Rollerskater: Flight


I | II | III | SSI | IV | V | SSII | SSIII | VI | VII | SSIV
VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | SSV | XIII | SSVI | XIV | SSVII | XV | SSVIII | XVI | XVII


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The Project Director sits, looking up at Parish, bound and suspended, waiting.

The time for threats has now passed. They have reached a stalemate in this little game, the two of them, and no more progress can be made.

They have arranged a set of folding chairs in the containment room, so all staff can be present to see their prisoner meet his end. After that, Project LUCIFER will be decommissioned, struck from the record, and everyone here can move on with their lives.

In some ways, the Project Director wants them to get on with it, but in others, he doesn’t want this moment to pass too quickly. It’s just too delicious.

This…this…thing before him has been a thorn in his side for far too long.

All this time spent far away from his wife, his children. They know he works in central government, yes, but he is tired of having to hide himself from them, keeping his lips buttoned up when he is able to speak to them through the telephone.

He’s tired of Emily Bush, as well. Tired of her simpering. Her girlish need to protect that freak. Don’t they screen for that when hiring medics for top-secret projects? Bloody budget cuts. They probably drafted her in from the NHS. Not a doctor who has seen real war. A bleeding-heart who has no place anywhere near Government. Oh, how he weeps for the future of Britain, when people like Emily Bush have the right to vote.

The Project Director unconsciously removes his glasses, reaches up and pinches the bridge of his nose.

Good God, he’s hated these months. They’ve aged him. Now, here he sits. He puts the glasses back on and folds his arms, smiling upwards.

This chapter of his life is drawing to a close, and he can once again be himself.

Where is that daft bint, anyway?

He folds his arms. Checks his watch. 08:57.

At the third stroke, it will be eight. Fifty-eight. Precisely.

The technicians come in on the accordion lift, fiddling with controls. There’s a metal box. Inside it is an array of syringes that will push poison into the veins of Blake Parish. He will die inside two minutes.

Two minutes! The totality of a man’s life, all those years, all that potential, ended by a cocktail of chemicals in less time than it takes the Sun’s light to reach the Earth. Two minutes! Less time than it takes to write a shopping list.

Two minutes!

The marvels of technology.

Ah! The technicians are finished fiddling now. Yes, they’re raising the lift. It softly whirs as it raises.

The Project Director clears his throat, snorts, and checks his watch again.

08:59.

This is it, then. The final curtain.

There’s a pfftsch sound across the room as one of the blast doors opens.

The Project Director turns.

The technicians rise on the ladder.

At the third stroke

There’s a soldier walking towards him.

it will be nine

The lift stops next to Parish.

The soldier’s expression is stunned.

The Project Director raises an eyebrow.

o’clock

The technicians take the needle, hold it up to the light.

“Sir,” the soldier is saying.

And the Project Director already knows what he is going to say.

“We can’t find Dr. Bush. She’s not in her—”

Already the Director is rising from his seat, raising his arm in desperation.

precisely

Stop—!

Sparks explode, showering on to the concrete floor below. The technicians lose their balance. The arm they had been reaching for – the vein they had been reaching for, has dropped out of their reach.

Oh Christ. Oh Jesus Christ.

Someone’s demagnetised the chains!

Parish dangles from the supports, and slowly, he begins to move.

A setback, the Project Director thinks. There’s still time. We can still get this done.

“Find that woman,” he barks at the soldier. “Now.”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier says, reaching for a radio on his uniform. “Attention please, attention please. Protocol Zero-Gamma is now in place. You are to perform an immediate sweep of the facility for Dr. Emily Bush, repeat, an immediate sweep for Emily Bush…”

An alarm has started blaring. Footsteps follow seconds later.

The Director suddenly has a thought.

The magnets holding Parish in place have backup generators. There’s only one place that the backups could have been disabled.

“You. With me. Now.

He rushes from the room.

The soldier runs with him, marvelling, perhaps, at how a middle-aged civil servant is able to pump his legs that quickly.

It’s really quite simple. The Director’s bloody future is riding on this.

Up a staircase they run. Then another. The soldier has his service rifle at the ready.

They reach an upper corridor, with a set of windows running halfway along the wall opposite the stairwell entrance. The windows look straight down into the containment room.

At the end of the corridor, there’s a room with a metal door and a round porthole.

As the Director approaches it, he sees that the room is occupied.

There, standing inside it, is Emily Bush, who meets his gaze.

She smiles.

Furious, he pushes on the door handle. No use. She’s jammed herself in.

“Soldier!” he says. “Put that door through. I don’t bloody care how many hundreds of bloody thousands of bloody pounds of bloody damage you have to bloody cause to bloody deal with it, just bloody do it!”

“Yes, sir!”

The soldier throws himself at the door, and it doesn’t budge.

The Director peers through the porthole at Bush, who looks at the chair she has jammed under the handle, then back at him.

“Doctor Bush,” he says. “You are done here, do you understand me? DONE!

She looks down at the chaos now unfolding in the containment room – soldiers pointing guns, barking orders, technicians trying to reposition themselves.

Her hand slips on to a lever.

The smile on her face indicates that she is perfectly aware that the Project Director knows what it does.

“Don’t you dare,” he growls. “Don’t you dare—

She pulls the lever.

A soft whirring up above, then: kadajunk kadajunk kadajunk.

The Director helplessly runs to the window overlooking the containment room.

The roof has opened.

It is a bright morning in late spring, and the Sun has started flowing in to the containment room.

Parish stirs, writhing in the light.

“No…” the Project Director says, breathless, before raising his voice to a terrible roar: “NO!

The soldier finally breaks the door down, and before the soldier even knows what’s happening, the Director has leapt on Bush and got his arm around her throat. The soldier trains his gun on Bush’s breast—

“Don’t shoot her yet,” the Director says, his voice shaking. “Give me your sidearm. Soldier.”

The soldier’s mouth falls open, his lips working, trying to form words.

“Sir, I really don’t think—”

“Give me your fucking. Sidearm. Soldier.

The soldier purses his lips, then hands the Director a Walther P99, which he points at the good doctor’s temple.

“Is this how it really ends, Director?” Bush says, hoarsely. “You’ve already lost.”

“Not yet, my dear Doctor,” the Project Director growls. “Not yet.”

He drags her down two flights of stairs, no small feat, given that she is taller than him.

He can hear his own pulse in his ears.

This wasn’t what was meant to happen. He can feel it, now, the whole world falling into an abyss. If he doesn’t succeed today, all of Britain is doomed.

He cannot allow that to happen.

He enters the containment room, now bathed in sunlight, to a scene of utter disarray.

Soldiers pointing carbines, alarms still blaring, red lights flashing uselessly, orders being shouted, technicians frantically trying to get out of the line of fire…

And in the centre of it all, a placid nucleus, surrounded by frantic electrons.

There is Parish, slipped free of the flight suit, his body entirely naked but for white cloth around his genitals. His muscles, which should be wasted, ripple under his skin. His arms are spread wide, almost cruciform, and coiled around his limbs are what look like golden ropes, bearing him gently to the ground.

As his bare feet touch the concrete, the impossible man approaches them. His face is still obscured by the mask.

“Don’t take another step!” the Director shouts, pushing the gun into Bush’s temple. “Or I’ll kill her. Do you want her death on your conscience, sir?”

Parish looks back at him, his expression unreadable under the mask. Rage? No. Sadness? No. Worse than that.

Pity.

He reaches up, slowly, releasing the clasps, and gently pulls the mask from his face.

Staring hard at the Director is a beautiful, dark-skinned man, his hair black and curled, and his eyes shining a brilliant blue.

Parish’s nostrils flare as his lips part.

“I will never obey you,” he says, his voice like the sound of torrential rain on stone.

His anger is not expressed by raising his voice. It is quiet, reserved.

It is the assurance of the oncoming storm that there is nothing that can be done against its strength.

It is terrifying.

Parish casts a glance to Emily Bush, then back to the Director.

“You have not made a soldier of me.”

The Director’s finger slips on to the trigger in a last desperate attempt to regain control.

At the same moment, the soldiers in the room train their weapons on Parish.

Yes, the Director thinks. He’s made his point. Now it’s time for the adults to step in.

He pulls the trigger—

And wings of white crystal burst from the man’s back, vast wings, spanning the width of the room. Six of them.

Then, six more are made manifest, one after the other.

Twelve wings, coiling around everyone and everything, gleaming in the sunlight.

“My God,” Emily Bush says. “They’re beautiful.

The Director realises a second too late that he is no longer holding a gun, but an inert piece of stone.

He collapses to his knees, defeated.

Open fire!” a soldier shouts.

The air is suddenly filled with the smell of flowers. Instead of bullets, rose petals begin to flutter around them.

The Director raises his head to see the soldiers’ guns disintegrate in their hands. A small fawn suddenly leaps from the arms of a soldier and goes cantering away. Other guns liquefy harmlessly, yet more turn to dust.

Parish smiles at Bush.

“Thank you, Emily,” he says.

“You’re welcome,” she replies. “Now, run. Someone out there is missing you.”

And with that, he flaps his wings, whipping the air with half the force of a jet engine, and leaps, taking himself up out of the open roof and into the wide, brilliant sky above.

*

Sunlight, air, warmth. He climbed to meet them, and they greeted him like an old friend. For the first time in many long months, he heard the singing of the strings around him, felt the vastness of the world.

Home, I’m home, Blake Parish thought.

His twelve wings fluttered now, skimming the edges of clouds as he ascended, higher and higher, the ground falling away from him. This sky, his love. The two of them were parted for too long. Now he reached up and embraced her, and she embraced him, her blue expanse enveloping him.

He rose above the cloud layer, surging into the upper atmosphere, spreading his wings as he met the Sun, glittering through his wings, casting lights on the clouds below like fireflies.

He basked and exalted, laughing and somersaulting in the cool, thin air, victorious at last.

No. Still much to do. Not there yet.

He had to get a hold on himself. The time to celebrate would come later. Find his daughter, prepare defences. He had bought himself time, but not respite.

They would not take him again.

He stopped, hovering above the Earth, as he listened for whispers in the strings.

Minutes passed, and then…

A very quiet voice, a beacon shining in endless dark.

Help me.

Libby!

Diving, now, he swooped back into the clouds and set a course, asking the strings to guide him on his journey.

Images came to him.

Men in suits – suits like the one that had entrapped him all those months. They were running across tarmac. He felt the impact of their boots in the soles of his own feet, felt their determination. A siren was blaring.

Then, acceleration. The roar of engines, as flying machines took off from an airfield far away.

If they could not have him, they wanted him dead.

He gritted his teeth, then took himself further down, reaching out with an arm over a body of water.

A flock of waterfowl, which had been sitting quietly on the water, suddenly surged up, beating their wings to meet him.

He flew amid them, these gulls, ducks, geese and swans, and then, with a pinch of his fingers, drew the clouds together into tight, dark bundles.

He would not let them kill him. Not now.

Rain began to pour, and behind him, he heard the roar of engines coming towards him. Three grey fighting craft, surging in formation.

He turned his head to see them.

A plume of white light from under the wing of the one in the middle of the formation, and suddenly something was racing up to meet him like a white-hot needle.

He threw up a hand, and the needle immediately transformed into crystal spheres that sailed on the wind, catching the sunlight at the edge of the stormclouds and shimmering in rainbow, before bursting.

Through the strings, he could hear their incredulity.

He smiled at that, then flew up, the flocks of birds in tow, and the aircraft entered a steep climb to follow with him.

He watched as the planes diverged, surging around him. One came up behind him, trying to line up a clear shot.

A loud sound behind him: B-r-r-r-r-rt!

Two of his compatriots were struck, and fell headlong from the sky, their bellies and throats ripped out by ammunition.

The sky is not too full of birds, thought Blake Parish. For it is to the birds that the sky belongs. No. The sky is far too full of planes.

Entering a dive, now, he drew himself up into a great somersault, and as he fell into the rear behind the planes, he clapped his hands together.

In answer, the clouds roared, and light flashed.

Two of the planes were immediately stricken, their engines instantly disabled by lightning.

The pilots cried out in terror, in their minds and in their mouths. They knew that death was certain to come, at the behest of their foe.

But Blake Parish was not cruel. Now, he outstretched his arms, directing the birds to the undercarriages of the two jets. Pressing his hands down towards the Earth, he asked them if they would be so kind as to deposit the jets safely on the ground.

The pilots were bewildered as their planes, borne on the backs of birds, were lowered gently into a field with not a scratch on them.

But now there remained a third plane.

Blake realised that one of the engines had been disabled, but the other was still running. The plane was flagging, the pilot inside panicking.

Blake smiled, flying under the body of the falling plane, grabbing the undercarriage with his hands. He carried the plane to the ground, landing it in a muddy field.

He climbed up on to the wing of the plane and wrenched open the cockpit. The terrified pilot looked up at him, shuddering.

Blake held out a hand towards him.

The pilot hesitated for a few moments, then reached for something concealed in his seat.

He pulled out a pistol, which he pointed at Blake’s face.

Before he could even speak the word “Die,” the pistol had changed in his hands into a bundle of fresh daffodils.

Blake smiled at him.

The pilot dropped the flowers, his eyes wide with awe.

Blake reached for his empty hand and took it, helping the pilot to release himself from the plane.

“You saved me,” the pilot said. “Why would you do that?”

“Because you do not deserve to die,” Blake replied. “I do not repay violence with violence.”

The pilot steadied himself against the wing, shuddering.

“What are you going to do now?” the pilot asked.

Blake laughed slightly.

“What do you expect me to say?” he said. “That I’m going to lay waste to your beloved country? Claim dominion over all of you? No. I have my own ends, and I wish to be left to them. If your government had done so in the first place, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

The pilot nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Your apology is accepted,” Blake replied. “Now, you’ll have to excuse me. There’s someone who needs me.”

He leapt, beating his wings in the late morning sky, lifting himself once more into the clouds.

He followed golden pathways across green fields and forests, lakes and rivers, hills and valleys, roads and railway lines, swooping over the countryside of England. This fertile land, this rainy, temperate little island. How beautiful it could be, when it was not scoured and harried by men with guns.

Further and further north he went, until he found himself crossing the border between England and Scotland, noting the change in geology. Past cities, motorways, mountain ranges. Up into the Highlands, where sheep grazed on grassy hillocks.

And then down, down towards a large estate, at whose centrepiece was a building – or what remained of one.

A smouldering heap, fire burning.

Was he too late?

He raised an arm and swept it downwards, calling the clouds to rain on the ashes.

From the ashes grew thorned rose bushes that sprouted bright red flowers.

As the smoke rose, he caught sight of a figure, hovering above the ruin, beating her six wings.

She turned to look at him, and her mouth fell agape.

Dad?” she said.

“Libby,” he said, as if to affirm his presence.

She covered her mouth.

Daddy,” she said. She shed tears, flying into his open arms. “Oh, I’ve missed you!”

He held her tight. Felt the weight of her in his arms. It was good to be free.

“I’ve missed you, too, Libby,” he said. His eyes passed over the broken foundations of the ancient building. “What happened here?”

Liberty held his hand.

“They were servants of Geb,” she said. “They took me and kept me here. I’ve been calling out for help for days now…I knew you’d come.”

“It looks like someone else got here first,” Blake said, regretfully.

Liberty looked at him, then away.

“Yes,” she said. “He…he died saving me.”

Blake looked down at the smashed foundations, at rose petals the colour of blood.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“It’s not your fault, Dad…”

“I came as fast as I could…if I’d just been faster…”

“Don’t you dare,” Liberty said, ferociously.

Blake turned his gaze to her. There she was, his daughter of almost twenty-one years, older and wiser than when he had last seen her.

“You’ve grown so brave since they took me away,” he said. “I’m so proud of you, Libby.”

“It’s not over yet,” Liberty said. “K-Os, she warned us. Armageddon is coming.”

Blake nodded, slowly.

“Then there’s no time to waste,” he said. “We must return to the Circle.”

“The Circle?”

“Yes. The place where Great Ur first sealed the Great Geb. An age is drawing to a close, Libby. We don’t have much time. If we act quickly, the world may yet survive.”

“Wait,” Liberty said.

Blake stopped.

Liberty was silent a few moments.

“Can’t we just…can’t we just go home?”

Blake looked down at the smoke billowing off the new rose patch, then out at the horizon, overlooking the rolling, mountainous terrain. Then he looked back at Liberty.

“You would abandon these people? Their lands? Their world?”

“Why not?” Liberty asked. “We never wanted to be drawn into all this. We wanted to be left alone. Let’s return to the woods, live away from the roads, the cities and the noise. I don’t…I can’t lose you again. You’re my Daddy, you always will be.”

She took his hand, and tugged on it.

“Come on, let’s go. K-Os will figure things out. Everything is going to be okay, with or without us.”

Blake took his hand from her, furrowing his brow in disappointment.

“Brave you are, Libby,” he said. “But still, you have much to learn.”

Liberty seemed almost winded by the criticism.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Great Ur did not split himself so we could live in eternal bliss. He became us, so that we could defend this world from his adversary. Now you ask me if you can shirk your responsibility, retreat into the comfort and security of apathy, and leave the rest of the world to die in fire and blood? I ask you again, Liberty Parish – have you learned nothing?”

Now Liberty bowed her head in shame.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Come,” Blake said. “We’ve a world to save.”

And he flew away, following the strings south. Their singing would lead him to the Circle.

He turned his head to see his daughter, reluctantly following him.

And so it was that Lucifer was cut loose from his bindings, and his return marked the coming of Armageddon.


Another time, another place…


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Illustration created using elements of images by Chris Sabor and Taylor Van Riper on Unsplash

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ARC FOUR: BLOOD MOON
I | II | III | SSI | IV | V | SSII | SSIII | VI | VII | SSIV
VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | SSV | XIII | SSVI | XIV | SSVII | XV | SSVIII | XVI | XVII