Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

“Nah, he probably just thinks the skull broke down,” Haussman said carelessly. “But there are Angels on the other continents. There are seven of them now.”

  Seven. Canon once again stowed this information away. “But they’ve never targeted me before,” he said. “Why now?”

  “Beats me,” Troy said. “I just got here,” he smirked again. “You want to run away from him just because he has wings?” the boy laughed merrily. “Don’t worry, Canon – I’m here to protect you now. I won’t let anything happen to you. And we don’t have to go anywhere.”

  “Are you going to tell me any more of your plans?”

  “It’s pretty simple,” Troy said, looking smug. “Barry Dell, like all Angels, has to be on holy ground when the sun rises every morning. Just like you have to be in a coffin, or in a room like this one, without windows,” the Demon gestured around at the wreckage. The hole in the wall could feasibly allow a little light to filter through from the outer rooms, but now that the sun had set it was quite safe. “They’re okay with sunlight, but the holy ground thing is really important. I don’t know what will happen to him. I mean, it won’t kill him – it’s basically not possible for him to die again now, which is a damn shame. Because he’s not really alive. Same as me. We’re even less alive than you are. We’re cut out of the system.”

  “I see,” Canon nodded. If what he had observed since his resurrection was any indication, Demons were not limited in the slightest by the position of the sun or rites of consecration. Haussman had repaired the Vampire in some deep, dark place beneath the port city of Fremantle, far from the sun’s destructive rays. Canon had, as Troy delightedly pointed out, not been coherent at the time. Even though he was well-away from the sun, he couldn’t really function during the day. This was a fact of life. Still, Demons obviously had no problems with sunlight.

  “What I do know, though, is that if he isn’t on holy ground by sunrise, he will be seriously messed up,” Troy went on. “Maybe permanently, but maybe just for a few days until he can get himself to a church. I don’t know for sure. Either way, they sort of collapse. It’s enough, if we can get him in his weakened state … well, that’s when you take over. You’re the abduction guy – making it safe and secure and getting rid of the cops and all. It’s not really an issue, since only a few people seem to know he’s back, and legally he’s been dead for months, same as me – but there are complications, and you can sort of act as my hands.”

  Canon nodded again, this time a little more positively. Seventeen this creature’s mind may be, but it wasn’t a bad idea at that. If he was correct about the Angel being weakened. If he was wrong, of course, Canon was signing up to get his head ripped off again.

  But if Haussman was right, this was the solution to his woes. “So the Angel collapses,” he said, “we capture him, secure him, and make sure he never gets back onto holy ground again,” he summarised. “I assume that his weakness will mean we can keep him secured, and if he never gets back onto holy ground then he will never get the chance to regain its strength,” Haussman nodded, grinning. “Barry Dell the Angel is removed from the picture, and we can continue as always.”

  “Yup,” Haussman wagged a finger at Canon. “But if you discuss this little scheme with anybody, like Doctor No did, I’ll be pissed.”

  Canon had watched his share of moving pictures over the past century or so, and knew all too well the frustrating habit fictional villains had of telling people what they were going to do instead of simply doing it. He nodded again. “There isn’t anybody for me to tell anyway,” he admitted. “I do not customarily tell my human employees anything, and my Vampire associates have all been destroyed,” he glanced questioningly at the Demon for confirmation of this.

  Troy laughed again. “Yeah,” he chuckled, “I didn’t bring any of them back. Don’t worry,” he continued confidently. “Once we’ve settled Barry Dell, we’ll settle the other Angels. Dell’s just going to be easier because he’s new to all this, the others are a bit more canny but this’ll be a good practice run. Then, we can get to work on building some more … what did you call them? Imago Vampires. The ones that can talk, and don’t look like zombies.”

  Canon did not ask the first question that sprang to mind, which was that if this plan was supposed to work, and there were other Demons somewhere on Earth – as seemed almost certain from Haussman’s conversational slips – why were the seven Angels still walking free? If the other six were really that canny, perhaps this was a suicide mission.

  Instead he asked the second question to raise its head. “Even if Angels do collapse when the sun comes up and they’re not on holy ground, and even if Dell does grow weak enough for us to capture him, how are we supposed to stop him from getting to his church before sunrise?”

  Haussman’s smug expression intensified almost intolerably. “That’s the best part,” he replied. “I went into his precious little church on Saturday to rescue your noggin,” he grinned at Canon’s mildly puzzled expression for a moment before continuing. “It’s an interesting thing, but the presence of a Demon soils holy ground. It won’t kick in immediately, and the church will seem okay for a few days, but then … it just won’t be holy ground any more. And he won’t know it until blip – the sun comes up. Then he’s ours.”

  “What if he finds out? What if he notices the sanctity of the ground fading, or moves to another church? What if he’s listening in on this conversation?”

  “It’s still daytime over in Fremantle,” Haussman said. “Dell’s stuck in his cell. And he hasn’t noticed so far, and it’s been a couple of days.”

  “What if one of the other Angels warns him?”

  Troy shrugged. “I’ve been jumping around to most of the churches and other places around Fremantle and Perth – over the past couple of days, in between fixing you up, I pretty much un-holied every bit of holy ground in the metro area,” the Demon giggled. “And I don’t think the other Angels are gonna stick their necks out for the new guy, by coming into an area that’s been soiled. And Angels can’t make ground into holy ground just by standing on it, the way we can do the opposite. Otherwise they’d be able to stay anywhere they wanted. It takes a man of the cloth to do a special blessing-thingy to it, and it takes time,” he grinned. “And humans have no idea. Holy ground and regular ground is basically all the same to them, isn’t it? What makes it holy to them is the fact that it’s got a church stuck on it.”

  “What if the priest in Dell’s church–”

  “You’ve got a lot of what ifs under your belt,” Troy’s voice went back to being testy, “don’t you?”

  Canon shrugged. “I assume part of why you want me along on this, as well as being your hands, is for my bottomless supply of what ifs,” he said. “There’s a good chance we will only have one opportunity to make this work, and after that the Angel will be alert to the danger – as the other six presumably are. He may not know about you, but he will probably take precautions to ensure that the church he goes to ground in each morning is well and truly consecrated.”

  “I guess,” Troy conceded. “You sure do worry about a lot, though.”

  “It gets to be something you don’t even notice you’re doing, after a few hundred years,” Canon admitted easily. What he really wanted to ask the young Demon was, if he and his ilk could jump around the world at will, why were there any un-soiled patches of holy ground for the Angels to hide in at all? Was there some reason the hypothetical other Demons weren’t helping with this? Could it be something to do with the disturbing shadows that Troy was happily splashing around in?

  Canon was telling the simple truth – after a solid millennium of not dying, caution became a baked-in instinct that you depended upon with absolute confidence. And right now it was telling him there was something big missing from the picture Troy was drawing for him. And the gap it formed was a very worrying shape.

  “I can drop you over there to kill the vicar, if you want,” the Demon was saying.

  Canon had co
nsidered it, as soon as Haussman had described the respective realities of Angelic and Demonic interaction. “No,” he decided. “That would only alert the Angel, wouldn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” the Demon nodded cheerfully. “So there’s no point in worrying about it. So hey,” he grinned broadly, “check this out,” he spread his arms.

  With a blurry shimmer, his cardigan and jeans and sneakers changed to a suit identical to the one hanging on Canon’s closet door, but tailored flawlessly to the teenager’s gawky frame. He looked immediately more mature, less awkward. If this Demon had appeared before Canon and told him the plan to get rid of Barry Dell, Canon admitted in shock, he probably would have swallowed it whole. It was astonishing, and a little embarrassing, how a shallow thing like presentation made a difference.

  But then, magically-self-changing clothes weren’t a little thing by any stretch of the imagination.

  “That’s…” Canon heard his voice tremble. “That’s incredible. How…?”

  “It shifts back to the dumb clothes I was wearing the night I died,” Troy grumbled, although he was unable to hide his pleasure at the Vampire’s astonishment, “if I don’t concentrate. But it’s starting to work for me. The cloak, I mean. Or whatever it is. I’ll figure it out eventually.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I was reborn with it,” Haussman shrugged, then grinned again. “So,” he went on, “where do we go to meet babes in this city?”

  VIGIL

  The weekend, and then Monday, dragged by without much activity. Preston Point Anglican hosted its usual modest little Sunday service and a steady stream of drop-ins during the day, requiring Barry to move the Vampire’s coffin into a side room and sit on it. There was no real danger, however – Laetitia seemed to be in a coma, only occasionally murmuring and even more occasionally crying out. He did his best to soothe her when this happened, but usually she just stared at him uncomprehendingly and then drifted back to sleep.

  He talked to her, since most of the time Father Bryant wasn’t around and the old vicar didn’t like spending time in the Vampire’s coffin-room anyway, and Barry couldn’t blame him. And so, with a vague idea that a pupating Vampire was something like a coma patient, Barry just talked.

  Feeling he couldn’t really venture far from the coffin, he didn’t go out on Sunday night although he did join Seam and a couple of the other Sheepbreezers on the pavement for a chat – he stood inside the church boundary and rested his arms on the little dividing wall until sundown, then came out and stood with them on the cracked cement for a while as night fell. There was no physical difference between standing in the little church carpark and standing on the side of the road, but the psychological difference was acute.

  There wasn’t much the Sheepbreezers could do to help. And aside from Seam, and to a certain degree Tommo, Barry had begun to feel a pulling-away from the rest of the group anyway. Gabriel had warned him this was likely to happen.

  “We don’t mix with mortals,” he’d said, the last time Barry had seen him. This had been before Barry’s mission to Sydney – the Archangel had been gone when Barry returned with Laetitia’s coffin and Canon’s scorched skull, and Barry had yet to hear back from him. “Sooner or later, all but the closest to us will drift away. They can’t keep the reality in their minds for long. It’s self-defence. The brain protects itself the way it protects itself from all the wondrous things that aren’t immediately applicable to survival, and might allow a predator to sneak up on it.”

  “A predator?” Barry had said sceptically. “Really?”

  “The human brain doesn’t change fast,” Gabriel had replied. “Trust me, sooner or later your friends will normalise you, then they’ll begin to filter you out altogether. Just be ready for it and try not to get too upset. Remember, there’s always angsty brooding.”

  It appeared as though this was another sad fact of unlife. The Sheepbreezers, at least, had been there for him at the beginning and were only just now starting to feel the strain of his glorification. The others – the guys from Cullem’s Nails, his few acquaintances from university, his Auntie Carol and Nurse Chloë – remained unaware that he was even back. It was a cold and indescribably lonely feeling.

  Barry wondered if he should teach himself to play the organ.

  He must have been more worn out by his two extended flights, and the battle that had taken place between them, than he’d initially thought. Although as far as he could tell Angels didn’t sleep, he began to feel increasingly run-down as Sunday night ended and he’d returned to the church for another dragging eleven-and-a-half hours of uneventful, visitorless daylight. Just the sterile emptiness of Preston Point Anglican, the occasional echoing mystery-noise as something in the architecture shifted or a small representative of the local wildlife skittered by, and the steadily-mounting urge to climb up onto the steeple and begin flying in loops around the inner boundary of the property.

  He kept a listless eye on the papers that Father Bryant delivered, but there was no news from Sydney. Considering Canon’s network and protection, Barry would have been surprised if there were.

  Monday had crept by, Monday night had brought no visitors to the church. Barry had taken three uninspired little walks around the block for twenty minutes at a time at roughly three-hour intervals. Eight, eleven-thirty, quarter-past three in the morning. His unwillingness to be far from Laetitia, just in case the child woke up and began screaming for blood, made it difficult for him to spend more time away … and yet the fact that he was trapped in the church all day made it simply intolerable to be trapped there all night as well.

  Not even Seam came to visit, and Barry could hardly blame him. As much as he would have enjoyed spending every evening in the Bad Cow for the next seventy-odd years until Seam died of old age, he guessed Seam ultimately had other plans for his life.

  Gabriel didn’t return. Barry began to wonder if maybe killing the Vampire had been a test after all, and Gabriel wouldn’t come back until he made up for failing.

  No … far more likely, the girl had been the fail-point. He should have rendered her down to dust as he had with the others. It might have been a bit messier, since she was still essentially a human at this point in her transformation, but it would ultimately have been a mercy. Best-case scenario, she would become a monster like Canon – worst case, a shambling derelict like the Imago’s minions.

  Tuesday had dawned, and Barry had slipped back into the safe shadows of the church.

  He’d considered returning Laetitia to her parents, but that would be an absolute disaster. A worse act of cruelty than straight-up murdering her in front of them, and all the more twisted for – in his mind’s eye – doing it in full wings-spread Angelic benevolence. They could only have watched her degenerate,. Any attempt to medically intervene would ultimately hasten her death. What the doctors eventually called it would depend on the symptoms she exhibited in which order, and the treatments they poisoned her with, but the result would be the same. Laetitia would never be cured, because Laetitia was already dead. You couldn’t turn a Vampire back into a human any more than you could turn a charred stump back into a tree.

  “No, that doesn’t work,” Barry said half to himself, sitting down and stroking the lid of the coffin. “A burned-out tree stump can grow new branches, and be good as new in a few years as long as the roots are intact. It’s more like … trying to get a living tree out of a burned-out telephone pole.”

  Canon hadn’t mixed with the other Imago Vampires. Few of the Imago really did get along – they’d realised long ago that the best way for them all to prosper was to just do their own thing and not interfere with each other. Interference led to disagreements, and disagreements led to wars that were no less horrible for the fact that they took place almost entirely beneath the skin of human civilisation.

  Sometimes, when Imago did battle, their minions went wild and human casualties began to climb. Even when that didn’t happen, Imago were wealthy and powe
rful and well-connected, and their manipulations caused widespread chaos in human economies. Many of the ripples were impossible to detect, but spoke of rip currents deep down. The Imago were like great tusks of yellowed ivory stuck through the teetering edifice of Earth’s nations. They did damage, but when one shattered it was almost more harmful. All an Imago did, if you could so belittle such an atrocity, was kill a couple of people a week. When one fell, it could drag thousands of unsuspecting humans down with it.

  “That’s still a weird analogy,” Barry grumbled, “so we’ve got a burned telephone pole and a big pile of something pinned together with ivory tusks. Great. That makes perfect sense.”

  Canon’s death hadn’t been the result of a war – it had been a clean, clinical assassination. Well, it had been an assassination, anyway. Whether it had been clean and clinical was up to debate. But it was possible – probable, even – that his network would adapt to his disappearance relatively well. His competitors would sweep in and take over territories, his human employees would shore things up out of their own self-interest, and with any luck things would continue without any major recessions. As for other Imago that might come looking for him, that was a negligible risk. The greater risk was Imago who might come sniffing around, sensing weakness, smelling blood.

  And there were still the lesser Vampires. The temptation to do something about them was overwhelming, but he might as well go and kill all the sharks in the ocean, all the disease-bearing mosquitoes in the wetlands, all the viruses … the natural order was robust, but it wasn’t indestructible. And just as the Angels were doing their unseen part in keeping the human race running, so too were the Vampires in their own way.

  “The boys were shocked when I told them about the Vampires in Perth,” Barry reminisced to the ebony surface by his knee. “Tommo was all like ‘there are Vampires in the sewers?’ and his face was all…” Barry wrinkled his nose, and chuckled. “I tried to explain that sure, there’s a million-odd people, one and a half million or so in the wider Perth-Fremantle metropolitan area, so there’d probably be ten or fifteen Vampires feeding on the ones who trail behind. Physiologically speaking. And the sewers is the best place for them to sleep. Not many Vampires have Imago patrons like Canon who can help them to live in apartments. Not many of them can even get hold of coffins.