Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR)

by Laurence Donaghy

  He faced the beasts down, their rampaging approach slowing to something a considerable amount more thoughtful as they absorbed the sight of the huge corpse of their fallen brother lying in a pool of his own head-guts.

  It was only then that Danny realised the sounds of battle – one-sided battle though it may have been – had ceased. He risked a quick three-sixty glance around him. The Formorians had stopped; they were holding the humans they had been herding for slaughter in position to prevent them from escaping, but for the moment, the killing had ceased. About a hundred pairs of terrified human eyes were fixed directly on him.

  “Are you a God?” one of the two facing him now, a Cyclops, rumbled at him.

  This was it. That crazy reflex-stuff switched itself off for a moment and he felt back in control.

  Roll with it. Tell them you’re a God. Tell them to fuck off. Most importantly, for the love of Christ at all costs avoid having a fight with these fuckers, because for one, there’s no guarantee that stuff with horn-boy wasn’t one incredible run of good luck and for two, just holding this axe is miracle enough. If you actually have to try and swing it, it’s going to take you a fortnight to complete a stroke.

  “Not just a God!” he proclaimed, loudly enough for all the Formorians to hear. Where’s the fuckin Morrigan? Either of her??? Where is she????

  There was a silence.

  “Yes…?” the Cyclops prompted.

  “I’m a hero! The biggest fuckin hero you bunch o cunts will ever see! And this village is under my protection! So you’d all better hit the fuckin beach! Now!”

  Danny paused.

  “Who are you??” one of the Formorians asked. He was huge, and shaggy, and about the size of a small cottage. He wore a skull ring on one of his fingers. The skull was human.

  He couldn’t say Danny, could he? What, then? Setanta? Was he even about yet? And if he called himself that, would he doomed to an inglorious collapse? John McClane? He could look good in a progressively-dirtier white vest, no problem. Now I have a big fuckin axe. Ho. Ho. Ho.

  “I am the Morrigan!”

  He heard the words, heard them come from somewhere right where he was standing, but he had no memory of speaking them.

  What was more – he glanced downward – he seemed to have grown breasts. Rather nice ones, in point of fact.

  “Okay, ride’s over. Time to come out of there,” a voice from beside him said.

  He glanced over. It was the Morrigan – the older version, his travelling companion. She reached over with a muscular arm and yanked him bodily and with an extremely strange sensation that felt like someone had just plunged his head into liquid ice and then slapped him, hard, he was pulled free – free, he realised, of being inside the body of her younger counterpart.

  “What…?” he said dazedly, things belatedly falling into place; the way the boys had ran to him, had sheltered behind him. His instant command of reflexes and fighting moves well beyond his ability. Okay, so he knew what. But he didn’t know how-

  She shushed him with a gesture and pointed back from where he’d came; the warrior maiden, currently clothed in the modest garb of a peasant woman, standing with both hands on a ridiculously large axe over the body of an extremely dead Formorian, an entire horde of the beasts facing her down.

  Skull Ring came forward. From his bearing and his stride, and the way his fellows scattered from about him, Danny instantly surmised he was the leader of this particular band of merry murderers. He sized up the woman before him, approximately one-fifth his size and probably one-tenth his body weight. A massive grin cragged across his enormous face, as if the San Andreas fault had just fissured his jaw.

  “You?” he said. “You are the Goddess of War? Living here amongst these…rats?”

  Danny could see the Morrigan’s eyes flash. “They are not rats,” she said softly.

  “They die as easily as rats,” Skull Ring pointed out.

  All things considered, this was not a wise thing to say.

  The Morrigan spat. The glob of spittle landed square on the disembodied head of the fallen Formorian. Every single person, captor or captive, was silent as she did it. She eyed Skull Ring.

  “Some rats are bigger than others,” she said.

  Over the Morrigan’s shoulder, Danny’s chest tightened as he saw three newcomers on the scene; Caderyn, with little Coscar still a bundle in his arms. A Formorian stood guard over them, prodding them along with a vicious-looking pike. Caderyn’s eyes bugged as he took in the scene; his wife facing down the Formorian leader, in front of the entire surviving village. If the Morrigan saw, or sensed, his arrival, she made no gesture to indicate it.

  Skull Ring reached around his back and brought out a spear so huge that a human-sized equivalent would have seemed a matchstick in comparison. He let it lie across his hands, rolling it in his grip like the caber it was. He got no outward reaction from his opponent, but Danny noticed that without quite making it obvious, she was retreating inch by inch, pushing Glon and Gaim further and further back, giving herself more room to manoeuvre when the need arose.

  “What happens,” he rumbled, “if I kill the Goddess of War in battle?”

  The Morrigan smiled. “Then you would go down in legend,” she said.

  Skull Ring was shifting his massive bulk. Getting ready to strike. Not yet, though. Danny itched to move forward, but the older Morrigan at his side put a hand on his shoulder and whether through his trust of her judgment or some mystical method, the urge to leap forward and assist drained away at the touch.

  “Go down as what?”

  At this, she frowned and smiled, as if amazed he could ask such a silly question.

  “Why,” she said brightly, “as something more than an ugly, smelly, cowardly piece of shit-”

  He was already charging in fury, his roar ringing through the ears of the throng. Danny despaired; such was the bastard’s size and power that it would take nothing short of a nuclear warhead to have stopped his charge, and he doubted the Morrigan had anything like that in her arsenal.

  She didn’t. But it didn’t matter.

  Rather than try to stop him, she let go of the axe-handle for long enough to shove her sons away from her in either direction, sending them safely out of the sphere of the battle. This done, and with only a second or so left before he crashed into her, she allowed herself to drop to the earth below. Skull Ring’s charge steamrolled over her a moment later.

  When he came to a halt, when he turned, the Morrigan was nowhere to be seen; only the blade of Rhino’s enormousmassive axe was visible, glinting in the light. Skull Ring actually lifted one of his massive feet, then the other, to check and see if her flattened body was pressed to their soles, as if she were a leaf he’d stepped on. Seeing nothing, he blinked, confused, and then began to laugh. The Formorians scattered around the village joined in.

  That was when the axe began to rise.

  She had been stepped on. But she had not been flattened; this was not hard concrete, it was soft and yielding soil. Even so, Danny could only guess at how much it must have hurt to have been pressed so far into the earth as to actually sink beneath the surface; the bones in a human body would not have been able to cope.

  One thing was perfectly clear, though, as she rose from the muck, covered from head to toe in its debris. The Morrigan was not human.

  With no apparent effort, she hefted the axe. Skull Ring made a noise of outrage and fury that might have been words but they were too swallowed in anger to be comprehensible. He brought the spear he carried around, ready to hold it before him – so angry had he been by her initial taunt that he had all but forgotten his weapon in the charge. Not this time. This time he would drive it through this impudent wretch.

  He managed one step forward.

  This was because the Morrigan had pirouetted, moving like a hammer thrower at the Olympics, flinging the axe thirty feet through the air; a flash of metal and wood that whipped around end-over-end too fast for the eye to follow.
Too fast, that is, until it slowed to a more pedestrian speed through entering Skull Ring’s chest. The axe buried itself so deep that it actually disappeared from sight. Danny expected to see it rip free from its back, having passed clean through. It did not.

  All eyes went from the filthy, earth-encrusted Morrigan, her chest heaving and her eyes white and wide, to the Formorian chief, stock still, eyes bulging in surprise. A dribble of red blood appeared on his lips.

  “Don’t go down in legend…” she hissed at her opponent. In that moment Danny had absolutely no trouble whatsoever in believing the woman stood before him was more than human, a Goddess made flesh. “Just go down.”

  Indeed, go down he did, puddled in a heap. Danny felt the impact as his body hit the deck. Looking around at that exact moment, he felt as though he were in one of those 60s TV shows where they ran the end credits over a frozen shot of the cast. No one within a half-mile radius of on that woman, that incredible Goddess, was moving so much as a hair.

  It was a coin toss to say who looked the most stunned, although the onlookers fell into three distinct groups on that score; the Formorians, who looked stunned and nervous, the villagers, who were stunned and terrified, or Glon and Gaim, who looked at their mother with amazement and hero worship in equal measure.

  Only Caderyn fell outside the group entirely; his eyes were just as fixed on her as everyone else’s, but his expression was unreadable.

  “Go,” the Morrigan said, turning slowly in a complete circle as she spoke, pointing a finger at a Formorian here and there to make it clear who she was addressing. “Leave this village now. It is under my protection. Return here and I will hunt…every…single…member…of your race…down. Do you understand?”

  The Cyclops who had been one of the original two Formorians to approach her before the ill-fated intervention of Skull Ring was the one to respond. He was stopping just short of falling to his knees and grovelling. “Goddess, we did not know that you-” he gabbled desperately.

  “Is that an excuse for slaughtering humans without cause?”

  His single eye blinked furiously in a gesture Danny translated as the creature’s feverish attempts to explain. His arms waved in the air. He even took the extremely brave step of moving a pace closer to her. “You do not understand. We were order-"

  Thunnnng.

  The eye blinked, more slowly this time. The Cyclops swayed on his feet and then pitched forward, dead before he hit the ground. An arrow protruded from his back; judging by the location, it had entered his heart, killing him cleanly. Assuming these things kept their hearts in the usual places…

  Another wave of noise, much like the original that had signalled the arrival of the Formorians, began to rumble from all sides of the village. Both the remaining villagers and their Formorian captors reacted to the rumbling nervously. Danny saw Caderyn motion furiously to the surviving men to tell everyone to gather in the centre of the village, near his wife.

  Despite their nominal status as captives, the Formorians were much too thrown by recent events and now this new wrinkle to resist when their hostages began stealing away. In only a few minutes what was left of the human village was gathered in a tightly-packed circle around the Morrig…no. Danny looked closer; by all rights it should have been around her, but a detailed inspection revealed that the only people standing truly close to her were Glon and Gaim, with Caderyn and Coscar beside them. The rest of the village huddled around one another. Fearful glances were sent in the Morrigan’s direction.

  A horn blast sounded. A cry went up.

  For the second time, the woods around the village disgorged a party of invaders. Not Formorians this time, these newcomers were human-like in appearance, albeit taller, grander, stronger than any humans had any right to be, all of them riding white horses that were likewise perfect equine specimens. He recognised them immediately as Tuatha; their appearance had not changed one iota since that landing on the beach he had witnessed a few hours and a few centuries previously.

  Formorian shouts rang out. Danny thought he heard a few voices, raised not in battle cries, but in attempts at dialogue. No weapons were raised. The Formorians clearly did not want a fight with these Tuatha. In that respect, they got their wish; this was no fight.

  It was another massacre.

  In less than sixty seconds, it was all over. The final Formorian body lay twitching on the soil. Riders dismounted their white horses, slapping glistening flanks while the horses whinnied and stamped their hooves, steam rising from their bodies in the frigid air.

  One Tuatha, magnificent in gold armour and wearing a gold helmet, was the last to dismount. He left his horse, the biggest on show, with his fellow warriors and walked with a swagger over to the assembled humans and their special guests. Even before he reached up to unclasp that golden helmet Danny had identified him, not only from the regal silver sword that hung from his belt, but from the swagger with which he walked. Only life’s true pricks had a dander like that.

  “Bres,” said the Morrigan.

  * * *

  The Duty

  Belfast, 2011 AD

  “OHMYGODSONHOWISSHEHOWSTHECHILEJESUS!”

  Danny removed his mother’s hooked claws from his upper arms. The woman was vibrating madly like a hummingbird on crack, hovering a quarter-inch above the hospital floor, giving off waves of terrified pleasure and ecstatic worry. He gestured down the maternity ward corridor and made to open his mouth to tell his Ma where to go to get to Ellie’s bed, but it was too late. With another outburst that was half-orgasm, half-stroke, his Ma was away.

  Like a homing Granny missile she turned correctly to the left and there was a wet, delighted shriek.

  “He’s fine,” he said weakly, knowing at this precise moment his very tired…girlfriend…would be too tired to argue at the sudden appearance of the maternity ward’s newest grandmother and that a very tiny, very pink bundle would have been unceremoniously plucked from his incubator with the inexorable inevitability of continental drift.

  “Alright son,” came a voice from behind him.

  Danny turned. His Da was there. He’d obviously been outpaced in the Tour De Grandson; knowing Linda Morrigan, Superman could have taken so many performance-enhancing drugs that Ben Jonson would have staged an intervention on his behalf and he still wouldn’t have beaten her down that hospital corridor.

  “Alright,” he returned.

  “Congratulations,” Tony said, offering his hand. Danny shook it. He could see intention to hug flash in his father’s eyes and he rocked back on his heels, only very slightly, but enough to make it clear that the attempt would not be welcomed. The moment passed, about as swiftly as moments usually did between the two men these days.

  “Everything okay with the wee one?” Tony half-spoke, half-coughed. He started moving down the corridor toward where Ellie and the parts of Luke that were above the bosomline of his wife were waiting. Danny fell into step beside him robotically.

  “Aye, seems grand.”

  “It’s some experience eh.”

  “Yeah,” he said hollowly. Wasn’t wonderful enough to persuade you to stick about Da.

  “I remember…” Tony began, and then they had to move apart to let a nurse pass between them, and as they did so he must have glanced across at his son and seen the words unspoken hanging in the air between them, because when the nurse had passed the thought would forever go unfinished and the words unsaid.

  “Do you want,” Tony said instead, his throat dry. “Do you want something from the machine? I might grab your Ma a wee tea or something.”

  “Now?” Danny said. “Right now?” With the grandson you’ve never seen fifteen feet away, you’re concerned your wife might be gasping for a cuppa? Really, Da?

  “Yeah. So can I get you something…”

  Danny looked at his Da and made zero attempt to hide what was dancing behind his eyes as he did so. “No, Da,” he said with finality. “No, I don’t want anything off ye. Thanks.”

&nbs
p; With that, he turned the corner and left him behind.

  **

  The Mourne Mountains, Ireland, 1968 AD

  “C’mon you, big lad!” James Morrigan called affably behind him, as he swung his legs over the fence gate and landed softly in the field beyond. “Not tired already are ye?”

  The fourteen-year-old hard on his heels shook his head in response, without the breath to compose a reply verbally. James watched as his son clambered over the metal rungs of the rusted gate and felt once again a surge of pride. Still a boy perhaps, and a little skinny, but what wee Tony Morrigan lacked in muscle he made up for in sheer bloody-minded determination.

  He looked into the eyes of his father now, as if reading his mind and choosing to prove his point, even as he adjusted the weight of the pack he carried, a smaller version of the pack James himself had around his shoulders. Any hint of a drivable road had ended miles ago; they’d had to abandon the trusty Triumph Herald, a big red monster of a car, to make the rest of the journey on foot.

  Five miles over countryside on foot carrying a heavy bag, and but for a hint of ruddiness in his cheeks and a deeper rhythm to his breathing you’d scarcely have noticed he was bothered.

  “Not tired yet Da. Gonna tell me a few more stories before we get there?”

  James clapped his son on the back, partially in amusement, but mostly so that he could push the boy ahead a few paces so he couldn’t see the trepidation written on his face at the enthusiasm Tony was displaying for getting there.

  “I think you know them better’n me now, son,” James said as they began to walk briskly across the field, the rolling greenery around them beginning to thin out as the altitude of the landscape tilted upward and the hills started to become the Mournes. Hard to believe Warrenpoint and Rostrevor weren’t all that far away; the only hint of human civilisation as far as the eye could see was a solitary farmhouse, and even that would soon be swallowed by the horizon as they continued to climb.