Alex was screaming and shouting and stamping and swearing and frothing at the mouth. He was a bit of an embarrassment, but there was nothing we could do about him. He was ruined. His scam had come unstuck. The Staxa Fun Caper was no fun at all. We left him to it and drifted away.
‘Check poor old Stax, will you,’ Rachel said.
We looked over towards the melee. Another couple of riders had got back onto their horses and were setting off for the winning post. The rest — horses and jockeys — were wandering around dazed or lying in the mud waving their arms and legs. Except for Staxa Fun and Great Guns. They were murdering each other. There was this unholy dust-up. Although I suppose you’d have to call it a mud-up. It was awesome to behold.
The two horses were lunging and kicking and biting and whinnying. Charging and retreating. Turning their great rumps towards each other, lashing out with both hind legs at once.
‘Go Staxa!’ yelled Tanya. ‘Kill the crudwit.’
Like I say, it was awesome to behold. A scene from Dungeons and Dragons, a scene from Hades, a scene from the Primeval Swamp, an historic clash of steel and flesh from the Mists of Time itself. And it was a fair fight. The two horses were evenly matched. They were set to slog it out until nightfall.
But Great Guns had mates. And Staxa had no mates at all. And Great Guns’ mates began to join in. One by one they picked themselves up out of the mud and began to circle the titanic pair. They were like jackals, like hyenas, prowling around the edges, rushing in for a quick bite or kick when they thought they could get away with it. Those jockeys who were on their feet were no help: they scurried around underfoot, trying to grab reins, trying to assert the mastery of man over beast. They might as well have tried to master a volcano. All they got was tromped on. Every horse that was still capable of standing was going for Staxa. And they were going to kill him.
‘You great bullies,’ yelled Tanya.
But her voice was lost in the roar and scream of the crowd. All those dorks and buffoons we’d seen in the car park, the guys in silly aprons, the women in hats like fruit shops, they’d all gone ape. All of them were now yelling and barracking and howling for blood.
‘Right,’ Rachel said. ‘Action … Grab Alex and get the keys off him. Get the van down there.’
I looked around for Alex. I could see his head twenty metres away across the crowd. He was out of it. He was lost in the realms of cosmic bankruptcy. Gazza saw him too and started to force his way through the mob. I turned to Rachel.
‘How are we meant to get the van onto the track?’
‘Just barge it through,’ she said. ‘Use it like a bulldozer.’
Easier said than done. The van was round the back of the stables along with all the other horse floats. There were a few fences and walls and rails and crowds of people between the van and poor old Staxa. But I needn’t have worried. Staxa knew his only hope was in the sanctuary of the furniture van. And what a van can’t jump, a steeplechaser can. With a mad charge he smashed through the snarling ring of his tormentors and set off round the track.
A well-ordered jump race with jockeys in the saddle would be one thing. A crazed rampage of horses who’ve ditched their jockeys is another. The mob thundered after Staxa, clearing the fences and rails with mighty leaps. And Staxa led them an heroic chase.
He quit the race track and thundered through a car park. The mob followed. He quit the car park and careered through the betting ring. The mob followed. Bookies dived for cover. Bookies were knocked aside. Bags of money went everywhere. Crazed punters could hardly believe their luck and scrabbled on the ground to help the bookies pick up the notes.
‘Stop watching the fun,’ Rachel said. ‘Let’s get to the van before Staxa does.’
Me and Rachel and Tanya and her mum started to race for the van. We passed Alex, still fuming and mumbling to himself, scarcely aware that Gazza had already relieved him of his car keys. We could see Gazza ahead of us, pushing through the crowd. Making for the stable car park. There was an official in a brown dustcoat with a big badge, guarding the gate to the car park. Gazza flashed something at him and stormed through — he’d probably knocked off Alex’s pass along with the keys. The official looked at the rest of us as if we were the barbarians at the gate.
‘There’s worse to come,’ Rachel told him.
We just barged through in a group. ‘Hold it,’ said the official. But you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. His attention was already on the approaching tidal wave. We raced for the van. Gazza was in the cabin, revving up the engine. Tanya and I hauled on the levers and swung the back doors open wide.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ yelled Gazza out of the cab window. ‘Get on board!’
Tanya and I scrambled into the back of the van. Rachel and Tanya’s mum piled into the front with Gazza. Tanya and I looked out of the open van doors.
Staxa was coming straight at us like a bullet train towards a tunnel. And what a sight Staxa was: mud, blood, sweat, great flecks of foam around his mouth, and his eyes — crazed beyond endurance. And behind Staxa, smashing through the gate, cannonading off cars and horse floats, came the mob.
‘Back against the wall,’ Tanya yelled.
But she needn’t have bothered. I was already spread-eagled against one side of the van. Tanya was spread-eagled against the other. And in came Staxa.
Did he come in! Did he what? He flew. His front legs were stretched out before him, his back legs unleashed every last ounce of power and through those wide open doors came the maddest, most deranged beast that ever graduated from a dentistry school.
He hit the floor of the furniture van, skidded on his stomach with his legs spread out in all directions and crashed his skull into the far end behind the driver’s cabin. If Gazza needed a signal, this was it. He let in the clutch and we were away.
Tanya and I couldn’t see where we were going. But we could see out between the wildly swinging back doors. What a sight: mad horses, mad officials, gleeful TV camera operators, stunned punters. And Poldarski and his daughters. There was a look of real satisfaction on Poldarski’s face. He shouted something gleeful at us, but there was no way we could hear. One of the daughters was calmly blowing a bubble. And then the open road. Trees, fields, farmhouses, cows and the odd horse chewing grass in utter contentment. Staxa lay on the floor, his eyes closed, breathing in huge great rasping breaths. Tanya slid down beside him. She lifted his head onto her lap and stroked his nose.
Gazza found a side road. Then he found a side track that ran up a hill and into some trees. He stopped the van in the trees and we waited until it was dark. Staxa recovered a bit. But, as no one had brought a laptop, it was a bit hard to find out what he was feeling. He lay on the van floor, his head on Tanya’s lap. He didn’t seem to want to stand up. Gazza climbed into the back of the van and ran his hands over Staxa, then he climbed out and came over to where the rest of us were sitting on a log.
‘His leg’s broken,’ Gazza said. ‘He must have done it when he landed in the van.’
‘They normally shoot horses with broken legs,’ Rachel said. ‘The muscles are so strong they pull the leg out of alignment and you can never set them straight.’
‘Well, we can’t shoot poor Luis,’ Gazza said. ‘There are limits.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Rachel. ‘We’ll fix him up somehow. Alex will know what to do. But where are we going to go now? I don’t think we should take Staxa back to the farm. The place will be crawling with cops and stewards and television crews, and investigative journalists. I could live without that sort of publicity. I’m a respectable neurosurgeon.’
‘Staxa will want somewhere nice and quiet too,’ said Mrs Chandor.
‘If Alex is going to set his leg,’ he’ll need a major veterinary surgery,’ Gazza said.
‘Deadsville,’ I said. ‘Nice and quiet. Nobody knows it’s there. Plenty of gear for doing operations.’
‘We’d never get Staxa down the stairs with a broken leg. Look what happened last time.’
‘Last time he really was a horse,’ I said. ‘This time he’s Luis. Luis will be a bit more co-operative. Even on three legs.’
So we waited until dark and then spent half the night sneaking the furniture van down to the cryonics lab. It’s a bit hard to go sneaking around in a huge van marked HERE TO THERE REMOVALS, ASK DRIVER FOR QUOTE but Gazza stayed on the back roads and we didn’t get stopped. Tanya and I rode in the back with Staxa. Poor horse. Poor dentist. He wasn’t well. He rolled his eyes a few times. Then closed them. I wished we’d brought a laptop. That way we’d have known what his last words were. As it was he seemed to establish some sort of wordless communication with Tanya.
‘Yeah, I know, mate, I know,’ Tanya said to him, as if she were replying to something he’d said. She stroked his neck and said, ‘It’s just the great race of life, Staxy. It’s better to have had a bloody go, than never to have done nothing. Have a bit of a sleep.’
The horse opened his eyes once more, looked at Tanya and sighed. A couple of minutes before we reached the City of the Provisionally Dead, Staxa himself really was dead.
Three minutes after we arrived, Alex and Easter turned up. Easter had hot-wired Rachel’s car. They’d been driving around looking for us. They’d had enough sense to realize we wouldn’t go back to the farm. The two men looked remarkably gloomy. I don’t think they’d been talking to one another. Easter was still covered in mud.
‘How’s Luis?’ Alex asked.
‘Dead,’ Rachel said.
‘How?’ said Alex.
‘Dunno,’ said Rachel. ‘Died of wounds, died of shock, died of organ rejection, died of exhaustion, died of grief, died of something — take your pick.’
‘Existential angst,’ Tanya said.
‘What?’ Alex said.
‘The poor horse died of existential angst. I was with him. I could see it in his eyes. See, I used to get this weekly magazine, right? One Hundred Great Ideas Made Simple. They did one idea every week and you put them all in this two-ring binder and at the end of two years you knew all about it.’
‘All about this existential angst?’ I said.
‘Naw. That was just week thirty-two. There was lots of other stuff as well. Reincarnation. The Wisdom of the Ancients. The Rainbow Serpent. Turning Base Metal into Gold …’
‘Tanya, dear,’ said Rachel. ‘Do be quiet. There’s a love.’
‘I suppose I could do an autopsy,’ Alex said. ‘See what he did die of.’ He didn’t sound very enthusiastic.
‘No way,’ Rachel said. ‘I’m not having you messing around in poor Staxa’s guts. They’ll want him in the best possible condition.’
‘Who will?’
‘The nano-technicians. The whizz kids of the future. This here is a cryonics lab, if you’ve forgotten. We’ll just stick poor old Staxa in the nitrogen and bingo, in a few hundred years’ time, they’ll bring him back to life again. And if they’ve really got their act together by then, they can even grow a new body for Luis and stick his brains back in it. You get one DNA molecule, turn off the genes for the brains, grow the rest, and there you are; new home for Luis’ old grey matter. Or they can use his old body — that’s in the vats as well.’
‘I’m not just bankrupt,’ said Alex gloomily. ‘I’m a few million dollars in the red. Who’s going to pay for the nitrogen?’
‘Oh, stop whinging all the time,’ said Rachel. ‘You win some, you lose some. That’s life, buster. You’ll think of a new scam. Maybe the next one will work. You’ll bounce back. You could even try something honest for a change. Come on, let’s get Staxa into the nitrogen before brainrot sets in.’
‘The nano-technicians are going to reverse brainrot,’ Alex said.
‘That’s the theory, but don’t bet on it. Move.’
Moving a dead horse isn’t that simple. But we did it. We backed the furniture van into the warehouse and managed to winch poor Staxa onto the forklift. Then Alex backed the forklift down the concrete stairs. The machine bumped and swayed, but it didn’t tip over. Once we were inside the steel forest, Alex drove the forklift up to the jumbo-sized tank they called the Pets’ Pool.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Who’s going up?’
‘Up where?’ I said.
‘Up on top of the tank. These things have lids, you know.’
Fool that I was, I volunteered. I climbed onto the fork lift beside Staxa.
‘It’ll take more than one to lift the lid,’ Alex said. ‘This tank’s got a horse-sized lid.’
Fools that they were, Gazza and Rachel climbed onto the forks beside me and Staxa. Alex gunned the motor and pushed the up lever. We began to ascend. The cold, gleaming side of the tank slid past. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling approached. We reached the limit of the machine’s reach and stepped onto the top of the tank. There was a broad rim and then a removable centre section. I looked down to the concrete floor. Easter, Tanya and her mum were leaning back against one of the normal-sized cylinders, craning their necks to look up.
‘Don’t dive in,’ Tanya yelled.
‘Not us,’ I shouted back. ‘We can’t swim.’
With a bit of difficulty we got the lid off. It was half a metre thick and weighed a ton. We balanced it on the side of the tank away from Staxa. I looked down into the tank. I’d half expected to see ponies and cats and dogs and other dead pets bobbing about like icebergs. But all I could see was mist, great swirling clouds of cold white mist. It rose up out of the tank and froze our ankles. It cascaded down the outside of the tank and slid along the concrete floor. I saw Tanya jump out of its way and climb onto the driver’s perch next to Alex.
‘Come on,’ Gazza said. ‘Let’s not stand around up here all day.’
‘I rather like the view,’ Rachel said.
‘I’ve seen better,’ Gazza said.
‘Stop bickering,’ I said.
We started to push Staxa off the forks. He wouldn’t budge. We pushed harder. He still wouldn’t budge. Under the cold fluorescent lights the cold mist swirled and eddied.
‘Put a bit of effort into it,’ Rachel said. ‘One god-almighty shove should do it.’
We gave Staxa one god-almighty shove. Suddenly he budged. He shot off the forks and into the mist. Gazza overbalanced and began to follow him. I grabbed Gazza’s arm, but I had no grip on anything else. For a second I was teetering. Suddenly Rachel was hanging onto the forklift with one hand and grabbing my collar with the other. But it was no use, I was over the edge, gone. I was pulling her in.
‘Let go of me,’ I yelled.
‘I’m coming too,’ she said and let go of the forklift.
The three of us entered the mist.