigan nodded. “Glorious, isn’t it?”

  “No it fuckin isn’t,” he snapped. “You outmatched them and you must have known it before you came to fight them. You could have shown them they didn’t stand a chance and then said - right, wise up lads. Behave your fuckin selves and we won’t have to massacre ye.”

  The Morrigan‘s brow darkened beyond anything he‘d ever seen from her before. She turned her full fury on him and it was all he could do not to back down in the face of it. She‘s a crow. She‘s a fuckin crow and she‘s trapped like that. Remember that.

  “I am the Goddess of War!” she thundered. “War is what I do! Look at me!”

  She wasn’t talking about the version of herself currently tearing him a new one. Danny looked across the battlefield. Her younger self was walking triumphantly across the battlefield, red from head to toe in Formorian blood, a Formorian head wedged atop her Spear which she held aloft in victory in her right hand. From her left hand she had hold of at least five Formorian scalps attached to five decapitated heads, swinging in an almost jovial way that was obscene.

  Tuatha warriors, big and burly men all, mobbed her and lifted her aloft, shouting and singing in celebration. Blessing her name and bending their knee to give tribute to the figurehead, the inspiration. Even Nuada, similarly feted, bowed his head for a moment when he approached. The entire battlefield, two thousand victorious Tuatha and many more thousands of dead and dying Formorians, rang to the sounds of praise for her prowess.

  At the peak of her powers.

  He remembered that feeling.

  **

  Belgravia Avenue, Belfast, 2011 AD

  “You have everything lad?”

  He cast a look around the room that had housed his entire world for the best part of three years; best part being definitely the operative phrase. 12 Belgravia Avenue. Three words guaranteed to strike trepidation into the hearts - and possibly the knicker elastics - of girls across the city.