Blood On Borrowed Wings: A Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Darren Stapleton

  ‘There a drink in here?’ I asked.

  Leonora took a small, heavy designer bottle of water from her bag.

  ‘No alcohol, but you can have this if you like.’

  I nodded, she twisted the top off and passed it over. I drank.

  ‘It wasn’t just Bethscape. It was Blackwings. Your government. Everything. I had had enough.’

  ‘So you sequestered yourself away from the world. You left the Slayers like you were leaving a friend due to irreconcilable differences. They’ve gone too far, enough is enough, etc., etc.’ Her tone was getting more harsh and I preferred it, I felt I was maybe one or two jabs away from an interesting conversation.

  ‘Leo. You are deluding yourself if you think you have friends in your profession, or that what you have chosen to do for a living, is altruistic. You like getting your way, along with the best of them and to say you don’t is naive to the nth degree. You will wind up crapped out of the other side of this machine before you can spell ‘altruism’ with nothing to show for your trouble but a new tweed suit and the same old wrinkles. Thanks for the drink.’

  I put the empty bottle in a cup holder in the driver’s console.

  ‘You’re a fucking coward, do you know that, Drake?’

  I carried on driving.

  ‘A fucking coward. Bravery has to be earned and not getting extinct like all the other dinosaurs, is not bravery. You haven’t lain down and you haven’t moved on. You are a fucking crippled dinosaur, alone, and waiting for the world to catch up, when it’s you that it left behind.’ She lowered her voice, ‘Everything you do is for yourself, even the constant purgatory you have created, and until you admit that, you are a fucking coward, Drake. Nothing more, nothing less. Now shut up and drive.’

  I did both.

  Smiling.

  *

  I pulled in to the side of the road and heard a discarded drinks container pop from somewhere underneath one of the wheels. The populace of citizens bustled back and forth across the litter-strewn pavements, hands thrust in pockets, heads bowed as if doing so might allow them to avoid more of the rain. People’s clothes were the same colour as their surroundings, greys on blacks and whites, tempered, worn and miserable. Here and there the occasional flash of colour peeked out from beneath a youth’s bedraggled raincoat, like a glimpse of spring in wintertime; they would learn soon enough.

  ‘We’re here,’ I said. It was the first I had spoken since our conversation’s end.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Get out, you’ll be driving back on your own.’

  ‘What? Where are we? It’s started raining.’

  Leonora peered out through her drizzle-streaked side window and saw nothing helpful. I reached into the back seat and grabbed my jacket,

  ‘Stay in here if you would prefer, but I have to go.’ I climbed out of the car, put on my jacket and flipped the collar up. The coolness bit into me and I could not decide if it was spiteful or refreshing. Leonora got out on the passenger side and looked across the car’s roof at me. She was not happy and visibly shivered, hunched her shoulders then turned her back.

  Already people were starting to pay attention: the flash car, the lady who looked strangely familiar, me in my funeral gear looking about as incongruous as it got for the heartlands of this Lowlands City. Someone began to walk over to Leonora, the early glimmer of recognition and an undoubtedly banal question dancing in their dull eyes. They nudged someone near them, maybe a friend, maybe not. They both whispered to each other and drew nearer.

  ‘Aren’t you the lady who…’

  I opened the car door and reached back inside to grab the empty bottle I had drained earlier. As I stretched, I felt the medical tape on my chest pull and snag my skin on the adhesive. Warm blood trickled and snaked down my chest, sticking my shirt to my body.

  ‘….with Governor Rose?’

  I noticed Leonora’s whole persona had changed. Her body language was open and welcoming, she demurred a smile back as if slightly embarrassed by the attention and slightly pleased by it. She was good. A consummate professional. More people strolled over. Leonora looked at me pleadingly.

  Get me out of here, her look said. You’re in your element, I smiled back.

  A few more people gathered.

  Perfect.

  I strode around to her side of the car. ‘Excuse me,’ I said to the crowd as if they were an interloping male asking my date for a dance, and grabbed Leonora by her left arm, spinning her towards me and closer.

  ‘We are outside the Horizoneers headquarters, the main resistance movement and protesters against Governor Rose all work there behind that false facade,’ I pointed to a plain shop front offering dry cleaning and ironing deals.

  Leonora looked confused.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For this.’

  She barely had time to process what I had said when I pulled her into me, kissed her deep and long, my mouth half open and closing around her pursed lips. Her back arched in protest but I firmly held her. Her arms came up to resist and pushed at my chest, sticking it to my shirt even more. A strange low sound was coming from her throat. I pressed in harder, her rump against the car’s ticking wet bonnet. I heard interest from the crowd escalate, whispers and gasps of surprise and laughter. Perfect. Then I broke away and shouted:

  ‘For you, Leo, and for Governor Rose!’ I raised the heavy bottle theatrically, horizontally out and back, as if I were hurling a javelin, and threw it through the plate glass window. It shattered and I heard neon pop, a poster offering three for two somethings shredded and dissolved. I heard screaming from inside and absently speculated that I may have hit someone. The crowd withdrew but held a perimeter at what they deemed to be a safe distance, close enough to gawk and far enough away to have a reasonable head start. I sat down, cross-legged, with my back on the passenger car door and waited for the Mudheads to descend in their masses to arrest me.

  I wondered if Leonora would keep shrieking until they did.

  Are we all not the sum of our mother’s love and our father’s shortcomings?

  Looking Back to Take a Step Forward

  Amelia Moss

  CHAPTER 58

  I had always been a loner, even when surrounded by family or friends I had perpetually cast myself out, placed distance or silence or war in the way of contact or communication.

  Mine was the seat in the corner.

  In service I had gone out up front, on point, I would lead, I took responsibility and made difficult decisions that some people would call brave or heroic. The truth was, I had nothing to lose, nothing to say and nothing to be but a Slayer. It was not heroic, it was inevitable. It let me avoid the confrontations and complications of relationships, the affectations of fake camaraderie and numbing small talk. I had immersed my life in sport, then Slayer training, flight and battle, and whilst I cared deeply for, even loved, the men I fought alongside, I was not close with any of them, not even my brother. I shirked any degree of involvement as if it was a vast unsolvable problem. I rode at the back of transport. I spoke little. I was a stone.

  This is not that ‘woe is me’ crap that you read about in the dailies, that the world does not understand me, blah blah blah. It is that I do not understand the ways of the world, its conventions and contradictions. I am not part of it, never have been. I have never felt the need to divulge what my inner voice whispers to me those times when I am alone or scared or bored. Seems to me people only share what they want to anyway, what they think will improve how they are seen or how they see themselves, what will get them what they want or portray them how they wish, what will bolster the lies or disguise the truth, to keep people where they want them to be, distant, close or under. To bully, coerce, manipulate or dominate. Communication is a form of combat, but one I never trained or excelled in. I was a loner by choice and that suited me and how I wanted to live. Saying nothing rarely complicated things further.

  But after my ar
rest, cuffed, sitting in the back of the Mudhead Police car between two Mudheads, watching Leonora and the thronging masses recede, I felt lonely. Lonely. The two groups of people I had experienced some semblance of belonging with, however vague, had disappeared. My family and unit were gone, totally dissipated, like feathers on a desert wind. And this was how I had wanted it.

  Wasn’t it?

  My chest hurt.

  As we headed for the Mudhead cells I felt like a person leaving on a vast ocean liner with no one to wave to and no one to care if I returned. And no one to miss.

  Then that hollow sensation was gone.

  I watched the Lowland slums grind by, blurs of glass and stone and wood, patchwork buildings threaded together so tenuously in places that it seemed a strong breeze, a flap of the wing, would be apocalyptic and level the whole area. I sighed and heard the whining officer next to me say something, but I tuned out and let the sensation go.

  They wanted me to feel like this, I knew that, I had no say.

  I sat there and harnessed my bitterness and my surging compulsion to get this thing finished. I had been shoved around, however I looked at it, played and chased, strung out and used and it was time I struck back and took the fight to them on my terms. As we drove on into the heart of where I needed to be, I knew that by this time tomorrow, everything would be different, everything.

  I would be shoving back.

  Hard.

  Nothing is always the best thing to do, when it is the most difficult thing to do.

  Action Inaction: Starting the Stop

  Karl Ether

  CHAPTER 59

  Of the three Mudheads who had been dispatched to pick me up, one, the enormous muscle bound Sergeant, had overzealously insisted on using far more force than my current phlegmatic demeanour required. He was also emphatic about sitting with me in the back seat and applying the cuffs a little too stiffly, so there was little room for comfort and even less room to entertain the notion that any degree of leniency or understanding may be coming my way.

  He sneered at me, through perfect teeth, for the entire journey and took up far too much of the back seat with his bulk and smarm.

  I knew the type, into career policing, fast track promotions from target hitting and arse kissing, high profile arrests and media chasing. I reckoned he even applied some kind of girly product to his hair whenever he took his hat off. I was another trophy for him, someone of note, of the moment, and I could open doors for him, fast track him some more. His excitement at having me on his arrest sheet was only diluted by his contempt for who I was.

  ‘You make me sick,’ he said.

  I said nothing, kept looking out of the window.

  ‘You used to be something. Someone. Someone everyone looked up to. Admired even.’

  It was still drizzling.

  ‘Now look at you. Look.’ He plucked at my jacket sleeve. ‘The new suit can’t hide the rotting shell inside, my friend.’

  ‘I am not your friend,’ I said, so low it was barely audible above the drone of the engine and susurration of the tyres on the wet, potholed road below.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  I did not answer.

  He slowly looked me up and down then leaned closer.

  ‘Shane, we got a facecloth?’ I did not know if he was addressing the driver or the other Mudhead.

  ‘No Sarge, why the f…’

  We both turned not understanding what he meant.

  Then he spat in my face.

  I turned my head, but still felt his hot spittle spray my neck and right ear, some hit the window.

  I turned back to face him.

  He sneered. I caught the whiff of something long dead and meaty on his breath as he leaned in and whispered,

  ‘I’m pulling a double shift tonight, just so I can find your cell, make sure you are trussed up like a Lowlands Dog, then come in and discuss things… further.’

  I saw the Mudhead driver look at his other colleague in the mirror and shake his head, seems even the Sergeant’s colleagues were not enamoured by his methods. I stared blankly at him, he ignored his colleague’s reactions and leaned in closer still.

  I leaned forward so our noses almost touched.

  Bite.

  Headbutt.

  Lunge.

  I did nothing, said nothing. I just sat back, chewed down all the white-hot rage and stowed it away for later, when it would come in handy. For the second time that day, I tried to travel the rest of the way in silence.

  *

  The Sergeant kicked the double doors of the Mudhead Police station open and bustled up to the admissions desk, shoving me in front like I was a human shield or battering ram.

  ‘What we got here, Coyle?’

  ‘I know, Frank, I know. Didn’t know they stacked shit this high either. It’s Theron.’

  Frank looked at me like I was a fairground curio, mild interest swarmed across his vapid expression, then he scribbled something in the register that I could not see as my face was slammed into the desk beside it.

  ‘Just in case you get any ideas about making a break for it, fly boy,’ he said. The wood felt cold and bit into my cheekbone. His hand was splayed and pressed on the other side of my neck and face to keep me pinned. His breath felt hot in my ear when he spoke again,

  ‘Now let’s kennel you.’

  I heard someone in the bullpen snigger. It had hurt, but it would not bruise. It was a show of force and I let him show. It meant nothing. He meant nothing.

  Coyle and the Desk Sergeant had a small yet noisy debate about whether the crime should be classed as primarily political or vandalistic and then I was booked in.

  He yanked me up by the short hair at the nape of my neck and shoved me towards heavy locked inner doors.

  ‘Buzz us in, would ya, Frank.’

  Frank hit a button somewhere under his desk and a thick deadbolt clunked as it disengaged. In the corridor beyond, I was slammed into a whiteboard that housed community notices and government statistic posters designed to spread the news wide and the bullshit thicker. I dislodged a pamphlet about domestic violence with my jaw, the irony not escaping me as I watched it fall to the floor. I was pulled away and then frogmarched, out front, down the main corridor into the bullpen.

  Two children and their father sat at a desk off to the right; they had all been crying. Fat, suited Mudheads’ peeled through files and folders like they had been hypnotised into looking busy for new arrivals. Some stole precursory glances at me from behind plastic cups of plastic tasting coffee. A prostitute was sitting at a desk further into the office. Apparently it needed three officers to take her statement. Some things never change. I felt a thought reach out like a tentacle, about Pan, but I ignored it; it receded into the murky water. I stayed in the moment.

  Coyle manhandled me into a seat and I sat back onto my cuffed hands. The metal links chewed into my wrists and my teeth clacked. The chair scooted back a little, on plastic wheels, and one of the Mudheads behind me shoved me back towards Coyle’s desk.

  Coyle reached into a ceramic pot and withdrew a boiled sweet that he twisted out of the wrapper and popped into his mouth. He threw the wrapper over his shoulder then leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, flexing his muscles.

  His desk looked conspicuously clean. There was a small statue of a dog with a plaque I could not read, there was the pot of sweets, calendar, notebook and pen. Nothing else. There were no photographs and nothing personal, save maybe the dog. I leaned closer to look at the plaque.

  ‘So you like dogs?’ I said.

  I did not load it with any subtle suggestion or innuendo. Just a harmless question. I saw something flash in his eyes and heard a couple of contained sniggers from the officers behind me. I had struck a nerve.

  He was a huge, big headed man that dwarfed the desk he occupied. He did not look at home in his uniform, having opted for a size too small, maybe to show off his musculature. It had the opposite effect, making him appear bloated
and uncomfortable like a caricatured, foot-pumped meathead shoehorned into his clothes. The seams looked strained and I kept waiting for something to give up the ghost with an ear-rending rip. He slurped noisily on the boiled sweet, hissing the accruing saliva back in to his capacious mouth. I wanted to smash the teeth that surrounded it. He picked up the pen in his huge ham fist and waved it at me as he spoke. He looked like a giant holding a matchstick. His words did not come out quite right around the candy.

  ‘Sho, we got resishting arresht, affray, vandalishm, and thatsh for startersh.’

  ‘What?’

  He pulled the sweet to a less obtrusive corner of his mouth.

  ‘Affray, vandalism, resisting arrest.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Sexual assault of a dignitary, disorderly conduct, politically motivated crime,’ he slurped more saliva back, ‘and stealing.’

  ‘Stealing?’

  ‘The bottle you threw, property of the plaintiff,’ he said.

  I said nothing.

  ‘You got anything you want to say?’

  I stayed quiet for a long time, then when he looked like he was about to fill the silence I nodded towards his desk and said,

  ‘Nice dog.’

  His glower was thunderous in shade and proportion. I knew he could not touch me out here, in front of the public, so I made the most of it, of the situation.

  ‘Cute even,’ I continued.

  Coyle was bug-eyed with rage, breathing through his nose, his chest heaved up as if trying to swell over his crossed arms. His jaw clenched.

  ‘Save it, Coyle,’ a gruff voice said from behind me. Maybe it was a friend of his, advising him to wait for a more appropriate, quiet time to continue the conversation, or maybe it was good policing averting the destructive hurricane that was amassing offshore. Coyle contained himself in his chair, held onto the arms so tightly it was if an invisible deity was trying to pluck him from it and send him tumbling down into the fate he deserved. He relaxed, chomped his sweet, then grinned. There were orange glassy shards of sugar on his teeth.