The Lockheed C-5M Super Galaxy was once the pinnacle of global force projection. The largest aircraft in the world, capable of loading hundreds of thousands of pounds of cargo and seating over a hundred passengers, and can travel thousands of miles before refueling mid-flight to travel thousands more. This was meant to rapidly deploy tanks, helicopters, artillery, and soldiers across the world. The C-5C modification removed the rear upper deck troop compartment, which housed the majority of seats, to make room for more cargo.
Today, the modified aircraft filled the hold to the brim with medicine and food to be delivered to Louis Armstron International Airport. The only people on board were the flight crew and nine passengers in the forward upper deck. In the future of crises and war, two of these passengers are more powerful than any bomb or platoon.
Aaliyah Folious. The Living Saint of Lerna. Her light shines in the darkest corners of the world to stay the hands of reapers and devils alike. Many travel from the furthest lands for the sight of gold embroidered cassock woven from the threads of heaven. The star cross she clasped with both hands, retrieved from hell to burn away all evil, has become an icon of the righteous and benevolent. An icon adorned by the seven angels that accompany her: Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, Sariel, Raguel, and Jeremiel. Their golden ‘Sentinel’ armor is enveloped in the same shield of Aaliyah’s that wards the most fearsome blows and insidious ills. Their armaments, laser carbine, sear through night to strike with precision and fury. At all times they are to stand by her side, at her command.
Lovensky Jean-Baptiste. An emissary of the Immortals, those that brought hell on Earth. Specifically and supposedly, he is an agent of The Embroidered, the special operation forces of the Immortals. They were once a paramilitary outfit that infilitrated criminal organisations around the world. Now that they carved out a nation with citizens and a standing army, they needed an offical designation to give name to their elite soldiers that force armies to kneel.
“The fact that they sent you means that there is more to this than what you’re telling us,” said Aaliyah from her seat. Angel squad took up the rest of the passenger seats.
“Hmm? Is that so?” Lovensky leaned on against the bulkhead and had one his skeletons push up his sunglasses, “I volunteered to help the Earthlings in need. I thought it was better than pretending to work by shuffling papers and browsing niche forums back in Olympus. Really, I thought I was going to be bored… to death,” the skeletons made a macabre impression of laughter and clapping.
“If you wanted to help, then you could make a donation.”
“I’m sure my Empress is laying out the plans for rebuilding as we speak. For now, we will work together to minimize the damage, and at that, I am much more effective than a care package. Yes, if I wasn’t here, the consequences would be… grave,” the skeletons chortled and slapped their patellas.
“What makes you think anyone wants you around? All of you people are omens of disaster; when they see you, everyone will think you caused this mess so that you could take the credit for cleaning it up in your own image.”
“So hostile! Are you sure that’s not just what you are thinking? I’m sure the survivors—cold, hungry, desperate, afriad—will just be thankful that it has heroes like us to save them. The path of cooperation—complementing our strengths—is the best and only way forward for humanity. There will be difficulties, but that is all the more reason to… bury the hatchet—” Lovensky extended his hand only to be slapped away.
“Your jokes are dead on arrival,” said Aaliyah. The skeletons whooped and hollered, stomping their calcaneuses and holding their vertebrae. The laughter stopped dead in its tracks and a skeleton pushed up Lovensky’s glasses again.
“Speaking of arrival, we are about to pass over our stop.”
Lovensky went to the stairs in the cockpit with his skeletons following his coattails. When they weren’t mimicking a laugh, the only noise they made was the rattle of bones. Whoever they were, these were nothing but puppets now.
“Are we seriously letting this creep tag along?” asked Raguel.
“We’re better off having them in front of us,” said Michael, “Angels, form up on North Star.”
In the time it took for Jeremiel to fall out of the lavatory, pull up their pants, and caught up to the rest of the squad in the cargo hold, the aft door was already open to the black sea of clouds beneath them. The raucous winds sent Lovensky’s coattails flailing and threatened to throw dozens of tied down pallets into disarray. Lovensky turned to salute before he walked off the ramp with his skeletons in tow.
“He wasn’t wearing a parachute,” said Raphael.
“Neither are we,” said Sariel.
Aaliyah climbed onto Uriel’s back and together they were enveloped in light. At the roar of thunder and flashing lights within the cloud, each Angel activated the same hardened shield. While even the sturdiest personal armor would be vulnerable to the sheer blunt force trauma transferred to the squishy wearer, diverting energy to the hard light allows it to absorb a direct hit from a missile—or a lightning strike.
Together, the Angels dove forth from the starlit heavens into the black sea. With the shield up, the roar of thunder became a distant echo even as light flashed around them. The lightning that did strike them dissipated on the shield without even knocking them off course. In the heart of the cloud, the droplets of water that looked like gas became more like a pool they fell through. Lovensky had long disappeared; the only evidence of fellow angels in the cloud were the signatures in their helmet displays that claimed they were only meters apart. When the lightning stopped, they were left with nothing but the dark and the silence, and a waypoint they were, supposedly, fast approaching.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Finally, they broke out and saw the flooded landscape. When they flew out, the water had just been rushing in; now it rose to cover almost all but the rooftops and tree crowns in the neighborhood. The official objective was to gather survivors and pave the way for the evacuation effort. The unofficial objective was to find whoever, or whatever, did this. It was obvious that this was no natural storm, and that an Embroidered was involved was all the more evidence. Australia was desolated by a blizzard that appeared from thin air; whether it was untamed mutation or magic, it was an unspoken fear that the same could happen again. In this new dawn of humanity, anyone could be born, or grow to be, a conduit of mass destruction. The response to that threat will shape mankind's destiny.
Their dive allowed the Angels to catch up to Lovensky who had been in an arch this whole. His skeletons were scattered to the winds in free fall across New Orleans. Raphael went to check on him, only to find that Lovensky was sound asleep even as he hurtled down. The Immortals were inscrutable at the best of times. Whatever technique this was, they were not to interfere unless it posed an immediate danger.
Raphael returned to Angel squad and together they flipped upright and rerouted power to deploy hoverboots. The squad’s meteoric descent was slowed by the soothing hum of repulsors until they each gently landed on slate roof tiles. Uriel set down Aaliyah just when Lovensky splattered on a nearby concrete tile roof in a shower of blood like a popped water balloon. The spray reached into the sky they came from and poured out into the water until dark and dirty turned pink. What was left of his body on was still twitching under his clothes
“Should… we have.. stopped that?” asked Gabriel over the comms, “is this gonna be a problem?”
“Never underestimate them,” said Aaliyah, “just watch.”
The pink that had been pulled with the flow of water suddenly reversed course. Now the pink was receding, dragging itself together from all directions until bright red pooled around the house Lovensky crashed upon. The bright red rose from the water in tendrils, tendrils that had shards of bone inside and converged onto the corpse that was mangled on the concrete tiles. The twitching remains was stabbed and pumped full of blood that made it writhe and gurgle as it grew in mass and vigor until it finally began to take shape as it lifted with the clothes into the form of a man. Now the stains on the coat receded as a bony hand reached down. Muscle sinew covered the bones when the hand picked up the ruined glasses, and flesh covered his face when he put his glasses on his nose ridge. The hollow sockets in his head were the last to be filled as his eyes finally pushed forward.
“Yes, there was a point to that display,” transmitted Lovensky to Angel Squad across Little Birdies, the Immortals’ telepathic communication network, “I’ve detected all the corpses in the area will raise them to assist us. Alongside my skeletons, this will let us cast a wider net. They can’t do everything for us, but this will save us from running into any dead ends. Just follow where the zombies go, for example,”
Before they could say anything back, a bloated and discolored zombie sprang from water beside a telephone pole and marched to the front door of the house that Aaliyah was standing on. The zombie clawed at the door and groaned a name: ‘Sarah… Sarah…’. Aaliyah focused with her cross, and indeed she detected life trapped inside the building. Usually, without direct line of sight, her healing light was dispersed to give it great range yet vastly reduced effectiveness, but with guidance, she could concentrate on specific areas, and with that concentration, detect specific targets. If those markers came in the form of the living dead, so be it, this was no time to argue.
While the members of Angel squad did not have an affinity for magic the same way Aaliyah or Lovensky did, their helmets were equipped to detect the radiation caused by her light, and now used that as waypoints for houses to search. Starting with the house they were standing on, Uriel lept over and into a dormer window to get inside the attic. They opened the ladder to get to the second floor, to be greeted by a flooded staircase to the bottom floor. With the waypoint submerged, Uriel dove in.
Meanwhile, Lovensky built a bridge out of dismebered and torn out body parts to reach Aaliyah’s roof. They sank back into the deep when he had no more need for them.
“I’m happy to see that my commitment has earned some of yor trust,” said Lovensky, “only through cooperation can we not only save the most lives, but build a more prosperous future for humanity. With us working together, humanity will control the matters of life and death.”
“If you want to kill me, you can do it at any time. That’s the sword you people hold over us throughout all this ‘cooperation’,” said Aaliyah, “so I get how you can track the dead, but how did that lead to finding the living?”
“You people,” chuckled Lovensky, “I don’t find the living. The zombies use their memories to guide us to their loved ones. Besides that, they can cover ground and provide us with other labor.”
“So, you don’t just use their bodies and souls, you violate their memories too.”
“With all due respect, Ms. Folious, you misunderstand. I am returning their souls to their bodies. They may not have all their faculties, but this is an agreement, not puppetry.”
“And the bridge you used to get here?”
“Okay, that part was puppetry but,” Lovensky saw Uriel climb out of the window and bring a teenage girl onto the roof, “allow me to show you what I mean.”
Lovensky snapped his fingers. The banging and groaning at the door stopped, replaced with the sound of something wading through water then shambling up the wall. Grey, swollen fingers latched into the eaves, broken through slate tiles to hook their grip. The zombie pulled itself up with a ghastly strength it could not summon when alive. With its torso on top, it continued to claw its way onboard the roof before it stood up. The teenage girl, ‘Sarah’, clasped her hands over her mouth when she locked eyes with it. The zombie outstretched its arms when it began to shamble toward her. Uriel took aim, but their carbine was lowered and they were ordered to continue the rescue operation. Only after Uriel left did the zombie get close to Sarah. It tried to lower itself, but it tripped on its twisted ankle and fell flat.
“Sarah… I couldn’t make it… I’m sorry.”
Sarah looked at Aaliyah, then back to the moving corpse.
“Is that really you?” Sarah asked as she let go of her mouth and reached out.
“I left you alone… I’m sorry…”
Aaliyah lowered to her knees now, healed what was left of the zombie’s body, especially its ankle and jaw, and pulled the corpse to sit upright.
“Thank you… Sarah… I… am not here anymore… but she…. will make everything… okay,” said the zombie. Sarah wrapped her arms around it.
“You’re here now,” Sarah buried her head in its chest, “that’s all I wanted.”
Aaliyah left their side to return to Lovensky.
“It is a new era, Ms. Folious. You people may have tried to keep magic in a cage, but my people have broken that cage to unleash infinite potential. To meet that potential, we must unleash our minds from their cages too.”