‘I need to talk to the camera crew first. I have things to say.’
‘You need to get your priorities straight, Slayer,’ Bronagh said. 'We don’t even know what kind of reception we will be arriving to.’
‘I’ve got to try,’ I said.
‘Doubt you will be able to blow me a goodnight kiss without doubling up, the way you’ve been stuck, it’s a wonder you can still hitch a breath at all.’ The captain nodded to the other two and they unfastened the floor anchors, lifted the stretcher free of its deck moorings and carried me out of the Orca.
Just the act of being carried, the shift in my weight and situation, sent me woozy and light headed. Or maybe it was the rum. They carried me off the Zeppelin and into the shelter of the hangar. The captain was armed and surprised that we had not been greeted by hostile parties, had not been assailed upon our descent, not been jumped the moment the door had opened. There was no one outside.
I was confused.
As I rounded the corner of the hangar’s edge I looked beyond the struggling Loopes and saw the explanation: Bleecker.
He had lined the Governor’s troops up in the centre of the hangar and was barking orders that echoed and troubled the rotting curved shell of the hangar; and the guards were doing nothing but listening. It was hard to do anything else when he spoke; actually scratch that, it was not hard, it was impossible.
He looked over at me, almost smiled, almost, then carried on with the barrage and made one of the young distracted soldier’s flinch, stand straighter, avert his gaze, adjust his bow and lift his chin.
I still had one thing left to do; one thing that I could not afford to tell anyone about, could not risk it. I had to get off the stretcher, get free somehow. I did not know exactly how I could get out of here but I knew that every second counted.
I tried to rise from my rolling makeshift bed but my arms were still bound, I could not get up. I raised my head.
I noticed someone at the far side of the hangar, in one of its more exposed corners talking to the camera crew. He was consulting his notes and laughing, and sunlight that streamed through a chink in the storm’s armour somewhere, front-lit him, his silhouette defined and vivid on the screen of the dilapidated hangar.
It could not be.
Laughing.
He turned, looked at me, his smile instantly dropped away.
He started to run.
I felt Bronagh and Loopes lower me.
Felt the cool floor through the stretcher’s cloth, and it felt good.
The world swam out of focus as I fought to hang on.
The cool arms of sleep were pulling me down, sending me to the dreamless dungeon where the selfish belonged.
I cursed the cruel hallucination.
Doc was dead.
It was a ghost, his ghost.
A figment of my drunk and pain addled, exhausted mind.
A mirage.
Then the mirage shouted for someone to pass him a field medikit.
And Doc’s face slid from worry to mortal concern.
I blacked out.
The only thing worse than unfinished business is an unfinished sentence.
The only thing worse than an unfinished sentence is …
The Memorable And The Rest
G.F.Frey
CHAPTER 108
‘How is he?’ Bleecker asked.
‘He’s out cold. Resting,’ Doc said. ‘I got the bolt out cleanly and have used some of his sleeve to patch up the hole in his side. I’ve used bandages on his wrists. We’ll need to get him to a hospital soon. There is only so much magic I can do.’
‘He said you’d died,’ Beaugent said from the doorway.
‘Who are you?’ Doc asked.
‘I am the Captain of The Orca, we brought him down,’ he said with neither boast nor apology.
‘What did Drake say?’ Doc asked.
‘That you would know how to fix him up, but that you, how had he said it, you were last seen swinging from the rafters after being tortured by the Blackwings or something like that.’
‘Exactly like that,’ Loopes added.
Bleecker nodded.
‘My crew,’ Beaugent replied, in commanding officer shorthand.
Bronagh nodded from behind them both in the office doorway.
‘So he thought that was me?’ Doc pointed to a body underneath a greasy coverall on the far side of the hangar.
As Doc checked his notes Bleecker spoke, ‘We found some discarded clothes and ID just off the track leading up to this place, if it matches him, and it’s not too easy to tell at the moment, then it looks like …’ he nodded his head sideways at the covered body, ‘could be some member of personnel from the Angelbrawl.’ Bleecker rubbed his short buzz-cut hair. ‘And a senior one judging by the cut of his cloth and the cost of his pillaged wallet. Name sounded like old French. Can’t recall it at the moment.’
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence as they all looked at the lump underneath the cloth on the tarmac.
Loopes broke it. ‘Is Drake going to be alright?’
‘Should be, thanks to your actions.’
‘We just fly the balloon,’ Beaugent said.
‘Well, whoever took the decision to leave his hands tied and trussed up in that way, saved his life.’
‘To tell you the truth, Doc, I did that for our own safety as I was not sure who he was or what he was up to. Though any enemy of the Blackwings, it must be said, is a friend of ours.’
‘Quite. However, it acted as a brace. Supported the collapsing lung. Limited the paradoxical breathing along with his tight sleeve. He has stabilised now, should be up and around in a matter of weeks.’
‘Or sooner, if he has anything to do with it,’ Bleecker added.
Loopes beamed.
‘What about the Blackwings?’ Bronagh asked.
‘What Blackwings?’ Bleecker asked.
‘They were last seen heading for the ground,’ Bronagh said, ‘about two clicks northwest of here.’
‘Quickly,’ Beaugent added.
‘The only thing to have hit the floor before you arrived was half an aeroplane and him via parachute.’ Bleecker pointed off to a large built man in the opposite corner of the hangar, near where Drake had entered first time round.
Cowlin sat outside the office. His hands bound, the parachute unfurled around his feet. His head was hung low, doleful.
Bronagh looked worriedly at Beaugent.
‘Did you hit them, the Blackwings?’ Doc asked.
‘I winged one. Winged him good too,’ Bronagh said.
‘It will be sometime before he flies again,’ Beaugent said.
‘If they made it at all,’ Loopes said, wishing he believed what he was saying.
‘And speaking of flying …’ Beaugent said, pointing to his balloon and turning to leave.
‘Before you go,’ Bleecker said, ‘can you give me your contact details? From what I understand there may be a vacant post in government about to come up for re-election and I am thinking of running. Could do with a good ferrying service.’
‘Do I have a choice?’ Beaugent asked, looking at Loopes.
‘Of course. Tell you what, you call me if you are interested.’ Bleecker passed Loopes one of his cards. ‘Or if you ever need anything.’
‘And thank you,’ Doc said, his eyes brimmed with tears. ‘Thank you.’
The Zeppelin crew left.
Doc scribbled in his book.
Bleecker patted him heartily on his back. ‘Why don’t you go and see if he is awake yet?’
‘His sedative should have worn off by now.’ Doc said, closing his notebook as he made his way into the small side-room next to the office.
Bleecker was on his way back over to the camera crew when he heard Doc shout.
‘Bleecker, quick!’ he boomed. ‘It’s Drake.’
Bleecker ran back towards Drake’s room.
The two words Doc said next echoed around the hangar as the wind had earlier
, full of bleak sorrow and free of hope.
‘He’s gone,’ he said.
Wings, feathers, bruised and battered
Shot, shorn and tethers tattered
My war lost in the cloying breath
And all is gone that ever mattered
And I wonder if I have ever flown,
Or delved her velvet blue alone,
Or fallen to a breezeless death
Or ruled upon her Nimbus throne.
Goodbye My Sky.
Mudhead’s letter to Nimbus (unsigned)
Battlefield Treasures: Anthology
CHAPTER 109
As I flew, I looked across the lake, beyond the horizon and blinked sweat from my stinging eyes. I was exhausted and the evaporating sedative cloyed at my eyelids, conspiring to pull the shutters down. The pain in my side burned with a deep fury and chewed at my frayed and tired nerves on every inhalation. Doc had reset my nose and my eyes complained at the wind and duress. The palms of my hands raw from where they had snagged the harpoon cable, which they had caught, and held and not let go.
I was glad Bleecker had been waiting for us, rather than the Blackwings, that he was talking to the camera crew and organising the forces about him, putting and holding things together. Gladder still to see Doc was alive and well. And there. For me. I felt bad ducking out on them as they had talked to the Zeppelin crew, but there would be time to explain later. A time for the media circus and dissection of events, to mourn the missing and the gone. Time to put everything back together, and keep it that way.
I wanted to fly until my battered wings could carry me no more, to falter on the breeze then plummet into the earth and rest like the soil, still and peaceful. At last, peaceful. I had heard many stories of men, Slayers, who had flown off to traverse, map or transcend the horizon’s limit and never returned, but as tempting as it was, I could not.
I had something left to do.
The water sped by beneath me as I banked into another thermal and started to climb high up through the first layer of base cloud. Nimbus City loomed imposingly, its plinth impossibly black and gargantuan in the fading light; an abstract for me to navigate by. It took me an age to ascend, to crest the verdant curve of the Nimbus Edgelands, where I came to rest among the flailing grasses and horizontal shrubs that leaned away from the edge, weak-kneed from the battering wind and vertigo. I looked down through a break in the clouds at the lake below. The water looked still, like varnish had been poured into a lake mould and set. Disbanding storm clouds stretched out like cotton smudges in front of larger, slower brothers. I looked at the darkening hills and mountain edges illuminated in the setting sun and thought they looked super-imposed; the definite, rugged lines of the inhospitable land discordant with the vagaries of the blurring sky. The few Slayers who had returned from flights into those distances, their wings in tatters, provisions gone, came back with very little other than stories of the landscape. And then, only stories of repetitive barren obstinacy and nothing beyond.
I felt something pull at my chest.
An invisible thread compelling me to take off and keep going into the horizon’s end.
Leave everything behind.
But I could not.
Like I said.
There was one more thing I had to do.
From where I lay, on the teetering line of the Edgelands’ drop, I struggled to my feet and leapt out beyond the ground’s end, a swan dive like my brother and I used to do to make an elaborate exit. I hit the up rush of wind and peeled back over Nimbus City, arcing low, above the trees, heading for my journey’s end.
The four-point church came into view sooner than I had thought, its dark gothic struts and stone arches ornately decaying, fragmenting like thoughts in an aged, addled brain. The weather vane seemed stuck on a NE direction, probably had been for years, and small fragmented pieces of coloured window glass that now only hinted at the glory they somehow used to capture, when they were whole and organised.
Next to the church stood the library, a squat building, wide and low. Holes evident in its walls and roof, like a multitude of mouths waiting to devour me whole. I landed on the church and looked in to the building opposite. Settled there for ten minutes, caught my breath and sat in eerie silence as I looked through the creeping darkness of dusk for any signs of life.
A small songbird landed on one of the fractured buttresses a few feet from me. He flittered his wings then settled, glancing sideways and skittishly at me until he decided I was not a threat. The bronze light of the setting sun reflected in its tiny black eyes. We both watched as a golden glow seeped into the library like treacle, oozing its way into every corner, like a slow-moving amber river, trying to find a level.
I watched as the bird flapped then dropped to dart into an open space in the library’s roof, without pause, I did the same.
The floor I landed on was a spongy dissolving mess and it almost gave way under my weight. I had to roll quickly to the room’s edge before the storey succumbed to my landing. Creaks and groans announced my arrival.
I suppose now it did not matter.
I went through a door at the room’s end and descended the stairs into the main halls of the library. Walked through the reception area, crunched cracked mosaic tiles, broke the jigsaw further. Echoes of my hollow footfalls scuffed back across the room that grew ever darker as dusk encroached. I ignored a balled up trench coat on the desk and a bag containing something I did not want to contemplate on a shelf to one side.
The place stank of death. Of fear. Of something so dark and insidious that the senses could easily perceive it, but yet never quite knew how to put it into words. Evil, pure and crawling, unimaginable and often. It emanated from every fungus-filled pore and underpinned the dereliction and sense of void, of the black hole I was standing in. Light disappeared here. Time stood still. I gave an involuntary shudder and winced at the creeping agony splayed across my ribs. I walked deeper, past the vacant shelves and cabinets in disarray, descended more stairs, made my way slowly and carefully into the bowels of the building. I sniffed at the dust and damp, at the putrid rotting stench that defied any invading breeze, turned a corner into a room with one low bookshelf. Large volumes. It looked like it had been used for torture, dark brown swatches of blood caked and collected dust, feathers and skin making a dismembered mosaic of their own.
Newt, I thought.
Though I could not dwell.
I turned from the room to make my way deeper into the library - I needed to check everywhere - and walked bang into someone in the dark stairwell.
Only it wasn’t a person, or Blackwing. It was an old wooden ‘Archives’ sign barely illuminated in the absconding light. Disturbed from vertical, it shuttled noisily along the uneven wall and clattered to the floor and I nearly tumbled with it. As I struggled to keep my feet, the scratch on my cheek opened up and fresh blood trickled down my face to fatten on my jaw and fall to the floor. The sound echoed in the silence.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Whoever had said time was a healer lied.
Time had not dulled my loss, the loss of Newt, of my brothers at Bethscape, of my life that was once colourful and purposeful, and mine. I had taken easy options, avoidance, selfishness, burial. Lived a life that ultimately let no one in and allowed nothing out.
Killed time and did not really live a life at all.
I had come here for selfish reasons. Not from altruism or curiosity or revenge. I had come here because I wanted to, because in this awful place, where the bronze light of dusk died at the door, there was something I had not known for a long time, for half a lifetime.
Hope.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Last time I heard a squeal like that was from a perfumed bitch in our basement.
Hope could be a suffocating thing. Take you to heights you cannot fly safely, over drops that would end you if you lost your way. But it had found me. And I was he
re. Nimbus would find a level. People would be held accountable. Pictures would be taken. Headlines shouted then forgotten. Time and gravity would prevail. The world would spin on its usual axis. Strange really, to me, when I had changed so much.
I stopped at the last door, at the end of the corridor. It felt heavy; thick, deep-set into the damp crumbling stone of the dark. There was no light here. I felt my way around its frame, fingers skimming over the clogging wet, searching blindly until I touched a key hanging on a chain to the left of the doorjamb, on the side that it would open.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
I found the keyhole with my fingertips, pushed the long, ice-cold key home and twisted it in the lock. The tumblers gave out a rusty clunk. I pushed with my shoulder, the door swung open.
The air was pungent, thick with the smell of neglect and sweat and fear. I could see nothing. I closed my eyes, stood motionless.
Did not speak.
Or breathe.
Then there, undetectable at first, the shallow hitching sound of someone terrified, and small, in the corner, breathing.
And a fleeting scent, a sweet aroma that did not belong here, that barely prevailed the dank must and filth. A faint hit of perfume I had smelled before, seemed to fill my head and brought tears to my sightless eyes.
Hope.
Sometimes you don’t save the girl.
Sometimes she saves you.
I tentatively took a step forward, edged into the room.
‘Pan.’
I said.
END
Chapter Links Below:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Blood On Borrowed Wings: A Dark Fantasy Thriller Page 41