Bad Cow (Oræl Rides to War Book 1)

by Andrew Hindle

  “We – they – we cremated you in the hat,” Little Phil said, building on the foundation of the laugh and making the best of the conversation that had been offered up. As the Captain of the team, he’d been instrumental in seeing to the Sheepbreezers’ part of the funerary obligations. “At least, that was the, um, well, it was closed-casket, so … but yeah, they put in your cricket pads, your factory overall, your Doc Martens, your hat…”

  “No wonder it was closed-casket,” Barry said lightly. “Was I in a tux under all that clobber?”

  There was more laughter, still sounding pale and shocked and borderline-hysterical, but at least this was almost like cricket practice banter. Several of the guys settled shakily into chairs, most of them well and truly on the far side of the ping-pong table to the indefinably dazzling apparition.

  “That’s sort of why they let us throw in so much extra stuff,” Seam said. “Closed-casket, and cremation. We got to send you off with a few of your, you know, your things. Bit of a Viking send-off,” he paused for a moment, then voiced his current – but still very much in-development – metaphysical theory of the afterlife. “You should still have it, shouldn’t you, mate?”

  Barry seemed to take this in stride. With the blanket pulled up to his chest and his wings folded awkwardly around his body, he was actually reasonably well-covered as far as his onlookers were concerned. “Okay,” he said, sounding almost like his old self for a moment. “Guess you really can’t take it with you. Bummer. I liked that hat.”

  Their wicket-keeper Tommo, the other guy who’d known Barry in school and coincidentally one of the only other half-decent players on the team, had been uncharacteristically quiet all this time. He burst out with a sudden desperate tirade of, “Oh God, Jesus, sweet Jesus, oh my God, God, Jesus…” and then subsided as his gaze met that of the being sitting at the opposite end of the ping-pong table. There was another silence, this one very much uncomplicated and composed only of acute and apparently universal embarrassment.

  “Right,” Barry said, “now we’ve got that out of the way…”

  “Why haven’t you got your hat?” Seam, not wanting to belabour the point, asked hesitantly.

  “Or your pants?” Little Phil, unfettered by a surplus of diplomacy at the best of times, added with characteristic bluntness.

  “Or your tooth?” Tommo demanded as though he’d been waiting for a chance to demand an explanation for this damning deviation from classic Barrity, and also as though he hadn’t been on the verge of an epiphany twenty seconds earlier.

  “I don’t know,” Barry said, and looked confused.

  Seam didn’t know either, of course, and felt it was unfair on some deep level that the one bloke in the room with wings didn’t seem to have any more information than they did. But then, as work-in-progress as his current thinking was, Seam also had a strange sense that of course Barry wasn’t going to get his clothes back. His clothes, and his hat, and his body, had been burned up and scattered back into the biosphere. His old false tooth was still half-embedded in the dashboard of Gibbo’s ute – or at least it had been two days ago. It was all gone, but all those burned-up molecules were still out there. Somewhere. What was sitting in front of them was … something else. And Seam wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

  This new Barry was a made-up version, filled in from the blanks. A solid reflection of what Barry Dell’s soul had gotten used to being housed in. With all the imperfections, all the Barry, seared away.

  “Probably the same reason your new body’s so much prettier than your old one,” Seam mused, then looked around defensively when he realised he’d spoken aloud. “Come on,” he implored. “He is.”

  “Yeah, he is,” Tommo came to Seam’s rescue, and there was a general manly-jokey round of too-loud agreement and piss-taking as, finding strength in numbers, the cricket team got off their collective chests as quickly and casually as possible just how beautiful Barry had become.

  Barry Dell had been – and Seam acknowledged this with affection – a plain-looking bloke with scraggy shoulder-length hair, a growing beer belly, and a faint scar and missing canine tooth on one side of his face. He’d been born with this scar, and he and his friends had enjoyed coming up with different stories about how he’d got it when people in pubs asked after its origins. He’d had a series of false teeth as a child and young adult, before breaking the final one in a minor car accident when he was twenty and not bothering to get it replaced, partly because of how heroic Gibbo’s ute now looked with a metal-pronged tooth stuck in its dashboard.

  He had played cricket, and worked at Cullem’s Nails, and attended the University of Western Australia, all of these in a fairly casual fashion. Then he had died in an elevator. What was seated in the Sheepbreezers’ borrowed clubhouse now, almost two weeks later, was like all the best bits of Barry Dell. It was impossible to really say what had physically changed, since it wasn’t readily quantifiable. He may or may not have wound up with less of a beer belly than he’d died with, but that could just be an illusion caused by being draped in wings and a blanket.

  He’d attained a sort of aura, Seam thought, but not a visible one. He still had the pale line of the scar down his face, and the missing tooth … but now, it was like it would look wrong if the tooth was there, and the skin unblemished. It was a highlight, among highlights.

  He was, for want of a better phrase, a glorified Barry Dell. With wings. Wings.

  Some of the team might have been tempted to question whether what was happening was some sort of hoax, either masterminded by Barry or another agency altogether for some unfathomable reason. The only reason, Seam thought, that nobody had raised the possibility was because it was simply beyond belief that the creature sitting in front of them could be the result of any sort of fakery. Even if the Barry Dell they all knew had been alive – and he categorically was not – no amount of makeup or costumery could have turned him into this.

  “Well shucks, fellas,” Barry said, and Seam reflected that he was sounding more and more like his old self all the time. It was like he was wearing in a new pair of everything. “Maybe it’s just that I’m as beautiful on the outside as I always was on the inside. You ever think of that?”

  There was a general chorus on the theme of ‘no’, and things relaxed a little further.

  “Have you always had glossy bouncy fuckin’ ringlets on the inside, tiger?” Little Phil asked. “Because if I’d known…”

  “Maybe I have,” Barry said with injured dignity, raising a perfect hand to his perfect locks. He drew one around between his fingers and looked at it critically. “Anyway, they’re really more tresses, aren’t they?”

  “That’s true,” Little Phil conceded. “Ringlets are curlier, aren’t they? Like poncy little springs,” he paused. “Tresses are still pretty poncy though,” he added in a discerning tone.

  “Really starting to regret not having that hat now,” Barry said, touching his hair again. “You’re making me self-conscious.”

  “I guess no amount of beautiful on the inside could bring that hat back,” Seam suggested.

  “Considering what was usually on the inside of that hat…” Little Phil agreed.

  “Is everyone just going keep on acting like Nails got sconned with a cricket ball and now we’re all just taking the rest of the evening off to make sure he doesn’t go to sleep with a fucking concussion?” Tommo, who despite his earlier Jesus-and-God-heavy outburst seemed to have been following the discussion and remaining grounded in what was really happening far better than the rest of the Sheepbreezers, demanded abruptly. “He died, and half an hour ago he crashed to Earth on a trail of fire, and now he’s sitting here with wings,” Tommo leaned forward over the ping pong table, his face imploring, this time not inclined to lower his gaze or succumb to embarrassment. “And even if they all just assume it was a meteorite, a ton of people must have seen and heard it, and it’s a wonder half the neighbourhood and the police and the fire department and the owners haven�
��t all shown up yet.”

  This, strangely enough considering how close Tommo had just been to collapsing to the floor and speaking in tongues, was a really good point. Nobody had come looking at the thumping great big hole in the cricket pitch, and emergency services hadn’t come looking for things to write reports about after a flash-thunderstorm-tornado thing had turned into a meteorite strike. The clubhouse was relatively secluded, but there were blocks of flats on the far side of the field and somebody must have noticed the landing. A meteorite crater was a prime bit of look-see on a Thursday evening.

  Little Phil solved this problem for them.

  “If somebody comes and asks what happened, we’ll just say it was a meteorite,” he suggested. “A little one would leave a crater like that and not much actual leftover meteorite, right?”

  “No clue,” Seam replied.

  “There you go,” Little Phil said. “Nobody else is likely to have a clue either. At worst, they might assume there was a rock and one of us kept it.”

  “Aren’t meteorites like government property or something?” Tommo asked. “For research or something?”

  “No clue,” Seam repeated stoically.

  Little Phil ignored this byplay. “Now, if we get an actual meteorologist turning up…”

  “I don’t think meteorologists actually study meteors,” Tommo remarked.

  “Alright smartarse, but they study weather so they’d know that what happened was pretty un-fucking-usual, wouldn’t they?” Little Phil shot back.

  “Alright Cap,” Tommo said, “I’m just saying…”

  “We should probably tell the owners something,” Seam agreed, “otherwise they’re going to find that hole in the pitch … and … make us pay for it … out of our deposit,” this seemed like such an out-of-perspective thing to worry about in the situation that Seam wasn’t surprised to hear himself petering out towards the end, and yet it was one of the few facts any of them had to cling to at this point. There was a hole in the cricket pitch, and this was what the owners would do about it.

  “I’m still more worried about what happens when someone recognises the late Barry Dell,” Tommo insisted, “because sooner or later someone will, no matter how … different … he is now. Unless he’s invisible to other people or he’s about to disappear back into Heaven or wherever he just fell from,” he added. “Or we all just died in a meteor strike and he’s here to lead us to … look, my point is, I’ve got a lot of fuckin’ questions here.”

  “He’s kinda got a point, Nails,” Seam said. “You turning up like this does create a bit of a legal issue, what with you being dead and all. And your body having been cremated. Not to mention, it sort of turns the entirety of human history and civilisation and science and our assumptions about the universe and existence … you know…”

  “Completely on their tits,” Little Phil summarised.

  Barry nodded, looking sympathetic. “How long has it been since … well, since I…” he waved a hand and grimaced.

  “Since you died?” Seam helpfully filled in, then cursed himself for blurting what might be a sensitive truth. “A couple of weeks. We just went to your funeral on Saturday.”

  Barry swept the room with his shiny new gaze, and then turned it on his old school friend. “I see. Well, I – Tommo, stop that.”

  “Sorry,” Tommo snatched his hand back as if burned. Barry lifted his wing slightly and smoothed his feathers in a gesture that looked as if it had been done so many times it was commonplace. “I was just, come on guys, he’s an Angel, don’t tell me you didn’t want to touch the wings.”

  “The rest of us have a little thing called self-control, Tommo,” Little Phil said.

  Everyone paused for a moment to allow this colossal, heaving lie to shamble sweatily through the conversation and lumber away to a safe distance.

  Barry cleared his throat. “Anyway,” he said, “so I died. How did I die?”

  The Sheepbreezers exchanged glances again. “You don’t remember?” Seam asked. Barry shook his head, looking like a cringe-inducingly overdone shampoo commercial in the process. “What’s the last thing you do remember?”

  “Len giving me a rushed batch of number five reinforceds to deliver on my way home,” Barry said with a frown, “and refusing to let me log it as time-and-a-half because the Duxworth was only twenty minutes away. I … assume I had a car accident?”

  “Um, accident in the hotel,” Seam said. “Elevator crash.”

  “Shit,” Barry said, but looked rather impressed at his own means of death in what Seam considered a completely surreal way. It was, he had to concede, nothing if not an interesting way to go. The Angel pondered his fate for a short time, then brightened. “So my car’s not trashed?”

  “Not far as I know,” Seam said, looking at Tommo. Tommo shrugged. “Don’t know what happened to it, though. All still with the lawyers while they figure out who gets what. All goes to Carol, I reckon.”

  Barry winced again. “Poor Auntie Carol.”

  “You don’t remember anything after leaving the factory Friday arvo?” Tommo pressed, and looked disappointed when Barry shook his head. “What’s the next thing you do remember?”

  “Nutter putting his dog blanket over my lap,” Barry said in amusement.

  “And you don’t remember anything in between?” Tommo summed up everyone’s dissatisfaction.

  “Sorry.”

  “But you were … you were crying,” Tommo protested. “You said ‘Dale?’ when The Seam called out to you!”

  “I was? I did?” Barry smiled awkwardly. “Sorry about that. Don’t remember. But you know, maybe it’s best if I do forget the whole thing.”

  There was a faint murmur, a sound which didn’t know what sort of emotion it was meant to be expressing, just as long as it made a noise. It was dominantly disagreement and disappointment regarding Barry’s conclusion, but a fair amount of grudging concession to the fact that they weren’t the ones probably being spared the memory of being cast out of Heaven.

  “So … you know even less than we do,” Little Phil summarised.

  “I guess,” Barry said, apologetic again.

  “What about God?” Tommo blurted.

  Barry shrugged, shoulders and wings lifting and falling in unison. “Couldn’t tell you,” he said, “sorry,” he brightened again. “But hey, obviously there’s something to the whole faith thing, because hello,” he waved both hands like tambourines. “Dead guy back as an Angel. It’s got to mean something.”

  Of all the things Seam might have expected an Angel to say upon descending to Earth, it’s got to mean something was not the most stirring. “But you don’t remember,” Seam, having up until half an hour ago considered himself a solid atheist, hypothetical Angelic speechmaking notwithstanding, felt this was an important point. “For all you know, God wasn’t involved. For all you know, you were … were cloned by some secret branch of the CSIRO7 and, I don’t know, genetically perfected and, and given wings … look, I know it doesn’t seem like the simplest explanation, but…”

  “I can tell you two things I was already pretty sure about before I died,” Barry said, clearly tickled by the idea of having been perfect-o-cloned by a shadowy organisation. “The simplest explanation is actually just about the most complicated explanation, said in the simplest way.”

  “And the second thing?” Seam asked, when Barry seemed to have stopped without finishing his thought.

  Barry looked hesitant, perhaps even afraid. “You’re right,” he told Seam, his voice growing cold and dropping almost to a whisper. “God wasn’t involved in this.”

  “You mean…?” Tommo said anxiously, and pointed expressively at the ancient scuffed carpet.

  Barry laughed aloud. “No,” he said, “nothing like that. It was definitely on the … the good-guys side of things, not malevolent in any way, but … look,” he sighed. “And this is just instinct, alright, not actual information – I just mean, I get the impression that if there was any involvement
from any sort of mind, making me into an Angel rather than … whatever else … then it was purely as a rubber stamp.”

  “God is a rubber stamp,” Tommo said. Seam, still hastily sketching in new pages of his own personal belief system, couldn’t help but feel sorry for the bloke. He also wanted to quiz Barry more on the subject of the instinct and impression he kept talking about, but he could see from Barry’s face that this would get him nowhere.

  “No. Yes. Not – I don’t–” Barry shook his head and frowned gloriously. “It’s way more complicated than that. Like I said, the simplest explanation – that I died and God sent me back as an Angel – is actually just a really simple way of explaining the most complicated answer. That’s all religion really is, a lot of the time. Nothing more and nothing less – I don’t mean it in a belittling sense,” he added, as though he was worried Tommo might try to stone him. “It’s just that saying ‘God did it’ is as much an oversimplification as saying ‘physics did it’.”

  “Uh…” Seam said.

  “And I don’t remember any of it anyway,” Barry added, “it’s just like a gut feeling I have. Should my gut feeling be any more dependable than yours, just because I died two weeks ago and came back with wings?”

  “Yeah,” Seam said, “actually it really should.”

  Barry chuckled. “Fair cop,” he sighed again. “Alright,” he said, “I’ll tell you what it feels like, what feels right to me. It’s like … like evolution and breathing and conception and growing fingernails. They’re all sort of the work of God, but they have scientific explanations too. Sometimes simple, sometimes complicated. This one’s complicated. But the two explanations don’t contradict each other, they overlap. This doesn’t really turn science on its tits,” he gave Little Phil a nod of acknowledgement. “I mean, it can’t, because when science gets turned on its tits it just goes ‘right, so how did I end up on my tits then?’. It just means there’s something science hasn’t gotten to yet. Everybody already knows there’s a bunch of stuff science hasn’t gotten to yet. That’s not about to make science stop.