You ever wonder what magic actually feels like? We’re talking about the good stuff, pure, no elemental contamination, no confinements to petty human concepts, just raw infinite potential. Alexander Gerifalte hadn’t. It never occurred to him. Not until the Earth’s core awakened and unleashed what became known as Gaia’s Awakening.
Scholars disagree, because they disagree about everything, it gives them purpose, about what triggered the event. What they did not disagree about, because it was real as a thumbtack in your shoe, was that the planet that sat third from the star named Sol, that little blue gem in the solar system, reached maturity in some unfathomable way, and, when it did, it announced its apotheosis by unleashing a pulse of pure mana across its surface.
In point of fact, the core of the planet had just jump started its dragon pulse, the first heartbeat of a young god, and the mana surge that enveloped Alexander Gerifalte while he tried to throttle down for landing the trainer-plane he was flying solo for the first time felt mostly like having your blood filled with lava while your bones froze to ice. The nose of the plane dipped when his body spasmed, mind racked with the kind of agony that defies description. It was all the migraines that ever existed, compressed into a singular moment. He blacked out before he had time to make a sound.
Every human who survived the awakening reported the same headache, insufficient word as that is for the experience of mana binding your soul to the dragon pulse of a newly wakened planet, it’s flow of mana transforming all that was into what would be. Not all humans did survive it. Not even most of them.
As near as anyone could tell between those first moments and the chaos that came after, about a third did. The rest died instantly. They turned into stone, statues memorialized, as do all sapients who bear the stigmata of Gaia’s will when they perish. Gaia loves her children, and remembers them when they die, immortalizes the departed souls by making monuments of their flesh with her own. Her love could not stop her ascendance from killing two thirds of humanity, and about the same proportion of dolphins, whales, octopi, hive insects like ants and bees, and crows. Turns out, humans weren’t so special after all. They were just the only ones with thumbs.
Alexander came back to full consciousness with the tarmac rushing toward him, air speed about triple what it should be for a landing, gear down, flaps all fucked, and he immediately began corrective measures to try to avoid a certain death, which would happen when the plane disintegrated around him as it hit. The little trainer had no eject, you unlatched the canopy and jumped out, the airspeed never supposed to be much above six hundred kilometers per hour or so. He could not jump out. He would hit the ground before his parachute filled, ground rushing upwards a hideous velocity.
Screaming an instinctive refusal against the concept of dying, Alexander Gerifalte hauled back on the stick to pitch the nose up and turned the flaps to pull the plane out of the dive it had started. The wonderful little plane responded. It pulled through an entire eighty degrees of angle, coming to nearly level when Alexander ran out of altitude, moving at about a hundred kilometers an hour.
Harness snapped taught as the bottom of the plane made contact, the landing gear shearing off cleanly before becoming shrapnel that tore half the tail flaps off. On its belly now, scraping along paved runway. Young Gerifalte gripped the stick with all his might, face locked into a grimace of outrage while he was powerless to stop the crash.
“You’ll Never Sink This Boat!” He howled, the most defiant statement rejecting fate that occurred to him in these final moments.
The left wing dipped then, and the plane turned sideways and began to roll, the aluminum skin shedding like the scales of some reptilian beast around the cockpit. Alexander’s world turned into rotating chaos, a maelstrom of force and violence. His seat came free, at some point, and he flew from the wreckage, spinning across the tarmac.
Brutal impact knocked the sense from him, a white flare of pain, and then, oblivion.
Pain. Pain. Pain. You’re in pain. These were the first thoughts that broke free of the darkness that had stolen him.
Alexander opened his eyes, eyes that stared upward at a sky so awfully and startlingly blue. Whisps of cirrus overhead promised rain in a day or so. He liked the rain. He probably wouldn’t live to see it though, his body gave off that numb sensation that said it was badly wrong, all over. An effort to move his head produced nothing. A moan the same thing. The Youngest Gerifalte tried to move a hand to feel himself and managed a twinge of fingers, and no more. But any movement was treasure, it meant he had avoided total paralysis.
Whatever damage had occurred to him, whatever protective numbing of biochemical nonsense had kept him limber enough to ragdoll without coming apart like his plane, it began to fade slowly over the next minute or two. The return of sensation was most…unwelcome.
Pain was what he had before when his brain had been switched off. Agony was what he had now, now that the old noodle rebooted.
Alexander struggled to move his arm and it did, much to his displeasure. The arm had broken. How badly he didn’t know but the upper arm radiated fire, and his wrist felt full of shattered glass.
For a little while he didn’t manage to do anything but shriek from the combined assault of his injuries. When his throat wore out and his breath was ragged, he stopped. Very slowly, realization that he was on his back came to him. Furthermore, he still had two legs that were semi-functional. The arm he hadn’t tried to move before and now did, didn’t. It was behind him, the shoulder dislocated, but, otherwise, sort of fine. Truth be told, the arm was the worst part of his injuries, although he hadn’t yet tested his neck or back, afraid to reveal that he had destroyed his spine in some way that wouldn’t be known until it moved.
“Uhhg, fuughin,” Curses streamed from him as he tried to turn himself over, to take his weight off the trapped arm enough for it to be freed from beneath him.
Endorphins, adrenaline, or something in that ballpark started to come to his aid. The heinous wracking kind of hurt went away, replaced by the dull throb that declared he had limited time to try to do something useful before he was completely immobile. A reprieve, a temporary blessing.
Alexander rolled all the way over, supporting himself partially with his face and the dislocated arm. He pushed himself with his core and whatever of his upper body that wasn’t the broken arm to a hunched over position on his knees, and, summoning desperate will to live, raised himself up to a sitting position.
“I shouldn’t be alive.” Alexander whispered aloud, seeing the ruin of the trainer plane scattered across a half kilometer of runway.
Shouldn’t be. But was. By some miracle of chance, he was alive. The sheer odds of it were in defiance of common sense. This was the baby picked up and set down unharmed by the tornado kind of shit. He wasn’t unharmed. Far from it. But he also wasn’t dead, which was more than he could ask for. Nobody walked away from a plane crash like that.
With that knowledge firmly in his heart, Alexander Gerifalte struggled to put his legs under him and walked away from the plane crash. It was a limping, gimping, walk full of pain that a newborn giraffe would find comically clumsy, but it was walking.
Now the fun part. Alexander had seen this in a movie once and had thought it looked awfully stupid. But. He had less than half an arm and no idea how long the endorphins would keep the agony at bay long enough to try to get that up to about a solid whole number, if you round. So, it was now, or not. Alexander leaned heavily against the run-down looking building that was the control tower of this tiny little flea speck airport, mostly used as a flight school. The dirty brick was support that he desperately needed, a wave of dizziness almost brought him down again, down where he wouldn’t be able to get back up.
The young man swallowed back the vomit that threatened to escape and busied himself from the nausea by ramming the dislocated shoulder into the wall of the building to reinsert the joint. Blind agony rolled through him. Reflexively he was puking, vomit spraying convulsively mostly bile onto the pavement and brick.
“Aaaaahg!! You fucking prick!” Alexander shouted, white static in his brain, nearly insensate.
He’d failed and paid dearly for it. Desperate, before he lost his nerve, he pushed his arm up, trying to hold the thing in line with where the socket should be and, with all the strength he had left, slammed his body against the building again.
A loud, horrible sounding pop accompanied the shoulder resetting, and it hurt terribly, but there was a sort of relief that came with it, a sense of rightness, now that things were where they were supposed to be.
That didn’t stop Alexander’s stomach from heaving again, doubling him over. His bruised body rebelled against the punishment of the convulsions, and he started coughing, which made everything worse. Without the wall to hold him he would have pitched over. As it was, he managed a sort of slow fall by sliding down the rough brick surface.
Sunset woke him, harsh direct light against his face, nearly blinding even through closed eyes.
Fluttering open, said eyes caught the full brunt of the falling sun and he had to turn away. More dizziness. No puking. The dizziness passed, replaced by the intense throbbing hurt of a body thrown into a big dryer for a nice spin. His right arm was absolute murder. The rest of him wasn’t so fantastic either but he could live with it.
Alexander almost laughed at that thought. Live with it. He didn’t have so much damned say in that matter, the options were live with it or die pretty much immediately.
“What the fuck happened to me?” He queried the reddening sky.
He had landed that plane fifty times, mostly under worse conditions than today. It was peak flying today, no cross winds, not hot enough for thermals to create weird lift or pressure on the runway, just a nice smooth reduction of throttle, get the air speed down, the nose up, the landing gear ready, and bingo! Safe landings. Only that hadn’t happened. Something terrible had almost killed him, had passed through his body. Only the vaguest memory of twisting inside out, his body reconstructed atom by atom, came to him when he tried to remember what happened.
For the life of him he couldn’t. Whether that was because of the trauma of the event or because he was still half out of his mind from the sum total worst moments of his entire life up to that point was debatable.
What was not, was that he was now aware of a ravening thirst and at least the faintest of hunger pangs. He hadn’t eaten before the flight, he never did. At least he wasn’t bleeding. There was blood, not to be in doubt, but, as he examined his limbs, he knew it was dried, just the result of road rash from his whirlybird flight from the cockpit.
Absolute insanity. He shouldn’t be alive. But here he was, with just a heavy dose of full body bruising to the bones, some wicked road rash, and a mostly fucked arm.
Alexander Gerifalte was the son of a naval nuclear engineer and a flight deck technician who was also a fervent participator in the decathlon and who, for a time, had serious Olympic aspirations before she’d decided she’d rather be a mother and a tutor for nerds who thought to tame the violin. He had drunk hard work from that mother’s milk, had been raised under the maxim that good enough never was. If he continued sitting here, he put himself in jeopardy of dying to some internal injury he couldn’t feel, or infection, or a bone splinter severing an artery, or any number of stupid things.
“Time to get off your ass and get home, dad’s home, he’ll know what to do.” Alexander told himself with certainty.
His father always knew what to do. He even mostly managed to know how to do it, which boggled Alexander’s mind routinely. A memory surfaced, replacing the resolve to move, because he wasn’t even close to in his right mind.
“You just saw it; how do you know that’s how it works!?” He’d yelled at the bespectacled man, who was disassembling his game console to upgrade it, not twelve hours after Alexander had first turned it on.
“I thought you said you hated the input lag from the controller?” the quiet man asked calmly.
He had hated it. He just didn’t think there was anything you could do about it.
“Have you ever even done anything like this before?” the suspicious then ten-year-old had demanded.
“Nope.” Replied his old man, “But all machines think alike, and this can’t be any harder than getting an old nuke reactor to behave.”
The geezer had fixed the input lag inside of a couple of hours. He got banned from the game he was playing because the game engine thought there was a cheat installed due to the lack of input delay.
That’s how it always seemed to work. His dad knew what to do and his mom made sure that everything got cleaned up when her husband got distracted with another project. If not for her steadying hand, the house would have looked like a scrap yard.
After retiring from active duty, his father had stayed home to help his wife and make part time cash to supplement his pension repairing things. Any things. All things. Lawnmowers, hairdryers, microwave ovens, it didn’t matter. It came, broken. It went, fixed. Alexander’s mother called his father “The Gremlin”.
They met while both served on the same boat in the navy, one an engineer, the other working on the flight deck. He fixed her watch for her after she got it caught on a bulkhead and a tool bag full of sturdy steel tools whacked it good. She offered cash to compensate him and he told her he only worked for fun or for mating opportunities. Alexander thought that was a lie, but his mother said it was true. She refused to answer why that line had worked and only said “You’d better be glad it did, I had more of a thing for chicks before he came along.”
His mother would freak when she saw him. Seeing her “little falcon” hurt would send her into soldier mode and if anybody cut them off on the way to the hospital, she might beat them into a coma.
Stray thoughts, Alexander, he told himself, becoming aware that his mind wasn’t all together. He’d been sitting there fading in and out, brain dredging up the past. Was he dying?
“I have to move.” He said aloud, thinking that maybe saying things would help him stay focused.
“I have to get up. Where the hell is everybody?” Alexander asked, suddenly realizing that something was badly wrong.
A plane had gone down on the runway. There had been fire, there was wreckage blocking the runway, there should have been firetrucks and police and ambulances by now. Where were all the people?
Cold adrenaline ran down Alexander’s back when his injury clouded brain made the connection. This airport was tiny, but it was still active. Where the fuck were all the people!?
Moaning from the aching body that hated him for making it move, he pried himself up to stand, leaning hard against the tower’s wall and panted from the effort.
“Hellooo?” He called, unimpressed by his own voice.
Try again, with your balls in it this time, he scolded.
“HELLLOOOO!” He yelled, muscles protesting the extra oomph.
“Where the hell is everybody!? Mayday! Man down! Get a fucking Corpsman over here!” Alexander’s voice rang out against the building.
He sagged against the brick, soothing cold against his face, warm sun against his back. No answer. Something was fucking wrong now, he knew it.
This building was as familiar to him as his own home, he limped slowly around the corner and found the entrance to the tower. The elevator was out. Like, all the way out, he didn’t see any light when he hit the button; That meant stairs, he shuddered. It had to be done, if nobody had come out to see what had happened, they had to still be upstairs at the air traffic control system. It was, like, federal law or some shit.
Three of the worst flights of stairs ever climbed by an ape or apelike creature later, Alexander found the door to the control room. It opened easily, in spite of his weakness, and he pushed it open noiselessly.
“I need some help guys, what’s goin-“ the question died swiftly, his eyes taking in a sight that refused to mesh with his experience of reality.
He was talking to three statues. Perfect replicas of the men who had run the airport. Each stood in their familiar places, each dressed as they had been when Alexander had taken off on his first solo run. They looked surprised.
This wasn’t possible. It wasn’t unlikely it just wasn’t fucking real, he decided.
“I never woke up.” The young Gerifalte told the room of petrified people from whom he’d learned to fly.
“I don’t know if I died, but I never woke up. This isn’t real.”
That’s the only thing that made sense. If you saw something impossible, then it wasn’t real. That was step one of determining if you were insane, or something.
Slowly, carefully, so he didn’t wake up the sleeping statues, he went to the air traffic control displays, noticing that they were all blank. Off. Nobody turned off air traffic control displays, and the things ran on an emergency generator, in case the power went out. That generator wasn’t running, he knew the sound of it, the loud bastard. Nothing was running. None of the ever so subtle hum of power that accompanied modern life.
Turning, he approached the statue that was the training pilot. Victor might have been carved from a pale marble. Smooth texture, like a Greek statue. Clothing hung from the stone carved flesh, itself unchanged from its textile nature.
“How?” Alexander asked, reaching out gently to touch the time frozen pilot, “How did you end up like this?”
Smooth, cold stone beneath his fingers, solid. The flesh that had been so warm, the hand that had patted him on the back just a few hours ago, encouraging him to get out there and do it right, to earn his wings, was still. Inert.
All three of them were in the same condition. It couldn’t be real. But how could it be fake? What kind of malicious psychopath would drag three full size marble statues of the men who worked here all the way to the third floor, for giggles? Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation. Even if it meant he was completely batshit.
“I am completely batshit.” Alexander confirmed.
His aching body twinged; he could feel his heartbeat in several of the bruises. Left shoulder throbbing, right arm a mass of brittle fire, he was hurting badly now. No more chemical barrier to the injuries. Moaning softly to himself, in spite of the effort not to, he reached up to take the bottle of water off the counter.
Statues didn’t drink, but madmen did. And drink he did, deeply, until the bottle was empty.
“Gaah! Oh, my sweet gods above, below, and between, thank you for that!” He whispered, grateful to anything that might show him mercy.
A morbid bit of curiosity wanted to tip over one of the statues, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It felt like…sacrilege. Alexander’s family wasn’t religious. He wasn’t religious. But there was a feeling of wrongness to trying to break one of these so lifelike representations of the men he had known. Some instinct tried to break through his wall of reason, to convince him that he was looking at the same men he had known. It defied all logic, but the whisper was insistent, “They’re gone, Alexander. This is all that’s left of them.”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
And they weren’t the only ones who were gone. Gerifalte was not the only person flying these perfect skies this day. From the window of the tower, he saw several pillars of smoke from the nearby forest. Black, thick, roiling smoke, that told him he wasn’t the only one to have lost control of his plane. He was probably the only one to survive, however. As unlikely as it was to avoid dying on the tarmac, it was exponentially worse to have come down in the trees. Each of those pillars of smoke was a grave, he knew it.
But no sirens. No response.
“Ooohhh boy, this is not good. This is worse than not good. This is gold plated fucked.” Alexander decided out loud.
His father would have told him to stop cursing. His mother would have given him some more interesting words to use. They complimented each other like that.
Was he in shock?
“Yeah, probably. I need all this water, and something to eat.” He decided.
A quick raid of the room revealed the lunches not eaten by the statues. The food hadn’t turned to stone, so whatever it was that had occurred was selective. Was it just certain humans, or animals too? He chewed painfully on a sandwich, while he thought it over. There was a couch in the room, so the air traffic controllers could nap while they spelled each other. Alexander inhaled the three sandwiches, drank another bottle of water from the desk, and gingerly reclined on the couch.
He lay there, mind circling. If there was no help coming, he would have to handle himself. If he had to handle himself, he needed to rest. His body was ragged out, he was physically done in. The right arm would just have to keep for now, there was little to nothing he could do for it, at the moment. Internal injuries and shock were the major threat now that exposure was off the table. He could be bleeding inside and not know it.
A niggling paranoia tried to keep him awake: What if he died in his sleep?
“What if?” Alexander challenged himself, “I already might be dead from the crash. This might be an ectoplasmic meat satchel, carrying around a vengeful ghost, that died unfulfilled because it didn’t get to have that threesome yet. What ifs are like wishes, you starve to death trying to eat them. Go to sleep, idiot.”
Thusly achieving the correct mentality, he let himself slip away.
The intervening hours were awful. Every shift that disturbed the broken arm brought him awake with slivers of molten lead in his bones. Most of him hurt at least a little, in some way or another. Sheer exhaustion bought him three or so hours of real sleep, the rest he drifted in and out, suffering through the night until pale dawn lightened the horizon through the tower windows.
Getting off the couch took a shameful amount of time, filled with not so short intervals of shuddering pain from the various hurts that had been allowed to stiffen. The broken arm was swollen to about half again its normal dimensions at wrist, humerus, and ulna, ugly bruising spread around the damage. Alexander needed a doctor; he needed one badly. But, first, he needed a sling. This limb flapping around was going to cause only more suffering. There was plenty to work with in the control tower, tools, tape, towels, etc. This place was meant to be occupied almost twenty-four seven and the men who had manned it hadn’t cared for stairs so very much. It was hard to think of the statues as past tense humans, there they stood, so almost alive looking, so vivid.
“Ass. Gears. Get to it.” He spoke again, trying to spur himself to constructive behavior.
It was like shoving a mule to get it to stop balking, mostly ineffective. Part of him just wasn’t ready to accept this new reality. The throbbing ache of his body did what willpower couldn’t, forcing him to break out of the useless stupor and get to work cutting a towel into the right shape for a sling. Slow going, with only one nonoptimal arm free to work on it. A good sharp box cutter was the only reason he ever managed.
Finally, it was the moment of truth. Sucking a hissing breath in while he did, wading through the nausea inducing shocks of pain, he got his arm into the sling and tied securely to his chest.
“Ohhhh, fuuuuuck.” He moaned softly, once the task was done, which had left him in cold sweat, shivering like a rabbit.
Five minutes he spent recovering from the task, the busted limb radiating pure awful into his spine. It faded, though, and left him strangely tired.
Nobody ever told you how much debilitating pain took it out of you.
Alexander scavenged the fridge, still cool despite its power loss, coming up with a tub of left over spaghetti that smelled incredible and a half dozen of those half-sized bottles of fruit juice. He inhaled everything, desperate for anything that would help him regain his strength.
He needed to get home. The sudden, bone deep urge to go home assailed him, prompted him to leave the empty bottles where they were, despite a lifetime of training from his parents to clean up after himself. The phone on the wall was his target. It disappointed him, issuing nothing, no dial tone, no static, just silence.
Welp, so much for getting help.
“Everything electrical is shot. It’s totally dead.” Alexander realized.
His plane had been almost completely mechanical, without reliance on electronic controls, since it was just a trainer. That was the only reason he’d lived, it hadn’t needed electronic assistance to manipulate the flaps and throttle, the controls being completely analogue. Whatever had knocked the piss out of him up there had cooked everything digital. That included the spark plugs in the engine.
“Electromagnetic pulse? Somebody set off a PINCH?” the young man wondered, looking again out at the surrounding forest.
Smoke had stopped rising from their creator’s pyres in the distance. There was only a low cloud cover, bringing in the rain promised by the cirrus clouds from yesterday. Heavy, gray, fat with water. It would blow in cold, just like it always did this time of year. October weather in Maine was nice, in his opinion. Not too many people shared that opinion, but they were allowed to be wrong.
“I can’t walk out of here, not like this, not in that.” Alexander said, eventually accepting that the gray pall that approached the tower was a barrier he couldn’t climb.
He had a car, but, if the electronics were all fried, it wouldn’t start. It wouldn’t run. The onboard displays, transmission, power steering, computers, fuel injectors, all that shit was digital these days. None of them would work with the circuits subjected to whatever had shut down the control tower.
Not much would, these days. Just the antiques that the car geeks had half assembled in their garages.
“Shit. I’ll die in that if I try to walk it.” Alexander predicted.
He would. Forty degrees was a pleasant temperature, almost shorts and t-shirt weather, really. But add a steady drizzle to it and exposure was waiting like a jaguar in the jungle. He could easily imagine being found dead of hypothermia just a few short miles down the road. His injuries on top of the weather made hiking back to town a pipe dream. Thirty miles, just right around, but it was effectively across water as far as he was concerned. If he were healthy, he could have done it in a single day, pushing himself to his limits. He was not healthy.
“Okay, plan B, sit tight, try not to burn too much energy, stay warm and dry. Whatever happened, it can’t be everywhere, unless it was, like, a huge solar storm or something. I just gotta keep from making anything worse.” Gerifalte soothed himself.
Logic was a boon in this kind of situation, a way to distract himself from raw injuries and the panic that wanted to well up every time he caught himself looking at the petrified people in the room with him. Solar storms didn’t turn people to stone. He wasn’t a nuclear engineer like his father, but the old man had made sure he knew that much. What turns a person into alabaster? Nothing, that’s what. It didn’t happen.
The unavoidable thought that he was insane, or dead came again, unbidden. Insanity didn’t run in his family. He didn’t do drugs, not even weed. A record, of about any kind, got you barred from ever sitting behind the stick of an active-duty fighter. Alexander Gerifalte’s life’s purpose had been, since he could walk upright, to fly planes. Specifically, to fly the kind of planes that made other people not try to fly them with aggressive purpose. He had turned down many temptations that might have interfered with that goal, lest a moment’s lapse in judgment cost him his dream. Discipline for a young man of seventeen was hard. Especially when the young ladies were involved.
Sitting there in the tower, surrounded with the strange mix of completely normal and impossible, he reflected on the last few months. Life changing months, in many ways. A cancer diagnosis for his dad, chemotherapy, remission, great joy after deep fear. He had graduated high school a year early, before the diagnosis. His parents insisted on it.
“Public school was so you learned how to deal with shitheads, of which you will find many flavors in life. You’ve got everything that place could ever teach you.” His mom told him seriously, when he had whined about staying his last year, with a relatively light schedule, just for fun, mostly.
She’d raised an eyebrow and smirked at him, making her case solidly by telling him “And besides, you’ll like the college girls more, they won’t have their dads just down the street. You’ve got my eyes, my build, your dad’s color, and wit. You’ll clean up, Little Falcon.”
College girls, she said? He was far more pliable after that. Alexander Gerifalte had dreams and aspirations, but he also had a functional set of gonads that wanted other people to enjoy them as much as he did.
“Hear that? You’re mine now, you little bastard.” His father had told him, in a rare use of profanity for the quiet man.
So ended his high school career. Papa Gerifalte had distinct ideas about what a proper education looked like. They included more calculus than was healthy for any human. The carrot was flight school. Knew how to get his gears turning did the father unit. He could attend flight school four times a week, as accelerated a pace as could be managed through his mom’s contacts with the old comrades that ran the school. But only if he put in a dedicated forty hours per week on his dad’s “Real Thing” coursework. Alexander liked a challenge, enjoyed the feeling of mastery no more than the struggle to get to it. His parents cultivated him like gardeners tending one of those flowers that only bloom once a decade, he didn’t lack awareness that he was his parent’s project. From his perspective, people with less interested parents were being hobbled in the race that life always would be.
The pace of that old life accelerated drastically, especially once the chemo started. Cancer had shaken his father, had instilled in him the fear that he wouldn’t be able to pass on whatever he could before the sickness and treatment dulled him too much to do it properly. Hence the aggressive schedule of lessons. Alexander shouldered the burden, turned into the wind, and soaked up as much as his father had to offer. There were several months where they both thought it was all the time they had left with each other. He got mornings, before the drugs dulled his dad’s thoughts too much. His mom got the rest of the time, took her husband out for regular little “vacations” where they didn’t speak of what they did or discussed. She had resumed birth control though so Alexander could guess. No surprises meant reasons for being surprised.
When the doctors declared remission, the now bald retired nuke cried in front of his family. One of the only times. The other being when Vivi, their black lab of fourteen years passed quietly one Saturday morning. Alexander got the okay from his senior flight instructor, standing frozen just ten feet away where he’d stood, alive, some twenty hours ago, to try for his wings just a week later.
And, now, here he sat in the dead control tower miles out into the lower Maine forest where the small airport sat in isolation, because nobody liked the sound of plane engines over their houses.
Alexander sat on the couch trying not to aggravate his arm, either of them, and watched the rain. He listened to the steady hiss of the downpour on the roof, the only break in forest silence. At no time did he hear a single siren or see a single contrail of a passing plane above, when rare gaps in the clouds revealed clear blue above. That was beyond unusual. Toronto airport had a flight path that ran over his hometown for their flights between London. It was a busy patch of sky, there were always tiny silver dots streaking high over the cloud cover. The absence meant that nobody was flying.
“Whoooo boy, I might be boned.” The young man hypothesized.
No flying said that whatever had happened to him had happened elsewhere. Many, many miles, of elsewhere. Maybe all of it. The whole planet.
There would be bigger fish to fry than Alexander Gerifalte if that was so. There would even be the possibility that nobody even knew he was out here. Other than his folks, who would also be caught up in whatever madness had killed the tower. And whatever it was that had made him feel like he’d gotten squeezed through a blender and reverse slurried too quickly to die. He hadn’t forgotten about that; he just didn’t like to think about it.
A day passed, mostly in boredom, carefully suppressed panic, and extreme discomfort, just to sweeten the pot. On the second day, Alexander consumed the last of the food in the minifridge. He had two of the tiny plastic bottles of fruit juice left. On the third day, blessedly clear of rain clouds or any sign that a follow-up system was bearing precipitation, Alexander Gerifalte discovered that his arm was healed.
Sort of. It hurt, but in the way that things hurt that haven’t moved in too long. Not in the should have taken months to heal, if ever, kind of way that a break so severe should have done. The shoulder that had dislocated was, more or less, as good as new. His bruises, body wide, deep, and without sign that they had ever been, were gone, same as the road rash. Scrapes like those, through all the skin layers, should have left scars, and gnarly ones.
That wasn’t right, Alexander scrambled, with surprising alacrity to the bathroom and looked into the mirror. He lifted a grimy, ruined shirt and beheld himself. Skin untouched by blemish, even his mediterranean tan, courtesy of father unit’s Spanish heritage was absent any indication it had ever been peeled by the cheese grater like surface of the asphalt. His black hair had even grown in just as it had been. No bruises on a face that had felt like it had been Mike Tyson’s speed bag just a couple of days ago, his pronounced nose unbroken. Deep green eyes edged by a nearly golden brown, the gift of his mother, saw a body untouched by injury, if covered by the filthy evidence of it having existed once.
He wasn’t a doctor. But. He’d broken bones before, courtesy of a short-lived hobby of skateboarding. They did not heal in seventy-two hours, without intervention of medical attention to set them properly, no less.
“Okay man. Something spooky’s going on around here. It’s time to bug the fuck out, get home, get the parental units, and run for the hills.” Alexander decided, escaping the image of himself in the bathroom mirror.
A plan, that’s what he needed. Something to calm a racing mind that was surrounded by impossible events. Something to focus on that wasn’t biology doing what it couldn’t do.
First, clothes. His had gotten mostly shredded while he was careening across pavement.
Alexander was a tall, narrow dude. Just a smidgen over six feet and a few inches, weighing a paltry hundred and sixty pounds. His adolescent body dysmorphia said unkind things such as “You are a scarecrow with half as much stuffing as you need” to him. He despaired of putting on weight until Mama Gerifalte told him he had her build, and she hadn’t filled out until relatively late. That was good news, his old man was many things, but he wasn’t big on heavy lifting, running long distances, or hand eye coordination. It was like the man had packed all his metabolic energy into his uncanny brain or something. That left the gangly youth needing new clothes which none of the statues would provide that remotely fit. His trainer came closest though.
With as much reverence as a grave robber could manage, Alexander undressed the statue of Victor. He took great care not to so much as chip the figure while he removed a flannel overshirt, a decently clean white cotton undershirt, rugged denim jeans, and boots that had to be discarded for being slightly too small. At least the wool socks were cozy.
From one of the air traffic controllers Alexander obtained a nice down jacket, far too big in size, with sleeves slightly too short that would work, nevertheless. Almost as an afterthought, he detached the small nine-millimeter pistol held in its inside waste band holster from the other controller.
The brat of two service members, although they both joked that the navy didn’t really count, Alexander had his share of range time. Not to mention this was Maine, people didn’t have so many hobbies around these parts, but they shot guns like people in Florida played golf: Straddling the line between casual and competitive. He’d taken his first doe when he was eight, when the rock of a seven point six two rifle was enough to punch his shoulder aggressively through his jacket.
Alexander was young, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew the gun was more of a moral support, than anything else. A pistol like that wouldn’t do a lot more than piss off a bull moose, the most dangerous thing that he would encounter in the Maine autumn. It wasn’t nothing though, and he needed every boost to his spirits that he could get. Thirty miles wasn’t far at all, not really. Thirty miles through heavily wooded terrain when you didn’t know what kind of mad house waited for you, given that his entire civilization was built upon something that may, or may not, even exist right now. People were dangerous when they panicked. A bunch of people panicking was even more dangerous.
There was no way to tell how things looked until he got there.
A quick test, accompanied by a prayer that went unanswered, confirmed that his car was toast. Not even a click from the starter when he tried the key. He had to get to his backpack in the trunk by climbing in from the fold down seats in the back, the trunk being operated by a button on his key fob or dash that was as dead as the rest of the electronics. With no manual access, because Chevy didn’t know what the hell they were doing and only police edition Impalas had cylinder locks on their trunks, for reasons that defied anything approaching logic, he climbed into the trunk and pulled his school bag out from the cold, dark of the trunk.
Immediately, he upended the pack to pour its contents into the back seat, considering all of the notebooks and educational supplies there mostly useless at the moment. The interior of the car was dim, slightly, with the sun at midmorning. He climbed out of the car to better assess what he had to work with.
When he turned around, five wolves that had been extinct from this region for a hundred years stood growling at him. They were massive, grey, brown, and black furred things, yellow green eyes and heads slung low, menacing. A low growl issued from the front most wolf, and Alexander decided he was in trouble.
Alexander slung the pack in their direction before launching himself back into the cab of the vehicle, just in time to slam the door shut against the animals’ rush.
Furred bodies slammed against the vehicle with surprising force, and claws immediately began to screech against the exterior. Vicious growling told the young man that these wolves weren’t fucking around, they meant to eat him. A snarling muzzle in the glass, eyes lit by bestial cunning, put the fear into him, about a half second before the wolf slammed its head through the safety glass of the driver side window and started climbing in after him.
As fast as he could, he dove between the front seats to the back, reaching for his waist.
Fumbling with the pistol, Alexander screamed when the shoe he had stuffed against the canine body was seized in a vice grip, teeth popping through the false leather easily. He pulled the gun in line with the animal and yelled when the trigger didn’t pull, his weight jerking roughly because the creature was shaking its head back and forth, trying to mangle his foot, only stopped by the awkwardness of being half in the car and straddling the console.
“Fucking fucking fuck! Fuck!” his screams sounded high, and he finally remembered to turn off the safety.
He racked the slide, desperate to save his leg, watched the already chambered round, because of course the controller had carried with one in the pipe, fly off to the side, disappearing into the floorboard and recently poured clutter.
Five loud blasts as he cycled the trigger as fast as he could stopped the wolf, along with the lead that they discharged. Blood blossomed against the windshield and the beast howled briefly before it stilled abruptly. Its partners did not stop their aggression. Instead, they tried to come in through the same window as their leader. He put the smoking gun in line with the first head that came through and put one into the head. It dropped immediately. A third came through and, this time, his shot was high, into the roof of the car. Two more rounds into the head and neck killed the wolf. The fourth was only delayed because it had to wait for its companion to fall out of the window, and then it was coming. This one learned, it jumped through the window entirely, and was almost on top of him, all teeth and fury before he even realized what had happened.
Alexander kicked out again, levering the incredibly strong animal away with his legs and aimed between them, sending five more shots into the beast center mass, which yelped but didn’t stop trying to maul him for almost half a minute. The growling faded away, along with the life of the beast.
That left Alexander holding a shaking handgun, barrel smoking, with the slide locked back on an empty chamber showing an empty magazine and one more huge wolf outside the car, which raised up an unearthly howl. He was a prophet, in that moment. Gerifalte knew the last wolf was coming in after him and he scrambled to find the first bullet he’d ejected. Hands shaking with terror he scrabbled clumsily, found the shine of brass about the time the last of the wolves sailed through the window and promptly got stuck on the two corpses of its brethren, which were clogging the front seats. That was most of the reason why it didn’t tear him apart within a couple of seconds.
Time enough to put the last of the rounds on his person into the chamber and work the slide. Not time enough to keep the wolf from biting his calf and starting that shake, jerking his leg with agonizing power as it tried to shred his limb.
Screaming, Alexander shot the wolf in the neck. It didn’t stop shaking him. He had to kill it, he was bleeding already from the ripped leg and the monster grabbed him again, higher up near his knee.
Desperation fueled his next act, and he grabbed one of the pencils he’d shaken free of his pack while searching it and slammed it home through a baleful eye, working the shiv back and forth as hard as he could, which broke the slender stick off in his hand. But it made the wolf flinch back, made it release his leg, which was bleeding badly through the denim, and Alexander clawed the door open, rolling out of the car, the beast slavering on his heels.
Teeth snapped just behind his good leg, and the young man scrambled to his feet, trying not to put too much weight on the bitten leg, in time to see furred head and shoulders emerge from the car.
Without a thought he charged the door and slammed it with all his strength, striking the animal behind its head with the door, pulling a sharp yelp when he did. Courage inspired by terror and certain death made him take the door in hand and start slamming it closed screaming all the while in feral rage, beating, pounding, and praying that the wolf would succumb before he exhausted his strength. He didn’t realize he was slamming the door against a still form for at least a minute.
Just as abruptly as it started, it was over. Five wolves, dead. Alexander Gerifalte alive. With a leg that was on fire and sheeting blood down into his shoe. He dropped to the ground, heart racing. The sling that he’d left around his neck after changing became a tourniquet, wrenched tightly just above the knee to slow the loss of vital fluids. He pulled the pant leg up, ignoring the sharp pain when it parted from the wounds. Fucking fuck. His left leg was chewed pretty good.
Shock, for the second time in recent memory was starting to set in.
“Gods above, below, and in between, why!?” He shouted at callous skies, before he limped back to the brick haven of the control tower.
There were towels there, there was a first aid kit, which he had planned on taking with him, which was why he was getting his backpack out of the car when the wolves ambushed him. Wolves. In south central Maine? Not in a century. How?
Thoughts were disorganized now, coming almost randomly. He focused on the only thing that mattered, limping to the first aid kit and trying to keep his blood inside him. One legged hopping up the three flights of stairs saw him stumbling through the door into the room with the stripped statues, each a David of impeccable capture of human form, in all its imperfection.
He ripped the red box with a white cross off the while and fumbled it open, hands shaking badly now. Gauze, he needed that. Elastic wrap, that too. Quick clot, he needed the fucking quick clot, why are there so many fucking alcohol wipes, he needed the godsdamned THERE!
Hurried, frantic ripping of the packet scattered the white powder into the lacerations tracing his lower leg. More pain when he then stuffed the wounds with gauze and then still more to wrap them tightly binding the wounds far more tightly than was good for him. He would deal with that later, when he wasn’t hemorrhaging.
Finally, flow staunched, lying propped against the couch, first aid kit in shambles around him, Alexander Gerifalte was able to take stock.
“I should have just pushed the stick down and died the fast way.” He summarized.