Blood On Borrowed Wings: A Dark Fantasy Thriller (26 page)

Are we all not the sum of our mother’s love and our father’s shortcomings?

Looking Back to Take a Step Forward

Amelia Moss

I had always been a loner, even when surrounded by family or friends I had perpetually cast myself out, placed distance or silence or war in the way of contact or communication.

Mine was the seat in the corner.

In service I had gone out up front, on point, I would lead, I took responsibility and made difficult decisions that some people would call brave or heroic. The truth was, I had nothing to lose, nothing to say and nothing to be but a Slayer. It was not heroic, it was inevitable. It let me avoid the confrontations and complications of relationships, the affectations of fake camaraderie and numbing small talk. I had immersed my life in sport, then Slayer training, flight and battle, and whilst I cared deeply for, even loved, the men I fought alongside, I was not close with any of them, not even my brother. I shirked any degree of involvement as if it was a vast unsolvable problem. I rode at the back of transport. I spoke little. I was a stone.

This is not that ‘woe is me’ crap that you read about in the dailies, that the world does not understand me, blah blah blah. It is that I do not understand the ways of the world, its conventions and contradictions. I am not part of it, never have been. I have never felt the need to divulge what my inner voice whispers to me those times when I am alone or scared or bored. Seems to me people only share what they want to anyway, what they think will improve how they are seen or how they see themselves, what will get them what they want or portray them how they wish, what will bolster the lies or disguise the truth, to keep people where they want them to be, distant, close or under. To bully, coerce, manipulate or dominate. Communication is a form of combat, but one I never trained or excelled in. I was a loner by choice and that suited me and how I wanted to live. Saying nothing rarely complicated things further.

But after my arrest, cuffed, sitting in the back of the Mudhead Police car between two Mudheads, watching Leonora and the thronging masses recede, I felt lonely. Lonely. The two groups of people I had experienced some semblance of belonging with, however vague, had disappeared. My family and unit were gone, totally dissipated, like feathers on a desert wind. And this was how I had wanted it.

Wasn’t it?

My chest hurt.

As we headed for the Mudhead cells I felt like a person leaving on a vast ocean liner with no one to wave to and no one to care if I returned. And no one to miss.

Then that hollow sensation was gone.

I watched the Lowland slums grind by, blurs of glass and stone and wood, patchwork buildings threaded together so tenuously in places that it seemed a strong breeze, a flap of the wing, would be apocalyptic and level the whole area. I sighed and heard the whining officer next to me say something, but I tuned out and let the sensation go.

They wanted me to feel like this, I knew that, I had no say.

I sat there and harnessed my bitterness and my surging compulsion to get this thing finished. I had been shoved around, however I looked at it, played and chased, strung out and used and it was time I struck back and took the fight to them on my terms. As we drove on into the heart of where I needed to be, I knew that by this time tomorrow, everything would be different, everything.

I would be shoving back.

Hard.

Nothing is always the best thing to do, when it is the most difficult thing to do.

Action Inaction: Starting the Stop

Karl Ether

Of the three Mudheads who had been dispatched to pick me up, one, the enormous muscle bound Sergeant, had overzealously insisted on using far more force than my current phlegmatic demeanour required. He was also emphatic about sitting with me in the back seat and applying the cuffs a little too stiffly, so there was little room for comfort and even less room to entertain the notion that any degree of leniency or understanding may be coming my way.

He sneered at me, through perfect teeth, for the entire journey and took up far too much of the back seat with his bulk and smarm.

I knew the type, into career policing, fast track promotions from target hitting and arse kissing, high profile arrests and media chasing. I reckoned he even applied some kind of girly product to his hair whenever he took his hat off. I was another trophy for him, someone of note, of the moment, and I could open doors for him, fast track him some more. His excitement at having me on his arrest sheet was only diluted by his contempt for who I was.

‘You make me sick,’ he said.

I said nothing, kept looking out of the window.

‘You used to be something. Someone. Someone everyone looked up to. Admired even.’

It was still drizzling.

‘Now look at you. Look.’ He plucked at my jacket sleeve. ‘The new suit can’t hide the rotting shell inside, my friend.’

‘I am not your friend,’ I said, so low it was barely audible above the drone of the engine and susurration of the tyres on the wet, potholed road below.

‘What did you just say?’

I did not answer.

He slowly looked me up and down then leaned closer.

‘Shane, we got a facecloth?’ I did not know if he was addressing the driver or the other Mudhead.

‘No Sarge, why the f…’

We both turned not understanding what he meant.

Then he spat in my face.

I turned my head, but still felt his hot spittle spray my neck and right ear, some hit the window.

I turned back to face him.

He sneered. I caught the whiff of something long dead and meaty on his breath as he leaned in and whispered,

‘I’m pulling a double shift tonight, just so I can find your cell, make sure you are trussed up like a Lowlands Dog, then come in and
discuss
things… further.’

I saw the Mudhead driver look at his other colleague in the mirror and shake his head, seems even the Sergeant’s colleagues were not enamoured by his methods. I stared blankly at him, he ignored his colleague’s reactions and leaned in closer still.

I leaned forward so our noses almost touched.

Bite.

Headbutt.

Lunge.

I did nothing, said nothing. I just sat back, chewed down all the white-hot rage and stowed it away for later, when it would come in handy. For the second time that day, I tried to travel the rest of the way in silence.

*

The Sergeant kicked the double doors of the Mudhead Police station open and bustled up to the admissions desk, shoving me in front like I was a human shield or battering ram.

‘What we got here, Coyle?’

‘I know, Frank, I know. Didn’t know they stacked shit this high either. It’s Theron.’

Frank looked at me like I was a fairground curio, mild interest swarmed across his vapid expression, then he scribbled something in the register that I could not see as my face was slammed into the desk beside it.

‘Just in case you get any ideas about making a break for it, fly boy,’ he said. The wood felt cold and bit into my cheekbone. His hand was splayed and pressed on the other side of my neck and face to keep me pinned. His breath felt hot in my ear when he spoke again,

‘Now let’s kennel you.’

I heard someone in the bullpen snigger. It had hurt, but it would not bruise. It was a show of force and I let him show. It meant nothing. He meant nothing.

Coyle and the Desk Sergeant had a small yet noisy debate about whether the crime should be classed as primarily political or vandalistic and then I was booked in.

He yanked me up by the short hair at the nape of my neck and shoved me towards heavy locked inner doors.

‘Buzz us in, would ya, Frank.’

Frank hit a button somewhere under his desk and a thick deadbolt clunked as it disengaged.
        
In the corridor beyond, I was slammed into a whiteboard that housed community notices and government statistic posters designed to spread the news wide and the bullshit thicker. I dislodged a pamphlet about domestic violence with my jaw, the irony not escaping me as I watched it fall to the floor. I was pulled away and then frogmarched, out front, down the main corridor into the bullpen.

Two children and their father sat at a desk off to the right; they had all been crying. Fat, suited Mudheads’ peeled through files and folders like they had been hypnotised into looking busy for new arrivals. Some stole precursory glances at me from behind plastic cups of plastic tasting coffee. A prostitute was sitting at a desk further into the office. Apparently it needed three officers to take her statement. Some things never change. I felt a thought reach out like a tentacle, about Pan, but I ignored it; it receded into the murky water. I stayed in the moment.

Coyle manhandled me into a seat and I sat back onto my cuffed hands. The metal links chewed into my wrists and my teeth clacked. The chair scooted back a little, on plastic wheels, and one of the Mudheads behind me shoved me back towards Coyle’s desk.

Coyle reached into a ceramic pot and withdrew a boiled sweet that he twisted out of the wrapper and popped into his mouth. He threw the wrapper over his shoulder then leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, flexing his muscles.

His desk looked conspicuously clean. There was a small statue of a dog with a plaque I could not read, there was the pot of sweets, calendar, notebook and pen. Nothing else. There were no photographs and nothing personal, save maybe the dog. I leaned closer to look at the plaque.

‘So you like dogs?’ I said.

I did not load it with any subtle suggestion or innuendo. Just a harmless question. I saw something flash in his eyes and heard a couple of contained sniggers from the officers behind me. I had struck a nerve.

He was a huge, big headed man that dwarfed the desk he occupied. He did not look at home in his uniform, having opted for a size too small, maybe to show off his musculature. It had the opposite effect, making him appear bloated and uncomfortable like a caricatured, foot-pumped meathead shoehorned into his clothes. The seams looked strained and I kept waiting for something to give up the ghost with an ear-rending rip. He slurped noisily on the boiled sweet, hissing the accruing saliva back in to his capacious mouth. I wanted to smash the teeth that surrounded it. He picked up the pen in his huge ham fist and waved it at me as he spoke. He looked like a giant holding a matchstick. His words did not come out quite right around the candy.

‘Sho, we got resishting arresht, affray, vandalishm, and thatsh for startersh.’

‘What?’

He pulled the sweet to a less obtrusive corner of his mouth.

‘Affray, vandalism, resisting arrest.’

I said nothing.

‘Sexual assault of a dignitary, disorderly conduct, politically motivated crime,’ he slurped more saliva back, ‘and stealing.’

‘Stealing?’

‘The bottle you threw, property of the plaintiff,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘You got anything you want to say?’

I stayed quiet for a long time, then when he looked like he was about to fill the silence I nodded towards his desk and said,

‘Nice dog.’

His glower was thunderous in shade and proportion. I knew he could not touch me out here, in front of the public, so I made the most of it, of the situation.

‘Cute even,’ I continued.

Coyle was bug-eyed with rage, breathing through his nose, his chest heaved up as if trying to swell over his crossed arms. His jaw clenched.

‘Save it, Coyle,’ a gruff voice said from behind me. Maybe it was a friend of his, advising him to wait for a more appropriate, quiet time to continue the conversation, or maybe it was good policing averting the destructive hurricane that was amassing offshore. Coyle contained himself in his chair, held onto the arms so tightly it was if an invisible deity was trying to pluck him from it and send him tumbling down into the fate he deserved. He relaxed, chomped his sweet, then grinned. There were orange glassy shards of sugar on his teeth.

I knew what the look meant.

See you later.

‘Let’s get you to your room for the night, and you’ll keep your tongue inside your head if you know what’s good for you,’ the same voice said from behind. I was tipped out of the chair to my feet, grabbed from behind and shoved towards the rear of the offices. I looked back at Coyle who was stooping to pick up the sweet wrapper he had thrown over his shoulder so nonchalantly earlier.

See you later, I thought.

‘Riley, Mannion, Jay, help me escort him to the Trophy Room.’ I heard more footsteps behind me as I was marched out of a side door and into a narrower, gloomier corridor that ran deeper into the building. We passed three interview rooms, a couple of non-descript doors and staff facilities before stopping at the corridor’s end.

Riley gave me a calculated stare before undoing my cuffs. I then removed my clothes as directed and dressed in a paper thin, plain yellow boiler suit. Riley grunted, satisfied and re-cuffed me. There were solid lockers there and my funeral clothes, belt, shoes, bow and belongings were placed on a tray then thrown into one of them. I signed for them on a small slip of paper, aware that I would not be seeing them again.

They searched me thoroughly for anything deemed to be of danger to others or myself. When I had removed my shirt they saw the blood-soaked tape and offered me a fresh dressing and medical attention, both of which I declined.

There were four of us in the narrow corridor, clearly they thought that more Mudheads, a show of force, would make any resistance from me less likely. Contrarily, it made them more vulnerable; in this confined space they would only serve to get in each other’s way, provide me with bigger targets. I thought of an old saying involving barrels of fish but could not bring it to mind.

Riley swiped a magnetic stripped card through a card reader, a loud buzzer sounded and then I was dragged past the guard station and two electronically locked doors towards the holding cells. The corridor stretched away, with rooms either side, on a shiny over-buffed antiseptic floor that seemed to eat rather than reflect light. Our shoes chirped and squeaked as we went. We stopped outside Cell 3, Riley swiped his card again and Mannion opened the door. I did not need persuading inside, despite their misgivings. I complied with the Mudhead shoving me along until I was shown the open door.

‘Home,’ said one of the guards.

‘Keep his cuffs on,’ said another, and I was shoved into the cell.

I slammed my shoulder into the upright of the top bunk to keep my feet, my balance wavering with my hands locked behind my back. I spun and felt the cut in my chest tug and open a little more. Then the door was slammed without any further litany or threat. There was nobody else in the cell with me, not that that made any kind of difference.

I could hear muffled voices outside my room and saw the peephole darken, faces pressed to the other side of the door to get a better, fish eye view of me. I sat on the bottom bunk and leaned back on my tethered arms. I heard the Mudheads leave after a couple of minutes.

I stood and moved my arms left and right, up and down, flexed my fingers and wrists. I had to keep the blood flowing. I took stock of the small room and noted it was an improvement on my last place of incarceration. Just. The small bucket in the corner had smatterings of dried faecal matter on its lid. The window was too high to see out of and the ceiling too high to reach. A harsh bulb shone, behind sturdy wire and fired bleak light into every corner of the room. The walls were painted a sickening light blue, the graffiti underneath only semi-obscured.

It was a while before I found it, I saw the camera secreted away in a small, dark crack in the corner opposite the bed. The lens regarded me with indifference and I did my best to ignore it. I wondered if Coyle was on the other end of the connection, staring at my image, re-sheening his hair and plotting. I looked at the lens and waited for the day staff to leave.

For the tables to turn.

For the lights to go out.