AEGIS Tales 2, page 9
part #8 of Airship Daedalus Series
Nothing about that woman was human.
"So she wins?” Suzy rolled her eyes. "A white woman wins? Of course, she does. Why wouldn't she? This is their world now.”
"Do you want it to be?”
Movement outside the glass drew her attention, but Suzy knew better than to look at it. Still, it intrigued her, like curiosity with the cat, it called to her.
Just one glance…
"No,” she snapped, as much to him as to herself and the devilish words between her ears. "No. I don't.”
"Well, that's a start.” He brushed a hand over the steam, and the powerful woman's visual faded.
"Nice. It's a start. That's great. The nearest I can figure, I'm dead, about to see my ancestors from the Ghost Camp, and my grandfather is lost. All of this, mind you, because of some stupid leather bag.”
"You mean this bag?” He reached into his coat pocket and produced the leather pouch, turning it over slowly in his fingers. "What about it?”
Suzy rolled her eyes. "You tell me. I don't know what it is, and frankly, I don't want to know. She has it now and that's that.”
He placed it on the table between them. "Do you know what she'll do with it?”
"Well, I don't think she'll make soup, but no. I don't know what she'll—”
The diner melted away like sidewalk chalk in the rain until there was nothing left but the trees and the stars. The trees burned, all of them. Flames leaped from branch to branch, while all around them the dead walked in numbers so great it boggled the mind.
"What is—”
The old man pressed a finger to her lips. "It is what might be, but it doesn’t have to be.”
They were all there, Gerry, her grandfather, even the other waitresses, but it spread beyond that. There were other faces, faces she'd only seen in passing, faces she knew but didn't have names attached to them.
They were all here, all dead, and all still moving.
Hate filled their eyes, hate, and hopelessness.
"I don't understand. If I'm dead, what can I…” Suzy's words faded on her lips when her body shuffled out of the trees, neck broken and twisted to one side.
A coyote howled in the distance.
"Life and death aren't really that different. You're here now, and you're still there, still on the floor. Can't you feel his fingers against your throat?”
Suzy opened her mouth to speak, but the words caught on something. She could feel them, she could feel those fingers, their icy grip.
"Do you want to live?” She was back in the diner, sitting across from him, a smile on that old man's withered face. "Do you want to live? Or do you want to go with them?” He tilted his head toward the glass and the shadowy shapes outside it, share dared not look at.
Again, she couldn't speak. There was no air to breathe.
"You need to answer quickly.”
The door swung open behind her, the friendly jingle of its bell now anything but.
"They're coming for you. They're coming, and they want to know your answer.”
Suzy banged on the table, then grabbed on her throat. Were those fingers she felt? "I…” The first word slipped out, and as it did the invisible hand on her neck tightened. "I…”
Shadows spilled over the diner, covering everything but their booth. "We need an answer. Do you want to—”
"Live!” Suzy managed to squeak the word out before the darkness descended, the old man reaching out fingers to grab her own. "Good. Then live, and take back what is yours.”
The booth vanished, and she was back on the floor, back beneath that crushing grip, but she didn't see the man for who he was, not the dead and broken thing. She saw beneath that, to the life that roared in his veins. He lived again because she willed it, that was her bag, it this was her medicine.
Invite them back?
Suzy's fingers found his broken face and gently caressed it. “Come back with me.”
She wished they’d all come back. She invited them. Suzy didn’t care about the rules anymore. The rules were for someone else. The rules were for weak people, for girls with aprons and dish rags.
They weren’t for Suzy anymore.
The sword woman had barely reached the door, the bag still firmly in her hand, when Suzy called out for her.
"Give it back.”
They were here with her. The shadows of her ancestors slipped in and out of the dark and swinging lights. She was not alone, and she was not weak, not anymore.
The blond drew her sword, bag tight between those slender fingers. "Interesting…I might have misjudged you. It won't happen again.”
Sirens echoed from beyond the lot. Someone was coming, the spinning lights splashing the trees in red.
"Give it to me, and maybe I’ll keep your face intact.”
The woman hesitated, her eyes on the street, then back on the diner. "I don't think so. I think you'll need to take it if you want—”
“Come back. I invite you back. Walk with me.”
Her words echoed across the lot and deep into the woods. Her words found ears, dead ears, and they listened.
Coyotes exploded out of the woods, dead coyotes with red eyes and fiery paws. They hit the sword woman hard and fast, taking her down beneath bloody jaws.
In seconds, the blond was little more than a red stain and bits of broken bone.
Suzy scooped up the pouch and pressed it to her chest, laying a hand on the closest coyote’s bony head.
The police would come, and others. Men and women would set out to take this from her, but they couldn't.
This was who she was.
She walked with the bones now.
Rail Rider
by Paul J. Howard
Henry Kinkle gazed up at the spray of stars spread out across the midnight sky—motionless dots of white punched into an inky black dome. Below this open window on the wide universe above, the ragged silhouette of pine forest canopy moved quickly past. Henry dangled his feet listlessly over the edge of the open doorway, allowing the rhythmic bounce and jostle of the railcar to swing them out and back with each thump of the track. The clicking and clacking of the steel wheels running across small gaps and imperfections between sections soothed his mind from his otherwise hard-scrabble existence.
Behind him, a coterie of fellow train hoppers lay scattered about, fitfully snoring the night away. His stomach rumbled in protest to the vacancy within and Henry pulled a deep breath against the constant discomfort. He turned and gazed from one shadowy form to the next. He thought of sleep. Better to shut your eyes and skip hours of hunger than obsess on it. Obsess on the next meal, the next honest to goodness real meal. An enormous charred sirloin next to a steaming baked potato. Perhaps, why not, cap the affair off with an oozing slab of apple pie, right out of the oven... Rumble, rumble, rumble. Jesus, he thought, pressing a palm against his chatty belly, need a little scratch to take care of this itch. Next town, he’d need to refill his depressingly empty pockets and liberate a little sustenance.
Henry, like most these days, lost much of what little he had when the market crashed a few years back. The world had gone haywire and, though he personally hadn’t any direct stake in stocks and bonds and what not, his bosses had. In a few short years, many thousands found themselves without work. In surprisingly short order, his money dried up and, along with it, the patience of his landlord. He found himself on the street.
Ramshackle tent cities popped up on the outskirts of most major cities across the country; the newly homeless gathering in uneasy alliance to share resources and shelter. But Darwin, being the bitch of a fellow that he was, had clearly defined the rule by which these new societies lived: survival of the fittest. The new pecking order had been brutally established. Anything obtained was often ripped away by the next larger man, and on and on it went: food and possessions moving from the weakest to the strongest. Thus, being a rather small man, Henry kept to himself, feeding and sheltering around the edges. Best to lay low, not be seen, blend into the background. Slink through today to survive until tomorrow. Take tomorrow when it arrives and so on...
Eventually Henry, like so many others, turned to riding the rails. Sure, he thought, plenty of danger in freight cars and train yards, but at least the scenery changed as often as you liked. Hop an open car and jump back off when things looked promising.
Henry turned back to the open doorway and again gazed up at the starry sky. The flicker of the tree line below the unmoving pinpricks of light and the gentle sway back and forth of the train’s hypnotic cadence pulled gently at his eyelids. The thought occurred to him of moving inside, away from the opening and join his fellow travelers in slumber, but no. He shook himself awake, rolled his aching shoulders, yawned and rubbed his stubbled cheeks. The others with him were complete strangers, joined only by the common experience of having hopped this particular train car at the same moment in time. In just a few years, his battered and beleaguered body bore witness to the hazards of trust. He’d find a quiet nook someplace tomorrow and get some rest.
Henry dropped his attention down to his wrist and the gleaming glass face of the watch fastened there. It hadn’t ticked off a single second since a particularly fierce beating he’d taken at one of those tent cities. The timepiece had been a gift from his cantankerous old grandfather and, though nothing fancy, implied value. A small group had demanded the thing and, grievously overmatched, Henry refused. In the ensuing melee, the watch had been broken. In their anger, over the now useless trinket, they’d added a few more licks but left the watch—broken crystal and all—fastened to Henry’s bruised arm. Someday, he swore, he’d get it repaired. Until then, he refused to take it off. It did not matter to him whether it got wet during the infrequent bath or more frequent thunder shower, it didn’t work anyway. What it was, what it represented, however, was a link to a much happier past and, therefore, a beacon of hope for a much better future. The face glittered gently back at him as he smiled to himself.
A glare flashed across the broken crystal, snapping Henry from his thoughts. He jerked his head up to see something zip across the sky to his right. A sputtering, burning thing that sped quick as a blink below the rise and fall of the moving tree tops. Henry’s mouth dropped open as he stared. A few breathless moments later, a faint yellow-orange glow radiated above the forest to the left of where it originally vanished from view.
“Mary, mother of...” Henry stuttered. “You all see...”
Before he could finish the question, feet or hands—he couldn’t be sure—slammed his back and he tumbled out of the open rail car doorway. “Toots, ya queenie!”, came the voice of the unseen perpetrator as the train sped away without him. Henry tried to ball himself up, squinting hard against the coming uncontrolled landing. The fall went on forever, yet the ground arrived far too soon as body met earth and gravel with enough force to squeeze out every bit of breath inside. Lightning flashes struck behind his closed eyes with each pummel to the head as he rolled and bounced to a stop in the shallow gully that ran parallel to the tracks. Pain throbbed angrily through every inch of Henry’s body as he slowly opened his eyes to watch the darkened whir of freight boxes fly by. Tiny bits of dirt and crushed gravel, swept along by the passing train, stung like mad little bees. He rolled face down in the ditch, covered his head and waited.
Eventually, the din of the Union Pacific died off and with it, the abrasive torrent relented. The hiss of flying dust and debris settling back to earth slowly faded to nothing. From nowhere, a distant memory, the sound of receding surf on the Jersey Shore, washed over Henry. He rolled onto his back, gazed up at the glittering spray of stars overhead and sighed. “Son of a bitch!”.
With every square inch of him crying foul, Henry pressed himself off the ground. Each flex and bend and movement came with a dull ache and he had to concentrate on remaining upright, once standing. He fought through waves of nausea as his head spun. He clenched his eyes tight and soon the world stopped spinning. He pressed his hands behind his hips, arched his back and let out a long, low groan. He’d be hurting much worse by morning.
He lifted his left wrist close to his face to check the time, a habit he couldn’t shake even after his watch had ceased working. The motion revealed nothing more than a skinny, pale arm.
“Shit!” Henry cried out, squinting his eyes, scanning all around for the missing time piece. He scoured the rough ditch up and down the length of tracks as far as he reasoned the watch might have bounced, but to no avail. The old watch, his grandfather’s gift and only remaining possession from his prior life was nowhere to be seen. He slumped down to his butt and sighed.
Not one of the good nights, he thought sadly. What now?
At that moment, he remembered the flash in the sky. In the ensuing ruckus, he’d nearly forgotten what he’d seen. He pressed himself back to his feet and peered at the horizon line between the tops of the trees and the night sky.
Too low, he thought. He scrabbled up the embankment and stood tiptoed between the rails, craning his neck, peering into the night, looking for signs of the...crash? Was it a crashed airplane? A meteor? Whatever it had been, it fell fast and hit hard just to the northeast. He fixed the direction in his mind and climbed back down the short embankment and settled down against the rise to await daylight. Whatever fell could wait until morning. Henry swept a small spot free of loose rock, pulled his ragged coat tightly around himself and lowered his shoulder to the ground. Tucking his palm under his cheek, he laid his head down and closed his eyes.
✽✽✽
The sun crept over the eastern skyline, its light a warm red glow through Henry’s closed eyelids. For the moment, the aches and pains from the previous night’s adventure had gone missing, like his old watch. Afraid to move, for fear of waking the fresh injuries on nearly every part of his body, he remained still. Slowly, carefully, he opened his eyes. Pain, pulsating and pure, rode in atop the wave of bright light. A sudden roiling in his stomach lurched forward and Henry rolled to the side, doubled up and spewed a hot stream of bile across the black and gray crushed gravel of the rail embankment. He coughed violently once, twice and finally one third time and sucked in a deep breath of clean mountain air, held it. He closed his eyes and waited for the spell to pass. As it finally did, he let out a long sighing breath and climbed hesitantly to his feet. He felt positively swacked.
Telegram to myself, he thought, try to avoid falling out of trains. A grim chuckle hitched his shoulders and a sudden spasm of pain exploded across his entire back. “Hi-dee-ho...” he mused and leaned slowly one way, then another, loosening the tightness best he could.
Before setting off into the woods, Henry scrabbled up and down the length of the steeply pitched rail embankment, scanning the entire area one last time in search of the old time piece. After a while, he slumped his shoulders in defeat and gave up. Well, he thought, I guess that’s just one less thing to worry about getting rolled for. And, with that, he aimed himself in the direction of the fallen “thing” and plunged into the thick pine forest.
After a few hours of pushing through the sparse undergrowth, just as he wondered whether he’d estimated the direction correctly, Henry began to smell burnt wood. He stopped and sniffed deeply, slowly turning to gauge its source. He guessed that whatever had come down must have torched the surrounding trees when it exploded and now, the smell would lead him right to it. He pressed on.
Soon, the gentle crack and pop and tick of burning embers accompanied the strengthening smell. The occasional wisp and tendril of white smoke oozed by, light filtering through the trees sparking it like searchlights through a cloudy night sky. Another odor, something oily, mechanical, bitter.
Henry stopped, looked down. There, at his feet, some kind of...metal? A twisted chunk of something that didn’t belong. He continued forward. More ragged strips and scraps of something torn terribly asunder. He prodded several with the toe of his shoe. Hard material that looked as if it should be heavier than small quick taps revealed. They didn’t sound like chunks of iron or steel either; no tink or clang when kicked across the forest floor. Just a dull thunk. Below each slab of this debris, the pine needles lay charred and smoldering. A tentative tap with his finger though proved odd. Cool to the touch. Whatever these scraps were, they didn’t hold heat like steel, however sturdy they appeared.
The further he moved toward the crash site, the more debris littered the ground. Each curled and deformed scrap resting atop charred and smoldering pine needles. Here and there now appeared bits of branches and clumps of discolored boughs and a slow gaze upward confirmed: something came in low and fast, clipping the tops of the trees. Henry looked left and right then paced back to the left, still staring up. Within a few strides, the treetops were untouched. Turning about to the right, keeping his eyes to the clipped treetops, he counted paces until the canopy, once again, appeared normal. Fifteen. That meant whatever had come down was around forty feet wide, give or take. Henry knew very little about airplanes. In fact, he’d never even been close to one, let alone flown in one. He guessed that wings could span that far, but the debris...
He leaned down, grimacing against the tightness spreading across his back, and gingerly picked up one of the, now plentiful, chunks. He turned it over carefully in his hand. It was so light, yet looked like a dull steel that should be so much heavier. The edges of the fragment weren’t even sharp, like metal ripped from a larger object should be. Strange, he thought. He dropped the piece and continued forward.
Before long, the angle of damage to the canopy overhead dramatically sloped downward. With less and less cover overhead, sunlight poured to the forest floor, brighter and brighter with each step forward. Bits of tree became tangles of large limbs and clumps of green everywhere. Pieces and parts of whatever had come down grew in quantity and increased in size. He picked up his pace.
