Blood On Borrowed Wings: A Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Darren Stapleton

  ‘There were no further instructions coming. You were supposed to wake up and break out. You are an ex-Slayer. That is what you are programmed to do. And they know that. You know that.’ Doc went to take a sip of tea, realised his cup was empty, shook his head and placed the empty cup upside down on the tray.

  ‘So, by that logic, they could have known we would come here too,’ said Pan.

  ‘We were not followed. I made sure of it. We got here by a series of half loops and double backs. There’s no way anyone followed us, on ground or above.’

  ‘I concur,’ said Doc standing, his knees eliciting an audible pop as he did. ‘So what do you think would normally be the next thing you’d do, after leaving me here?’

  ‘I’d go back to the cells, properly investigate, maybe even wait for someone else to show with further instructions.’

  ‘So don’t do the obvious. Do the opposite. That will make them veer from their plans and react to you rather than control you. You must disembark from your usual train of thought, Drake.’ He rose from his chair and smiled, possibly pleased he had made it to the end of the conversation without any half loops or double backs or perhaps that he had successfully remembered my name.

  ‘In fact, more than simply being contrary, I would encourage you to think before you think.’ He walked into the kitchen. ‘More tea?’

  I shook my head at the effortless profundity of his statement.

  ‘I’ll have coffee.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like coffee,’ said Pan.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Doc from the next room.

  Pan shook her head and frowned as a flick of hair swung down over her eyes.

  Doc came back into the room as the water boiled, ‘I need to make more notes, please excuse me.’ He scribbled a few short sentences, tapping his pencil when details eluded him. Then satisfied, he set his book back on the table, on a pile of other, similar notebooks.

  Pan looked at the pile of books. ‘It must be a chore living like this, having to write everything down,’ she said.

  ‘Ignorance can be bliss,’ he said.

  ‘You mean the absence of worry and concern?’ I asked.

  ‘No. My condition in itself gives cause for both. What I mean is,’ he paused and looked up, searching the painted ceiling of his mind for the right picture, ‘all my life, logic has been prevalent in my thinking. My modus operandum if you will, from my time spent learning basic physician duties as a Mudhead Police Medical Officer to the intricate, pioneering work on transplants and grafts, burns and battle wounds, the idiosyncrasies of the body itself. Logic is the thread running through it all. As a scientist and as a human being, it has always affected my decisions and actions, given meaning to my life and helped me help others.’

  ‘But that’s the same for all of us,’ said Pan.

  ‘To a point,’ said Doc, ‘but then other influences kick in. Conditioning, how we respond or react to stimulus is as much, if not more, governed by experience than logic. The bell rings, the dog salivates.’

  ‘I’m locked up, I escape.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Doc. ‘Psychologists also argue that on some level our genetic encoding will determine our course of action, whether we have a predisposition to independence or family, egalitarianism or intolerance, peace or rage. And so on.’

  Pan looked at me as Doc Carlow had said ‘rage’, I pretended not to notice.

  ‘I’m not saying those things do not have any bearing on me or the person I am any more, it is just they affect my decision making here and now less than they used to...’ He stood to go back into the kitchen. ‘And the bliss comes from being governed primarily by logic. It lends decision making an uncomplicated purity, gives me a kind of freedom if you will.’

  ‘Doesn’t that mean you miss out on some things as well?’ said Pan.

  ‘Yes, it does. Absolutely. Good and bad. I can recall vividly most events in my life up to the accident. The building blocks for who I am, the type of person I am, the foundations for the body and the soul are already laid. Everything I have learned, ingrained.’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘And here Drake proves my point. That the person I have come to be will no longer be shaped by catastrophes or loss, jaded by bad experiences or disappointments. I can be positive and logical because that is all I can be, all I ever will be. It is what I logically choose.’

  ‘What about the passage of time? Are you aware of it?’ asked Pan, ignoring the tension between us now. These were all similar questions that I had asked Doc myself, at one time or another.

  ‘Time means very little to me anymore. It is simply our attempt at quantifying the mystical onto a scale of measurable units. To me time is divided into two epochs. Before the acci… I mean before Bethscape Field and today.’

  ‘But don’t you miss practising medicine?’ asked Pan.

  ‘Yes. Every single day. Though, in my case, the frustration comes from what I do know rather than what I have forgotten.’

  He went back into the kitchen then and Pan went back to tending to her hair, frowning as she did.

  ‘He was one of the best,’ I said. ‘He could do things on the battlefield that surgeons in fixed hospitals would struggle with, even seen him splice a wing.’

  ‘Is that why he was with you, at Bethscape Field?’

  ‘He was the field Doctor, like I said, one of the best, one of the good guys, and there aren’t many. He came along to learn and to help save lives. As simple and as complicated as that.’ Something about Pan’s demeanour told me I had been terse with my last response.

  ‘Look, it’s been a long day. We’ll finish this drink and then get you home and paid for your trouble.”

  ‘Fine,’ it was Pan’s turn to snap.

  Doc came back into the room with the tray of drinks and I was reminded of the grace and finesse he had always conducted himself with. He was a neat, precise man, in everything he did; as decisive and elegant with thoughts as he was with a scalpel. It reminded me of the intricate, protracted medical operations I had seen him perform and brought back the bone deep, head spinning sadness of loss, which settled in my stomach like a stone balloon. I missed him and I grieved for him.

  For us both.

  For us all.

  I had a drink and was also reminded how much I hated coffee.

  The dull aches in my leg and arm were subsiding and the drug induced fugue of intoxication was dissipating.

  The morning was pressing on and it would soon be time to go.

  Whilst I was reluctant to leave this sanctuary of warm drinks and cool observation, I was keen to get in motion; to take the fight to them, whoever they were. This time there were no fat cat lawyers, politicians or directors pulling my strings, telling me where to go, what was expected.

  This was not the chain of command or other people’s Machiavellian agendas. It was about survival and pride and self-preservation as it was on any battlefield.

  And it felt as exhilarating and as petrifying as I had remembered it.

  A bird in the hand will shit on your palm.

  Twisted Sayings

  P. Leech

  CHAPTER 23

  Mckeever looked into the eyes of the thrush and angled his head as if searching for a secret message or sign of life. He tilted the birds small head and it flopped back limply.

  Tutting, he threw the dead bird into a dark musty corner of the practice area, where it came to rest near the door, against ornate scrolled skirting that had peeled and warped from damp and neglect. One of its wings was outstretched as if waving a doleful last goodbye.

  It reminded him of Newton.

  Croel was laughing and counting his credits.

  ‘Right through the heart. Good shooting,’ said Mckeever.

  ‘I could hit a gnat’s appendage on the dangle with this thing.’ Pleased with himself, he tapped a dirty finger on the smooth wooden stock of his crossbow. Mckeever had often noticed Croel get a strange look on his face
whenever he was working with or talking about his crossbow. It had taken him a few moments to register what emotions were in play, so alien were they to him and this particular part of the world. Mckeever supposed it was not love or admiration, but as close to those two emotions as could be mustered by a heartless sadist.

  ‘A gnat's danglies? Now that might be a bet worth taking,’ said Mckeever. He looked around the floor at the rotting bodies of the small vermin and birds that had had the gall or misfortune to venture near the building in the past. Visitors, winged, furred or otherwise, came to these environs less and less these days. Maybe word of beak and whisker had spread widely of the two men’s cruelty or maybe the animals could smell or feel death emanating from the building's innards and so afforded it as wide a berth as possible, lest they join the rotting carcasses of their brethren on the spongy, mildew patterned floor.

  ‘The food chain has not been forged fairly, has it?’ asked Mckeever.

  ‘Seems fair enough to me. We’re at the top.’

  Mckeever shrugged.

  ‘Birds are pea-brained dinosaurs who were put on this earth to supply me with target practice and you with something else to carp on about.’ Croel folded in the armatures of his crossbow and carefully slipped it into its leather case, which he slung at his hip casually, like it was not the most important thing in the world to him.

  ‘They represent us before evolution kicked in; I feel an affinity with them.'

  ‘Evolution? We are genetic mutations Mckeever, you know that.’

  ‘But generations....’

  ‘Generations? The Weismann barrier was breached. We are the result of DNA therapy and a fuck up with what was supposed to be the cure for avian flu. Our ancestors emerged accidentally from lab soup.’

  ‘All of nature is not an accident.’

  ‘Yes, Mckeever, it is.’

  Mckeever frowned.

  ‘Look, if you want to whistle whilst crapping on people from a great height then feel free to my friend, it’s a hobby, but do not expect me to go all bleary eyed about evolution every time a bird is stupid enough to wander into my field of vision.’

  ‘Next time, shoot gnats.’

  ‘I’ll shoot what I want.’

  ‘Good luck catching them. How is the shoulder?’

  Croel narrowed his eyes to slits, his pointed chin and long, drawn features gave him the appearance of a funeral director. A pallor which suggested he did not care much for the open air. His dark sunken eyes merely added to the illusion that this man spent more time with the dead than the living. He glowered darkly at Mckeever, darted a thin tongue across his sharp yellow teeth and hissed, ‘Was that meant to be a threat, Cyclops?’

  Mckeever drew himself up to his full height, pushed his hefty shoulders back and breathed in to puff out the concrete slabs of his chest. His face was rotund, planet like and though it had the same sickly ashen hue of Croel’s it was without the honed, rat-like appearance. His eye looked like a granite marble deeply recessed under the tombstone mantle of his forehead. His frown revealed weather worn cracks and fissures a trawler man would have been proud of.

  ‘It was not a threat. If I had wanted to threaten you, I would have warned you about danger of me dropping my digested breakfast on you from a great height,’ he paused, ‘whilst whistling.’

  They stared at each other for a few seconds that stretched out into millennia, the library was entirely quiet and the dark of the room seemed to grow and spread like a stain. Mckeever’s foot twitched with nervous energy and Croel hissed a stale breath to expel some inner demon of his own.

  Then the moment was gone.

  Croel turned to leave without worrying about putting Mckeever at his back, and Mckeever followed without once thinking of the advantage this gave him.

  As he entered the stairwell, Croel spoke over his shoulder, ‘It’s time we went to the Deadlands cells, we have our instructions to release them and put the other miscreants out of their misery. Assess the damage. Get Newton’s wings to Coyle too.’

  ‘But not in that order.’

  ‘They don’t care about the order, just about the timing.'

  Mckeever nodded.

  'A drink before we go? We’ll say a toast to sitting and easy credits.’

  Mckeever followed him down the stairs. He had got the bird reference and wondered if Croel had meant to use it.

  Had he seen the smug glee smeared across his partner’s wrinkled face, he would have had no doubt at all.

  Croel stepped on the thrush as he left. He sniggered as it popped like a small paper bag.

  In my experience all protesters detest themselves. And showers.

  Press Interview

  Lord E Guilford

  CHAPTER 24

  ‘I’m surprised you wanted to come along,’ I said. I stuffed the change the taxi driver had begrudgingly returned, into my trouser pocket.

  ‘I’m full of surprises,’ Pan said. Her eyebrows arched as she spoke, and despite her tired eyes, a little flash of light flickered behind them, still being playful.

  ‘You’re full of something,’ I said.

  She spread the thin-lipped fake smile that girls are often so good at, right across her expressionless face, tipped her head to one side in faux deference and then headed towards the Angelbrawl Arena doors. I followed.

  The Horizoneer protesters were amassed like a bunch of tired and surly kids just outside the doors. They were quiet today, though our arrival seemed to have motivated a few of the more energetic among them into elevating their placards and voices. The twenty to thirty members presented their ideology of a unified Nimbus state with little temerity or gusto. They sounded almost apologetic in tone, some even choosing to look at their shoes rather than their own displayed messages about unification and harmony. The Horizoneers used to be an organised voice of opposition, and though some swell of public opinion still backed their movement, they had not really made any significant waves since their failed attempt at launching an aircraft had ended in significant loss of life and loss of face. All they had done was to strengthen the aircraft and air travel restrictions they so vehemently opposed. Well, it used to be vehemently, at least.

  Though bringing the sky and ground together was of noteworthy concern to these members, more immediate and pressing issues seemed to be their preoccupation: ‘When’s lunch?’, ‘Looks like it’s going to rain.’ And: ‘I’m only here because I thought it would get me laid.’

  I gave them my best institutionalised Vanguard Slayer salute and walked over. My leg still ached but it felt good to be moving, especially after the cramped taxi journey here. Sleep could wait.

  Their apathy annoyed me. ‘Do you really think you’re making a difference?’ I said, to the collective rather than anyone in particular.

  ‘Fascist scum,’ said one of the younger members. The ones who had been sitting now lurched to their feet, ironically like they had been called to a military attention, stirred by an opportunity to be contrary. One of them rubbed the palms of his hands into his own eyes so vigorously it seemed as if he was rising from a hundred year torpa.

  ‘Less of the “Fascist”,’ I said.

  ‘Excuse my earnest colleague,’ said a hawkish looking woman from the back of the group, ‘he is one of our more outspoken members.’

  ‘Well, his appraisal was pretty off,’ I said, ‘but at least he’s awake now.’

  ‘His assessment of you was not quite strong enough, if you ask me,’ whispered Pan.

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘We have no fight with soldiers or, erm,’ she looked Pan up and down in that way only women can, ‘ah, working girls. Our protest is with the bureaucrats and businessmen who perpetuate the division between Nimbus City and the Lowlands because it serves their pockets and own political gain.’

  ‘Ex-soldier,’ I said.

  Pan folded her arms high across her chest.

  The protester carried on, no doubt happy for the opportunity to continue with her speech. />
  ‘Ex. Whatever. It is not your fault you chose to work for a secular organisation that decided to forget it’s ground bound brothers and sisters in favour of creating an elitist haven in the heavens. We should be allowed to live up there. Travel up there. Be nearer the stars.’

  ‘They seem just as far away, believe me,’ I said.

  ‘The Government keep us down here, in their shadow, whilst they sit pretty in the sun. Why not join us, help fight the inequities?’

  ‘There will always be haves and have nots. That’s just the way life is,’ I said, ‘live with it.’

  ‘Sounds like an anti-anti-protest song,’ said the scum boy.

  ‘If it’s not then it should be,’ said Pan.

  ‘We’re here today to gather support, To stop the profit made from these Angelbrawls streaming skyward.’

  ‘No, you are not. You are here today because you are clinging to the media circus hangover from the last couple of days, hoping for some kind of publicity, which, even second hand, is better than none at all.’ I was enjoying the banter and hoping the woman would bite. I felt like I was prodding a reclining corpse and waiting for signs of life.

  ‘Don’t you think the world would be a better place under Horizon? No restrictions? No division?’ She turned to face her small crowd of fellow believers.

  ‘Life is about highs and lows, ups and downs…’

  ‘Ins and outs,’ added Pan, smirking.

  ‘… one gives the other perspective, relief, motion. Only when we have all come together as one nation, one Nimbus, can Horizon…’

  A loudspeaker spluttered into life and a static filled voice announced:

  ‘This is your final warning. Repeat, this is your final warning. Failure to remove yourselves and your property from the area will result in forcible ejection from the grounds. The Mudhead Police will be called, you will be liable for all damages and costs. This is your final warning.’

  The protesters looked like small animals in large headlights.