Birds Ablaze, Chapter 4

*copyrighted material*

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    Calvin woke up from a deep-seated slumber very much displeased. A nettlesome sensation, an elusive thorn cutting through his backbone due to an improper resting position. His eyes rectified his vision, blinking away the sombreness. He had not drowsed for too long but had succeeded in relieving his weary eyeballs for a few hours. The roost of drapes, raincoats and a variety of other vestments had provided him and his fox with a comfortable indoor temperature for the night. He outstretched his strained joints and caught a glimpse of Carol sleeping over a sprawled trench coat through the dimness of the windowless alcove. The stink of musty and humid costumes reminded the boy he’d decided to stay somewhere else for the night, in fear that his room at the abandoned hotel was no safe place anymore. His father’s name was on the Red List and that was no forgetful exertion from the military’s side. The eerie spectral encounter had, however, shaped and revalued his interests. He showed to be ready to butt into all sorts of conspiracies, no less.

     A genuine concern for sanity had taken him to Nooktown’s courthouse and public bibliotheca at midnight before finding shelter, where he piled and rounded up several urban legends and ghost story essays from the province. He’d never touched that section of the library before, he

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was not easily bewitched to believe in any of that. He had then stopped by Nelson’s Booze Bucket for its only closing night of the week, it was more of a provisional accommodation request than a simple sociable visit. The pot-bellied little man had gladly offered him and Carol the pub’s shed, a place for the lost and found objects such as scarves, umbrellas, coats, gloves, and mittens. An unbefitting place to pick and the most unfavorable person to choose, yet Nelson was seemingly all he had and the only person that wouldn’t divulge his darkest secrets. A familiar name on the Red List was no topic to argue with just anyone, least of all his ghostly encounter in the middle of a public space.

     Once he woke he could not go back to a justifiable shuteye, he tiptoed to the counter and looked at the books he had borrowed. He learned about the Tomtenisses. Undersize Scandinavian creatures with white and wispy mutton chops, along with conical caps similar to those of garden gnomes. These creatures lived secretly in farmlands as household guardians and according to the scripts, were known to be pranksters at times, yet friendly. He read about Trolls, Elves, and Mares, but nothing as atypical as the ghosts bathed in rich sunny light he was willing to testify about. He swiped a leather-bound notepad used to dash off meal orders and a fountain pen paired with it from a kitchen drawer, he ripped off the used pages and scratched on it his chance upon tale about the horned specters. Nevertheless, he thought, the woodcutters had sauntered through those woods several thousands of times a day, yet the creatures were unheard of. Had Jesse Mcallister put something in his teacup, perhaps?

     He was about to bring his research to a close by putting away a third manuscript full of stale, sunbaked pages. But just then did he take notice of a four-page individual section that had been detached from the spine, folded, and placed at the back of the tome. The first page was stamped with familiar figures, two slender images in a praying posture. One before the other. Robed with

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butterscotch sparkles, hanging rosary beads from their gowns, and thorny antlers on their heads. The short essay presented different calligraphy from the rest of the book. In it, the witness described the horned creatures as ‘unfleshed and made out of pure radiance’. ‘Spiritual and metaphysical’. In other words, otherworldly beings shared a strong bond with nature and the universe. ‘Guiders of destiny and rarely spotted protectors of Mt. Mowaki’. The number of apparitions of these beings had increased throughout the years. From the 1890s to the present day, approximately forty-five years of high activity.

     Calvin rearranged the parched sheets of paper before putting the collection of disquisitions aside, then it was time to ponder. It was odd enough that his new topic of interest had been written by someone else entirely as if to finish the work of the first author. Who, by the way, was also anonymous. Not disappointing, but could not give it much thought now that he would surely be on the run soon. He pressed his lips, walked towards the pub’s counter, and sat near the chrome front tombstone radio. He looked up at the clock wall, 02:36 A.M. He sighed, as he knew he was not getting the rest he deserved before his next shift back at the airfield. Abandoning his job right away was not the appropriate move for a better escape, he’d have to play it cool.

     He turned on the small wood box receiver and lowered the volume as much as he could, just enough for the sound to grace his ears. He anticipated some bubbly tunes through the art deco machine after a bizarre and frightful day, but surely his unreserved attention was not welcomed.

    “ON RE—REPEAT, Breaking News from Nooktown’s Town-hall radio! We’ve received reports from the airport radio frequency regarding a small enemy aircraft being chased down after trespassing into the town's aerial space. It’s imperative for the involved authorities that our 

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townsfolk remain calm and safe at home or seek refuge in the nearest and most secure public facility in the area. The police and the military are on their way. Please, remain calm.”

    Nooktown’s air raid sirens rang a bat of an eye later, and a quick sight of passing red and blue glows flickering outside the establishment’s small basement windows did much more than simply alert the boy. He clothed himself with winter garbs hurriedly, grabbed the keys, and headed out the door. Carol growled at him, woke by the noise but he didn’t stop.

   “Stay!” He said, before closing the door shut with a loud slam.

     Chasing the law enforcement lights determined to be some effort, he moved fast, making his way around an evil-smelling alley full of waste bags, the passage took him to an abutting boulevard. The air at that quarter came in faint flavors of gunpowder and fuel, his vision at night was still ill-defined, and the darkling shapes of the sidewalk trees tricked him into thinking he was seeing people. He expected so for he knew the streets were ample and highly traversed by those coming in and out of Nooktown. Yet, not tonight.

     A forgotten motorcar at the gas station seized his attention, keys still in the ignition. A baby blue Roven 14 HP Streamline Saloon model with an opened bonnet. The only 24/7 gas station forty miles from town to the nearest province outside Mt. Mowaki, with no employees, and no customers. An active locality almost every hour of a regular day had been evacuated on all counts. Calvin’s gaze followed another wave of intense double-colored lights moving North from where he stood. Their sirens faded away for every wasted second.

     He slammed down the Roven’s bonnet into place and hopped in.

    The motor rumbled beneath him, and he stifled. Adrenaline getting the best of him. One or rather two basic skills he never knew he possessed kept him on track, tragically slow but determined.

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He lacked gentleness with the brake pads and gear lever regardless. He turned the wheel to one side, the car moving with his amateur whacks. He’d never touched a vehicle in his life before and the machine was suffering from it. His experience was somehow fleeting, picking up noises at the other side of the park beyond a brick wall shrouded in cold-tolerant vines and orchids. He followed the parkland’s dirt road—spectacularly unaware of his bad use of it—he parked the Roven beside a charming-looking gazebo painted in white. He heard voices coming from beyond the wall, between gibbers and grumbles. He figured the only way to proceed with caution from that point on was crawling, and he had no other choice but to put his knees and elbows to good use. He jumped at the vine-covered obstruction propelling his torso just enough to peek above at the other side. He distinguished a group of policemen through the shrubby hedge with four horses and six patrol cars, beacons on circling, and circling endlessly.

    “When is that thing coming down?” One reproached, fidgeting with a chewing tobacco tinder box strapped to his belt.

    “It’s coming down when it’s coming down, son. Orders say to keep the streets clean just in case those psychos land in the middle of the avenue. Which I rather not . . . ”

    “Dick-sucking Rootstocks, what do you think they want now?”

    “Terrify us, what else? With their doomhammers crests and their army of scummy ranchers. The filth of the country.” Their captain responded, adjusting his police cap with a grouchy gesture.

    The brick Calvin was holding on to at the top of the wall crackled aloud in his hand, finally snapping and detaching. He fell back onto some brushwoods.

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    “You heard that?” The policemen took out their fusils and five shooters in a shake, searching for a proximate target and taking refuge by the trunks of their motorcars.

    “Where did it come from?” Another asked with twitching hands. Nevertheless, these men had no chance of ever finding out.

     A louder, and deafening noise made them wince and drop to the ground. The vibrations of something cutting through fine air, a burst of bullets that came quickly like thunder. The airplane came to view out of a thick mist—a detonated smoke grenade presumably, merged strategically with blurs of blemished clouds—flying low to raise with another legion of bullets from its fast-action guns. A compact flying machine with a shaded complexion, the size of a Volkswagen beetle. Its attacks were directed at another two pursuing steel birds below it, considerably larger and heavier in military power. These military aircraft twisted, their shapes convoluting to dodge, leaving the motors fairly unharmed, not quite the fate of the fuselages or wings.

    The bluecoats’ horses had fled and they were forced to request reinforcements. The town’s law agency had deployed their men in small groups all in hopes to defend it. The officers waiting by the parkland aimed at the attacker above, crushing next door’s diner shop window with the end of their rifles to creep and shoot within the shelter. Calvin sprang back onto the balls of his feet, his eyes roaming overhead before locating the bird machines. He returned to the Roven and crouched at the sound and sight of reinforcements entering the battlefield's radar, quick to hide and scared stiff to witness a dogfight up so close. They lit the skies with bullets one more time. The jet-powered Rootstock airplane had somersaulted ready to open fire with its automaton armament, but all within a fraction of a second overdue. Black fog sprouted by fire began to consume its tail. Soon it was pivoting its way to the floor, the pilot accomplished stabilization and the nose went up once more. It flew low for an instant, rose to regain altitude

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but still, it did not go too far. It disappeared from view behind the district’s church bell tower and collided with some farmer’s iron plate barn. Eventually engulfing the place in hellfire. The feverish radiance could be suffered from blocks away, the scent of scorched wood and steel had gradually and very quickly become atmospheric. Burnt particles fell as gray snow, followed by glowing tongues like autumn leaves.

     The conception of unfeigned fear. Calvin did not return to the pub, instead, he found himself starting the Roven’s engine a second time and driving towards the catastrophe. He looked through the rear-view mirror on more than just one occasion to make sure he wasn’t being followed. He did his best to pinpoint the exact spot where the Rootstock bird had touched the soil, but the town’s Ecclesiastical edifices blocked the skyline, even so exquisitely. He drove until he came across a large field covered in tall vermilion winter flowers behind a desisting wooden fence. It had been twisted by the weight of the snow throughout time. From there he could see hell rising, a structure shining in the firestorm, wrathful and resilient. He pulled over, jumped over the fence, and ran towards the fire. Blazes feasted on the now frail-looking barn with somber-colored smoke pillars stretching with the wind. Iron scales had blown away in the thick of it, and the carcass of the barn remained halfway fractured and irreplaceable.

    Calvin masked his face with a sleeve, asphyxiation would not be difficult hereafter. Questioning his actions was not something he wanted to do now. He puffed up his teenage lungs, replenishing them with air he knew he’d quickly lose if met with too many obstacles. Yet knowing this, he covered his face again and bolted inside. Within the carcass the situation was wearying altogether, comprehending the begrimed obstructions made of rubble, twisted iron, wooden posts, boxes, and untouched haycocks was a challenge, along with the incandescent and roasting emanations cooking this place.

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     Calvin’s first thought was to retreat immediately but stood there with wobbly legs. A governing and stirring thirst for liberation took over him. He was dead halfway. Persecuted by the nation’s toxic marrow. They knew where to find him, one day they would take him away. So simple and defeated.

    “Hello?! Where are you, pal?” He questioned out loud, “I’m here to help you!” He went on, realizing that the dead might not answer anyway. “I’m not . . . the police!” He was starting to feel out of place in this scenario. He got no reply, but a couple of short-winded coughs that came somewhere far in what was left of the barn.

     “Hang in there! I’m on my way!” He yelled, making his way around the inferno wreckage. He came across hay straws drifting in the ambiance, walls of fire, blistering flat bar steel beams fell from the rooftop, frightened goats making their way to the exit, dozens of roasted apple crates, an iron forged ladder that led to the second floor fractured upon impact, and last but not least, clouds of condensed smoke that were starting to stupify him.

    “THIS IS THE ROANOKIAN POLICE ROOTSTOCK GARBAGE! HAND YOURSELF NOW AND MERCY MIGHT BE GRANTED! YOU ARE SURROUNDED! WE REPEAT, SURROUNDED!” The loudspeaker went off, and the insistent noise of more approaching patrol cars could be heard in the background. Calvin spat black phlegm and crawled instead with much more resolve than a couple of minutes ago. Whatever to be at an opposing force.

      Just when he thought he’d rushed into the wrong conflagration with no plane in sight, his eyes began to make out a dismantled warplane more than a few meters away from him on soil level. Its ailerons were wrenched and lacerated, and the cockpit was completely foggy. He raced towards it, noticing how the machine had interlocked at the back of the barn bending all sorts of welded pieces, burst iron plates, and tubes, impacting the wall yet not destroying it. Gladly,

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there was a hole big enough on the rooftop where the toxins were being vacuumed from outside.

     He closed the distance, just in time to see one side of the barn’s facade coming down like mudslides. Weighting rubble against the lowest standing foundations from the opposite side of the barn. He was positive it wouldn’t hold forever.

    For a fleeting moment, he could have sworn he saw a tall, white-hot-robed silhouette walk past him, hollow-cheeked and starveling. Despite that, pacifying and noble to the senses. Branchy, thorned antlers and recognizably from another existence as the manuscripts had described the so-called guiders of destiny. Something about it knocked the air out of him, so potent he almost lost his footing.

     A question followed, “So you are the brat . . . ? You are hardly getting out of this one alive on your own.” He was deceived to believe it was the voice of a woman who spoke to him, the diction in her words seemed unnatural and indefectible. Calvin breathed again breaking whatever spell he was in, to later realize those words came from the physical realm he belonged to. The inquiry came from a bloodied bald man with oriental features and a British accent, his legs trapped between ferrous metals inside one of the two cabins of the warplane. His windows were partially splintered, certainly, this man was the pilot. His battlefront shooter companion and co-pilot at the front side of the cockpit had died in the collision. His blood was all over the crystal.

     “I’m getting you out of here, Sir!” Calvin answered, wasting no time to make his way around the severed bird machine, despite the odd question.

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     “My legs are broken. I’m not going anywhere, and those bastards are not getting a piece of me. You got that?”

    “There’s got to be a way I can help you.” The boy rummaged around the junk in hopes of a tool to free the man’s legs.

    “A Rootstock at heart . . . ” The man then mumbled something that could be in Japanese, Calvin was not quite sure. “You . . . can do one last thing for me. Come here.” The pilot got a hold of a pouch on his sleeveless buckskin coat, revealing a monochrome photograph of a freshly planted tree sapling surrounded by an icy background. Milk white marble columns of some sort of large edifice and rose bushes. Lots of them, popping gracefully in the snow.

      “S—sir?”

    “See this? My buddy and I have secured the mission’s completion for now . . . I can’t offer any precise data . . . ”

    “Wait, I—”

    “You said you wanted to help, now listen up. Ain’t too much time left.” Additionally, he took out an envelope. “This letter is classified, as Rootstocks’ business. I need you to deliver this letter and the picture to Ms. Mulhouse.”  

    “Ms. M—”

    “Don’t mention her name to anyone.” He interrupted, conspicuously impatient. Dire pain and discomposure on the pilot’s physiognomy became obvious.

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     “I . . . I’ve been living in Nooktown for a decade, there’s nobody here with that name. I mean, not that I know of.”

    “That’s not necessary, you’ll know of her soon.”

    “What . . . ? What does that mean? Will she talk to me? I don’t follow, Sir.”

    “Stop making questions, kid. You’ll know what to do soon enough, the plan, the gears are  already in motion.”

    Calvin kept the photograph and envelope looking at the crippled man in wonder, and in hopes, he’d say anything else. And he did so. “If by any chance you run into one of us again, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Us Rootstocks . . . we help our kind.”

    “Thank you . . . ” He nodded, nowhere near as satisfied as he thought he would be by the end of the night.

    “Why are you just standing there? Move it, kid!” The pilot’s voice showed itself cold and stark. He was carrying a grenade in his hand. “Go. I’ll take care of the rats.”

    Calvin discovered a carbon fiber reinforced wheel window large enough for him to go through above the plane’s junkyard. The nose rammed against the wall permitted him to grab onto the broken railing of the second floor, a bit deformed along the bars. He had to hop onto the unviolated piece of the cockpit, then jumped and hold on to the rails. He climbed to the top and the rooftop crunched again. This time the flames came down closer, feeding themselves with more of the barn’s structure. Shutting in the lethal fumes.

     He seized the window firmly and found the glass intact. He tried opening it and it did not budge, his lungs were being roasted to the point that he was desperately in need of fresh air. He

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stepped back at the edge and stomped the glass, a piece fell off. Calvin pressed his mouth and nose into the hole. The first mouthful of clean air felt like heaven. He sucked air again before giving the window a last but definitive blow. It fractured into small pieces, and he climbed towards the exit.

     Gunshots were coming from inside and a jiff later, a barbaric blast. The grenade’s shock wave sent the kid flying—surrounded by timber, iron scraps, and smithereens—toward the flower fields he had gone through earlier. The tall blossoms cushioned his fall and vanished him from all sight. Partially deaf and virtually blind, he perceived and knew of someone or many coming his way. He shut his eyes. Dog-tired and agitated he took a deep breath and went back to sleep.

END OF CHAPTER #4