Untitled Part 14
IN NO CONTEXT CAN THE COWS ARE ATTACKING be considered good news.
Will picked up Rachel in a firefighter's lift – for a gentle healer, he was deceptively strong – and together we jogged over to join Nico at the window.
In the railyard below, the cows were staging a revolution. They'd busted through the sides of their cattle cars like an avalanche through a picket fence and were now stampeding towards the Dare residence. I suspected the cattle hadn't been trapped in those cars at all. They'd simply been waiting for the right moment to break out and kill us.
They were beautiful in a nightmarish way. Each was twice the size of a normal bovine, with bright blue eyes and shaggy red hair that rippled in dizzying whorls like a living Van Gogh painting. Both cows and bulls – yes, I could tell the difference; I was a cow expert – possessed huge curved horns that would have made excellent drinking cups for the largest and thirstiest of Lu's Celtic kinfolk.
A line of freight cars stood between us and the cows, but that didn't deter the herd. They barrelled straight through, toppling and flattening the cars like origami boxes.
'Do we fight?' Meg asked, her voice full of doubt.
The name of these creatures suddenly came back to me – too late, as usual. Earlier, I'd mentioned that troglodytes were known for fighting bulls, but I hadn't put the facts together. Perhaps Nero had parked the cattle cars here as a trap, knowing we might seek out Rachel's help. Or perhaps their presence was simply the Fates' cruel way of laughing at me. Oh, you want to play the troglodyte card? We counter with cows!
'Fighting would be no use,' I said miserably. 'Those are tauri silvestres – forest bulls , the Romans called them. Their hides cannot be pierced. According to legend, the tauri are ancestral enemies of Nico's friends, the troglodytes.'
'So now you believe the trogs exist?' Nico asked.
'I am learning to believe in all sorts of things that can kill me!'
The first wave of cattle reached the Dares' retaining wall. They ploughed through it and charged the house.
'We need to run!' I said, exercising my noble duty as Lord Obvious of Duh.
Nico led the way. Will followed close behind with Rachel still draped over his shoulder, Meg and me at his back.
We were halfway down the hall when the house began to shake. Cracks zigzagged up the walls. At the top of the floating staircase, we discovered (fun fact) a floating staircase will cease to float if a forest bull tries to climb it. The lower steps had been stripped from the wall. Bulls rampaged through the corridor below like a crowd of Black Friday bargain hunters, stomping on broken steps and crashing through the atrium's glass walls, renovating the Dares' house with extreme prejudice.
'At least they can't get up here,' Will said.
The floor shook again as the tauri took out another wall.
'We'll be down there soon enough,' Meg said. 'Is there another way out?'
Rachel groaned. 'Me. Down.'
Will eased her to her feet. She swayed and blinked, trying to process the scene below us.
'Cows,' Rachel said.
'Yeah,' Nico agreed.
Rachel pointed weakly down the hall we'd come from. 'This way.'
Using Meg as a crutch, Rachel led us back towards her bedroom. She took a sharp right, then clambered down another set of stairs into the garage. On the polished concrete floor sat two Ferraris, both bright red – because why have one midlife crisis when you can have two? In the house behind us, I could hear the cows bellowing angrily, crashing and smashing as they remodelled the Dare compound for that hot apocalyptic barnyard look.
'Keys,' Rachel said. 'Look for car keys!'
Will, Nico and I scrambled into action. We found no keys in the cars – that would have been too convenient. No keys on the wall hooks, in the storage bins or on the shelves. Either Mr Dare kept the keys with him at all times, or the Ferraris were meant to be purely decorative.
'Nothing!' I said.
Rachel muttered something about her father that I won't repeat. 'Never mind.' She hit a button on the wall. The garage door began to rumble open. 'I'm feeling better. We'll go on foot.'
We spilled into the street and headed north as fast as Rachel could hobble. We were half a block away when the Dare residence shuddered, groaned and imploded, exhaling a mushroom cloud of dust and debris.
'Rachel, I'm so sorry,' Will said.
'Don't care. I hated that place anyway. Dad will just move us to one of his other mansions.'
'But your art!' Meg said.
Rachel's expression tightened. 'Art can be made again. People can't. Keep moving!'
I knew we wouldn't have long before the tauri silvestres found us. Along this part of the Brooklyn waterfront, the blocks were long, the roads wide and the sight lines clear – perfect for a supernatural stampede. We had almost made it to the pineapple matcha café when Meg yelled, 'The Sylvesters are coming!'
'Meg,' I wheezed, 'the cows are not all named Sylvester.'
She was right about the threat, though. The demon cattle, apparently unfazed by a building falling on them, emerged from the wreckage of Chez Dare. The herd began to regroup in the middle of the street, shaking rubble from their red hides like dogs fresh from a bath.
'Get out of sight?' Nico asked, pointing to the café.
'Too late,' Will said.
The cows had spotted us. A dozen sets of blue eyes fixed on our position. The tauri raised their heads, mooed their battle moos and charged. I suppose we could still have ducked into the café, just so the cows would destroy it and save the neighbourhood from the threat of avocado bagels. Instead, we ran.
I realized this would only delay the inevitable. Even if Rachel hadn't been groggy from her snake-induced trance, we couldn't outrun the cows.
'They're gaining!' Meg yelled. 'You sure we can't fight them?'
'You want to try?' I asked. 'After what they did to the house?'
'So what's their weakness?' Rachel asked. 'They have to have an Achilles' heel!'
Why did people always assume this? Why did they obsess about an Achilles' heel? Just because one Greek hero had a vulnerable spot behind his foot, that didn't mean every monster, demigod and villain from Ancient Greek times also had a podiatric problem. Most monsters, in fact, did not have a secret weakness. They were annoying that way.
Nevertheless, I racked my brain for any factoids I might have gleaned from Aelian's trashy bestseller On the Nature of Animals . (Not that I normally read such things, of course.)
'Pits?' I speculated. 'I think farmers in Ethiopia used pits against the tauri.'
'Like peach pits?' Meg asked.
'No, like pits in the ground!'
'Fresh out of pits!' Rachel said.
The tauri had halved the distance between us. Another hundred yards and they would smash us into road jelly.
'There!' Nico yelled. 'Follow me!'
He sprinted into the lead.
I had to give him credit. When Nico chose a pit, he went for broke. He ran to the luxury-apartment construction site, summoned his black Stygian sword from thin air and slashed through the chain-link fence. We followed him inside, where a narrow rim of trailers and portable potties surrounded a fifty-foot-deep square crater. A giant crane rose from the centre of the chasm, its jib extending towards us at just about knee-level. The site seemed abandoned. Perhaps it was lunch hour? Perhaps all the workers were at the pineapple matcha café? Whatever the case, I was glad not to have mortals in the way of danger.
(Look at me, caring about innocent bystanders. The other Olympians would have teased me mercilessly.)
'Nico,' Rachel said, 'this is more of a canyon.'
'It's all we've got!' Nico ran to the edge of the pit ... and jumped.
My heart felt like it jumped with him. I may have screamed.
Nico sailed over the abyss and landed on the crane's arm without even stumbling. He turned and extended his arm. 'Come on! It's only like eight feet. We practise bigger jumps at camp over lava!'
'Maybe you do,' I said.
The ground shook. The herd was right behind us.
Will backed up, took a running leap and landed next to Nico. He looked back at us with a reassuring nod. 'See? It's not that bad! We'll grab you!'
Rachel went next – no problem. Then Meg, the flying valentine. When her feet hit the crane, the whole arm creaked and shifted to the right, forcing my friends into a surfer's stance to catch their balance.
'Apollo,' Rachel said, 'hurry!'
She wasn't looking at me. She was looking behind me. The rumble of the herd was now a jackhammer in my spine.
I leaped, landing on the crane arm with the greatest belly flop since Icarus crashed into the Aegean.
My friends grabbed my arms to keep me from rolling into the abyss. I sat up, wheezing and groaning, just as the tauri reached the edge of the pit.
I hoped they would charge over and fall to their deaths like lemmings. Though, of course, lemmings don't actually do that. Bless their tiny hearts, lemmings are too smart to commit mass suicide. Unfortunately, so were the devil cows.
The first few tauri did indeed topple into the pit, unable to stop their momentum, but the rest of the herd successfully applied the brakes. There was a great deal of shoving and jostling and angry mooing from the back ranks, but it appeared that the one thing a forest bull could not smash through was another forest bull.
I muttered some bad words I hadn't used since #MinoansFirst was trending on social media. Across the narrow gap, the tauri stared at us with their murderous baby-blue eyes. The sour stench of their breath and the funk of their hides made my nostrils want to curl inwards and die. The animals fanned out around the lip of the chasm, but none tried to jump to the crane arm. Perhaps they'd learned their lesson from the Dares' floating staircase. Or perhaps they were smart enough to realize that hooves wouldn't do them much good on narrow steel girders.
Far below, the half-dozen fallen cattle were starting to get up, apparently unhurt by the fifty-foot drop. They paced around, mooing in outrage. Around the rim of the pit, the rest of the herd stood in a silent vigil as their fallen comrades grew more and more distressed. The six didn't seem physically injured, but their voices were clogged with rage. Their neck muscles bulged. Their eyes swelled. They stamped the ground, foamed at the mouth and then, one by one, fell over and lay motionless. Their bodies began to wither, their flesh dissolving until only their empty red hides remained.
Meg sobbed.
I couldn't blame her. Devilish or not, the cows' deaths were horrible to watch.
'What just happened?' Rachel's voice trembled.
'They choked on their own anger,' I said. 'I – I didn't think it was possible, but apparently Aelian got it right. Silvestres hate being stuck in pits so much they just ... gag and die. It's the only way to kill them.'
Meg shuddered. 'That's awful.'
The herd stared at us in apparent agreement. Their blue eyes were like laser beams burning into my face. I got the feeling they'd been after us before just because it was in their nature to kill. Now, it was personal.
'So what do we do about the rest of them?' Will asked. 'Dad, you sure you can't ...' He gestured at our bovine audience. 'I mean, you've got a god-level bow and two quivers of arrows at basically point-blank range.'
'Will!' Meg protested. Watching the bulls choke in the pit seemed to have sapped all her willingness to fight.
'I'm sorry, Meg,' Will said. 'But we're kind of stuck here.'
'It won't do any good,' I promised. 'Watch.'
I drew my bow. I nocked an arrow and aimed at the nearest cow. The cow simply stared back at me like, Really, dude?
I let the arrow fly – a perfect shot, right between the eyes with enough force to penetrate stone. The shaft splintered against the cow's forehead.
'Wow,' Nico said. 'Hard head.'
'It's the entire hide,' I told him. 'Look.'
I shot a second arrow at the cow's neck. The creature's shaggy red hair rippled, deflecting the arrowhead and turning the shaft downward so it skittered between the cow's legs.
'I could shoot at them all day,' I said. 'It won't help.'
'We can just wait them out,' Meg suggested. 'They'll get tired eventually and leave, right?'
Rachel shook her head. 'You forgot they waited outside my house in hot cattle cars for two days with no food or water until you showed up. I'm pretty sure these things can outlast us.'
I shivered. 'And we have a deadline. If we don't surrender to Nero by tonight ...' I made the explode-y hands gesture.
Will frowned. 'You might not get the chance to surrender. If Nero sent these cows, he might already know you're here. His men could be on the way.'
My mouth tasted like cow breath. I remembered what Luguselwa had told us about Nero having eyes everywhere. For all I knew, this construction site was one of the Triumvirate's projects. Surveillance drones might be hovering overhead right now ...
'We have to get out of here,' I decided.
'We could climb down the crane,' Will said. 'The cows couldn't follow us.'
'But then what?' Rachel asked. 'We'd be trapped in the pit.'
'Maybe not.' Nico stared into the chasm like he was calculating how many bodies could be buried in it. 'I see some good shadows down there. If we can reach the bottom safely ... How do you all feel about shadow-travel?'
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