Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR)

by Laurence Donaghy

  “Close indeed ye are.”

  The car swerved before returning to its proper path.

  Tony waited for his heart to resume normal operations again as he turned to berate their uninvited guest perched in the back seats, all eighteen inches of him grinning innocently. Brian accepted the tirade of abuse with nothing but a placid expression on his face. When Tony paused for breath, he shrugged.

  “Finished?” he said. “Good so. It’s about another mile down this road. Not much time left by the way, boys. Ritual’s near complete.”

  Tony’s blood ran cold. Rituals had many different forms, but their one universal currency was always the same. Blood.

  “How many?” he asked tersely.

  “Two,” Brian replied, all businesslike. “But don’t let that fool ye. This one’s a powerful one. Not seen its like in many a year. And to be bein done where it’s bein done, with the energies and all,” he whistled softly, “plenty dangerous as well as powerful.”

  The car lurched forward with as much speed as it could muster, which wasn’t all that much. Tony felt himself be bounced around in the passenger’s seat like a ping-pong ball on rubber stilts at a rock concert for pogo stick fetishists.

  “Powerful enough for them to get the Claíomh Solais?” Tony asked.

  Brian shrugged. “Who knows?” he replied lightly. “Personally I think that oul thing’s a myth. But hey,” he indicated himself knowingly, “look who’s talking lads, eh?”

  “They won’t be able to raise it,” James said, with such confidence that both human and faerie passengers within the car reacted with surprise.

  “They won’t?” Tony said.

  “Not a chance. Trust me. Stupid faerie fuckers don’t realise the Morrigan thought of how dangerous the sword would be if it was ever brought out of the Otherworld. She’s protected it so that it can’t happen.”

  “Then forgive me for bein Mr Obvious here Da, but what the fuck are we doing gallivantin round the bastardin countryside?” and ruining my chances of a quick fumble, or even a fuckin long and quite complicated fumble, in the process? Tony added internally.

  “Because them even tryin somethin like this is bad news,” his father replied grimly. “Tryin to get one of the Treasures? That’s cocky, even by their standards.”

  With an effort of will, Tony forced down his frustration at this line of reasoning and changed the subject. “So Brian…haven’t seen you around for a good wee while…” he said, leaving the sentence hanging clearly for Brian to fill in the blanks which amounted to what have you been up to?

  “Me?” Brian touched his hand to his chest as if offended by the intrusion into his personal life. “Bit o’ this, bit o’ that. Ya have to admit the North is an interesting place these days. Reminds me of the old days almost. Hard to believe it all started in a wee clearing on the Mournes those years ago.”

  “You expect us to believe that shite caused this sorry fuckin mess goin on now?” Tony scoffed, hoping he sounded more dismissive of the notion than he actually felt. More than one evening he’d lain awake listening to the sounds of chaos outside wondering that exact same thing.

  Brian’s eyes twinkled with mischief. It wasn’t hard to see how his race had gotten the mistaken reputation as harmless tricksters. “I’ll grant ye, there’s plenty of human places in the world as bad if not worse than here that my kind haven’t a hand in. To my humble knowledge, anyway. So maybe you’re right. But I remember you, Tony…just a wee boy back then, following his Da about with a song in his heart and all the joys of spring. How things change eh?”

  “How long have you been back there?” Tony demanded.

  Brian looked confused and hurt, as innocent as a week-old puppy. “Sure whatever do you mean?” he asked, before smiling a thin quicksilver smile. “This’ll just about do yis at the end of the lane here.”

  “What are we up against?” that was James, keeper of the big picture as ever.

  Brian’s smile disappeared. “I’m not fuckin invisible to them am I,” he grumbled. “What did you expect me to do, have a dander round? Be your scout? All I know is there’s more’n a few. Rumours of a bigwig too,” he jabbed a finger, “that’s your department, mister Morrigan. I’m outta here.”

  “Cheers, Huggy,” Tony said as the faerie faded from sight.

  The car crunched to a halt on the gravel track. James looked across at his son.

  “Huggy?”

  Tony sighed. “Don’t you ever watch TV, Da?

  Weapons. This bit, he had to admit, had a certain appeal. The boot of the Triumph was filled with all sorts of strange objects, enough of which were recognisably pointy so that it would certainly get them arrested were they stopped for a checkpoint, but it would be an interesting interrogation, that was for sure. Thankfully they hadn’t been stopped yet; his Da had vaguely suggested at one point that this was due to another favour being repaid to him from a source he wouldn’t identify.

  He hefted an iron shortsword and a silver shield. Both had had enchantments woven into their design to make them additionally deadly to beings of faerie origin. The weight of the apparel was familiar against his shoulders; how many twenty-one year old Belfast natives could claim that in 1975, he wondered?

  As ever, his Da carried his customary pair of silver daggers; only five inch blades on each, but wickedly, lethally sharp. A long car journey to Cork to deal with a changeling outbreak, in which Tony had repeatedly coerced his Da into naming his weapons citing the coolness factor of doing so (based mainly on Westerns he’d seen), hadn’t quite had the results he’d hoped for.

  “Pinky and Perky ready to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers?” Tony asked sarcastically.

  James Morrigan span the daggers in his hands, the blades whirring in the twilight, catching the lunar rays. He smiled. “Fear’s not all I’ll be strikin,” he said. He looked at his son with a smile playing across his lips. “And how’s, er…?”

  “Moonblood,” Tony said, trying to sound heroic and not, for talk’s sake, more than a little embarrassed. That long weapon-naming trip to Cork had included a few stopovers in pubs, which he was beginning to regret.

  “Oh aye. Moonblood, aye. Sorry, I keep forgettin that don’t I…”

  “It’s a good name for a sword, alright?”

  “Oh it is. It is aye. Fantastic. Strikes fear in me and I’m on your side.”

  “…strike something into something in a minute...”

  “What was that son?” James cupped a hand to his ear as Tony shut the boot as gently as he could. Tactically speaking, petulantly slamming a car boot down might harm their chances of maintaining the element of surprise in any forthcoming attack.

  “Nothin Da.”

  The fire on the summit of the nearby hillside was hard to miss. Father and son exchanged a glance and a nod and began moving towards it, keeping low to the ground, avoiding the direct glare of the moonlight. Voices were travelling in the night air; low and reverent and rhythmical. Chants. Ritual chants. Whatever was happening was happening now, and there were two terrified people on that hilltop who probably didn’t have very much time left to them-

  Shapes slinking in the shadows. Wolf-faeries. The soldiers. Sheltering behind a few rocks, Tony made out two…three…Jesus Christ…four of the things within eyeshot. Brian hadn’t been messin around with his predictions of a heavy presence here tonight. If you had four solider faeries patrolling the lower slopes of the hill, what the fuck was gonna be the cherry on the cake?

  Tony let his mind slip from the buzz of normality and into the headspace he’d come to occupy when in a situation like this, feeling only a fleeting twinge of annoyance that situations like this were becoming all too prevalent. Then it was gone, and his mind was clear apart from two driving motives; the first to get to the top of that hill in as quick a time as possible.

  The second was to stay alive.

  A nod was all it took. He and his Da edged out from behind the rocks, fanning out to whatever other cover the hillsi
de could provide. The highground was a powerful tactical advantage to have, but thankfully the wolf-faeries weren’t too bright and didn’t possess the best eyesight. Their hearing was good, but both Morrigans had long experience in making as little noise as possible and on grass, it wasn’t hard to pad undetected so long as someone wasn’t looking in your direction when you moved. Smell was the big worry. Tonight, mercifully, the wind was still; amazing for December. Tony willed it to be a sign that someone out there was helping them.

  His father talked sometimes of the Morrigan, the original, the goddess. Undoubtedly real though all of this mythological stuff was – through the evidence of his own eyes and ears over the last seven years – Tony still wasn’t sure what to think of this War goddess. Little enough had been passed down about her beyond that she was the origin of their bloodline and had passed the torch of responsibility down to them for defending the above-ground world, the human world, from Carman and her ilk.

  If that were so, why didn’t she help with that task herself? Why wasn’t she kicking Carman’s hole down in the Otherworld and preventing these repeated attempts to thin the dimensional walls and escape? Long nights in dark places Tony had thought of this deity, his supposed superior, and his thoughts had not exactly been complimentary.

  None of this went through his mind right now. The wolf-faerie only eight feet or so further up the slope was moving in a rough patrolling line, and as he crouched half-hidden behind a rock he watched it pause, and turn, sniff the air. The fucking thing was huge. He’d encountered a few of these bastards in his time, and had taken down a few, but none had been the equal of this specimen; it was as if they’d been throwing the raw rookies at him up til now and here they’d reserved space for the real deal.

  He reached into his inside pocket and took out the thin tube within. An observer might have wondered why he was carrying a peashooter, but his ammo wasn’t vegetables. He affixed a tiny silver dart into the end of the tube. Each dart had to be handmade to a very specific set of instructions and blessed at a certain spot in Fermanagh that the faeries tried yearly to desanctify.

  Last year they’d encouraged Satanists to set up camp around the wellspring. That had been hilarious. Presumably through whatever arcane methods they’d used to bring them there, they’d been imagining the Satanists to be the real deal, and not, say, a few spectacularly nervously-bladdered teenagers messing around with a crudely modified Scrabble board in hopes of impressing the more dimwitted local girls tagging along. His Da was darkly predicting that next year they’d get serious about it and try to arrange a Bay City Rollers concert to take place there.

  A quick glance to his right – James was in position, as he’d known he would be; he could just about make out his father’s silhouette about thirty feet to his right. A single finger went up into the air and Tony pivoted, the blowgun at his lips, aiming even as he automatically started counting down from five, four, three, two, one-

  Pfft.

  The silver dart left the gun and entered the wolf-faerie’s hindquarters, immediately loosing its toxic venom – a cocktail of fairly mundane ingredients harmless to humans; at least that explained why the “special tea” his Da had insisted on drinking had the most loathsome aroma he’d ever come across. He’d always suspected brewing it was simply his Da’s way of getting him out of the house so he could have sex (and in this, quite unknowingly, he was half right).

  He felt a pang. Marie, his mother, had passed away three years previously. Heart disease. His father had been inconsolable for months thereafter; Tony suspected the man would never really recover from it. He was beginning to understand why – it wasn’t simply that he’d loved her, although he had, in an obvious way quite uncharacteristic for most fellas of his generation – it was that he’d been forced to keep so much from her.

  Marie had gone to her grave thinking her husband was a fairly run-of-the-mill sort, a labourer-for-hire who was good enough at his line of work to be in demand all over Ireland frequently to require him to spend quite a bit of time away from her. James had been crystal clear to his son that he must never, never ever even think of telling his mother anything about the real line of work they were both involved in.

  “She wouldn’t understand, son. And I wouldn’t want her to. Take the day at the Mournes. Eight people, dead, and them sitting in my mind the whole drive home. But I was able to come in the door and spin her a yarn about some miserable oul landowner not paying me the bonus I was due for finishing a day early and to cheer me up she made me a big dinner and brought me a pint. That’s the sort of her, son. She’s apart from all of this and I want her to stay that way, you understand me?”

  The wolf-faerie crumpled to the ground. Thirty feet to his right, his father’s target did the same – but this one, even bigger and with more spirit than the one Tony had gone after, had managed to let loose a howl of pain before it collapsed.

  Answering howls went up immediately from the remaining two guards. The element of surprise was gone. Tony was faced with the sight of one of them loping down the slope toward his position, covering the distance between them in big awkward bounds that were as speedy as they were ungainly, its mouth opening in anticipation for the battle ahead-

  He stood, and drew the shortsword, catching a glimpse of his father doing something similar against the fourth wolf-faerie going after him. There wasn’t time to see anything else before it was upon him, leaping and snarling-

  He dodged the initial lunge, if barely, his shield flashing as it swung and connected with the beasts’ left hind leg. Where it touched flesh it burned and the wolf-thing rrooooowwwl’d long and loudly in pain.

  “Hoooooounnnnddd!” it snarled. “Ffffffilllllltttttthyyyyyy dooooggggggg!”

  Eastwood would have had an instant riposte. Every dog has its day, maybe, before he’d have pulled the trigger on his Magnum and blew the fucker’s brains all over the grass.

  Unfortunately, Tony Morrigan was no Clint. For one thing, he was terrified out of his fuckin wits. Still, something – the code of the action hero, perhaps – compelled him to reply to this. So, too terrified to think of anything particularly clever he settled for simply snarling back the first angry words that entered his mind.

  “I should be gettin a blowjob off some fuckin bimbo! Ya hairy cunt!” he screamed with heartfelt passion, and he charged.

  Shortsword met flesh. It wasn’t textbook; he’d had some training, obviously, with his father in the last seven years, but the primary thing has father had taught him was to stay within killing distance whilst staying out of “getting killed” distance. Most of the things he’d ended up fighting had possessed no weapons save their own teeth and claws, and his shortsword tended to have a longer reach than those if used carefully.

  He lunged, jumped back, lunged again. The shield saved his life more than once, blocking the creature’s attacks and returning them with interest, since every time the wolf’s flesh came into contact with the shield’s surface he wounded it further and reduced its mobility another notch.

  But this wasn’t some piss-ant little bog-faerie or a pathetic little post-discovery changeling. It was a soldier. The fucker was big, it was strong, and it wasn’t giving up despite the burns the shield was inflicting. His arms were tired from swinging the sword and his reaction times were down and still it advanced, the initial bloodlust having faded, probing at his flanks and forcing him back, staring at him with calculating eyes that seemed to say I’ve got the measure of you. I’m better than you. And you know it.

  On the hilltop, he could hear screaming. Standing between he and whatever was in pain up there was this thing from an ancient world that didn’t care what year it was or how ludicrous it would be to die on a twilit backwater of Armagh and be found in medieval garb. If he was ever found.

  He saw its muscles tense, those massive shoulders ripple. It was going to spring and even if he blocked it with the shield, the weight of it would send him sprawling, make him lose the grip on the sword, and it would
ignore whatever wounds he would inflict on it and rake those needle-pointed claws across his stomach, spilling his intestines out like film reel from a movie projector. His eyes locked with those of his opponent, predator regarding prey and he had the horrible feeling they were looking at each other for the final time.

  It was an accurate feeling, as it turned out.

  James Morrigan, coming in unnoticed from behind, hopped on the creature’s back as if it were a pony at the Balmoral show and before it could do more than wriggle in surprise at this development, he had driven Pinky and Perky up to their hilts into each side of that massive skull. The wolf had time to blink, to twitch, and for its tongue to flit out and in spastically for an instant before it fell lifeless to the turf.

  “Come on,” he said, retrieving the daggers with one, two sharp tugs that Tony knew required a lot more strength than they seemed to, “I don’t think there’s much time.”

  Tony ran. He was faster than his father but he kept side-by-side with him as they raced up the slope. They passed the corpse of the fourth wolf as they did so. James had had time to despatch his opponent, every bit as big and bad as the one Tony faced, and to save his son. Not for the first time, either. He was good at what he did. Of course he was. He’d had decades of practice at doing it. Decades that had taken him from his wife and his son. Never once had Tony heard his father’s resolve weaken. Even when his mother had passed away, his father had simply withdrawn a little further into himself, but the work had gone on.

  He believed in this, in all of this, with all his heart. Tony only wished he could say the same for himself. He hadn’t the stomach for this. Never had. Any romantic notions he’d had about this great familial dynasty he’d been born into had died in a terraced house some years ago, on the night of his first mission…

  The night his father had-