Freedom

    

            My eyes rolled out from the back of my head.

 

I looked around at the pieces of twisted metal that wound malevolently around me; their dark shapes eerie in the blackness of the night. I hung, suspended by the straps that kept me harnessed to the pilots seat. My head pounded and I could hear the blood pulsing through my temples. Blood clouded the vision in my right eye.

            Where was I? How did I get here?

            I tried to unbuckle my seatbelt, but I couldn’t. My arms wouldn’t move.

            It was raining very hard that night. I remembered that had something to do with why I was hanging by my straps from the wreckage of a downed plane, but nothing else passed through my memory.

            Who was I?

Why was I here?

I couldn’t remember anything, I just looked up and hoped that someone would find me. But the fog was thick, and I couldn’t see anything. I felt more blood trickle down my face to my chin, running with the water.

The straps keeping me tied to the broken hunk of metal were starting to dig into my chest and cutting off my circulation. I couldn’t breathe.

I started gasping for breath, attempting to move my arms and undo the straps. The worst that could happen was I would fall to my death, or get impaled on some random piece of metal. I wasn’t sure what I would be leaving behind in death, if anything.

But my arms wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t even look at them, their appearance was masked by the shroud of darkness below me.

I passed out.

 

“Hurry, get him on the table!” I didn’t know who or where the voice was coming from. Heck, if you asked me, I probably couldn’t have even told you if it was a man or woman who was attempting to save my pathetic life.

“Get his suit undone!” said the same voice from before.

I felt something tug on my right arm, then my left, but it was like they were numbed by some incredible anesthesia. I could hardly feel the fingers tear off the fabric that covered my arms, and then my chest.

I opened my eyes as much as I could, but they were swollen and blood shot, like I’d just gotten my a*s kicked in a back alley. All around me, there were these shapes, people as far as I could tell. Moving around, muffled sounds coming out of their unseen mouths. I was in a small room on top of a wooden table that hurt my already pained back. The light was dim, almost as if it came from a single candle far away.

There were gasps as my suit was finally pulled away, and I knew something was wrong.

“What? What is it?” I mumbled, my words tumbling out in a drunken mess.

“What should we do?” Said the first voice.

“Knock him out, quick, before he comes too.” Said another voice.

“Wait, don’t!”

A sharp crack over the top of my head hurt like hell for a split second, then I was out again.

 

“So . . . you’re a militia pilot, aren’t you, and an ace at that?” said an unfamiliar voice as my eyes fluttered open briefly. It was rough and old sounding, I could picture the voice coming from an old man with a wooden cane and a scraggly white beard.

            This room was even darker than the first. As I came too once again, I realized I was strapped, naked, into a chair. I tried to look around to see where I was, who was talking to me, and what kind of place I was in.

            My eyes were still swollen, and my forehead was stiff from dried blood, but my mouth felt less numb.

            “Who are you?” I asked, “what do you want?”  

            “Do you realize what you are?” said the voice.

            “No sir, I don’t, please . . . let me go.”

            “I can’t do that son, I’m afraid my family would have mixed feelings about that.”

            “What do you want? Please, just tell me, what you want . . . I don’t know anything, if its information you want, I don’t know anything, just let me go . . . please.” I tried to keep my voice calm, but it was being overrun with emotions.

            “I told you, no . . . Now, what is it that you want?”

            “What . . . what do you mean? I said I don’t know anything, please, you have to believe me.”

            “I don’t. You came here to kill my family didn’t you? You rat b*****d.”

            “Please sir, I don’t know your family, I don’t want to kill them, I don’t know why I’m here, I don’t know anything . . . please!”

            A sharp pain on my scalp as the man grabbed my hair forced my head to jolt up.

            “Look at the rat . . . begging for his life. I didn’t realize this was part of ace pilot training.” The man scoffed.

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about, you damned freak!” I was on the verge of tears now.

            “You say you don’t know what I’m talking about, well maybe this will remind you.”

            My vision was beginning to clear up now, and I could make out the faint image of the man, as he stooped over a desk, and grabbed a knife.

            “No, please don’t!” I yelled.

            The man didn’t answer. He moved toward my left, and began to saw off my arm.

            “NO! PLEASE DON’T! I was crying now. Tears fell down my face, and I was unable to wipe them. I squeezed my eyes shut, desperate not to look at the scene.

            However, there was a strange thing. My arm was being hacked off, I was sure of it. The man’s grunts of effort and the pressure I felt on my arm were proof of that, but I didn’t feel any pain. I wasn’t in shock . . . I couldn’t have been.

            “There we are. Well, if it isn’t the fanciest piece of work I’ve ever seen.” He said finally, when it was over.

            “You b*****d . . . you . . .You b*****d!”

            “I wouldn’t talk like that to the man who’s got your arm . . . now, take a look.”

            I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to look at whatever hunk of flesh was laying in that freak’s hands.

            “Now . . . I bet you didn’t feel any pain from that . . . am I right?” The man said. I could tell he was smirking. How could he have know that?  His words threw me over the edge. I gave in to curiosity and wrenched open my eyes.

 

            The hunk of metal and flesh before me couldn’t have been my arm. It couldn’t have been. The thing had veins and skin, but the deep interior was metal. Metal bones and wires twisting this way and that. It was some was if some sort of diseased robot had stopped halfway between man and machine.

            “What . . . What is this thing?” I said, my voice quivering.

            “This, Warren Aldrich, ace pilot of the Eastern Militia, is your arm.”

            “N-no, it . . . can’t be . . .  There’s no way!”

            Another crack on the head told me that there had been another man in the room with us the entire time.

I was knocked unconscious . . . again.

 

The next events happened quickly like some sort of twisted slideshow.

A door broke down. The hinges cracked and the hunk of wood fell to splinters.

There was gunfire.

Footsteps.

People were approaching the room where I was being kept.

More gunshots, followed by screams.

My bonds were cut around the one arm that I had left, I was shouldered by a husky man who carried me through the house and outside.

He was shot down, and I fell onto the damp earth. Feeling the coldness of the wet grass on my face woke me up slightly.

I tried to push myself up, but realizing I had only one arm, it wasn’t easy. I managed to get into a sitting position, then I accidently bumped into the dead man’s body. I gasped and instinctively grasped my shoulder.

I found metal and dried blood. There was a hole in my left shoulder with interlocking metal pieces and smooth rims. My arm was detachable, I had decided to accept that, but how much of me was a fake . . . was I even human at all?

More gunfire.

I felt hands grab my existing arm and pull me away from the scene. A voice gasped and struggled with my weight. I figured it was a girl, comparing her strength to that of the man who had shouldered me effortlessly.

            I didn’t struggle. I wouldn’t have complained if she had left me to die, or just shot me herself and saved me the misery of having to live whatever terrible life I had been living before.

 

            I was in a cockpit. I didn’t know how I got there, or why. I just was.

            I looked forward at the seat ahead of me, just in time to see a spout of flowing blonde hair disappear into a helmet. I closed my eyes, ready to pass out again, when suddenly, everything vanished. I became weightless. A tiny fish in an empty ocean.

           

I thought I was dead for a moment. Then everything solidified into darkness, and I realized I was looking at the insides of my eyelids.

I sat up in bed, sweating horribly. My eyes were greasy, and I tried to rub them, but it only increased the irritation. I looked over at my flight gear, sitting on a lone chair in the dark room. A small window was carved out of the earth in the wall, letting in a few rays of soft light that landed quietly on the pale gear.

I was indeed Warren Aldrich, how that man had known me, I may never find out. My occupation and my name were imprinted on my clothes, but how could he have known where I was from?

Also, she never admitted to it, but I knew it had been Merle who had saved my life that night. I remembered waking up in the medical building and saw her talking to a doctor near my bed. I had thought she was the most beautiful thing in the world.

Every time I thought I was going to die, I always found myself regretting never admitting that to her.

As for my condition, it wasn’t until much later that I learned everything from the major. I had forced him to tell me, once I was well enough. Apparently, Pilots of the Militias worked unofficially for the company: An anonymous benefactor to the Eastern Armies. The war we were fighting had gone on between the two rivals for so long, nobody could even remembered how it had started. It was a war filled with unimaginable bloodshed and mass civilian casualties.

Eventually, things became so bad that the population was becoming noticeably smaller. Fertile land was burned to the ground and blasted to bits from countless battles fought all over the globe.

Peoples wish for peace wasn’t granted, but there was a way that human deaths could be remarkably reduced. The solution were the pilots, and to a higher extent, the aces. We were manufactured in factories, combined with organic tissues and organs, then a state of the art A.I. system to promote individuality, morals, and opportunities to learn . . . all that bullshit.

That’s all I was told. The major had me thrown in solitary confinement for a while after that. But he had to tell me. I had just seen my arm detached, and a while after that, when I woke up briefly inside of a blue tank filled with liquid and covered in wires and tubes. There was no way I was going to believe that that was all a dream . . . not one chance.

           

There was a knock on my door; a light tap on the steel frame.

“Come in.” I muttered, standing up and scratching off imperfections on my bare chest.

“Coming in!” said a voice. It was Merle.

I was suddenly embarrassed to be shirtless. I looked around for something to throw on so I wouldn’t be standing there like an idiot in black sweat pants.

Merle twisted open the old fashioned submarine style door with a grunt as I finished putting on a stained undershirt. Now I was cursing myself that I hadn’t done any washing lately.

The light outside the door was the same dim, colorless light that resided in my room.

Merle stood in the open doorframe with a tray of what looked like blue marshmallows, and a beer. She wore her flight gear, which hugged her slim figure and all around looked fantastic on her. For a moment I pretended to be staring at the tray, but I was actually admiring her.

“Eyes back in the head please.” She smiled.

I blushed, then tried to cover it up by saying “I wonder when we’ll start getting real food and not this blue garbage . . . Wait, what kind of beer is this?”

“Oh, stop complaining, this is all we have for now. And it’s called a . . . Le Roux?”

I couldn’t help but laugh a little.

“What? What is it?” Merle asked, perplexed.

“Don’t worry about it.” I laughed.

 

When the empty tray and beer bottle were sitting on the desk, Merle and I headed out of the room towards the hangar.

It was through a series of tunnels carved roughly through the interior of Mt. Veta lon Carlo, the largest of the Nestar mountains.

We have been living here for two months now. Me, Merle, Julia, Willis, everyone. We had all come through the thick clouds surrounding the Nestar region, along with ten thousand five hundred and seventy three other pilots and mechanics, (it took us a while to do the head count) and all for the sake of freedom.

The Nestar region had been previously thought uninhabitable, but when we came here, we found nothing but life. It was like the region had been untouched by the brutal war. There were lakes and streams, forests and mountains. Creatures of all shapes and sizes  lived here, there were geckos and wolves and bears, and so many types of birds it would take a lifetime to count them all. It was like Noah’s Arch had crashed upon the very same mountain we had.

The Nestar region was encompassed by a massive cloud of thick fog. We lost more than one ship trying to make it through, and the desert that preceded the fog for miles in every direction was almost unbearable. but we got through, and here we are today. It turned out that the fog kept this area under a constantly cool temperature, separating us from the harsh desert and making it possible to survive.

The hanger was a massive cave with an mout nearly as wide as the entire thing. It was at least ten times the size of the one back at base, and it contained hundreds of planes. These hangers were all over the mountains. We had set up dozens of smaller colonies as we landed, we split up, then headed to territories based on personal preference. Though there was a plethora of other areas  would’ve preferred to a mountain, this was where the Xiphon had come, bearing a wounded Merle.

 

“Willis!” I called.

Willis jumped out from underneath my plane, hitting his head on the underside of the wing in the process, his blond hair now messed up and angled in all different directions.

“Warren!” He called excitedly.

I smiled. “How’s the weather report?”

“Weather’s looking pretty good out there, but the lake colony is reporting a little bit of turbulence about a thousand feet up.”

“Sounds good.” I told him. “How’s the Artemis?”

Willis paused for a moment, confused, then said “Oh, I see the name’s finally catching on eh? I told you, you should’ve named her.”

“How is she, Willis?”

“She’ll be fine to fly, though I recommend staying above the trees, I don’t want to have to see ole Artemis here in the shape she was in last time.”

“Sure thing Willis” I chuckled.

Merle punched me in the shoulder playfully, then headed off to her own plane.

I jumped into the pilots seat and started the engine.

 

The runway was prepared, a massive steel panel that connected to the opening of the hangar, with supports reaching down miles below to the bottom of the mountain.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish in two months with a few thousand mechanics and all the resources you could ever need.

Merle was behind me in her plane. Her copilot was killed in the storm, just like Ken, but the both of us have gotten used to flying without adequate copilots, or often none at all.

I looked over at Willis who stood at the block controls and waved to him. He pushed a button on the console, and soon the huge steel beam the blocked off the runway rose majestically into the air.

Willis gave me a thumbs up which I returned. Then, with a push on the throttle, Merle and I sped off down the runway, hitting the open air, we both plummeted off the edge of the runway, lifted our landing gears, pulled up and sped off towards nowhere.

This was freedom. I could feel it in my heart. This was absolute peace.

 

But there was no way I could’ve known that this peace would soon be harshly disrupted.

Reviews

[WriterSki7]

You REALLY should use the Book application. Works out better in the long run.

I keep thinking of a steampunk-style world when I read this. It must be your writing style or something; I dunno. So far, so good. But not as good as the second chapter. Now (of all times) you throw in some back history? Seriously . . . other than that and a few minor grammatical errors you have a decent choapter here.

[Ross Saunders]

Interesting. I think there is definitely the start of something here. I think your exposition could be expanded, so it isn't just "I later found out that..." and make that into a scene of some kind. Also spotted a few minor grammar and structure things, but nothing too serious.

[Abhinav]

i'm loving the story build up...gotten me hooked.....just amazing character depth and description......keep on writing!