by Robert Brown
Cora and the others leave their guns strapped tightly to their bodies as they spin in for the final few hundred feet of the attack. Repeated thanks have been given to Lloyd after various battles for his decision and insistence on using swords.
To the defenders of Denver, the weapons The Angel’s forces use are still a secret. Word spread across The Rockies about the advance of an army freeing humans, but no mention of their choice of weapons reached the ears of those over here. Lloyd’s selection of weekend entertainment provides the perfect weapon they need to fight their mutant brethren in close quarters, a weapon their foe in this battle do not possess.
Each winged fighter draws out a sword which they hold before them in their spinning approach. The blinking flashes of light reflecting off the blades from the sun help disorient the mutants Cora and her soldiers are targeting. They successfully fly through the enemy line with blades swinging freely and furiously at the opponents they came to destroy.
Mutant grabbing mutant in collisions in the sky. Bones snap on impact, wings break or are severed from their owners by slashing blades. Above all else, teeth are plunged into the necks and bodies of enemies on both sides of the battlefield. Each bite causing death and regeneration alike.
The Angel flashes through the aerial battleground, freezing many of her opponents in the air before her with a raised hand and a psychic directive for them to stop. She then severs their heads or wings in order for her ground troops to drain the blood from the fallen bodies once they land. Her goal, as always, is to make it to the flaming buildings and save as many of the humans in this territory as she can.
One building is completely engulfed in fire. The screams of the dying inside are heart-wrenching, but there is nothing she or her soldiers can do for them any longer. What she can accomplish is helping those in one of the other three buildings.
Cora flies to the ground and picks up a large industrial garbage dumpster as deftly as if it were a small cardboard box. Flying to a large pond across the road from the flames, she scoops her container full of water and tosses the water into the air.
Lloyd calls to his lieutenants, “Fly to The Angel. We have to help her.”
They begin circling the building and beat their wings to force the falling water into the open windows to douse the flames.
Dozens of others join her with metal dumpsters or other scavenged containers of their own. They unite in her efforts at making an artificial waterfall flowing into the flames of the buildings while the others continue their fight around them. Many of the flying saviors are killed while distracted by trying to put out the flames as well as some that are tossing water into the air with Cora, but they are quickly replaced by others that move in to assist in the rescue.
The enemy army defending the Denver territory is losing. The Angel’s ground troops have finally reached the buildings where Cora and her fliers have been battling equally against the flames and attackers. Some of the runners begin clawing their way up the sides of the burning buildings and reaching through windows to toss humans out to be safely caught below. Others are speedily climbing their way up to the top floors where they jump out into the air to catch a flying enemy soldier and bring them down.
The carnage is terrific and terrible. This is the most vicious yet one-sided battle many of the fighters have been in so far. With no swords or blades on the opposing forces side, The Angel’s troops are making incredible progress in breaking through and destroying defenses. The streets and rooftops below the current combatants is slick with blood, a telltale sign of warfare that has been absent before now. It seems the bodies of the enemy are being chopped apart and fall from the sky so rapidly that the freedom forces are finding it difficult to drain the bodies of their blood. They are instead bleeding out on the ground until someone drains them or they piece enough of themselves together to attempt fleeing.
The tactics by the enemy have also changed dramatically. Outside of using trained humans to man military weaponry, at no point before now did enemy mutants threaten or consider to use their human captives as fodder to stop the advance of The Angel’s army. This time, the forces of Denver chose to burn the humans alive, knowing the pained cries of the trapped men, women and children would distract and disorient The Angel’s forces during the battle.
The front line has been broken, but the defenders are fighting ferociously to kill The Angel’s forces and stop their advance. Many troops are able to break through the line completely and move their fight into the streets and skies beyond the cities edge while attempting to win the Denver territory.
Out of the six-hundred sixty-thousand people that populated the city before The Shattering Event, there are believed to be only sixty-five thousand humans left alive today. The brutal winter and lack of food have taken their toll. How many humans manage to survive the destructive battle going on around them is unknown. If the mutants holding this area continue to set fire to the buildings the humans are housed in, there could be losses of a third or more of those few that survived the starvation of winter.
In a last ditch push to save Denver from The Angel’s forces, Rafael, the general controlling the territory, sends new mentally binding instructions to many of his remaining winged troops. Bring her down. Target The Angel, I want her dead.
Flanked on all sides, in front and back, above and below, The Angel, her generals, and her lieutenants hover in the air and wait for the incoming attack. Many of her soldiers fly high above them and drop their swords to Cora’s surrounded group. Half of Rafael’s remaining flying soldiers have their attention locked on to the white-winged beauty. Beating her wings high above the carnage below, her painted white armor is stained in red from the slashes her sword produced against her enemy.
It is Rafael’s fault for not being a student of history and not being a general that leads his soldiers in combat. Any observer could see the death his people were flying into, but he was no longer there to witness it. He is flying off to secure his own safety now that he has given the order for his vampires to continue their attack.
With outstretched arms, The Angel and her surrounding vampires start spinning in the sky. With a sword in each hand, their spins increase and the intensifying velocity makes the blades sing as they cut through the air. The soldiers flying into them are firing their guns, but the bullet impacts are having no effect. The Angel’s forces are so gorged with the blood of their enemies that their regeneration against the small projectile fire is near instant.
Rafael’s soldiers want to stop their progress, some twitch slightly as they attempt to turn and fly away, but his control over them is too strong and his command is final. They continue to fly into the spinning blades of death the Angel and her mutants have created. The first group to reach the blades are carved into halves and quarters. The severed parts fall to the waiting soldiers below who will drain them and end the threat of Rafael’s group. A second wave attempt to fight through the line and get at her, but even with the blades held fast without the spinning motion, they are cut down in seconds.
To show her power over Rafael, Cora does something none of the other arch-vampires have the ability to do. She sends him the vision from her own eyes of the final vampire he sent at her, the blade she holds coming down and cleaving the arch-vampire in two. She forces her sight into his mind and makes him watch as the body falls to the ground, cutting off the vision in the end with one powerful and hate filled thought to pummel his mind. You are next!
The power of The Angel’s message is so strong it ends Rafael’s mental control of his forces defending the city. The remaining soldiers on his side are finally able to choose their course of action. A few choose to change sides and fight on the side of The Angel’s army, a few, but not many.
Rafael exerts his will on the soldiers during battle, and his power is stronger than many other vampires that were defeated in previous conflicts. Unlike others, Rafael can control minds, even if his goals don’t match those of his followers. If the battle were not so phy
sically devastating to his troops, he would have been able to draw on their strength to begin controlling the minds of The Angel’s forces.
In this case, even though he could have, Rafael didn’t need to struggle against competing views while running the Denver territory because many of the vampires friendly to humans left when they took the president to Wyoming for safety. The forces that remain on Rafael’s side are largely of the mindset that their evolutionary leap of mutation has put them in the driver’s seat of the future. The non-mutated human race is there to be nothing more than a food source that can be treated in any manner necessary.
Some of Rafael’s loyal winged forces remain to fight for the city while most follow him as he flees the area.
With the numbers on her side, gaining control of the city should be an easy task at this point. Even with some remnants of Rafael’s group remaining to fight, they are so incredibly outnumbered the complete battle should be over shortly.
Should be an easy task, is turned into a could have been when Rafael’s final weapon is released.
The Angel spent her time bringing into her fold as many likeminded vampires and giants as she could find to free the remaining humans from their slavery and internment. Rafael spent his time collecting behemoths and penning them up in buildings and parking garages. Their naturally destructive nature due to their size and relative lack of control have been fostered in some way by Rafael and his soldiers to make them lash out even more violently at everything that moves.
Once freed from their prisons, the behemoths spread out and begin to destroy all that they see. In attempts to break in and get at the screaming souls inside, several buildings where the humans have been corralled are brought crashing down around and on top of the humans and their destroyers. Taller and much wider than the giants on The Angel’s side, the behemoths are able to prolong the battle several more hours and enable more of Rafael’s troops to make their escape than Cora would have liked.
*
In the end, the death toll is in the tens of thousands and many more human lives lost than there should have been. Even though they had a limited fighting role in the battle, because Rafael used the lives of humans to distract The Angel’s army, nearly thirty thousand people were brutally killed in fires or building collapses. Many more humans that survived through the deadly winter and this battle will soon die due to injuries sustained during the fighting and rescue. It is difficult to contemplate the evil actions that placed innocent lives into buildings so they could burn. The difficulty is compounded when considering they were concocted by a vampire who was not so long ago a simple thirteen-year-old boy.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Internment Zone #758
Wyoming
Quick splashes are made by the small feet quickly crossing the muddy yard. Julie Moore is rushing to let President Thomas know he has a visitor.
“Mr. President, she’s here.”
“Who is here?”
“It’s the one they call The Angel.”
“Great, some bleach-skinned mutant that wants to take even more away from us? Maybe you should speak with her if you are so excited about it.”
“Mr. President, you have to speak with her, she is here specifically to see you.”
“Why do you still call me that? We have no country left. There are no free people to serve and I have no power.”
“She calls you that because that is who you are, Mr. President.” The pale winged woman speaks to him standing in the doorway to President Thomas’ room.
The beauty of the vampire the people call The Angel has not been exaggerated. She stands tall at 6 feet 6 inches with her head nearly touching the door frames top. She is wearing all white, which in contrast gives her skin a warmer pink color, and she has a friendlier feel than the vampires that like to wear dark colors or black. President James Thomas is taken aback by what his mind can only identify as magnificence.
The Angel smiles at the president. “May I come in?”
James stands and looks from his aid back to the winged beauty and hesitates before squaring his shoulders and standing taller than he has for months. “This isn’t my property, it is controlled by the mutants of this area. I cannot deny you entry if you wish it.”
“And I am asking your permission still.”
“Then come in…”
“Cora, you can call me Cora.”
“Come in, Cora, and have a seat.”
President Thomas sits in a chair and motions to a comfortable loveseat for Cora to sit. She walks over, spreads her wings out and slowly lowers herself to the cushions. Her wings then flutter and fold up behind her over the back of the small sofa.
“I don’t mean to make a show of my wings, sir. I have been told it is intimidating to some. I cannot sit down comfortably otherwise, I hope you understand.”
*
Word has spread of The Angel’s arrival and the residents of this internment area are gathering outside the president’s building by the hundreds.
“I heard she has come to kill him,” one person whispers.
“They are trying to take away the last person that means something to us,” another person says quite loudly.
*
“President Thomas, you believe you no longer have power and that your position is a meaningless one. You should not give up, I am here specifically because you are wrong. You were not elected by the people but you are still the president and the citizens of this nation look to you for council and guidance. The weekly addresses you have been giving to your internment group have also been broadcast to hundreds of other zones and areas around the country.
“They are powerful, have meaning, and have given the people of this nation hope. In fact, there is a great uprising occurring right now, and your words have helped to encourage the people to rise up and begin fighting back against the mutants who hold humans as slaves.”
“Have they now? And you are here to stop me, I suppose?”
“That is what the people gathering outside believe. You should take a look. There are three thousand people in this internment zone and almost all of them are gathering around this building right now. They believe I am here to kill you. Their loyalty and concern for you is undeniable.”
“If you are here to prevent me from speaking to my people, I won’t stop. I will continue giving them hope, and we will continue trying to find a way to defeat the mutants so the human race can be free! If you want to stop me and my message, then you’ll have to kill me and then you’ll have to kill all of the people that have heard what I have to say. What will that do for your food supply then?”
“If I wanted to stop you, I wouldn’t have set up generator systems or ordered power stations to be brought back online to support the broadcasting of your speeches. I wanted to speak with you because there is a difficulty with the uprisings I did not foresee. There are inevitable casualties in any war but I wasn’t prepared for the tactics used by my enemy. In our fight to control Denver, more than fifty thousand lives were lost, nearly fifteen thousand of those were mutants.”
Thomas lifts his head, eyes wide at her words. Looking from Julie back to Cora he smiles. “Mutant deaths? So someone has figured out your weakness, the people are fighting back!”
“The people loyal to you and this nation have been fighting back, but there hasn’t been a discovery of any weakness humans can use against the mutants. Aren’t you concerned over the human lives lost, Mr. President? I am here specifically because it has gotten so out of control. In the battle for Denver, over thirty-five thousand humans lost their lives, and I need your help to figure out how to prevent that from happening again.”
“Your vampire friends and even some humans might call you The Angel, but to me, you are nothing but a demon. You enslaved humanity the first chance you got and now you are upset that the people are rising up and killing your precious mutant friends? Well, get used to it. We will continue to fight you to the end. Even I will willingly die to get rid of your m
enace and free my people from your control.”
“I have to apologize, sir; I am reminded that you are not aware of what has been going on during the battles or why I am here. You did hear what I said about your speeches, correct? Aren’t you curious to know why I had them broadcast to other camps?”
“Damn it, woman. Tell me what you want! If you’re here to kill me, then get it over with. I’m not going to stop trying to free our people and will continue to give them hope in any way I can.”
Her expression doesn’t have the malice he believes it should for the task he thinks she has arrived to complete.
“Why are you here?”
“My soldiers and I are here to set you free. I understand your disbelief, but I assure you I am not here to stop you from speaking or to kill you. I am here to let you go. With all of my questions, I have been trying to gather a better understanding of your character by observing your thoughts during our talk.
“I am not only here for your freedom, I am here because I need your help. It is not the humans that have been rising up to free humanity. It has been my soldiers and I.
“We have been retaking cities, and in our last major battle in Denver, the enemy commander, a vampire named Rafael used tactics we were not prepared for. He set buildings filled with humans on fire and let loose dozens of the behemoth creatures which brought down many more buildings.
“During the previous battles, no one used humans as shields or distractions, but now with the change in tactics, I need your assistance in preparing the humans we can reach for the difficulties which lie ahead. They need to understand that there is a vampire army out there that is fighting for their release. The population is in all-out war and regular humans are in the crossfire.”