by R. E. Fisher
“Stop it!” he heard the man hiss, which only caused Dmitri to flail his fists toward the sound of the serpent-like voice.
Dmitri’s wild swings managed to knock the glasses from the grown-up’s face, and he heard plastic and breaking glass as they hit the tiled floor. It was only a minuscule victory, but it did give him an equal amount of hope. Dmitri was finding it harder to breathe the more he struggled. The man’s hand smelled like bleach to him, but he didn’t look like a janitor. He was wearing dress pants like the ones his father wore when he went to visit the policeman who watched him.
Using both of his free hands, he grabbed the man’s wrist while struggling, trying to get enough room to breathe. He managed to kick his feet out and was able pry himself away just enough to take a quick gulp of air. He also bit down on the calloused hand that was covering his face. His attacker left the key in the lock and punched Dmitri on his head, near the temple. The punch was hard enough to make him cry out in pain, and Dmitri felt the hand push his mouth closed; the man shifted to cover his mouth more tightly than before, if that was possible.
He’s too strong, he realized. He felt the man fumbling with the remaining buttons on his trousers, and Dmitri began twisting his hips away while flailing at his hand to try and stop him.
“Be still, you little shit!” Dmitri heard as he was carried toward the line of three sinks in the bathroom.
Unsure of what was about to happen but fearing it all the same, Dmitri struggled to think of a way to escape.
“Kick him in the beans if he’s bigger than you!” he recalled his father telling him.
He began kicking his heels backward, hoping to connect. It was then that he heard a small groan escape his attacker’s lips. Knowing that he had connected, he began kicking harder.
Stumbling about the toilet, Dmitri saw that they neared the sinks, and he was being carried toward the stall where you could peek between the door and the wall to see who was washing their hands. Even in his panic, he remembered thinking that it would be weird to catch someone looking back at you through that same crack.
But the man didn’t carry him into the stall. Instead he pushed the door closed with his foot and then wrapped his arm around his waist, holding his arms still and leaning forward. Dmitri felt the hand over his mouth move up and begin squeezing his nose closed, suffocating him. As the man moved him toward the sink, he could see the man’s reflection in the mirror from the corner of his eye as they struggled. The man’s eyes were crazy-looking, and because the mirror had become warped, the steel edge of the mirror had begun to buckle. It was making it look as though the man had steel teeth. He would always remember that image.
Dmitri was now unable to breathe and was struggling to stay conscious. All he could see were the sinks and the locked door. The longer the man held his hand over his nose and mouth, the dimmer his vision became. Weakening and unable to struggle anymore, he felt his body begin to go limp, now barely able see anything. The hand around his waist began fumbling with his trouser buttons again, but this time he was too weak to do anything about it. He couldn’t even lift his arms.
As his vision faded away, he felt the hand let go of his nose and mouth, then it moved to the back of his neck, grabbing it tightly. He felt himself being flung down across the sink’s hard, cold surface. His head struck the cold porcelain, and then he felt nothing. The world went completely black. The taste of copper filled his mouth, while the odor of piss filled his nostrils and fear filled his soul.
Dmitri awoke several hours later and found himself lying across two of the three sinks. He could hardly see anything in the completely dark room, and he froze when he heard a quiet moan in the darkness. The moan disappeared as soon as he stilled, realizing it was only himself that he had heard. He lay there, barely breathing for fear of his attacker returning, and the smells of copper, bleach, and urine filled his nose.
Once he realized that there was no one else in the room and that what he had heard was the echoes of his own pain bouncing around the tiled room, he stood. He felt a pain like no other he had ever experienced, one that he knew he could tell no one about. If the kids at school ever found out about this, he knew he would be the target of even more ridicule. He began crying for that reason—and because he also knew that he was going to receive a beating for arriving home so late.
Whimpering and still wearing his socks, he crawled around the floor looking for his pants and underwear. He found them on the floor, under the sink he had been lying across. Dressing as fast as the pain would allow, he pulled his clothes on and looked for his shoes. Once again, he crawled around the floor in the darkness. His fears grew with the realization that his shoes were not there. That man took them! he thought.
He wouldn’t find out until years later that most predators, like the one who had attacked him, took trophies of their victims.
With only his socks to cover his feet, he rushed to the door but found that it was locked and he couldn’t get out. He banged on the door and shouted with all his might. Through his tears and fear, he thought that the man might still be out there; so he stopped, afraid he might come back. He fell back against the wall, wanting to sit but knowing that it would be too painful to do so. Looking around the room, he struggled to figure out how to get out when he saw that there were a couple of small windows above the sinks that let light into the bathroom throughout the day.
He climbed up onto the sink, where he saw that they could not be opened. He climbed back down and went through all three of the stalls, looking for something to break the glass with. Unable to find anything, he began to panic. His tears had now slowed to almost nothing and he became even more determined to escape. There were enough broken things at home, so he realized what he had to do.
He lifted the seat of the toilet and began kicking the heavy plastic at its hinges. Because of the darkness, he couldn’t quite see where he kicked every time; as a result, he hurt his foot each time he missed the plastic seat. He finally succeeded in breaking one of the hinges free. He grabbed the seat, ignoring the stench of the stale toilet water, and began twisting it back and forth. His anger and youthful fury began to take control. He imagined that each twist of the seat was the man who had attacked him—or his drunken father. He shouted in anger, not caring if the man returned, so focused was he on his desire to pay back everyone who had ever hurt him. Finally, the second hinge broke free. He collapsed to the floor, exhausted, wincing at the pain he felt as he landed. He listened to his own heavy breathing. His breaths were coming fast and deep and echoing in the now claustrophobic room. It became comforting to him for some unknown reason.
After he caught his breath, he grabbed the rim of the toilet, pushing himself up and then climbing up onto the sink. He turned his head and began slamming the toilet seat against the glass. It took three tries until he managed to break the glass with most of it falling outside, but he heard the same sound of breaking glass that he had when he’d knocked the man’s glasses from his face. He stood on his tiptoes and looked out.
The moonlight outside was enough for him to be able to see that the wooden frame still contained glass that would cut him if he tried to climb out now. He began picking out the pieces of glass, focusing on that task and completing it meticulously since it gave him a calmness of purpose and allowed him to forget—if only for a little bit—what had just happened to him.
What he couldn’t remove by picking out, he broke further using the toilet seat. He wanted to ensure that it wouldn’t cut him as he tried to climb through the narrow opening. After he cleared the wooden frame of the glass, he pulled himself through and dropped to the ground, his socks managing to protect him from the broken glass that lay below the window.
Once he had arrived home missing his shoes, his drunken father hadn’t even wanted to hear what his excuse was this time. He gave him another beating and threw him into the closet, blaming his missing shoes on a stupid after-school prank of some sort. Dmitri smelled the vodka on his father’s breath wh
ile he had been yelling and beating him. He refused to cry while his father beat him; it wasn’t that he didn’t want to, it was because he didn’t have any tears left.
He sat silent in the dark, cramped room wondering what he had done wrong.
His mother asked him the next day about how he had ruined his clothes. Dmitri looked at her, not answering. He never again told either of his parents that he loved them.
Dmitri lay in his bed looking up at the ceiling as the glow of headlights from a moving car slid across it, illuminating the pattern of the ceiling tiles. He followed the lights across the room, where he saw the picture of his mother.
“What a bitch,” he said aloud. He pushed his cigarette out, rolled over, and went to sleep.
He awoke with a start to the sound of loud, heavy breathing. He realized it was himself. He had been dreaming about Baba Yaga again. Baba Yaga was chasing him in his dream, but this time it turned into a misshapen shadow grunting and growling at the child he had been in his nightmare. As always, he had gotten caught, but this time the shadow became the man in glasses, who then turned into an iron-toothed, clawed demon.
He awoke just as the demon’s metallic teeth began digging into his flesh. He shivered from the cold that fear brings. He wasn’t sure how long he had been asleep, but he lit another cigarette anyway, trying to calm himself. Instead he ended up thinking about some of his sins since that fateful day in the park.
As he inhaled the menthol-cooled smoke of his cigarette, he reflected on the first time he had killed someone.
Chapter 4
“Tread lightly, for the ground is not solid and the waters are deep!”
(W.Ad.1.11 - Book of Waters, Tenets of Adoel, Chapter 1, Verse 11)
The MPs escorted the pilots through the cold, gray halls to the flight ready room. Both men marched with military precision. Although they dressed in the same dull green utility flight suits, the two pilots looked very different from one another.
Robert “Ollie” Hardy had the typical pilot’s physique and the military bearing to go with it. He was not tall, only 5’8”, but with broad shoulders and a thick, muscular neck. His close-cropped blonde hair tapered down to his collar while his blue eyes were bright with the anticipation of their first real-world mission in this special aircraft. His unit patch showed a visible outline of an SR-88 within a triangle. A thin, bright red line trailed the aircraft through a sky-blue background, and the unit logo read “If you can see us, you’re already on your way to heaven” stitched in black letters along the upper two lines of the triangle. Oddly, the patch failed to cite a squadron assignment.
The other pilot was Timothy “Lazarus” Coffin; he didn’t look at all like your typical pilot, with his disheveled brown hair and green eyes. His eyes carried within them a hint of mischievousness and a lust for life. His flight suit fit him a bit more snugly than Ollie’s did, but Laz was a full five inches taller and much more muscular than his counterpart. He was a strong man, as a few mouthy civilians in a bar had found out while they had been in Zaragosa on a training mission. He was not afraid of a fight or the repercussions of one, which always came to an officer in the U.S. Air Force. Laz, as his fellow pilots referred to him, was a large but fit man. His weight was almost always an issue, and even though most of it was muscle, it was always on the verge of disqualifying him for flight duty. So close to the edge of disqualification, in fact, that on a couple of occasions several other pilots had thought his career dead. Much like the biblical Lazarus, he always rose from the dead to return to flight duty. That trait had earned him his call sign, “Laz.”
He wore the same patch on his flight suit as Ollie, and the two officers—majors, to be exact—were part of a classified aircraft testing unit. They had spent the last fourteen months training in an experimental aircraft. It was known as an SR-88 by those with a high enough security clearance; others dubbed it the Blackwing. They were about to perform their first “real-world” mission.
Their boot heels made heavy thudding sounds against the hard tiles as they walked in unconscious rhythm toward the briefing room. The four men came to a halt in front of a nondescript door, and the staff sergeant who had been waiting for them opened it, allowing the two pilots to enter the small briefing room first. Staff Sergeant Barnes turned and followed them in while the armed escort remained in the hallway. The pilots walked down the center aisle and took their seats in the front row, one of them on each side of the aisle.
Robert, whose call sign was “Ollie,” had earned his call sign because of a slight bout of nervousness he had displayed after a particularly intense F-22A training exercise. He also happened to share the last name of the actor who pretended to be nervous all the time in comedic skits. Looking around the room, he noticed that the maps on the wall covered their current theater of operations. He saw Mexico, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, and especially Cuba. The rest of the recently formed Latin American Pact was being shown as well. He wondered how everything had gotten to this point. The President, for all his faults, had steered the country onto a course that had brought jobs back and revived the economy so that it now only lagged behind China and the European Union, even after the worldwide depression.
Ollie had been feeling a deep sense of dread since the reunification of most of the states of the former Soviet Union. Both his job and Laz’s job consisted of reconnaissance overflights of Cuba. Rumors abounded about the Soviets now staging forward fighter-bombers on the island. The Castro families still ruled the island nation but were close to losing control of their small empire. To prevent that, he had made a pact with the renamed Republic of Soviet States, shunning the efforts of the previous American President. The Latin nation had once again allowed itself to become a staging area in exchange for currency from the now oil-rich country. The brief three-month war between the Soviet Republic and a collapsed Iraq resulted in Russia now controlling more than twenty percent of the world’s oil supply. The number of dead Americans from only two decades earlier was already almost forgotten.
America had stayed out of RSS-Iraq war and had only taken an international defensive posture until the Russians began staging their aircraft on the Cuban island. The reason behind this was not only the weakened state of the military, but also the possibility that the E.U. might join in on the side of the Soviets. The global depression caused by the withdrawal of Britain from the E.U.—along with the absence of Britain’s voice within—ensured that there was no more reasoning with the anti-American European parliament. Ollie didn’t even want to think about the China/North Korea situation.
While Ollie contemplated his thoughts, Laz watched Staff Sergeant Barnes as he set up a laptop and monitor for the briefing. Laz observed the Non-Commissioned Officer come to attention, and then called the room to attention. The pilots rose, snapping into a ramrod straight posture as Colonel Woodman walked past them and up onto to the podium.
“At ease, gentlemen. Be seated,” said Colonel Woodman.
Laz and Ollie took their seats while the SSgt moved off to a corner of the room. Colonel Woodman opened the folder that he had brought in with him and propped it open atop the podium. While scanning the contents of the folder, he reached over and turned on the display monitor connected to the laptop. A map of the southwestern United States and a flight path over Cuba appeared on the screen.
“As you know, gentlemen, we have been tasked with reconnaissance flights over the island of Cuba. It’s come to our attention that the Soviets have brought in an advanced craft, the purpose of which we are still trying to determine.”
Colonel Woodman clicked the mouse, causing the monitor to display several black-and-white photographs of an aircraft hangar. One of the photos showed an aircraft tail section partially extending from the hangar.
“At this time, our best intelligence has identified this as a stealth aircraft. Your mission today is to use the Blackwing to take pictures that will allow us to discover more about it. This will be a real-time mission, and only your camera ops are
preprogrammed. Any questions?”
As the lead pilot, Laz asked the flight commander, “What are the rules of engagement?”
“Major, this is a recon flight. You may only evade, not engage. We are already near wartime footing. Any other questions?” The Colonel paused as he looked at them. “Then have a safe flight, gentlemen.”
The NCO in the corner called the room to attention and the pilots stood, snapping to attention as the Colonel left the briefing room. The pilots looked at one another, smiling as they left the room after collecting their briefing notes and flight logs.
As they proceeded toward the hangar that housed their multi-billion-dollar aircraft, Ollie looked at Laz and asked him, “So? What do you think?”
“This could get hairy. They’re sending us up there naked. No cover, no direct support,” Laz replied and then added, “Or didn’t you catch that?”
“I caught it. But this is a simple shoot-and-scoot, isn’t it?” Ollie asked as he opened and held the door into the hangar for his pilot. The smell of JP jet fuel wafted into the hallway as they entered the hangar.
“I hope so. But you know as well as I do that the RSS has a scramjet too, and theirs is a fighter. We won’t have a fighter that is that mission-capable for a couple more years. If that’s the aircraft they deployed, we could be in trouble up there. According to Aviation Science, it’s faster and they say that it’s armed with some sort of super laser or something.”
“Aviation Science? Please...they’re a bunch of tech stalkers with binoculars!” Ollie laughed.
“Well, those tech stalkers were dead-on about Aurora. And so far, they’ve been spot-on about this nextgen we’re about to climb into,” Laz said, patting the fuselage of the Blackwing and beginning his preflight inspection.
After they had completed their inspections, the pilots made their way to the operations ready room. In the sterile-looking room, support personnel assisted them into their pressure suits. After donning the suits, the two returned to their aircraft, and the ground crew then assisted each of them into their individual cockpits. Since Laz was the primary pilot, he climbed the mobile ladder and stepped into the lower front cockpit. Ollie did the same to enter the cockpit where the reconnaissance systems officer sat—above and behind the pilot. The ground crew secured them within each of the cockpits. The crew also checked that their pressure suits were operating properly one last time before the pilots were “buttoned up” inside the airplane.
