And dragged bodies.
‘Do you know, it will soon be five years we have lived here in this, our Nimbus Edgelands hole? This forgotten realm of book lending and….’
‘Ssssh!’ said Mckeever.
‘What? What is it?’ said Croel.
Mckeever used a meaty hand to point to a warped, wooden sign hanging by two rusty chains from the centre of the library’s domed ceiling that read ‘Quiet Please’.
‘Got you again.’
Croel heaved a dramatic sigh and dropped Newton’s head with an unceremonious smack onto the grubby floor.
‘Mckeever, if you devoted as much time to honing your fighting skills as you did to catching me out with your badly timed fuck-wittery, you may still be able to use binoculars, spectacles and goggles. Instead you have consigned yourself to a life of monocles, telescopes and squinting, that somehow succeeds in making you seem far less intelligent than you actually are, which in turn, is far less intelligent than you needed to be to hang on to both eyes IN THE FUCKING FIRST PLACE.’
Mckeever looked down and hauled Newton by his feet across the cold floor, then spoke.
‘I know I am not as smart as you, I’m not even as fast as you, but you know when it comes to flying…’
‘Sssssh!’ Croel pressed a finger to his lips and pointed at the sign.
Croel watched Mckeever drag Newton around the admissions desk and the rest of the way across the empty main floor. Newton’s head was tilted back, like he had died looking up and as his head bumped and scraped along the abrasive floor, his eyes fixed on Croel. Croel stared right back looking for some flicker of accusation or sorrow or possibly some tattered remnant of death itself, but saw nothing. Newton’s head thud-whacked on the heavy edge of each of the twelve stairs, as Mckeever continued to pull him, feet first, down towards the archive department in the basement. Only when Mckeever reached a door he could not negotiate with his rump, did Croel once again offer his assistance, which was begrudgingly accepted with a perfunctory grunt. They dropped Newton on the floor.
Some minutes had passed without a word or glance exchanged between them.
‘We have to prepare him like they said,’ said Croel.
Mckeever winced and held his hand up to where his eye used to be.
‘Cocksucking piece of shit mother fucker.’ He spat heavily into Newton’s face then volleyed him in the ribs. Air escaped from Newton’s punctured lung and bubbled in his stretched throat. It sounded like something gurgling up through a plughole.
‘That was not quite what I had in mind but he had that coming, I suppose.’
They hefted Newton up onto a low, fat bookcase then Mckeever stomped out of the room, swearing and shouting something to do with more painkillers as he went.
Croel pulled up a plastic chair, swept some dust from it and sat down facing Newton.
‘You hurt him, you hurt us.’ He idly kicked a foot at Newton’s head, ‘Newt.’
Croel spat the name out like it was something disgusting he had failed at trying to chew. ‘We are a unit, a package; an all singing all dancing spanner in the works of life and you nearly ended our partnership. Put an end to us,’ he shook his head. ‘If that knife had been thrust on a slightly more horizontal plane…’ He left the sentence unfinished, as though that would leave the sentiment it was trying to capture incomplete too.
‘And now here you are, covered in sputum and lying on your back on a dusty library bookcase, all deaf and dead and discovering one inescapable truth, and there are not many of them in life, or death, I hasten to add. It is a truth you should heed and take with you into the afterlife, a mantra on your rotting, greying slack lips.’ He leaned closer, placing his mouth next to Newton’s blood covered ear and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘You don’t fuck with us.’
Croel stood.
His expression twisted, his face flooded with black rage. Malice and hatred crackled like electricity, charging the air with negative energy and blackening the sky. He kicked the plastic chair and sent it careening into one of the empty filing cabinets with a massive clatter.
‘You do NOT fuck with us.’
The night pressed at the high, grimy windows of the archive room and the falling moon tried to shove its way inside, like an uninvited guest. Sombre, entrenched shadows settled across Newton’s face where he lay atop low squat shelves that had once housed outsized volumes A to C, on a bed of his own splayed wings.
Croel turned away, spat, then went to fetch the bolt cutters.
A good soldier does not waste time thinking about the things he has little or no bearing over.
A great soldier does not think at all.
Vanguard Training
Sergeant Windaker
CHAPTER 4
The darkness was impenetrable; a black shroud draped across the sky of my world. I blinked to make sure my eyes were open.
No change.
Where was I?
The drugs I had received into my thigh were beginning to wear off, but the feeling of disorientation and nausea persisted. The dull ache at the back of my head was trying to demand attention and my craving for a drink of some, any, description was one of the few things that assured me I was still alive.
No doubt their narcotic of choice would have been potent enough to stop a bull elephant, let alone subdue the women they usually went after, but thanks to my more robust physiology, I had been able to take most of them out before it had kicked in. They would not be the first assailants to have underestimated me.
I tried not to waste any more time thinking about things irrelevant to my immediate situation.
I plunged off the cold slab that constituted my bed and began to slowly push my way across the floor, all the time listening for sounds of movement or a change in the atmosphere that would indicate I was not alone in the cold, pitch black. My right arm sang from the clubbed blow it had received earlier but I scrabbled around, hands outstretched, evaluating my location, its constitution and any possible means of escape.
I could not find a door. There were no hinges, discernible joins or gaps. Light and noise were absent, barred. I had not been discrete in my exploration but my conscious state was not greeted with any interest or threat to cease; just hollow echoes hinting at the small scale and sealed nature of this room.
This cell.
It looked like I was here to stay for a while.
As far as I could feel, the room was about ten or twelve feet square and entirely formed from one, join-free block of moulded concrete. A solid concrete block was my mattress and it seemed to be an integral part of the main structure of the room. There were no cracks or finger accommodating fissures. I could not touch the ceiling, not even when standing on my bed and jumping, so I had to assume that access to the cell was gained from above or from a seam free door.
Whoever had put me in here would be watching me right now. I was sure of it.
I tried to clear my head and sat on the slab, rubbing my leg where the needle had stuck in. Not to ease any discomfort, rather because the sharp pain it caused reminded me I was still alive, put me here, in the moment. It prevented me from floating off into sensory oblivion, kept me in this room, my senses firing.
I closed my eyes, the pointlessness of which was not lost on me, and walked the room in my head. I imagined its shape and dimensions. I felt the rough-hewn slab of a mattress, the abrasive edges and corners of the bed, and pictured ramming someone’s surprised face into it.
They would come.
I would be ready.
I lay down, this time through choice rather than induction. If I could not do anything, then I was going to make the most of my chance to do nothing, and I swayed into a light but healing sleep.
I thought of Pan, touching my face, telling me that she would be OK ringside if I hired her, joking about ‘date bait’, reassuring me that she could handle herself, that nothing would go wrong.
That she trusted me.
And as she spoke she had wrapped a tight ri
nglet of blonde hair around her finger and smiled. I thought of her in that red dress, of how perfect she had looked and wondered if she was still alive or if I would be around long enough to find out. My sleep was fitful, I did not dream.
But my thoughts were black and foreboding.
Like the cold and empty room.
Medical matters aside; bad luck rarely means misfortune. It usually means you or someone else has made a mistake.
The Turning of The Stone: A Memoir
F. Stone
CHAPTER 5
Mckeever removed the heel of his palm from the bandage now covering the vacant socket of his right eye. There was a dark, but no longer spreading swatch of blood held in the dressing. He examined his hand with his remaining eye and, satisfied that the bleeding had now abated, pulled one of Newton’s wings to full span, up towards the libraries dusty ceiling, so Croel could get to work.
Croel picked up the bolt cutters.
‘Has it stopped bleeding?’ said Croel.
‘Think so, but it still smarts.’
‘Mckeever, you are the new king of understatement.’ He doffed an imaginary cap. ‘This would have hurt him too, if he was around to feel it.’
‘Part of me wishes that he was,’ said Mckeever.
‘And I think I know which part,’ said Croel.
It was not easy work. Newton was sprawled on his front. Croel severed the bulky tendon and muscle mass around the wing’s base first; it stretched and sprang away like snapped elastic, one tendon even elicited an audible twang. He then scoured a deep groove around the thick bone with the sharp leading edge of the bolt cutters to weaken the wing further. Only when he was satisfied he had already taken a quarter off the bone’s circumference in this manner, did he attempt to sever the wing.
‘Here we go.’ Croel exerted all his strength into the handles, trying to bring them together. There was a sickening crunch that echoed off the library walls, but the bone remained intact.
‘Do you want me to try?’ Mckeever offered Croel the outstretched wing, so they could swap positions.
‘No. I’ve nearly got it. I’ve started this one and I’ll finish it, you can save your strength for the next one.’
‘You sound like a proud housewife trying to open a jar of pickles in front of her husband.’
Croel chewed his thin lower lip and doubled his effort, applying pressure on the end of the bolt cutter’s levers. The veins in his scrawny forearms and neck were near the surface and began to bulge out, his eyes narrowed.
‘Nnnnggghhhh.’
Sweat beaded on his forehead and his biceps shook from the strain. Fresh blood began to spot the floor from his shoulder wound. He ignored it and applied more pressure.
‘Come…’ he bounced the handles together.
‘On…’ he bounced them again, this time hearing the noise of bone splitting.
‘You…’ the bone crackled and Croel saw the cutters bite deeper.
‘Stubborn…’ he applied his whole being into the final push, his calf muscles cramped and went into spasm, his chest expanded and stomach muscles constricted. He heard his elbows noisily pop as gas escaped from the compressed pockets of his stressed joints.
‘Fucki...’ the bone snapped cleanly.
Mckeever staggered backwards holding the thin end of the now unfettered wing. He reached his other hand out to steady himself and removed a curled, yellowing poster advocating ‘Get Lost in A Book’ from the library wall in the process. Croel, breathing heavily, scowled.
‘Housewife indeed. Here,’ Croel said breathlessly. He handed Mckeever the bolt cutters and took the wing from him, throwing it onto low shelving marked ‘Periodicals’ and tried to get his breathing back under control.
‘Motivated you though, didn’t it?’ said Mckeever.
Croel picked up the thin, tapering bone of Newton’s other wing and dragged it up towards the ceiling. When it fanned out he could see spots of blood on the white feathers. ‘Now it’s your turn. And get a shift on, we have a deadline to meet, Mckeever. We’ve got some cleaning up to do after this, before we present him to Vedett.
*
When they were finished, the handles of the bolt cutters were bent out of shape and the blade was separated by a visible gap on its axis. Some white feathers and sinew, dark with clotted blood stuck to the blades’ rusted edges and the top of the bookcase.
‘The handles look off-plumb,’ said Mckeever.
‘Like a bow-legged man after a pig rodeo,’ said Croel.
Mckeever smirked and tossed the battered tool onto the tiled floor, putting another large crack there. Croel took the wings upstairs to submerge them in the preserving medical wrap that had been provided.
When Croel returned, he rolled Newton’s body onto its back to begin the laborious but thankfully brief task of cleaning up. Without a working heart to empty the veins and arteries after his spectacular death, there had been little blood spilled.
‘What the….?’ Croel said.
‘What?’
‘Where’s his eye?’
‘What?’
‘His eye. He had two when I went to stow his wings, now he has got one. This is one less than he had when he arrived here, and one more than you’ll have unless you stop pleading ignorance.’
‘You know that old saying: an eye for an eye?’
‘Oh please, tell me you didn’t.’
‘It’s over there.’
‘What?’
‘There.’ He pointed at the stomped on and mangled mess of Newton’s eye, in the corner of the room.
‘No, I heard what you said. I just do not want to believe it.’ Croel breathed heavily and pinched the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb. ‘For fuck’s sake, Mac.’
‘Well, what did you expect?’
‘Stupidly I expected you to follow orders.’
‘Croel. It hurts. Really hurts. My depth perception is shot. Because of this scumbag, I’m probably going to have to wear an eye-patch for the rest of my life, not to mention my throbbing head right now, so let it go.’
‘Let it go? Obviously your depth perception is totally off-kilter or you might have been able to hazard a guess at how deep in the shit we could be because of this, because of you.’ Croel kicked at Newton’s body casually, like it was a heavy bag of cement. ‘Do you remember what Vedett said?’
Mckeever said nothing.
‘Identifiable. Recogniseable. His client had been very specific. Given us the exact hows and wheres and fuck me why-fors, even had to lug that windshark gun around, just to keep them happy. Then you go making dance-a-doodle doo on one of his vitals! Why don’t we just cut off his dick and stitch that to your forehead while we’re playing doctors, eh?’
‘We had to shoot him with a harpoon gun though. It was always going to be messy. Look, I’ll tell Vedett that it happened in the heat of the battle, that there was a scuffle and that… shit sometimes happens.’
‘Shit happens? A massive coincidence wouldn’t you say? You both accidentally slipped and had each other’s eyes out playing crossbow chicken. I suppose I should be thankful that you just jumped on it and didn’t instead embark on DIY cosmetic surgery and attempt to shove it back into your own vacant eyehole.’
Mckeever looked sorry he had not thought of that.
‘Anyway, it wasn’t your colour,’ said Croel.
It took them an hour to prepare the body as best they could. They knew the transgression would be small print and would probably be overlooked when the main contract was delivered.
The important thing was that they were on time to deliver Newton’s dead body to Vedett.
Wings and all.
Inaction galvanises our opponents’ resolve, it motivates them, abets them, speeds them towards victory; as apathy dishonours ourselves and the causes we fight and die for. Doing something, even the wrong thing, is better than nothing. Doing nothing creates a vacuum, where light and sound and hope do not travel. It is the black hole that grows in the s
pace of our cowardly hearts.
Causes And Consequences
General Marque
CHAPTER 6
I am awake on the cold concrete, sleep quickly letting go.
Someone is in the room with me.
I can hear their breathing.
They are on the floor in the opposite corner.
I steady my own breathing, careful not to sound like I have stirred from slumber. I keep my eyes closed and hold my position. Turn inward to concentrate on all of my other senses.
I listen. Inhale. Something’s wrong.
That smell.
Cloying at my senses, reminding me of something. I slowly curl my fist into a ball and two of my knuckles make an audible crack. In the stillness of the room it sounds like the report of a double-barrelled gun.
No movement.
That smell.
I shift my weight slightly, as if in sleep, but it perches me on the edge of the bed ready for a strike. I plan. I will hit at their head and throat. I will hit hard. They will not be getting up.
I listen carefully again to make sure they are the only addition to my lodgings and could not hear or feel any other sign of life. I do not know how they have got in or if they are equipped with an infra-red lens or night vision goggles. They could be watching me right now poised with a crossbow pointing directly at my face, smiling, waiting for my move and I would not know. It did not matter. Action mattered.
Motion.
My heart trip-hammered. There was an explosive building of kinetic energy coursing through my body as the electricity of my synapses fired to get me ready to strike.
And then I got it. It registered and I lay down and sank back onto the concrete, shaking as the adrenalin dissolved into my system, like spent waves across a rocky sea wall. I could smell my own stale sweat, feel the tense skin at the nape of my neck, and faintly, almost imperceptibly, underneath it all, like the bass line of an orchestral hum was the slight, sweet, fading aroma of familiar perfume.
Blood On Borrowed Wings: A Dark Fantasy Thriller Page 3
