Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  The other was, physically, a pale and rather skinny kid of sixteen or seventeen, his sallow face spotted with pimples and his body clad in sneakers, jeans, T-shirt and a red cardigan that looked like a hand-me-down from the Age of the Cardigan. The guy in the suit was clearly the more dangerous creature according to every extant human sense, and yet as soon as Seam laid eyes on the kid in the cardigan, he felt terror like a bolt of lightning pin him to the ground. The other Sheepbreezers also froze, staring. The silence in the room was complete.

  Almost complete. The partially-freed Angel, lying face-down on his cement slab between the humans and the new arrivals, made a low, senseless hooting sound and moved his wings with a rattle of concrete clinkers.

  “Well well,” the kid said, and Seam was vaguely horrified to feel hot wetness in the crotch of his inherited Cullem’s Nails overalls. He’d pissed himself. “Breaking and entering,” he stepped into the room, the Vampire close behind him, and swept his watery blue gaze across the tumbled cement blocks, the three unconscious and bleeding goons. “Or entering and breaking, maybe.”

  “Your … lads are alright,” Phil said, exhibiting far more courage than Seam currently felt even though the big fellow was as white as paper behind his beard.

  “My lads?” the kid said, his squawky voice lapsing into the most atrocious American-failing-to-do-an-Australian-accent Seam had ever heard. “You mean Pete, Alan and Vince? Crikey mate, lemme just give ‘em a good ol’ hand then, cobber,” he grinned and clapped his cupped hands three quick times. Pop, pop, pop.

  Seam’s terrified transfixion was broken by three simultaneous noises behind them, like oversized eggs falling on the floor. He turned, sickly, and saw the headless bodies of the three goons jittering and soiling themselves. Moulded clumps of skull-fragments, minced brains and hair, and spattering fans of blood stood out above each one’s now-unoccupied shoulders.

  “Oh sweet Jesus God save us,” Gumnut quavered, and the kid – the Demon, of course he was a Demon – sniggered and launched back into his bad accent.

  “Au swait Jayzuz Gawrd sayvus,” he took another step forward, opened his mouth again, and then Gabriel skidded into the room.

  The whump of displaced air was far louder down in the basement, and the Archangel enhanced the effect by spreading his great grey-black wings with a thud that reverberated around the stark concrete room. The fluorescents flickered.

  “Leave them,” Gabriel said commandingly. “Take Barry and go.”

  In the momentary lull that followed the Archangel’s appearance, Seam couldn’t help but think his gesture would have been a little more meaningful if he’d landed himself between the humans and the Demon, instead of carefully away towards Barry’s feet and a safe distance from the monster. It also might have helped if Seam, in his terror-addled state, had the first clue who Gabriel was referring to, and who he was talking to. At least he didn’t seem to be as paralysed as the humans were, though.

  The Demon shook his head, tsked in disappointment, and took another step forward. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said, and poked the still-cement-encased front of the Angel gingerly with the toe of his sneaker. “Whisk your new pal away into the shadows, paint a target on my back? No,” he smiled and raised his hands, “you know how it is with popping heads. Once you start, you just can’t–”

  Seam didn’t get a clear view of what happened next. He saw the Vampire step up behind the Demon, extending something shiny and reddish-brown between his hands like an assassin holding a garrotting wire. And that appeared to be precisely what it was, despite the fact that it actually looked more like hair. He swept his arms over the top of the Demon’s head, drew them back so the cord lay across the kid’s skinny throat, and pulled.

  Instantly, there was a vile cascade of bubbling black sludge and the Demon very briefly screamed, a deafening and rending sound that probably would have made Seam wet himself if he hadn’t already been running on empty. The cord, the Demon’s neck, and the Vampire’s hands vanished in a seething mass like boiling molasses, through which the bones of fingers and spine could be seen for fleeting instants before they too were gone.

  The Vampire staggered back with a hiss of shock and pain, his wrists scattering sizzling chunks of corruption. The paralysing terror that had held Seam and his friends abruptly released its grip, but none of them moved – now they were pinned in place by a whole new spectacle. The demon’s head rolled off his neck and landed with a thump between Barry’s cement-caked wings.

  At that point, the screaming began again as Demon head and Angel torso alike began to boil into a swirling cauldron of black sludge, dissolving meat and jutting bones. It didn’t last long, however. The Vampire, teeth bared and fangs sinking horrifically down past his chin, lurched forwards again with his maimed arms curled against his chest, and hip-and-shouldered the shuddering Demon’s body into the howling mess.

  Moments after the rest of the Demon fell into the liquefying Angel, the screams ceased. There was nothing left of either immortal, except for a seething, spitting pool of black slush that had collected into the cement cast of Barry’s front. Slowly, it began to ooze out over the edges and through the cracks in the broken block, but it didn’t seem to be spreading like water, or even treacle. It boiled and curdled and churned, but seemed to constantly pull back into itself, like a great shapeless jelly. Nevertheless, Gabriel stepped adroitly back from the block. His deep-set amber eyes were hard.

  Then the smell hit Seam’s nostrils, and for a minute or two the petty concerns of his world were eclipsed in a carnival of vomiting the likes of which he’d never experienced before.

  THE NATURAL ORDER

  When he began to recover, Seam became gradually aware that the Vampire and the Archangel were talking. He also became aware that the room still reeked thickly, but his sense of smell had shut down in protest so at least his stomach wasn’t still trying to turn itself inside out.

  “…when it reacted with the Demon flesh I suppose it became volatile enough to hurt you,” Gabriel was saying. “Even if it didn’t before.”

  “That’s fascinating,” the Vampire said through clenched teeth, and Seam looked up from his vomit-puddle to see that the Imago had regained his composure at least enough to pull his teeth back into his head, although his wrist-stumps were still blackened and curled against his chest. “But the police won’t stay up there talking to my floor manager forever, especially now that your human friends have gone to tell them about the basement,” he shook his head, once again impeccably tidy and self-possessed, yet slightly haggard around the eyes. “Honestly,” he chided, “who calls the police?”

  “It put you all off-balance enough to take away some advantage,” Gabriel said. “I can’t say I was expecting you to change sides, though. That didn’t seem like the winning move for you.”

  The Vampire laughed shortly, more like a cough. “I liked things the way they were before,” he said, “since you didn’t seem all that interested in killing me, then,” Gabriel inclined his shaggy head slowly. The Vampire nodded towards the cement bowl full of sluggishly-roiling sludge. “This was a solution to two problems, as far as I’m concerned. And hopefully earned me a stay of execution – at least until your next new recruit falls from Heaven,” he smiled. “Maybe you could even give me warning next time,” he added, “so I know not to poke my head up.”

  Gabriel chuckled. “Never let it be said you don’t place a high premium on insufficiently good deeds performed too late, Canon.”

  “Canon?” Seam blurted. “You’re dead. I saw your skull. Barry killed you.”

  Robed Archangel and suited Vampire turned and looked down at the kneeling human in the vomit- and urine-stained overall. It was a tableau, Seam thought with an epiphany-like feeling, that really said everything that needed to be said about the natural order.

  “I got better,” Canon said dryly, then turned back to Gabriel and raised his stumps. “Although … perhaps for the sake of our delicate new partnershi
p, you might be so kind as to restore me?”

  “We don’t have a partnership,” Gabriel said harshly. “For now, you’re less inconvenient alive than you’d be as a power vacuum and/or trainee exercise. You get to live because you helped. That’s all. And besides,” he went on, “do I look like a microsurgeon? I can’t transplant new hands onto you. Get one of your pet doctors to do it.”

  “The Demon managed to restore me from a burned skull,” Canon had the admirably colossal brass testicles to mention.

  “I’m not a Demon,” Gabriel growled. “Stick your stumps in your pockets, saunter nonchalantly back upstairs and buy me ten minutes to get all these guys out of here.”

  “Wait,” Seam pushed himself up, staggered and almost stumbled forward face-first into the churning Angel-Demon salsa. Unholy guacamole, he thought disjointedly. “What about Tommo?”

  “If you mean Thomas Chamberlain,” Canon said, half-turning in the doorway and looking back at him, “he’s dead. Laetitia fed from him and then Troy clapped his hands and made his head burst. I’d like to say he didn’t suffer, but in the intervening period between these two events, Troy also interrogated him in some Demonic manner. Death almost certainly came as a relief.”

  Seam looked helplessly at Gabriel, who sighed bitterly.

  “Since Troy is going to be paying for his crime for the rest of practical eternity,” the Archangel said, gesturing at the sludge, “and no police investigation is going to uncover anything remotely applicable to the human criminal justice system … leave Australia,” he turned back to Canon and pointed with a decided lack of melodrama at the door, “and never come back.”

  Canon bowed mockingly. “Consider it done,” he smiled. “I’ll take Laetitia and be on my way.”

  “Oh, you won’t be talking to her again from now until the day you die,” Gabriel said. “And next time you decide to turn a child–” he actually seemed to quiver on the verge of rage, but calmed himself. “Leave Australia,” he repeated, “and never so much as look at another child, and consider yourself to have gotten off lucky.”

  Canon bowed again, slipped his ruined wrists into his jacket pockets, and departed.

  Gabriel turned to the Sheepbreezers, all of whom were beginning to stir.

  “Come on,” he said.

  WADJEMUP

  Seam was the only Sheepbreezer to see the Archangel Gabriel again.

  The next time was about a month after what became known in local legend as the Dwamps Decapitations, or ‘the Dwecapitations’ to some of the older and even less reverent local nightclub-goers. Seam had popped in for a visit at Preston Point Anglican, which still seemed as holy as ever despite its Demonic soiling. Father Bryant had greeted him with vague friendliness. Preston Point Anglican, and its resident vicar, had hosted a closed-casket service for Tommo, who had been declared deceased even though no body had yet been found. The fact of his disappearance and the presence of the bloodstained room, inadmissible though the bleached evidence was, combined with the eminently admissible headless carcasses of Vince, Pete and Alan, had left the police in little doubt as to his fate. An investigation was ongoing with every sign of going unsolved into the archives, and Das Wampyr’s was as broke and boarded-up as the Duxworth Hotel. One day, maybe, a rich and morbid investor might re-open the buildings in new incarnations, but for the time being they decayed slowly into the cityscape.

  This time, Seam had delivered the eulogy.

  Father Bryant, almost as an afterthought following their brief chat, had mentioned to Seam that Gabriel had appeared to him a few nights before – “I shudder to think how that might sound to the wrong person!” the affable old man of God had added – and had told him he was preparing to leave Australia for the foreseeable future. Before he left, however, he’d wanted the vicar to let Barry’s friends know where he was holed up.

  Seam suspected that ‘wanted the vicar to let Barry’s friends know’ was Father Bryant’s creative interpretation of an infinitely more grudging acknowledgement from the wingèd hominid. If he’d wanted to, after all, Gabriel could have turned up at any of their houses any night since the Dwecapitations. Still, Seam – alone out of all the Sheepbreezers – made the modest pilgrimage to see the Archangel. The rest of the guys almost seemed to have forgotten about everything that had happened. Seam supposed that was just good self-preservation, but he couldn’t seem to do it himself. He, Barry and Tommo had shared a closer connection than the rest of the team. They’d gone to school together, they’d grown up together, and they’d lost Barry’s parents together.

  And now Dale, The Seam, was the last man standing.

  He took the ferry to Rottnest Island off the coast of Fremantle, and walked from the ferry port to the location Father Bryant had passed on. The spot was … well, it was nothing much, in his admittedly ignorant opinion, but evidently it was holy ground of some description because the Archangel Gabriel was there, squatting in broad daylight under a tree almost as old and gnarled as he was.

  “Native Australian sacred ground,” Gabriel said without preamble, gesturing around with one long, dark-haired arm. “They call it Wadjemup – the Wadjemup Burial Grounds. They called the whole island Wadjemup, actually, before the Dutch showed up and decided the quokkas were rats and renamed the whole thing rat’s nest instead.”

  “So the whole island’s holy ground?” Seam asked, feeling the usual sting of inherited cultural shame for all the idiotic and evil things white people had done.

  “No, just this area,” Gabriel said, “not exactly sure why … I try to stay on the outskirts, so as not to disrespect the dead.”

  “Oh,” Seam squatted down against a nearby tree, then eased into a sitting position. “So,” he said.

  “So,” Gabriel echoed. The silence extended between them.

  “What did you do with him?” Seam finally asked. “Them. Nails and the Demon, I mean.”

  “His name was Troy Haussman,” Gabriel said sadly. “Turns out he committed suicide at the same moment Barry Dell and the other victims died in that elevator.”

  Seam nodded, doing his best to absorb this and finding that he really didn’t feel like thinking about Troy Haussman as a troubled and sympathetic teenage boy buckling under social and hormonal pressures he should never have had to endure. He was much happier thinking of him as a crazy murderous cunt, and compounding that with a nice solid back-story of self-killing loser. “He was the one in the papers,” he said. “He was the kid who killed himself, then a couple of weeks later his father and stepmother or whatever were murdered. That was when he came back from the dead, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Gabriel said.

  “Sorry, but I’m just not seeing anything to be sad about there, aside from Tommo and all the other people he killed.”

  “He’ll be an Archangel,” Gabriel went on, and Seam blinked himself back to the here-and-now. “Barry. Nails,” Gabriel added, seeing that Seam hadn’t understood. “He’ll be an Archangel. Posthumously,” he grimaced. “Or as close as we get to posthumous. It’s sort of the deal. Angels that kill a Demon get promoted to Archangels. Demons that kill Angels get promoted to Archdemons. Hasn’t happened yet,” he added, giving Seam an enormous grin that was probably meant to be encouraging.

  “Is he really dead?” Seam asked, plaintive.

  Gabriel grimaced again. “Sort of,” he repeated. “There’s … no coming back. They’re merged, cancelled. Anything else to enter that mix will just boil for all eternity along with them.”

  “How do you know that?” Seam insisted.

  “Experience,” Gabriel replied heavily. “We’ve lost a couple of Angels – Archangels – in the same way, but it’s been a long time. The … remains, at least those we managed to contain, are … well, they’re still technically…” he shuddered. “They go on living, and anything that gets drawn into the mix goes on living too – after a fashion.”

  “Hold on,” Seam frowned. “If an Angel becomes an Archangel by killing a Demon and that whole awfu
l sludge for eternity thing happens when an Angel touches a Demon, how are you an Archangel?”

  “It’s not the only way to become an Archangel,” Gabriel said with a hint of impatience. “Another way is to be one of the first ones, and just stay in one piece long enough to learn a bunch of tricks. The Demon-slaying clause is really more like a way of honouring the dead, alright? Look,” he conceded, “if there is a way to separate them out again, I don’t know it. We haven’t found it yet. How the … awful sludge for eternity … can break down and incorporate living things on contact, yet doesn’t nuclear-meltdown itself right through the Earth…” he shuddered again. “There’s a lot we don’t know.”

  “But you took the … stuff … somewhere safe after Dwamps,” Seam said. “It’s still lying around somewhere,” Gabriel nodded. “Couldn’t you study it?”

  “Sure,” Gabriel said, “and I will, same as the earlier events. Very, very carefully. And maybe one day we’ll figure it out. Like I said to Canon, there are rules. Even if we don’t know them.”

  “Mysterious ways?” Seam guessed.

  Gabriel snorted. “Don’t get me started.”

  Seam cleared his throat, then reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. “I want you to take this,” he said, and passed the envelope to Gabriel. The Archangel turned it over in his hands. Seam had written the simple note Nails: Eulogy 2 on the front. “It doesn’t seem right to do another funeral for him, but I promised I’d do the eulogy when he died again – I know he’s not really dead, but…” he struggled to express his intent. “Can you … I don’t know, leave it there near him, with the goo, in case he ever…”

  Gabriel nodded, and tucked the envelope into his robe. “I can drop it into the goo if you like,” he said gruffly. “It might–”

  “No,” Seam interrupted, shuddering. “No, leave it out. So he’ll find it when he gets free.”