A Day Of Faces (3 page)

Or maybe I give him the full fox treatment, biting into that bloodied wing and sinking my fangs in deep, poison flowing into his body. He wakes, jumping to his feet, and lashes out, his strong arm smacking into my face and knocking me back. As he rises and leaps towards me I grab a pitchfork from the tool shelf and swing it around in front. He impales himself and staggers back, then I pick up a shovel and being it down on his head. I tie him up before he comes to and drag his sorry ass down to the police station. Kicking open the front door, I slide him across the polished floor, as the cops and other perps turn to look in astonishment. I stand in the doorway, silhouetted against the streetlights. It’s pretty sweet.

I ignore the blood-washed floor and move quietly closer, aware of my own breathing and my beating heart. I can see his chest rising and falling, his breath sporadic. He might be dying. I pick up a gardening fork from the workbench, just in case, and lean in close, the fork held up in front of me as I peer at his face. His eyes suddenly snap open and and arm rushes out, seizing my wrist in a firm grip. He looks at the fork, then back at me, and whispers, “you have nothing to fear from me.” I remove his tattered shirt and tend to the wound, delicately removing the remains of the bullet. He grimaces but doesn’t cry out. “I owe you,” he says, voice hoarse but powerful. I close my eyes and lean in.

Nope. That didn’t happen either. Tempting, though.

“Hey!” I keep my voice down, not wanting to wake up the neighbourhood. He doesn’t stir. I shrug, then kick his leg, hard. “Hey, dead guy! You’re bleeding on my floor.”

That got him moving. He groaned, and turned towards me, bleary-eyed. “Fuck,” he said.

“Are your wings absorbent?” I asked. “Will they mop up all this shit?”

He tried to sit up, making the mistake of putting weight on his injured wing. He collapsed back to the floor with a thud and a moan. Glancing over at his wound with a wince he asked “Did I get shot?”

I nodded. “And guess what’s weird, right? I saw it happen. A couple miles away. And now you’re right here in my garden. What the hell?”

“Weirder things have happened to me lately,” he said, grunting. With my eyes adjusted properly to the dark I could just about make out his face, although the dirt and blood didn’t make that any easier. The wings were clear testament to his birth year, but I didn’t recognise him from any particular phase. January wings tended to be more feathered, while April wings were gliders rather than free-flight. Each day was unique, so it wasn’t like I would know them all, but the annual pattern tended to develop in a predictable manner - much like me and Rachel both being squamata but differing massively in our genotype due to our birth date.

Not recognising him wasn’t unexpected, given that wings tended to keep to themselves. They made their buildings tall and without ground floor doors for a reason. Nevertheless, there was something a little off about this guy, something just out of reach.

“I’m thinking you don’t want me to call an ambulance,” I said.

He snorted. “That’d be a bad idea.” He moved into a seated position, more carefully this time, avoiding the damaged wing. Part of the wing hung loose, the frame shattered and snapped. “You should probably go,” he said, looking me dead in the eyes. “The less you’re involved the better, for you.”

“Yeah, I’ll just pop back to bed, then.”

After a moment he smiled, then shrugged, then regretted the shrug. “Alright, then,” he muttered, “your funeral. You got something I can bite?”

All I could think of was smut.

“I mean like a small piece of wood. Or the handle from one of those gardening tools. Yeah, pass it over.”

I picked up a trowel from the workbench and handed it over, reaching out as far as I could and half-flinging it at him. I wasn’t getting too close. The police don’t send ten cops into a packed venue without some kind of good reason.

Holding the trowel, he looked at the damaged wing, then glanced up at me. “This is going to give you nightmares,” he said, putting the handle width-ways into his mouth and biting down, his jaw clenching hard.

All his feathers fluttered as if in a breeze and he grimaced in evident pain. His left wing arched upwards, stretching into the perfect double-arc insignia that adorned every building owned by wings. The other wing flexed but didn’t respond, hanging limply and still bleeding. He cried a muffled cry and sweat appeared on his forehead as his face turned red and his breathing intensified. There was an alarming series of cracks and both wings jerked, then shivered uncontrollably for a few moments, followed by another, longer series of rending cracks.

I was so consumed by the behaviour of his wings that I almost missed the two wounds that had opened up on his temples, large slits that were growing in size, blood pouring from them as something started to protrude out of his head. As in, actually poking through the skin, from the inside. His face was a contorted mask of agony, basted in sweat and saliva.

Another sharp crack and the wings collapsed to the floor. At first I thought he’d simply relaxed them, then I realised with a jolt that they were no longer attached. Both had fallen away, separated from his body, the bloodied stumps where they had connected to his back clearly visible. Feathers drifted away from the frames like autumn leaves.

The ordeal seemed to last forever but can only have been seconds. Before me was the same man, but no longer winged. He’d impossibly changed type and was now a bovid, complete with curved horns emerging from his skull. The wooden trowel dropped from his mouth and he sat gasping for breath, before lifting his head up and staring at me from a blood-streaked face.

“Let me guess. You didn’t see that one coming, right?”

nature

ˈneɪtʃə/

noun

inborn or hereditary characteristics as an influence on or determinant of personality.

A month
passed.
8
In the short time I had with Cal, that first month was the best. Before it all got complicated and crappy and people started dying. I never liked that shed or that garden, but I sometimes want to just be back there, like those early weeks.

I kept going to school, so that everything seemed normal. After dark I’d wait until my dad was asleep, then sneak out with some food and we’d talk into the night, trying to figure out what to do next. Trusting him didn’t come easy, what with the image of that cop falling off the roof still fresh in my mind.

“I was born twenty five years ago,” he’d said. “If you want to know whether you can trust me, go to the records office. Look up my genodate.” He’d pleaded for me to allow him to stay in the shed, hidden away, at least until I’d checked out his story.

Truth is, I didn’t have any real alternatives. Here was a guy, bigger and older than me, who had transformed from wings to horns right in front of me, shrugging off a bullet wound like it was nothing. Some of the feathers still fluttered about the shed when the door was opened, even though we’d disposed of the wing carcass before it started rotting. Having a graveyard out the back turned out to be really, really handy.

On the way to the records office I’d thought about the rest of his claims: that he’d grown up in an orphanage, having been rejected by his parents. I’d always wondered why my parents hadn’t given me up; they certainly didn’t seem to have ever enjoyed having a child. Cal had gone to an orphanage out in the countryside somewhere nice and quiet. It sounded pretty great - I’d always wanted to be taken away to an orphanage when I was growing up. Better to be among kids close to your age, rather than attempting to forge familial ties with your actual parents, who you had nothing to do with, least of all genotype. My dad was a fluffy little thing, about as far removed from my scaly squamatan nature as was possible.

The orphanage had treated him well, right up until the point it burned to the ground. That’s when it had all gone wrong. The stress from the fire brought on his change, which attracted all the wrong kinds of attention.

At the records office I’d found a secluded cubicle at the back of the room, behind filing cabinets and the endless shelves. Thumbing through brown cardboard folders I’d picked out the dozen-or-so babies that had been born on the same date as Cal. Which pretty much assured that they’d have the same abilities.

There was nothing consistent about the recorded dates of death, other than that they all had them. All at very different times and in different places. Some had died during birth. Others as children, in accidents or domestic abuse incidents. One had died as a teenager, killed by a drunk driver while travelling the world before starting work. There was no consistency or pattern but none of them were still alive. None of the deaths on their own looked particularly suspicious, but Cal assured me that it wasn’t a localised coincidence.

Cal wasn’t his real name, he’d said. I pulled out the file for Jason Parks. Born locally to rich parents, who had placed him into the orphanage along with a substantial investment to ensure his and the orphanage’s success. They sounded like nice people. Jason Parks was generally unremarkable, doing okay in his studies without setting the world on fire. Which is a bad turn of phrase, I guess, because he died when the orphanage went up in flames ten years back, along with most of the other kids and half the staff. It had been big news at the time, but I’d only been about eight so didn’t really remember it.

Although most people are born possessing an obvious genotype, some abilities only became apparent during the change. It was basically a secondary puberty. Because why settle for one when you can have an additional embarrassing physical development? For me that meant that I only started generating my own venom around age twelve. Having that happen right around when I started getting interested in boys was all kinds of trouble. Nobody wants to be a bad kisser, let alone kill your crush with slightly over-enthusiastic smooching. It kinda put a dampener on that whole part of my life.

It was the fire itself which introduced Cal to his new life. Turns out the shift he’d done that first night wasn’t a one-off. He could do it whenever he liked, aside from the off-putting pain and exhaustion it caused, going from one genotype to another. I’d never heard of anything like it. I was pretty sure it had never been known to happen before.

“I think I’m the only one left,” he’d said, when I’d returned from the records office. “I’ve moved around a lot. Every town I’ve been, every country, it’s the same. Nobody’s noticed the pattern, or it’s been suppressed, or something. A whole generation has been erased. They do it slowly, carefully, so that nobody picks up on it. They’ve spread it out over two decades. They’re trying to find me.”

Conspiracy always seemed like bullshit. No government or organisation was that organised. Even if they wanted to be like that, they’d just cock it up through incompetence. It’s better to think of our overlords as being idiots rather than evil, right? Whenever a shitty, stupid law got passed, that’s what I told myself.

“Why are you telling me all this? Why me?”

“Because I’m stuck in your shed.”

And there was me thinking that maybe I was special.

Because we weren’t really sure what to actually do, after the first week we moved into talking about normal stuff. Favourite movies. Awesome bands. Places we wanted to go, people we wanted to do. It was like hanging out with a friend. A secret, on-the-run fugitive friend with some kind of magical shape-shifting power.

It was pretty great.

Aside from the burning orphanage. And the police. And the actual reality of the situation. As long as we ignored all that, it was just the two of us, in a shed, talking shit until four in the morning, every night, until the sky started to brighten or I heard a milk float buzzing down the road. It was like having an imaginary friend, without any of the brain effort.

Then one evening I got home from school, said hi to my mum, who was more-or-less asleep on the kitchen table, ignored my dad, and disappeared upstairs to my room with a hastily-made sandwich. From the window I could see the shed, and knew that Cal was in there, and could probably see up to my bedroom window through the dirty glass of the shed door. I just had to wait for it to get dark, which took an annoyingly long time as it was summer. Looking out at the unkempt, knee-high grass and jumbled collections of junk, I was glad for once that my parents had no interest in what happened out the back of their house.

I closed the curtains and got changed, out of my school gear and into something more practical and warm. Every night it occurred to me that I could just leave the curtains open a bit, but that just seemed weird. Kind of exciting, but not the right thing to do. I figured it’d spoil things, that me and Cal weren’t heading down that path. I felt like a stupid schoolgirl just thinking it, but there was the thought, popping into my head every evening. The whole situation just read too much like those slushy romance novels I'd loved a few years back, I guess, where you'd have a girl getting into some kind of inappropriate, vaguely dangerous relationship, usually with an older guy. From the wrong side of the tracks, and so on.

After dark I tip-toed down and out to the shed, taking with me a bunch of snacks and some fresh water. Cal told me about his travels after the fire, when he’d first been trying to understand his new ability, without anyone to guide or help. There’d been a cop who had looked after him right after the orphanage, who had told him to watch his back and put him on the road. Sounded like a nice guy, but Cal didn’t know his name or what he was doing now. He even thought that maybe in all the trauma he’d just made him up entirely.