El Sombra

by Al Ewing

  Safe in the knowledge that he had quashed all resistance, General Eisenberg had allowed his top men to form the congregation at his son's wedding. These were the military minds he had hand-picked to aid him in his work, the cornerstones of the clockwork dream, the most integral parts of Projekt Uhrwerk. He would never have allowed all of them in the same room if there had been even a shred of doubt that resistance in Aldea was finished for all time.

  And that was the final thing he had lost. He had come to the town of Pasito as the warlord of a thousand campaigns, one of Hitler's most trusted lieutenants. He had come to the Project as a success - and one man had stripped that from him. He had lost the most valuable resources of the Ultimate Reich - the Traction Engine, Der Zinnsoldat, Daz Drehkreuz, mostly likely Master Minus, not to mention countless weapons, supplies and men - and he had lost them all to that one man. He had lost the respect of his Führer to that one man, and with it his life, for there was no way he could escape punishment for such a titanic failure. And finally - cripplingly - he had lost respect for himself. The tactical skill that had won him his position had been exposed as hopelessly, fatally flawed in his own eyes, and the taste of that knowledge in his mouth was bitter beyond description. He was sick inside with it, black bile hissing and scalding his soul. He burned.

  He would cleanse that shame. He would excise the foul, black matter from his being and then go to the execution chamber with at least some tattered piece of his dignity intact.

  He would see El Sombra's corpse at his feet. Or he would die trying.

  Above the Church, El Sombra flew on his borrowed wings, pursued through the sky by the highest echelons of the Ultimate Reich. He squinted against the rushing wind, performing a tight loop as bullets singed the air inches from his feet. He had had some small amount of practice with the wings on the way over from the Palace, and he had spied on a training session once or twice during those nine years he had spent in a fugue state, learning what he needed to know. It wasn't much at all, but he could at least manoeuvre without crashing into the ground.

  The assembled officers were more adept with the wings, but not by much. For one thing, these were dress models - designed for their looks more than for actual use. For another, these were men used to a position of leadership and command - in other words, the rear. Perhaps three of these men had ventured out from behind the safety of their desks in the Red Dome during the past nine years - apart from the occasional leave, of course, which was generally spent getting fat on German beer and imported champagne in one of the beerkellars or underground cabaret clubs in Berlin. To put it bluntly, these were not the lithe troopers who swooped and soared through the sky like swallows on the recruitment posters, but rather, for the most part, a selection of fat robins, blustering their way through the warm air as they attempted to shoot down their prey with guns they had not practiced firing in months.

  They had the advantage of numbers, and that might have forced a quick end to the combat had they deigned to work together. But these were men used to barking orders in the heat of battle - or at least the heat of administration - and being quickly obeyed without question, and so they flew their own courses yelling directions, which were ignored by any within hearing. Birds without a flock.

  Their disorganisation cost them dear. El Sombra knew that, with his limited skill with firearms, he had to get in close in order to do any damage with the machine-gun, and so he allowed as many as possible to get on his tail, waiting until the bullets almost brushed his cheek before flipping back in a tight turn. As they attempted to swing their guns upwards and pick him off, he flashed over their heads, firing tight, controlled bursts with his weapon into their wing-packs. The masked man managed to rake four sets of wings with the gun before the ammo ran dry, their owners crashing into the ground or, in the case of one whose bright painted wings were torn completely off by the blazing assault, tumbling up into the sky, the cavorite infused into the main harness lifting his body against his will so that he resembled nothing so much as a slowly-rising helium balloon with kicking feet.

  The machine-gun El Sombra had stolen was now little more than a club, and so he hurled it downwards with all the force he could manage, the heavy metal object smashing into the elbow of an aged Oberstleutnant who, until today, had been in charge of requisitions and the many different types of forms that needed to be filled out for such matters. The lower end of his humerus was shattered by the blow, and he dropped his own weapon, veering helplessly towards the ground as the pain caused him to lose all control over his flight. Like many of the aged and out of shape men who formed the officer class in Aldea, he was unused to wearing wings in anything other than a ceremonial situation, and so failed to pull out of the dive before the earth rushed up to meet him and crack the rest of his old bones like fine china.

  One of the few who was used to wearing wings in combat was the elegantly named Major Dieter Faust, a sixty-year-old veteran of the Ultimate Reich's unfortunate adventures in the jungles of Vietnam. After a long and gruelling career in the Luftwaffe, he had been posted to the clockwork-town for the purpose of training new recruits in the use of the steam powered wing-packs that gifted the Reich with the power of flight. Now he saw his fellow officers, seemingly unable to engage in a simple aerial combat with a single amateur foe, and he was horrified. Was this what they had been reduced to? Granted, they had lost Eagle Staffel, and such gifted impresarios of flight as the younger Eisenberg and Hugo Stahl, but when he thought that officers of the Reich could be reduced to such a shambles... he shook his head, fuming. He would finish this ragged upstart himself, and then once he was back in Berlin he would be submitting a full report on the combat-readiness of the officer class. He would submit it to the Führer himself, in triplicate. That would show them.

  El Sombra noted the grey-haired man pursuing him, and angled his flight down towards the Church, picking up speed. He could tell that Dieter Faust was going to be a problem. For a start, he carried a Luger in his grip rather than one of the cumbersome M30s. The others had fired off their machine-guns as though they believed that, if they fired enough bullets into the air, by the law of averages one of them was bound to hit the target - but Major Faust was evidently a believer in a single accurate shot. He was not firing his weapon randomly. He was tracking El Sombra carefully, aiming at where he was going to be, and accelerating to bring himself in range so as to shoot to kill. El Sombra smiled grimly. This one actually had a chance of bringing him down.

  The masked man flipped onto his back, letting Dieter come closer, hovering in place as he kept his eyes on where the other officers were. Then he turned his attention back to Major Faust, and drew his sword.

  And stilled his mind.

  He closed his eyes, feeling the sword in his grip, opening them to see Major Dieter Faust aiming the pistol carefully. Time seemed to slow. Somewhere in the still, silent desert that he had become, El Sombra calculated the exact trajectory Major Faust's next shot would take. And the one after that. And the one after that. He listened to where in the air the other officers were, buzzing around, raising their own guns in a bid to catch him in a crossfire. He smiled, relaxed and content, and looked Dieter Faust square in his furious green eyes.

  The Luger fired three times.

  One by one, the bullets struck the sword, ricocheting off at angles as El Sombra brought it slashing through the air at exactly the correct moment.

  Major Dieter Faust was shocked. For the first time in his entire ordered life, there came into the piercing green eyes a look of uncertainty, as though all of his most cherished assumptions about the world had been brought crashing down. This was the fear to be found in the eyes of the parish priest on coming, in a single horrific instant, to understand that there was no God.

  Then he heard the first screams.

  To his left, he saw the accountant, Major Heinrich Mahler, who kept the books for the Project and probably had not known which end of the gun shot the bullets, screaming and clutching at his eye, p
ulses of rich red blood flowing between his fingers, before he went still and tumbled out of the sky. One of the bullets had burst the jelly of his eyeball and travelled deep into his brain, bringing him death in one single white-hot instant of unendurable agony. How could something like that have happened?

  He looked to the right, and there was Gustav Vogel, the Oberstleutnant who coordinated the supply routes, a good friend who knew how to fly, how to shoot, and yet there he was, clutching his throat and gasping like a dying fish, with blood coursing down his chest...

  And then Dieter Faust realised that he was no longer holding his pistol, and that he would never hold anything in that hand again. The final ricochet had taken off three of the fingers on his right hand. He look at the hand, the thumb and little finger wiggling obscenely, bookending three lumps of torn, bloody meat, and then he looked at the masked man who was swooping down towards the Church roof.

  He realised then that he was looking at Satan himself.

  No normal man could have done such a thing. This was a creature with death and vengeance coursing through his veins where other men had blood, a creature born not of flesh but of some infernal flame of damnation. Where order was brought to the world, this one would bring bloody chaos. First the scene in the church, service reduced to a riot of dead and wounded men, and now this - this final insult, this demented fluke that the monster had used to save his wretched life. Dieter Faust knew that this ragged, ungainly creature was the enemy of everything he held dear.

  A new resolve took hold of him in that moment. He might not have a gun, but he could deal with this abomination, this grotesque untermensch, with his own bare hands. Swooping down, he kept hot on the heels of the ragged swordsman, reaching to grab hold of the flapping trouser-legs. At these speeds, he could do serious damage if he could only force the masked man down onto the roof.

  El Sombra looked back at the last enemy, keeping his course straight, heading towards the bell tower with the weathercock standing proudly on top of it. He swung his sword at the thin metal spoke that held the bird up, chopping it in two, and then reached out quickly to catch the tumbling piece of flat metal. He looked at it - perhaps a quarter of an inch thick, the metal rusted and weathered over the years to a blunt edge. He smiled, gave a swift backward glance, and then simply flipped the weathercock backwards over his shoulder.

  Major Dieter Faust saw the motion but had no time to consider its significance before he felt something hard strike his face, smashing the cartilage and bone of his nose and splitting his lips. He felt his front teeth rattling on his tongue, loose, but he could not seem to work his jaw to spit them out. Blood coursed down over his neck and into his throat and something grey obscured his vision - something he could not quite define. He reached up, wobbling in his headlong flight, and felt the flat metal of the weathercock, his fingertips feeling back until they reached the point where it had embedded itself vertically in his flesh, splitting his face into two grotesque halves...

  That was the moment when Dieter Faust, who was a man who believed in a rigid order, who had no patience for any who lost control of their wings no matter what the circumstance, fully understood the true meaning of chaos. His scream as he lost control and veered madly towards the bell tower was long, barely human and wracked with impossible agonies, and it was cut suddenly short when he impacted against the heavy iron bell, tolling his own demise.

  El Sombra hovered in place, looking quickly around for his next opponent. The sky was clear.

  Slowly the sound of the bell faded away to silence.

  He exhaled.

  And then General Eisenberg roared out of the shattered window of the Church below, bellowing at the top of his lungs.

  "El Sombraaaaahhh!"

  The General's dress wings gleamed in the sunlight, and El Sombra could see from the way he rocketed through the air that these were far more powerful than the wing-packs he was used to, or even the one he was wearing. It could move faster, turn tighter. Every twist he made in the air on his way up seemed effortless, a fact even more astonishing given that he was holding the struggling Carina by the waist, in one hand, using her as a human shield while he aimed the Luger at the masked man with the other.

  The Generaloberst grinned, although it was less a sign of good humour than the baring of teeth common to predatory animals. The wings he wore were a prototype, fresh from the offices of the Messershmitt company. Mass production was not due to start until the following year, and so, with Project Uhrwerk in its final stages, he had had the new wings repainted to serve with his own dress uniform. This happy accident meant that he was now able to outfly and outfight his enemy - El Sombra had a sword and an inferior set of wings, while Eisenberg had a gun and the finest flying apparatus in Mexico. It would be no contest. He flew directly for his enemy, keeping his Luger trained on the space between the masked man's eyes despite the struggling efforts of his hostage.

  El Sombra saw what he had to do. He rolled, pitching downwards, the metal wings on his back clanking as they folded in. He hurtled down towards the earth, picked up speed, the ground rushing up to meet him. Eisenberg took his opportunity and followed close behind, keeping on the masked man's tail as he aimed the pistol and readied himself to put a single bullet into the back of El Sombra's head. He looked forward to the sound the lifeless corpse would make as it smashed into the dirt.

  At the last second, El Sombra triggered the wings and they unfolded out to either side, spreading wide to catch the air. He turned upwards, shooting into the blue sky with the speed of a rocket - the speed he needed to outfly the faster foe. The Generaloberst's bullet thudded into the dirt below him, and Eisenberg cursed, once, before he replicated the masked man's manoeuvre effortlessly, swinging himself up into the air, keeping on El Sombra's tail, aiming for another shot. He was grimly confident that he could keep up such a chase indefinitely. He had the faster machine. He was the better flyer. And he was armed. All it would take would be one mistake on El Sombra's part and the terrorist would be a dead man.

  Carina was holding onto her captor for dear life. She was terrified - her fear of heights made her queasy with vertigo at every turn the General made - but she held back her fear, keeping her focus on the possibility of escape. She knew that if she could claw free of his grip when they were close to the ground, she would have the best chance of survival. The only flaw in that theory was that, when the General had been close to the ground, he had been travelling at such speed that she would very likely have broken her neck had he chosen that moment to let go. On the other hand, at the height they were at now, she did not have the slightest hope of surviving the fall. Whether she liked it or not, she had no chance of getting away. So she held on against death, praying through gritted teeth that there would come a moment when she could break free without killing herself in the process.

  Eisenberg held onto her tightly and lifted his pistol, aiming once again for El Sombra's back. This time he would shoot to wound, and then perhaps shoot to wound again, until the masked man was finally no longer able to avoid the fatal shot. This plan had the advantage of cruelty, and the thought of the agony a bullet could inflict when boring through the soft offal of the gut made the Generaloberst smile to himself. Even as he squeezed his trigger, El Sombra flipped backwards in a tight loop, suddenly facing downwards again and aiming himself directly at the General. The bullet whispered past his temple.

  Eisenberg clicked his tongue, growling low in his throat. A quick death, then, instead of the planned torture - whatever it took. He had patience. El Sombra could dodge as many shots as he liked, but he would die in the end as surely as a pig fattened for the slaughter. Eisenberg sighted the pistol directly between the masked man's eyes, making sure that Carina protected as much of his own body as possible.

  El Sombra hurled his sword straight down.

  Carina's eyes widened in shock as the sharp, flashing blade seemed to come straight for her. Eisenberg gritted his teeth and his finger began to squeeze the trigger - o
nly to feel the gun jerk in his hands, suddenly heavy, off-balance. He looked at it, and his own grey eyes grew wide at the sight.

  The barrel of the Luger was split down the middle and blocked solid. El Sombra's sword was securely wedged into it.

  The masked man smiled and allowed himself a single instant of pride.

  It had, perhaps, been the best throw he had ever made.

  The Generaloberst snarled like an animal and reached to tear the sword free from his gun and in the process he let go of Carina with no more thought than you or I might let go of, say, the handle of a heavy suitcase in order to reach into a pocket for a key. Carina had finally outlived her usefulness, and now Eisenberg needed both his hands free more than he needed her alive.

  She did not scream as she fell. But her face grew pale as gravity took hold in the pit of her stomach and her own death rushed up to greet her.

  El Sombra, diving downward like an eagle sighting prey, had already reached terminal velocity, while Carina had a few moments left before they were falling at the same speed. He sped past the hovering General, reaching, hand clawing at the air. At the same time, Carina reached upwards, kicking with her legs as though that might slow her fall, straining with all of her strength as though attempting to break gravity's hold through sheer force of will. Underneath, the ground rushed at them both like a barrelling freight train, as the masked man's hand finally found hers, tugging her into his arms before he allowed the metal wings to spread wide once again, lifting him and Carina back up towards the blue canopy above.