Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  Barry scowled. “It was all of those things,” he snapped.

  “I know it was!” the Archangel exploded.

  “Were you watching me?”

  “Of course I was watching you!”

  “So you were just going to let that guy get beaten up and robbed.”

  “I’d called the police, you imbecile,” Gabriel growled. “As soon as I’d seen the guy break off from his crew and begin loitering, I recognised the setup. I’ve been watching humans beat and rob each other for thousands of years. Do you think that moron had come up with a new way of doing it?”

  “The police wouldn’t have shown up in time,” Barry said, although he felt his indignation falter. They had arrived very quickly, hadn’t they? So quickly, he’d been forced to rush his little post-rescue speech. They had already been on their way.

  “And when you came barrel-rolling out of nowhere like the vengeful spirit of the Lone Ranger, I’d been about to yell from the church doorway,” Gabriel concluded witheringly. “Muggers are basically cowards. As soon as he thought there was a witness, and as soon as he heard the cops were coming, he would have bolted. The only reason he didn’t run when you showed up was because he was too busy falling over and pissing himself.”

  “I didn’t–”

  “And while we were virtuously throwing an underprivileged and substance-fucked citizen into the gears of the state’s mental health system because he now believes in Angels – and oh yes, whose total mental breakdown will probably bring more police attention to this neighbourhood–”

  “I sorted that out,” Barry started. “I leaned on them both and calmed them down, and the guy told the police he didn’t really remember anything from the attack, he said he must have blacked out.”

  “Oh, you leaned on them. Almost gave them both fatal aneurysms is what you did. And while all that was happening, twenty more people got beaten and mugged – or much, much worse – on the streets and inside homes all over the city.”

  Barry felt his feathers ruffle, an absurdly literal indignation response. “What, so because we can’t stop them all, we’re not supposed to stop any of them?”

  “Don’t lecture me about moral relativism! Did you somehow miss the part where I said I was already going to stop the whole thing before you blundered in? Stop it without causing more problems for the victim, the criminal, the police, and us?”

  Barry grimaced and looked at the stained glass windows for the fiftieth time in the past half-hour, waiting for the light-shift to signal sunset and freedom.

  It was true, he hadn’t really helped – and he made a lousy superhero. And Gabriel didn’t even know about the other attempts he’d made at protecting the people of his home town. Or at least, he probably didn’t know. If he had, he would almost certainly have yelled at Barry some more.

  His attempts to fight crime hadn’t been complete disasters. He’d managed to conceal the signs of his involvement almost every time, and he hadn’t seen any crazy news stories about Angels. And if his appearance led to a little spike in the number of wild reports that the police ignored, what of it? It must be a pretty normal thing, when a new Angel joined the team.

  Gabriel had relented a little, recently. Barry suspected it was because the Archangel had been through this before, and knew when his new trainees were getting frustrated and ready to do something stupid. Yes, Gabriel had taken him out, tried to show him the ropes, all the while lecturing him on the human condition and The Way Things Were.

  It really was true that Angels had to do more esoteric stuff than attack muggers, but it wasn’t quite like visiting misanthropes and giving them pre-Christmas epiphany dreams, either. The Angelic version of crime fighting was strange. It was nice, in some cases. It was almost like, if he squinted, he could see how it was making the world better. A lot of human behaviour models were chaotic and the Angels brought order and peace. Their effect on group psychology – or, if you liked, mob mentality – could do more than help onlookers ignore their presence. Angels could sit in the background, unseen, and pass for human … and when the situation got volatile, they could calm things down. If things got really bad, they could lean on the belligerent mortals and make them lose focus – even consciousness.

  Barry was still working on that. His leaning was a bit more sitting at this point, and when he did it in the heat of the moment he tended to wind up with people in fortunately-reversible comas.

  And those cases of crowd control were about the most interesting cases he got to go out on. Being an Angel was, for all its wonder and glory, really quite boring. It was sitting around all day and then being free at night when almost everybody was asleep and only certain things were even open.

  Gabriel said that the loneliness and the nocturnal environment lent itself to brooding, and most new Angels went through a few decades of gloom and angst – usually ending when the last mortals they’d known when they were alive had shuffled off.

  Barry was currently torn between wholly embracing the night-time brood, and doing something else to prove Gabriel wrong – which would almost certainly play into Gabriel’s hands because it was definitely reverse psychology of the crudest kind.

  He looked out of the windows again. Almost time.

  The Angels were involved in the space programme, albeit in a very distant and careful way. They stayed at the edges of human industry and science, probably out of concern that they might end up on a dissection table. But after the collapse of civilisation that Gabriel had alluded to following the veil, they’d done what they could to direct the recovery.

  Gabriel and the other Angels thought there might be something on Mars or Venus, some remnant. Humans had been convinced for a century or more that there was nothing out there, but the Angels had kept some sort of interest alive, culturally if not scientifically. It could be nothing human, not after so many centuries of separation, but the Angels thought there might be other things – maybe Angelic, maybe technological, maybe something else entirely. Gabriel had been unwilling to go into more detail until Barry had ‘settled in’, which may or may not include a century of brooding.

  Barry didn’t know what that phrase, centuries of separation, might mean. Every time he tried to get a straight answer from Gabriel, the Archangel trotted out Stormburg’s Theorem for another airing. Barry suspected it had become a convenient way to avoid difficult questions for the hairy old bugger.

  And then there was religion. Gabriel didn’t talk much about that either. Barry got the distinct impression that the Archangel was unhappy, maybe even embarrassed by the way things had gone since the beginning of the First Century AD, because he’d started out with some sort of plan and it had rapidly gone all human-shaped. The big monotheistic religions of the past millennium-and-a-half or so had their own ideas about how they were going to manage things, and the Angels had lost a lot of control. Humans notoriously got carried away with certain things, and the little tribal clubs of nation and faith were big ones. Gabriel’s desire to maintain the Pinian church, to keep the Pinian God at the forefront against the big messy polytheistic parties that the Norse, the Greeks, the Indians had enjoyed, had wound up … not exactly backfiring, but it definitely hadn’t gone the way he’d intended. And he was still annoyed about it.

  There were other things the Angels did. Things in hidden corners, in the parts of the world that humans did not usually notice. For Gabriel, the most important of these were the Disciples.

  The Disciples were Firstmades, and Firstmades were … well, Barry still wasn’t entirely sure what they were. Gabriel had told him about them because he’d been convinced Barry was supposed to be a leftover from one of them.

  There were ten Firstmades, although only one – only part of one – was here on Earth. They were like great formless entities, spirits. Except they did sort of have forms. Lots of forms. Each Firstmade was divided into different facets. Some were extremely powerful – Gods – and others less so – Disciples. And each little bit of each of the ten Firstmades
had a mind of its own. Sort of.

  And they could put meat around themselves like clothes, and walk around like people – or, in the case of the God-powered bits, They could put God-stuff around Themselves and walk around like Gods, Barry supposed.

  There were only three of them here on Earth. Three parts of a Firstmade – or Firstmade Brotherhood – called the Pinian Brotherhood. Except there were two main halves of the Firstmade, and only the good half was called the Pinians. The other half were called the Darkings, or something silly like that.

  Gabriel had gotten frustrated trying to tell Barry about it.

  “Look,” he growled, “there are ten Firstmade entities, and one of them rules the Void. We call this one the Pinian Brotherhood. This one has eight parts: two Gods, six Disciples. One God and three Disciples on each side. One side rules Earth, among other places. Those Disciples are here somewhere, wearing flesh suits that they’ve forgotten are suits. I’m trying to remind them, and I’m hoping you’ll be able to help me with that.”

  “Well shit, Gabriel,” Barry retorted. “Why didn’t you just say?”

  Gabriel grunted. “Alright,” he said, “now, the thing about Firstmades is, they can’t die. They can lose their meat clothes, but they can always get new ones. The entities can’t die. That’s sort of why they’re referred to as nonentities in classical … yes?”

  Barry had raised his hand. “What about the other nine Firstmades?”

  Gabriel put a hand briefly in front of his face. “What about them?”

  “What are they doing while we’re sitting here waiting for sunset?”

  “All sorts of dumb things, I imagine. Can you try to focus?”

  “Sorry. So there’s three Disciples on Earth somewhere…”

  Barry was still only starting out on his journey down those roads. But the Vampires, as representatives of that unseen world, were part of it. And one thing Gabriel had told Barry about, and Barry had understood, was Canon.

  Gabriel had told him about Canon because the Vampire was coming to Australia, which was now technically – and provisionally, Barry suspected – Barry’s turf. Was he supposed to protect it, or not?

  Canon was coming here to lie low with some little girl he’d kidnapped and turned into a Vampire. Just … snatched her, and ended her human existence, on a whim. Was he supposed to let that happen?

  The whole Firstmade thing was a complete mystery to Barry, but he could just about wrap his brain around a sleazy child-molesting Vampire who needed his body removed.

  Barry shook his head, and as the last rays of the setting sun faded from the stained glass he rose, shook out his wings, and strode for the door. he had to believe Gabriel had told him about the Vampire for a reason. And it wasn’t just another test he was destined to fail. Something he was supposed to know about, but do nothing until some poorly-defined right time.

  He stepped outside, rounded the church out of the main lines of sight – not that this seemed to be much of an issue for potential witnesses – and launched himself into the rapidly-darkening sky. He was, he’d decided, still going to do some crime fighting. He needed to practice his flying and his crowd control if he was going to make the flight to Sydney and deal with things when he got there.

  He flew up and circled slowly like a huge seagull, spiralling higher as the sun continued to sink beyond the horizon. He saw a fight developing outside the Subiaco oval and swept down. He landed, moving too fast for the human eye to register, snapped his wings out to either side, and scythed through the charging mob at careful chest-height. As fast as he was moving, he pulled the blows so as to push the humans over and knock the wind out of them rather than crush ribcages or flat-out cut the offenders in half. They never knew what hit them, tumbling like foul-mouthed bowling pins across the pavement.

  The two guys Barry had picked out as the would-be victims of the belligerent group made good their escape, one of them looking back and laughing raucously as he saw their tumbled and presumably blind-drunk pursuers falling behind. Barry swept back up into the air, leaving what he hoped wasn’t a too-overpowering feeling in the rattled brains of the aggressors, a feeling that they should quit while they were ahead and maybe go home for a quiet six-pack rather than spend the night out on the town.

  He was definitely getting better at this sort of thing, he thought.

  PUPA, IMAGO

  Canon opened the little coffin of ebony and silver lace with the childish delight of a boy on Christmas morning. He looked down at the immobilised shape of Laetitia DeVaney with shining eyes and a loving paternal smile. She looked up at him with the same expression she had worn on the night he’d awakened her from sleep in that Paris hotel – her soft indigo-blue eyes flashed from puzzled to irritated in an instant. This was a girl used to getting her own way.

  Then she remembered what had happened. Canon had … Canon had made her into a Vampire. There was no real equivalent to any other act one might perform on a human being. There was no basis for comparison. Vampires – lesser Vampires – did not generally make others of their own kind. The process was natural and directionless, and as far as Canon knew or cared there was no real formula or procedure for it. The life cycle of his kind was something he was comfortable to remain ignorant of, in the broad strokes. A little mystery, he felt, was romantic. He wasn’t even sure how he did it – and that was fine, since what he did not know could not be wrested from him by envious foes. Over the centuries, however, he had reached a point where he was almost certain of success, once he bent his will to the task.

  Even so, it was exciting to see evidence of his achievement.

  The process of metamorphosing from human to Vampire was a slow one. It was, after all, a phenomenal change. It made the change from caterpillar to butterfly look simple, and yet the comparison was surprisingly apt. A metamorphosing Vampire didn’t pupate, didn’t need to lie in a cocoon. Indeed, it helped to keep them awake and engaged in human interaction and thought if you didn’t want a regular Vampire on your hands. The lurching, mindless unfortunates that resulted from abandoned creatures left to transition alone … these were failed Vampires, in Canon’s view.

  The change was far slower than the life-cycle transformations enjoyed by moths and frogs, however. Between the initiation of the process, and the emergence of the beautiful Vampire Imago, one could reasonably expect four or five years to go by.

  During that time, in the normal order of things, the larval Vampire would fall unobtrusively out of human society, severing ties to family and friends and – these days – government and bureaucratic systems one by one or in glorious explosive orgies of self-destruction. It would develop an aversion to sunlight and become unable to eat or drink anything but human blood. It would sink underground, into the bowels of the city in which it had lived or to some convenient dark place in suburban or rural areas. It would degenerate further, becoming deformed, deranged, awful.

  This fall was inevitable, and beautiful in its own savage natural way. It was what the overwhelming majority of Vampires were supposed to be. By their base grotesquery, they defined the true Imago. For the fall could only be averted if the larval Vampire was taken from the start, and schooled by an Imago. One such as Canon. Sometimes, if the schooling was inadequate or there were other factors in play, this only postponed the process of degeneration. As with the unfortunate – and now late – Felice.

  Sometimes, if done perfectly, the result was an eternal, beautiful, lethal creature that was visually indistinguishable – most of the time – from a human being.

  Some changes, Canon noted with pleasure as he studied Laetitia, were immediate upon the act of alteration. The skeletal structure began to shift and change within days, further accelerated if the pupa’s flesh was young, still growing. Canon’s smile widened as Laetitia’s tiny, surly little mouth opened to make an indignant exclamation. The way her delicate jaw flexed, the way her cheekbones had re-set … ahh, it was masterly. She was still very green – she would still be able to walk
in the daylight for at least another three years, if Canon gave her the opportunity – but her bones were busily shifting and melding and separating.

  Laetitia would not age, or grow, much further than her current fourteen years. She might mature somewhat as her body dumped a wildfire of hormones into her system preparatory to what it probably interpreted as death, and she may have one more frantic growth-spurt in her, but for the most part those biological processes would slow, stall, and cease in the next few months. She could pass for an adult or a child in the changing sociocultural networks of humanity, the assumptions and preconceptions of which were in constant flux. This was perfect.

  Her canines were now the great retractable dagger-spikes of a Vampire, her jaw capable of unhinging and opening wide enough to engulf an entire human head if she so chose … but for now the fangs remained retracted, the jaw human – and most shapely, in Canon’s discerning opinion. She was not disintegrating into monstrosity. Nor would she, if Canon had his way. And Canon always had his way.

  After the ordeal of the change, Laetitia had fallen into a deep sleep, and Canon had packed her into her coffin straight away, and made good his escape. By the time the DeVaneys had realised their baby was gone, Canon was already halfway to obscurity. He’d moved from place to place for a while, covering his tracks with the ease of experience so long it had become almost normal migration to him, and had ultimately decided to settle in Australia to enjoy the next stages in comfort. His last visit had been in colonial times, and he had found the place odious. Today, it was the perfect blend of backwater isolation and modern convenience.

  Now Laetitia was awake, and what had happened to her was crashing down like the walls and ceiling of her very world. Her indignant exclamation became a shriek of terror somewhere between her brain and her mouth, but it never reached the air. Canon silenced it with firm fingertips over her sweet lips and an unblinking serpentine gaze. Once he was certain his eyes had taken hold, Canon removed his hand. Laetitia’s scream died in her throat.