Ch. 29: Gillard The Gallant Goat

The goat, whose name was Gillard the Gallant, (yes, his owners had named him "Gillard the Gallant Goat") absently chewed on some hay. Gillard was the control in a somewhat scientific study today, though he didn't know it. All he really knew, at the moment, was that the whole place stunk like shit, as one of the men on the floor had shit himself. 

Crom didn't know he had shit himself. Didn't realize it was his last day on earth. He had no idea he was breathing his final breaths. He had been blissfully unconscious, and consciousness was now bubbling slowly up to him, a bit at a time, hitting him first with a headache. It was the hangover type of headache, a tight, throbbing band across his forehead that told him he needed more sleep, so he kept his eyes closed and tried to sleep more. 

That's when the nausea hit. Now Crom was sure he had been drinking, that the whole afternoon had past, and the sight of the Professor and three gun hands at the gates of the quarry hadn't been the terrible sight he had thought it had been.

He could feel the bruised area on his right shoulder where the Yank's taser had pulled the life out of him, buzzing relentlessly, making him shit his pants. He could feel his bruised knees where he had fallen after the taser let go, after Red had round-housed the Yank right into the dirt. He remembered laughing through the dull, buzzing pain. Laughing at how Wyland had gone limp in midair and landed with a dull thump in the dirt.

He remembered the boys dragged the Yank, now bloody faced and thoroughly unconscious, into the back of the truck, and that they made him sit back there with the fecker, since his pants still full of shit and covered in piss. Blue had told him, "Neh, you'll stank up the cab, we'll getcha feckin' shytin' ass cleaned up back at the shop."

He remembered getting to the gate. The truck slowing down and stopping long before it should have. Looking up through the dirty back window, he saw a man with a long rifle, one with a pistol, another with an assault rifle, and the Professor standing, arms crossed, looking exceptionally angry. The gate was closed behind them. He hadn't really ever seen the Professor angry, and that was a very bad sign. 

He remembered jumping out of the truck, feeling the shit in his pants squish around his pants disgustingly. He remembered calling to the Professor, saying something about how "we got 'em, teh dirty cunt's in deh beck uh deh lorry!"

He remembered the man with the long rifle raise his gun, and a small puff of gas pop from the barrel, there was a small click from the gun, and he felt the tiny needle of a dart puncture his chest. 

By the time all this had registered, he could feel the cold of the liquid in his chest muscle. The needle was vibrating softly, and Crom could see through the small sight glass that all the liquid in the syringe had been injected. He pulled the dart out and looked back at his brother with a stupid, surprised look on his face. Ollie was still sitting in the truck. Blue was moving slowly, pulling something from his pocket. Ollie was getting out with his hands raised, and hollered to the Professor "Now, Prof, we'n teh boys aren't gonna cause no trouble."

The Professor called back "Yes, my friends, that's right. You won't be causing me any more trouble, but please do cooperate here, I beg of you." The armed men, men Crom had never seen before, began to move forward. 

Crom looked back at his brother just in time to see Blue smack him in the back of the head with a blackjack. He did it swiftly, and his expert hand drove the small leather bag full of buckshot right into the base of Ollie's neck. Ollie's head snapped back, and he went out like a light. Ol' Blue, obviously sad that he has to do this particular job to an old friend, grabbed Ollie's shirt and allowed him to drop slowly out of the truck cab and onto the ground. 

He remembered feeling the first wave of the puff gun's drugs hit just then, a deep, soft thrum in his brain that spread out to the rest of his body. He was already losing control, his chest was tingling and numbing, time was slowing down, his brain was expanding to fill the void of the universe.. 

He remembered saying something to Blue, and stumbling towards him. "Feckin' Bl-bl-blue doggie bark fart. B-b-bite brother bad k-k-kin." He remembered laughing, his face starting to go numb, and then the next wave hit him and out he went.

...

Crom now tried to rub his chest near the right shoulder, which ached from a taser and then from a tranq dart. He found that he couldn't. His hands were bound behind him. So were his feet. And in his mouth, a cloth gag. 

Shit, he though. That is what happened. We're dead. Where am I?

Crom looked around. To his left, he could see the grey and white goat, Gillard, staring at him brainlessly. The strange cross shaped eyes of Gillard looked at Crom calmly.

He took a deep breath. God, he smelled terrible. 

He had to roll to his right to see what else was around, and the movement and smell made him sick. He vomited, or tried to, but the gag kept it in his mouth. The sudden acrid taste of bile made his eyes water, and he tried to swallow what had just come up, but that just set him vomiting again. To his right, he heard his brother, also gagged, say "Cmmumm!"

Ollie was trying to get his hands unbound by scraping them against a small rusty spot on the trailer. He was undulating like a worm, working feverishly now that he saw the desperation in Crom's watering eyes. He never even noticed Wyland sitting nearby. 

Crom managed to choke down the vileness in his mouth, but now a new sensation was emerging, a strange sensation Crom had never felt before. His brain wasn't working right. His face was numb and tingling, but it wasn't like the knock out drug he so recently felt. One side was completely gone. He tried to move his left fingers, and they worked great, but the same movement with his right fingers yielded nothing. Less that nothing. Like they weren't even there. At first he though maybe the knock out drugs and the taser combined somehow to create this effect, but then he felt a piercing pain behind his left eye. He felt the pain thicken and it felt like his head suddenly filled up with warm fluid, which is exactly what happened. Thus a brain aneurysm gave Crom Cunninghill to the great God Alva.

Ollie and Wyland watched the whole thing happen, and watched Crom go limp and stop breathing. After a few more seconds of scraping, Ollie's hands came free. He ripped his mouth gag off and screamed "Crommy! Wake up, boyo!" Crom sat still and lifeless, smelling about as horrible as a human can smell. Blood began trickling out the sides of his eyes and ears, and Crom let loose a deafening scream, all anger and sightless rage. He tore his foot bindings off and ran to Crom, shaking him, desperately wiping the blood from his eyes, crying for him to wake up. Crom refused to respond, and Ollie sat, now crying softly, holding his dead brother's head in his hands. 

Just then, in the distance, through the soft patter of rain on the trailer, and through Ollie's ragged breathing and Wyland's calm mouth breathing, came the deep Glug-rum-glug sound of a big rig downshifting on one of the long shallow hills on the road outside.

Ollie looked at Wyland with that hateful stare, wiped his tears away, stood up, and gave Wyland a good running kick to the face. Wyland moved only slowly and thickly, and Ollie's boot connected with his ear and the side of his head. Wyland gave a short yelp of pain, and his head went white for a moment. Ollie decided that would have to do, because despite all he had been taught about the Alvanic chant, he had to try and save his brother.

He ran to the door and threw open the lock bolt that held the door in place. It was unlocked. The door swung open and Wyland saw that it was now mostly dark, and that yes, they were in a horse trailer in the middle of nowhere, Scotland. The road in the distance shone with that dark, wet shine, as though it's reflecting the deep, black depths of space on the other side of the low clouds. The soft, wet grass had a grey nighttime tint to it. The clouds were glowing off in the distance, reflecting the light of some town just settling in for the night. Ollie's footfalls sounded squishy in the peaty, almost subarctic soil as they got more distant.

Wyland rolled over to the sharp bit of rust, now covered in bits of Ollie's binding ropes, and began calmly sawing through his own bindings. He really wanted to get away from the foul smelling, bleeding corpse next to him, and thought, well, he was likely to die no matter where he was, so it shouldn't be right here. Maybe a satellite or a meteor would crush him out there in the wilds of Scotland. The idea seemed somehow romantic, but part of him knew that wasn't going to happen. He had scared death away. At the though of Alva, a strange whisper came to him in his mind. Like the wind was talking to him. He shook his head, and it was gone, replaced by the thick pain of his face where Red had decked him.

Wyland got his hands free, and quickly removed his mouth gag and foot bindings. It felt good to breath freely again. His broken nose was completely stuffed, and he had an idea he didn't want to breath through it right now anyway, as he could taste the foul rank odor of shit and vomit and blood, and the air must smell even worse than it tastes.

He stepped out into the cool, wet air. In the distance, perhaps a half mile up the road, he could see the outline of a car. He had some vague notion that this was a scientific endeavor, and that there sat the scientists, calmly studying their lab rats in their final moments.

Gillard the Gallant Goat bleated at Wyland, surely asking to be set free, but Wyland ignored him.

There was indeed a semi tractor-trailer coming up the road, a full 53 footer (a 16 meter lorry, out here) heavy with gravel. Oliver was running full out to get to the road and flag him down. Ollie got to the road just as the truck was passing him. He was waving his hands frantically in the air.

It took a moment, but then the driver obviously saw him, and it must have surprised the hell out of him, because he slammed on his brakes, perhaps thinking he saw a deer or something. He was not accustomed to seeing frantic men out in the fenn.

The trucks brakes locked, and there was suddenly grey smoke illuminated by red brake lights at the rear of the trailer. The back tires were not moving, locked by the brakes, and the load of heavy gravel, always obeying the laws of physics, yet somehow coaxed into fateful movement by Oliver Cunninghills now broken Wyrd, began to swerve into the soft, wet gravel of the road's shoulder where Ollie was standing. Oliver managed to give a single growl of surprise and anger, a last act of defiance, then the four foot tall set of wheels set on two giant thousand pound axles ran him over at nearly 30 miles an hour. He was instantly crushed, sparing only his left hand and foot. All the driver saw in his side mirrors was the man's hand and foot beneath his rig's formidable tires. He never drove a rig again after that night. 

In the distant car, someone tapped the "lap" function of a stopwatch, and wrote down the time of Oliver Cunninghill's unwilling sacrifice to the hungry old God of Death. 

Ch. 28: A reasonable failure

The trailer was now silent, save for the soft patter of cool rain on the thin roof. Wyland's blood was already warming back up after his second confrontation in a day with the God of Death. "The eternal death bird", his mind was already calling it, trying to trivialize what had just happened. It was the only way, really. He would have gone completely mad if his mind didn't rework it, mold it into something that was a normal part of everyday experience. Just a goddamned bird. Yes, an massive, ancient, immortal bird with the head of some long extinct creature and the behooved legs that the Devil wore, but still, just a goddamned bird. It even acted a bit like one, shaking and preening, with it's head moving in jerking movements.

Wyland sat against the wall in the aluminum trailer, still bound hands, feet and mouth, and Oliver and Crom Cunninghill, also bound the same way, both lay prone on the floor. Ollie was in the fetal position. Crom lay unconscious. 

Ollie, now truly a marked man, sacrificed, as it were, to the God of Death, let out a painful, muffled moan, through the cloth gag in his mouth. In some way, through the blindingly terrible grinding, screeching, crunching noise, he had also heard the curse. It had been refined since he had last read it, there were new elements, and a syncopated beat and rhythm to it that flowed, sounded more like a chant and less like a student nervously reading a script. The new kid, his replacement, was damn good. The research was coming along.

There was a burning feeling in his throat, and he felt nauseous. He choked this feeling down, though, vaguely aware that to vomit right now would mean his death, as he would choke on it with a gag in his mouth. The feckin' yank still sat in the corner. At least Wyland would die too, Ollie thought to himself, but he hoped that he could help the Yankee bastard suffer a bit before he got shoved off. 

Looking at the Yank, yes, he was cursed too. He was breathing heavily, his face a bright red, his eyes as wide as an American double-wide trailer. He had heard the curse. Ollie couldn't know that this failure of a man, this coward, hadn't heard the curse, and had, in fact, stood up to death itself, and scared it off.

And his brother now stirred, also letting out a painful moan. Ollie now teared up a bit, realizing that the Cunninghill name would die with them, that their father had either been circumvented, been "removed from office", or perhaps he had personally approved their deaths? He doubted his father, heartless bastard though he was, would have allowed both his sons to die. Especially not Ollie, he had always been the good son. Crom, sure, he was a loose cannon, a danger to those around him (and wasn't all this his fault, anyway?). No, the good father Elliot Cunninghill would never have allowed such a thing. 

Anyway, the old man never would have expected a coup d'etat from the Professor. It would have been perfectly reasonable from the Professor's viewpoint to off the father and the kids in one go. The council would have been terribly weakened, and the Professor knew the secret now, didn't he? He no longer needed the council, the truth was now out, but the council didn't know. Probably shouldn't know; should never, ever, ever know. They could curse an entire football pitch now, thousands of people, without breaking a sweat! General Pia, the deposed dictator, would have surely used the knowledge to regain control of his country, at the expense of many, many lives. No, the council must never know. The Professor could now finance his operation without the council's help, through the simple threat of a curse lobbed from a distance.

Ollie now realized his failure. He had asked the Professor about analog vs. digital. Dammit! He should'a kept his mouth shut! He was now a liability, and the more dangerous kind. The smart ones are the dangerous ones. Crom could be controlled, his anger vented in a proper manner, with fist fights and bourbon. But Ollie, if he had figured out analog recording first, well now, the whole council, including the Professor, would have been the ones who heard the curse just now! And yes, he would have killed them all (save his father), and the Cunninghills would have been planetary emperors of a new age. 

But alas, no, Ollie wasn't ambitious enough to save his family's life, he had been out drinking and fucking when he should'a been studying, building, and practicing. The professor had been the one building, planning, preparing. The Professor had won, sort of. He still didn't know any blessings, that would have sealed the deal, but this was close enough. A solid and decisive win for the Professor, for the odd brand of mystic research he practiced, and a brutal and final loss for the Cunninghills.

Ollie hoped now that the whole council was dead, regardless. If the Professor won, may it be a whole victory. May he and his have been kill't by the all-time winner, the new king and emperor of planet Earth. Then his failure would be, at least a bit, noble. A reasonable failure. Who could win against such an enemy as he who conquers all? But the Emperor would still remember their names in the dark of night, and nod quietly to the deaths of his once formidable adversaries.