The Fomorians

by John Triptych

  The Fomorians

  Wrath of the Old Gods Book 2.5

  By John Triptych

  Copyright© 2016 by John Triptych

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN (soft cover) 978-621-95332-4-9

  J Triptych Publishing

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, and/or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover by Deranged Doctor Design (http://www.derangeddoctordesign.com/)

  Interior formatting by Polgarus Studios

  For Christopher.

  You know why.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s note:

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Also by J Triptych Publishing

  Author’s note:

  Dear reader, I would like to thank you for purchasing this book. As a self-published author, I incur all the costs of producing this novel so your feedback means a lot to me. If you wouldn’t mind, could you please take a few minutes and post a review of this online and let others know what you think of it?

  As I’m sure you’re aware, the more reviews I get, the better my future sales would be and therefore my financial incentive to produce more books for your enjoyment increases. I am very happy to read any comments and questions and I am willing to respond to you personally as quickly as I can. My email is jtriptych@gmail.com if you wish to contact me directly. Again, thank you and I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it!

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  Since the narrator of this story is from the United Kingdom, certain words will have a different spelling as well as meaning when compared to the same words written in US English.

  To every man upon this earth

  Death cometh soon or late.

  And how can man die better

  Than facing fearful odds,

  For the ashes of his fathers,

  And the temples of his gods?

  - Thomas Babington Macaulay

  Chapter 1

  When the only thoughts left in your mind are those things you wished you had done in your life but didn’t do, only then do you realize that you’re in a fair bit of trouble. It’s like what they say when your whole life flashes before your eyes at the point of your death and all that. I never thought it would happen to me. After all, I had already endured having to narrowly escape from an army of monsters when my neighborhood was invaded, only to fall into the hands of a very evil wizard who then banished me to a netherworld, after which I managed to come back and vanquish him with the help of my best mate. Once all that was said and done, I thought I was practically invincible, and the hard part was all but over.

  But it seems I was mistaken. What happened afterwards was far, far worse.

  The first thing I saw when I woke up was the barrel of a gun pointed at my eyes. I tried to look away, but the hollow black tube just kept following my face as I shook my head back and forth, its gaping hole calling out for my death. I kept imagining that the last thing I would ever see would be the bullet coming out of the barrel in the split second before it ended my life. They were horrible thoughts but with the gun being aimed at me, I really had a very hard time thinking about anything else. What made it all even worse was the incessant laughter coming from the man who was pointing it at me. I’d finally had enough so I just closed my eyes, hoping this was all a bad dream and it would just go away.

  I couldn’t move the rest of my body either, since my hands were behind me and tied to the back of the rickety wooden chair that I was sitting in. I’d always thought stuff like this only happened in movies, but now here I was, right in the thick of it. The room that I was being held in looked like a deserted basement, with square support columns and lots of dust on the bare concrete flooring. I suspected I was still somewhere in London, but I wasn’t quite sure of the exact building I was in.

  The laughter continued. “Oy, Dan! Look at this, the lad thinks that if he closes his eyes then the gun I’m pointing at him will go away somehow! What a stupid little tosser he is!”

  “Leave him be, Ollie!” another voice that came from the far side of the room said. “We got orders to keep ’em both alive till the top man comes over.”

  Since there was no sense in trying to block out reality, I decided to open my eyes again. The pale man who was standing in front of me looked pretty scrawny; he was probably an addict of some sort because he just couldn’t stay still. He was constantly fidgeting and glancing around with alarming rapidity. His bulging eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his skull-like face as the pupils would repeatedly dart back and forth. His name was evidently Ollie, and he looked like a dirty, emaciated rat, despite the fact that he was wearing a brand new tracksuit with the price tags still on it. I could see the tattoos just below his neck and forearms. He had a fair bit of orange stubble on his chin, but that was pretty much it. If I stood up, he would probably be a shade taller than me, but only just. The one thing that made me worried was the gun he was constantly waving around.

  I wasn’t into guns. I preferred reading magazines about sports cars and skating. There was a time when one of my classmates brought in an actual bullet that he secretly took from his grandfather’s antique pistol collection, and showed it to us in school. We all got to touch it as we passed the slug around during break time, but I really wasn’t impressed by it all; it seemed to be nothing more than a piece of lead with a casing around it. But now that the world had ended, I reckoned that I might need to brush up on my knowledge about such things. From what I could remember, the gun that the villain was threatening me with looked like an old revolver, the kind of gun the British Army used back when they were fighting the Zulus in Africa, at least that’s what it resembled to me.

  Ollie pointed the gun just above my head as his shifting eyes tried to focus on me. As he got close, I could see that his crooked teeth were stained brown. His smell was quite appalling. “Now that you’re awake, are you going to tell us your name? Come on, lad. Just your name is all we want for now.”

  My sister’s boyfriend, Mark Loman, was lying on the dirty floor a few feet away from me. I caught his eye as he tilted his head up. His hands and ankles had been tied up with black plastic zip restraints and his face was all bloody and swollen. “Don’t…tell t-them anything,” he whispered.

  The other man, the one who was called Dan, ran over to him and gave Mark a swift kick in his ribs. “Oy, shut it! We wasn’t talking to you, so unless you want more of what we’ve been giving you, just lie still and go back to sleep, aye?”

  Mark groaned as he partially rolled over. He was bigger and older than me and got the worst of it when they jumped us as we were out looking around. I was scared that if they beat on him enough they might end up killing him. But Mark was right, I couldn’t tell them about my sister Amy and where she was, nor could I tell them about what had happened to us. I wasn’t sure who these people were. At first glance I thought they were just a couple of gang members who somehow survived the Fomorian invasion and were just looking to rob us, but then I sensed more sinister motives were in the mix.

  Dan walked over and looked down at me. Like Ollie, he wore a black-and-blue tracksuit that he had evidently nicked from a store somewh
ere in the city, but he was also much bigger and had swarthy skin. While Ollie’s head was shaved, Dan had thick black curly hair and was apparently the more senior member of the gang. He looked at me intently with his beady brown eyes. “Look, lad, we don’t really want to hurt you,” he said as he pointed to a table that was in the far corner of the room. “But you need to answer our questions. Now, why was you carrying that mirror? What does it do?”

  I glanced over at the table. The black mirror of Tezcatlipoca was lying on it, along with the other stuff that they took from us. I tried to act as innocent as I could as I stared back at him with my best puppy dog expression. “It’s just a mirror. It’s my mum’s.”

  Ollie turned away and shrugged. “He’s right, maybe it’s just a mirror that his poor mum gave him.”

  Dan wasn’t convinced. He grabbed me by the collar. “You’re a bloody liar. We was watching you as you and that other bloke was walking down the street. You was holding that mirror as if it was the most precious thing in the world. I know from experience that you wouldn’t have made it this far without some sort of help. There’s something magical about that mirror, isn’t there?”

  Mark had been listening the whole time. Even though he was hurt and his hands were tied behind his back, he was still able to turn his head upwards. “Leave him alone, you bloody arseholes!”

  Ollie quickly made his way over to Mark, then smashed the butt of the revolver into the top of his head. Mark cried out in pain as his head recoiled from the blow before slumping back onto the ground.

  My eyes were wide as saucers. Did they kill him? “No! Please stop hurting him!”

  Dan smirked as his blunt, leering face got close to mine. “If you want your mate to live, then you better tell us about that mirror. You may be just a lad but if you keep this up, then we might have to get violent on you too.”

  “What’s all this then?” a heavy-sounding voice said from across the room.

  Ollie and Dan turned around. Standing near the open doorway was a big black man in a dark hooded jacket. He wore baggy cargo trousers and had a pistol belt on his hip. Like everyone else in the room, he too wore brand new trainers on his feet. What was really strange was that he had what looked like a solid gold ring around his neck. I quickly recalled seeing something like that when my class visited the British Museum in Bloomsbury last term: it was an ornament worn by the ancient Celts and they called it a torc. The neck ring looked like a giant bracelet around his neck and it was open at the front so the loop wasn’t fully enclosed.

  Dan grinned at the man as he walked towards him. “Bloody hell! Twaine Osei, how are you, mate?”

  Twaine shook his hand as he looked around the room. “Raver Dan, nice to see you again. I’m good, I’m good. So what have we got here then?”

  Dan gestured at Ollie to come forward. “Let me introduce you to my mate, Yob Ollie.”

  Twaine nodded as he shook Ollie’s hand. I could see that he not only had a pistol, but he also had a British Army rifle slung over his shoulder, the kind that had the magazine behind the trigger grip. “So there’s only two of you left?” he asked them.

  Dan looked away. “Yeah. We lost Dom, Ronnie and Shaun just a couple of days ago. We had some pints in an abandoned pub and we were just getting drunk. We thought we were safe since the windows were shuttered and all that. But then those Fomorians just came right through and got them. Ollie and I were the only ones able to get away.”

  “Dom could have gotten away as well,” Ollie said wistfully. “But he was too slow. Those monsters just ran down the fat sod and ate him alive. He should’ve never eaten all those packs of crisps. I told him so.”

  “Hey, he was my best mate! Don’t you insult his memory like that!” Dan said as he slapped him hard on the back of the head. Ollie nearly fell forward as he staggered under the weight of the blow and was about to bring his pistol to bear, but Dan stared him down and he looked away both in shame and with barely suppressed rage.

  Twaine was the tallest among them so he stood in between the two. “Alright, that’s enough. It’s the way things go now. There’s maybe a few hundred of us left. In my group there’s still about two dozen of us still alive.”

  “That’s because you Barney Boys have your torcs now,” Dan said. “You’ve got immunity from the bloody Fomorians. If we had those, then we’d all be alive too.”

  Twaine glared at him. “Don’t be daft. We earned these torcs. A lot of us were killed in the beginning of the invasion, just like your group and the others. In the weeks before we got our torcs, only the fittest made it. These days, if you’re not a good runner, then those monsters will get you.”

  That was when I remembered watching a documentary show on the telly with my dad a few years back. It was one of those true crime exposés and they featured the Barney Boys, a South London gang mostly made up of Jamaicans and local Africans. The Barneys got their nickname from the cartoon character Barney Rubble, which was originally the Cockney rhyming slang for trouble—but instead of saying the word trouble, people would just say Barney instead. The Barneys were mostly drug traffickers, but a few years back had started to move into contract killings for some of the bigger firms in the city.

  Dan pointed a finger at me. “Well, you did say that if we stayed on the lookout for anything valuable, then we could get a pair of our own torcs, right? Well then, I’m telling you we found something from these two.”

  Twaine walked over to where I was sitting. He looked me over before staring down to where Mark was lying on the ground. “What’s this? The Pleasant Firm doesn’t need any more slaves. They’ve got as many as they need and they don’t go for boys anyway.”

  Dan shook his head as he pointed to where the table was. “No, it’s not about those two sods, it’s about what they were bloody carrying.”

  Twaine walked over to the table and looked around for a bit before picking up the obsidian mirror. Then he looked at me before facing Dan again. “Is this something magical?”

  Dan nodded. “Yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, mate. We nabbed those two and the younger one was carrying that. I’m pretty sure the lad used it somehow to survive against the Fomorians.”

  Twaine looked at me for the third time before staring back at Dan again. “Did he tell you what it could do?”

  “They’re not saying a word,” Ollie said. “But I bet if I slap them around a bit more I can get them to talk!”

  Twaine raised his hand. “Leave them be for now. I can bring this mirror over to the Pleasants and they can have a look. If it’s truly magical then they will surely find out about it.”

  It all started to make sense to me now. In the United Kingdom, we called our organized crime groups firms, and one of the biggest of these outfits was the Greenes. Headed by two ruthless brothers, Owen and Archibald Greene, the popular media dubbed their firm ‘the Pleasants,’ a take on a poem by William Blake in which the final stanza talked about England’s green and pleasant land. From what they were saying, it seemed that the Pleasants had somehow struck a bargain with the Fomorians, and anyone who wore a golden torc would be protected against attack. So it looked like those monsters could be negotiated with after all. But what worried me most was that the remaining criminal groups in London were on the lookout for any sort of magical item. What made it even worse was that they were about to take the black mirror away, and that would make me totally helpless.

  Dan was getting desperate. It was clear he was angling to get himself a torc, just so that he could stay alive. “Look, I’m pretty sure that mirror is magical. Now what I need is to get a neck ring right away, otherwise we won’t be able to keep this up, you know.”

  Twaine was unmoved. “Like I said, I need to bring this over to the Pleasants first. If they deem it valuable, then I can have one of my mates come over here with torcs for both of you.”

  Dan clenched his fists in frustration. “But you don’t understand, we need those torcs as of this minute. If the Fomorians come through
here right now, we could all end up dead except for you. Since we’re giving you that mirror, how about you just give us one torc now, and we can get the second one later, yeah?”

  Ollie’s head bobbed up and down as he tried to make his case. “I used the stun gun on the younger lad and he was the one with the mirror. Since I got him, I should get the first neck ring.”

  “Shut up, Ollie,” Dan said tersely before staring at Twaine. “Just one torc is all I ask. Come on, Twaine, we’ve known each other for years, mate.”

  Twaine shook his head as he stowed the mirror underneath his jacket and started walking through the doorway. “My hands are tied. I don’t carry an extra torc with me. The firm can only get them from the Fomorians and then they pass them over to us. The firm’s orders are that any suspicious items must be handed over to them to be examined first. Now I need to take a slash.”

  Both Dan and Ollie followed him out of the room as they continued to plead their case. I could hear their arguments just past the entryway but they kept at it even as I heard Twaine telling them to bugger off as he started up the nearby stairwell. My heart had sunk the moment I saw Twaine placing my mirror in his jacket pocket. I doubted they would be able to work it even if they tried, since I felt that the mirror was attuned to me and only I could use it properly, but the thought that gnawed at the pit of my soul was that I would need to get it back from them if I ever stood a chance of finding my parents again. I was now totally back to square one and even worse, I might soon be killed while sitting helplessly bound to an old chair. Tears had begun to form in my eyes but I fought off the urge to cry.

  It was then that I heard a scraping noise on the ground. As I looked over to my side I saw Mark was slowly inching his way towards me. Even though he was bound, he was using his body to squirm forward as he tried to get behind the chair I was on.