Whirling World

by Drinkel, Dean M

  Wright saw Johnson with the Glock in his hand.

  “Just hold up there, professor,” she said. “This is now a crime scene. And we have a room full of unlicensed weapons. Everyone put them on the floor, please.”

  “I’ll call it in if I can get a damn signal,” Pearson said going for his cell.

  Johnson put bullets into both of them.

  The detectives crumpled to the floor as the blood oozed from their bellies. Wright had a look of comic surprise on her face.

  “Sorry, detective,” Johnson said. “What happened here today is a result of a failure to conduct an experiment under correct test protocols. But even I have to say, despite this, the preliminary findings are far too remarkable to abandon.”

  Pearson and Wright lay panting with exertion and pain yet both of them watched as Johnson stepped over to the machine and shot it several times in the head. The brain inside gave way to the trauma in a starburst of grey matter and milky skein. It mixed with nearby pools of blood to create a sickly strawberry goo.

  Johnson looked over at O’Neal with an expression of genuine sorrow.

  “I’m sorry, doctor,” he said. “But she was feral. At least we now know a degree of psychological conditioning may be required in order to prepare the test subject for the transitional phase.”

  “I concur, professor,” O’Neal said with nothing but understanding.

  Johnson stepped up to the Team Leader and handed back his weapon.

  “Get a cleanse team up here and notify estates,” Johnson said. “I want this place looking like nothing happened in two hours. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In the meantime I will make a few calls to our superiors and explain our achievement today,” Johnson continued. “Loose ends will be tied up within the hour.”

  “Speaking of loose ends, what about them?” the Team Leader asked indicating the detectives who were now slipping into unconsciousness.

  Johnson turned to O’Neal.

  “Prep them for surgery,” he said.

  The Fall

  by Tim Dry

  The sudden eruption of noise was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. It burst at him louder than thunder and drove through his whole body. The entirety of the building shook mightily as if a vengeful God had taken a fist to its very structure. He lurched momentarily sideways as the floor seemed to ripple beneath him. From nowhere acrid smoke started to invade his eyes and his lungs causing his breath to rasp harshly in his chest and throat. He could hear many others behind him screaming, their loud cries searing through his brain.

  The hi-jacked American Airlines Flight 11, Boeing 767, struck floor 93 of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre at 8.46 am like a missile out of the clear blue September sky, resulting in a massive shockwave with the ripple effect of an earthquake. No one within the building saw, sensed, or heard the plane’s dreadful, terminal approach as they were all at work at their desks.

  Absorbed in their computer consoles, texting loved ones, doing a hard sell to a potential client on their cell phones, dictating memos, thinking of the steamy sex that they'd hopefully be indulging in that night, printing out memos, some younger male staff surreptitiously downloading porn onto detachable memory sticks or lurking in dubious Internet chat rooms, girls trading hair and make-up tips in washrooms and all the other office minutiae that make up corporate activity. Then, in an instant all of that was taken away.

  James ‘Jim’ Appleby, Senior Administrator of Finance at Worthington, Pyle and Alfredes located on Floor 87 of WTC 1, was at his desk which faced the tall windows that looked out across New York City and was about to clinch what would have been, even at that early hour of the morning, a very lucrative deal for his company when the jet airliner struck. Jim instinctively ducked as in mere moments he felt the sudden dreadful influx of colossal, destructive heat driven downwards into his workspace five floors below the site of impact.

  Although his mind could not yet comprehend what was happening, his time spent serving in the Marines on the ground for the duration of Operation Desert Storm back in the day had given him a refined flight or fight survival instinct. It immediately kicked in, pumping adrenaline furiously through every vein and nerve in his body. He leapt up from his chair, turned his chrome and glass desk onto its side, scattering everything upon it to the floor and crouched behind its meagre shelter close to the slim windows behind him.

  He watched in voiceless horror as debris fell from the collapsing ceiling and suddenly everything began to burn. Office partitions, carpets, computers, paperwork, cell phones, cabling and wiring, jackets and sweaters draped casually over black swivel chairs in the office in front of him all began to sickeningly melt in the heat of a Hell unleashed upon the world on this mild, clear-skied early autumn day.

  Colleagues who just mere moments before were indulging in the usual day-to-day office banter of suggestive emails and flirtatious chit-chat with each other via voice or keyboard became crawling and distorted figures with seeping blackened holes for mouths and eyes, displaying exposed flesh that bubbled and burst as they tried so desperately to reach some place of refuge. There was none. They were beyond any kind of help that he might possibly be able to offer them before he in turn melted like a waxwork effigy.

  Dreadful smells swarmed like malignant demonic winged creatures unleashed in an instant — the stench of ignited carpets, wood, plastic and plaster along with those of scorched flesh, hot boiling blood, vomit, expelled piss and excrement.

  For James, only mere yards away from suffering the same ghastly fate of those he knew, his fear for his life coupled with a steely resolve to escape forced him into action and he picked up his office chair by its padded back rest, turned and repeatedly beat it, metal legs first, against the narrow strip of window glass in front of him until the pane shattered.

  Discarding the ruined chair and without daring to look back he knocked out the remaining shards of glass and eased his way out onto the narrow sill and clutched with all his might at the already warm window frame to his right like a bug on a windshield wiper. His trousers had split from thigh to knee, he’d lost one shoe and the sweat from his body soaked his shirt. The sudden vortex of wind induced by his smashing of the window violently sucked out around him smoke, paper, burnt and distorted office equipment, the smell of jet fuel and the crisped, pork-smelling body parts of some of his fellow workers.

  His hair blew back as he clung with desperate fingers at the window’s cracking frame and he looked down at the whole of Manhattan Island spread far below him. In that brief of moment of pure clarity he saw how beautiful, how historic the city of his adult life looked way down there, like the Promised Land with its skyscrapers and tall buildings reaching up like stone and glass fingers into the deep, endless blue sky above it.

  He smiled sadly and he knew that there were other lives, other worlds down there in that geometric grid of streets still extant where bad and inexplicable things like this do not happen to innocent people like him and all the others. James shouted aloud a decisive, repeated mantra in his last few moments on the windswept edge of what was shortly to become a completely ruined building:

  “I will NOT die in flames and in agony. I WILL jump to escape this dreadful Hell.

  “I will NOT die in flames and in agony. I WILL jump to escape this dreadful Hell.

  “I will NOT die in flames and in agony. I WILL jump to escape this dreadful Hell.”

  He wished briefly that his ultra, up-to-date cell phone had not been immolated in the side pocket of his Armani suit jacket that only minutes ago had draped itself elegantly on the shoulders of his ergonomically designed office chair. If he could have only cradled that it in one hand he would have tapped in the number of his ex-wife Clarissa, even though he’d inevitably only reach her voicemail with its characterless announcement and then left some kind of fucked-up and very brief farewell message for her and more importantly for their pre-pubescent and
totally socially inept and malcontent daughter, Charlie, who didn’t as yet have a cell of her own much to her pimply disgruntlement.

  He heard far below him in the panic-strewn streets the sirens of what he knew were Port Authority Cops and NYC Firefighters getting closer but agonizingly slowly in their vehicles. From above, he saw on either side silhouetted bodies falling with fatal deliberation and disappearing from sight far below.

  Behind him death and destruction swarmed unavoidably closer. Straightening as upright as he could in the remains of the window, he adjusted his tie in a fruitless but habitual gesture, smoothed his expensively maintained hair back into place, closed his eyes and then, with his head and heart massively pumping, he jumped downwards. He managed to immediately right himself in the air as he fell, as if that curious action was caused by some perverse need for correct dignity like some Olympic diver on display to a vast viewing public.

  Only a second or so after James leapt into the soiled air, an aged and ashen-faced, sad-eyed male Angel with grey, tarnished but still somehow active wings appeared from nowhere and fluttered in front of him in a disjointed manner and then halted his downward trajectory with a thrusting gesture from an upturned palm.

  Then it said without further ado right into his face:

  “Hi, James! Whoa, it’s all right, I gotcha, all right? Hey, you don’t have a problem with me addressing you in a personal way do you? No? OK, cool. You must admit it’s a weird one, right? Yeah? There’s some seriously bad shit going down right here, right now in NYC and we’ve all been dispatched to help out all you jumpers that have made that difficult decision to fall to an infinitely less drawn out and painful ending as a result of whatever the fuck is going on here destruction-wise, yeah? We’re here, and some of us have been forced out of retirement I’ll have you know, to make your last moments just an itsy bitsy, teeny weenie bit better, you know? Anyhow, you have approximately ten seconds left after I vamoose before your body smashes into the ground at about one hundred and fifty miles per hour in a very bad and messy way for all concerned below unless you make a choice.”

  “What the fuck? How the…?” James finally managed to cry out loud.

  The Angel said:

  “Hush now, baby. Please, don’t even go there with all your questions and bafflements OK, man? Time is of the essence already! I just want to ask you one thing while you’re temporarily hovering stationary and bewildered above New York City as it was. And that is: where do you really want to go?”

  James screamed instinctively:

  “HOME!”

  Big teeming blackness ensued.

  ***

  September 1971. Inside a small but homely 6th floor apartment block in Queens, the cream-coloured plastic transistor radio on the breakfast counter in the kitchen was tuned to New York’s Radio WPLJ and was playing that week’s Top Ten hit singles. Right at that moment it was beaming out the song currently at No.4 Bill Withers: Ain’t No Sunshine.

  Mom said with a sigh in her voice as she turned over the rashers of bacon in the small frying pan on the stove:

  “Ah, Jimmy. I kinda like this one a lot. Do you like it, sweetie?”

  She hummed along to it under her breath and then felt sad as she remembered the continuing absence of her wayward husband. Ray. That whisky-loving and abusive bastard who finally walked out on her and little Jimmy after one bruised late night argument too many back in January. Jimmy was five years old then and was a quiet, solitary child who had learned to enjoy his own company but more often than not these days his gaze seemed to focus on something in a distance no one else, not even his Mom, could reach.

  In his high-pitched young boy’s voice he said:

  “No, not really. I like the one by Five Man Electrical Band. You know, the one called Signs? It’s kinda …mmmmmmm.”

  Suddenly his head lolled to one side and his voice shut down. He swivelled and his head smacked downwards into the cereal bowl in front of him.

  “Jimmy? Hey, Jim! Jimbo? Are you all right? What’s up, honey? You not feeling good? C’mon, honey. Tell Mom, please! It’s MOM!”

  Upon hearing her last shouted word young Jimmy violently raised his head from his broken bowl of Cheerios on the gingham cloth covering the breakfast bar and spewed half-digested milky wheat products from his gaping and distorted mouth in all directions.

  His head craned back at an almost impossible angle from his bony shoulders, he lifted his hands to cover himself but some tarry black and evil-smelling liquid squirted out from between the fingers that covered his face and splattered the front of his Mother’s apron and her upper body. Horrible specks and slimy slivers of it reached her unmade up lips too and she recoiled in horror at their disgusting taste and she spat them out in a quick but ladylike fashion into a hastily withdrawn handkerchief.

  Wiping herself as clean as she could she then knelt beside her son who now sat rigid and upright in his chair, his poor young head soiled, unnaturally coloured and tilted sideways with his eyes rolled back in their bloodshot sockets. His slack mouth strained to speak. At first nothing came out except dribble and words half-formed and indecipherable. Then with what seemed an enormous effort he hunched himself forward and said quite clearly in a hoarse voice utterly unlike his own:

  “Smoke. Burning flesh. Towers. Towers falling. Bodies falling. Bodies burning. Screaming. Panic. Sirens. Paper blown in the wind. Searing. Heat. Smoke. Fear. Melting. Falling. Fear. Smoke. Flesh. Panic. Towers Sirens. Fear. Falling. Heat. Falling. Wind. Wind in flesh. Searing. Sirens. Burning. Paper Screaming. Burning. Burning. Blown. Ashes. Grey Angel. ANGEL. This is home? MOM!”

  Jim fell silent and slumped forward with his moist, bony chin touching his chest.

  “Jimmy? JIMMY? You’re scaring me now, honey! What IS it? What’s the matter? What are you seeing? What are you saying? Please, Jimbo. Talk to Mom. I love you. I LOVE YOU!”

  She crouched at his side, regardless of the rip in her nylons and the dark mess upon her chest and reached towards him to hold his shaking, fragile little boy’s body tightly to hers as it sat akimbo in his chair. She longed to cradle him and kiss his entire nightmare away but he was no longer there.

  He’d gone.

  ***

  The sudden eruption of noise was unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. It burst at her louder than thunder and drove through her whole body. The entirety of the building shook mightily as if a vengeful God had taken a fist to its very structure. She lurched momentarily sideways as the floor seemed to ripple beneath her. From nowhere acrid smoke started to invade her eyes and her lungs causing her breath to rasp harshly in her chest and throat. She could hear many others behind her screaming, their loud cries searing through her brain.

  As soon as she heard the monstrously loud intro music to the live performance of her boyfriend’s band SLID as it burst forth from the massive PA stack immediately to her left, Charlie Appleby’s eighteen year old nipples hardened and moments later she came forth full and squirty in her panties. She gasped excitedly and flush-faced looked briefly around and then laughed out loud. Her thought bubble said:

  “Fuck you, there’s no embarrassment round here, that’s for sure. Who’s gonna see that spreading damp patch in the middle of all this anyway”?

  She threw her head back and forth as the stage lights began to spin sinister patterns over the packed auditorium. Faces became transfixed to the stage. The clouds of dry ice swirled outwards and made her choke as they swarmed over her and the thousands behind her in the auditorium. She elbowed her way through the first few rows of the awestruck crowd until she arrived at the centre of them all just as the first thunderous notes of the band’s opening number hurled outwards.

  If she could have knelt she would have done because there he was, pinioned by the stage lights. Kyle Madison. KYLE! The One and The Only! Her Star Bright Saviour. Oh, how he commanded the centre, his lank and dyed hair flailing, moist mouth sexily agape as he sucked upon the microphone
to howl and sing and those oh so skinny legs posed akimbo in tight and torn crotch-bulging leather trousers. YEAH, HIM! Throwing shapes only a perverted Devil could design. One music magazine online that she remembered described SLID’s music on their breakthrough album KR as:

  “Pagan and passionate, indiscriminately ugly and vicious. Loud, more than loud in fact. This band, fronted by their lead singer, Kyle Madison, appear to be extreme, destructive and soulless creatures that demand nothing less than absolute surrender to their monumental deconstruction of what you thought Industrial Music was. This is sonic warfare that has FUCK YOU carved into every foul and discordant note. We fucking love it! Go forth and torture yourselves into bliss!”

  Wow! If Charlie’s back was big enough she would have had that entire quote tattooed right across it.

  She knew that he was ‘the love of her life, her mentor, her sage and her partner’ because he told her that in a poem scrawled on the reverse of a set list a few gigs ago. He’d even signed it with his own blood. She would wait to spend eternity with him.

  That night, in the Hammerstein Ballroom, the songs were somehow more colossal in their volume and power. The band, ugly but somehow sexy as fuck, sounded like machines from the future unexpectedly cast back to here and now and demonstrating musically how mightily angry they were about this unwanted time-slip. They bludgeoned, roared, enticed and they terrified and delighted all at once. One reviewer in Rolling Stone said of one of their live concerts:

  “SLID sound like the Nuremburg Rally set to music. Kyle Madison, their front man and lead singer, conducts and controls the set like Hitler in a metabolic collision with Jim Morrison and Charlie Manson. Every girl in the audience wants to fuck him and every guy either wants to fuck him too or assassinate him. It’s a joy to behold. This is the sound of the future that we dreaded would actually arrive. But it’s most definitely here like it or not and SLID are the soundtrack”.