In the Shadow of Falcon's Wings

CHAPTER 14 GOD IN THE MACHINE

“It is well that you grovel before your god.” The hooded figure glided closer to where Dodge still lay on his belly.

Suddenly feeling very defiant, Dodge tried to rise, but a swift blow from the sparkling staff hammered him against the floor. He remained there, clinging to consciousness, and still trying to put the pieces together.

He won’t be happy when he learns I saved you…

Who? Who saved me? Where did he go?

A battered metal canteen lay on the silvery floor, mere inches from his face. He absently reached out to touch it, but a booted foot knocked it out of reach. So that much of it was real.

“I know you, intruder. You are the Chronicler.”

Chronicler? He called me that, too.

“You are the keeper of Captain Falcon’s victories. I have studied these writings. You would make me believe that this Falcon is a worthy adversary. Why then does he continue to cower behind his minions?”

Dodge tried to rise again, and again was forced down. His spirit however refused to kneel. “You poor fool. You’re afraid of a pulp magazine character. A figment of my imagination.”

The dark god pondered this as he paced a circle around Dodge. “Your words have no meaning. Where is Falcon?”

“There is no Falcon. He’s a bedtime story; a myth.”

“You do not lie well Chronicler. If Falcon is only a myth, why do his minions hunt me?”

Dodge rolled onto his back, and then tried to spring to his feet, but the hooded one was there and struck him down yet again.

You must find Falcon. Only Falcon can stop him.

The plea of his anonymous benefactor was as much a mockery as the torment meted out by this villain. Find Falcon? Zane Falcon was just a man; Dodge’s father would have said about him: “He puts his pants on one leg at a time, same as you.”

“What’s so special about Falcon? Why are you so afraid of him?”

“Afraid!” A sudden sphere of light erased Dodge’s vision as surely as had the darkness. “Falcon is the one who cowers in the darkness. He will not even fight me to save his king. This is America’s champion?”

Dodge grimaced as he defiantly stared up into the brilliance. “You didn’t answer my question.”

The light from the staff gradually dimmed. “You don’t know where he is either. He hides, even from his chronicler.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Dodge repeated, successfully getting to his feet. “What do you want?”

The light continued to shrink. Dodge caught a glimpse of the dark god, no longer hooded, his robe thrown back to reveal a very human figure. The face was that of a wild prophet, clean-shaven, but with an unkempt mane of white hair. His eyes blazed with supernatural intensity, but below the sharp jut of his chin, he seemed supernaturally ordinary; a skid row Rasputin. He wore a tattered shirt and heavy denim trousers, hardly the attire of a mythic deity. Then Dodge saw the talisman lashed to his very ordinary leather belt and the final piece of the puzzle slipped into place.

Abruptly the light vanished altogether and Dodge was left alone in the maddening dark.

He gradually reconstructed the events missing from his memory. Concern for his friends was uppermost; he vividly remembered fixing the exoskeletons in place, but had Molly been successful in landing the big aircraft? Images of a fiery crash flooded his brain, and he tried to force himself to think about something else.

His solitary imprisonment did not last long. It seemed only a few minutes had passed when a wedge-shaped line of illumination split the unseen walls of his cell. As the light grew larger, becoming a pie shaped gap in what he now realized was the flying disc he had first glimpsed above the skies of Washington DC, he saw a green line of distant trees on the horizon. A few feet below was a field of scorched barren earth. The gap continued to widen as the strange metal peeled back, and Dodge was faced with the choice of retreating or jumping down to the ground. He chose the latter and hopped lightly down to the trampled cinders. He knew where he was even before he glimpsed the towering baobab trees.

As the flying disc reduced to almost nothing, Dodge became aware of a gathered throng of pirates. He saw Marten, towering above the rest, and at the head of the assemblage was the mask wearing figure he had earlier assumed to be the pirate king Johannes Krieger. The group shifted to surround him, and while no weapons were bared, they collectively exuded menace. As he turned to take in the situation, he found the dark god, hooded once more, standing directly behind him.

Krieger’s mask hid his scowl, but could not conceal his irritation when he spoke. “Why have you returned?”

“I was forced to sacrifice my aircraft. I require the one you captured from the priest.”

“The Hell you say. That plane is worth a lot of money to me.”

“I will not barter with the likes of you. The gift I have given you is of greater value than any amount of gold.” As he spoke, the god seemed to swell from beneath his robes, an angry volcano about to erupt. He thrust out the staff, once more wreathed in a halo of static electricity.

Krieger kept his defiant posture, but he knew when to cut his losses. “Take the plane. But if you darken my doorstep again, your threats will not save you.”

The man in the cowl ignored Krieger’s posturing. “This is Falcon’s chronicler. I have no further use for him, but he may be of some value as a hostage. He is an American of some notoriety.”

Krieger regarded Dodge with eyes barely visible through the slits in his carved demon face, then the turned to one of his lieutenants. “Put him with the others.”

Dodge got a glimpse of his former captor striding toward the amphibious biplane floating in the harborage, before a quartet of rough men hustled him into one of the fortress-like hollowed trees.

The pirates were needlessly rough with him, shoving him forward so hard that he stumbled and randomly hitting or kicking him for their own amusement. To his own amazement, Dodge felt none of the dread he imagined they hoped to instill. While he knew better than to think that he was invincible, his recent experiences, walking in the shoes of his literary creation, had taken the edge off the fear that so often shocked and paralyzed the unready. He did not resist his captors, but let their punishment wash over him like an ocean wave. He could almost picture the Padre doing the same thing; weathering the storm of abuse, while focusing his energies on the task of planning an escape. He observed everything — memorized the guards’ appearance and mannerisms. Which among them seemed just a little bit slower than the rest, or physically weaker? Which were too large and powerful to be dealt with man-to-man? He drew a mental map of the compound, noting places where he might find temporary refuge or lose, if only briefly, a pursuer. And he thought about where he would go once he escaped the fortress…not if, when.

The pirates all but dragged him out onto a sturdy tree branch, where a plank landing had been constructed, the only point of access to the suspended holding cell. He was pushed into a haphazardly constructed cage of wooden bars tied with hemp rope and already dangerously overcrowded with half-naked native hostages. Before he could pick himself up, the cage was pushed away from the tree branch and allowed to swing over a pit of crocodiles that waited lazily, mouths frozen open it seemed, thirty feet below.

Crocodiles, thought Dodge, adding the information to his escape plan without a hint of trepidation. More important to him at this moment was the possibility of finding allies among his fellow captives. After the pirates had moved off, he addressed the group. “Anyone here speak English?”

The hostages had barely stirred upon his arrival. They were battered and emaciated; it wasn’t too hard to believe that Krieger had deprived them of food and water since dragging them off from the mission nearly two days previously. One young man perked up at the sound of his voice. “Anglais? Non. Parlez vous francais?”

Dodge understood that much, but no more. He shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t parlez francais, so this is going to be a little harder than I thought. We’re going to escape, okay? Um, liberte?”

He didn’t know if that was the right word, but several more heads turned when he said it. The young man shook his head and pointed at the ravenous beasts below. “Les crocodiles.”

He gave the young man a comforting smile, as a parent might a frightened child. “You let me worry about the crocodiles.”

He already had the beginnings of a plan that would get them as far as the jungle. The voracious reptiles were key to that scheme; or rather their captors’ belief that the mere threat of being eaten alive would keep anyone from attempting to break through the prison bars. The pirates would trust their scaly watchdogs to do the real work of guarding the prisoners, and their initial response to any perceived escape effort would be slow and unenthusiastic. With luck, that would buy them enough time to swim around the palisade barrier and gain concealment in the forest. From there, he could lead them to Marten’s boat, which hopefully was still stranded on the marshy bank. The plan was a good one, if hasty, but he wondered how many of his haggard cellmates would survive to its conclusion.

On the river below, the airplane engine turned over and began to roar. Dodge craned his head around to observe the Grumman JF “Duck” as it taxied into open water and then charged skyward. The little single-engine biplane looked a lot more at home on the river than the enormous X-314 had, and that image brought a pang of sadness, particularly when he thought about the fiery-haired pilot whose kiss still lingered on his lips. He knew he would see Hurricane again; somehow, he couldn’t imagine a world without the giant Hurley, but Molly’s impression on his life had been too brief to leave him with that kind of confidence. Instead, he was filled only with fear and dread concerning her fate.

Forcing the dire predictions from his mind, he turned back to the other captives, focusing primarily on the young man that had spoken. He touched a palm to his chest and spoke his name.

The man nodded and mimicked his actions. “Claude.”

“Okay, Claude… and the rest of you, too. Here’s what we’re going to do.” Using pantomime, he demonstrated his plan. When he got to the part where they all fled into the jungle however, Claude snared his wrist and shook his head emphatically.

“Notre femmes.”

Dodge blinked uncomprehending, then emphatically repeated himself. Claude shook his head, and then turned to the other men who had begun to take more interest in the exchange. He spoke rapidly in a language that sounded nothing like French to Dodge’s unskilled ears, and a few of the prisoners nodded sympathetically. More words in the unusual tongue passed between them, then Claude abruptly turned back to Dodge, an anxious but eager smile on his bruised visage.

“That settles it then,” Dodge announced. “And no time like the present.”

He had actually debated waiting until nightfall, but thought better of it. Any advantage afforded by darkness would be offset by the inherent peril of traversing the jungle in pitch black. The pirates were certainly as tired as Dodge, having spent a night trekking through the forest and boating upriver, and the lassitude borne of confidence in static security measures— namely the crocodile pit below the hanging cage — would make them slow to react to any disturbance. Or at least that was what Dodge was going to bet his life on.

He gazed up at the rope connecting them to the tree limb. The hemp was swollen with moisture, impossible to untie given the load it bore, but showed signs of rot and fraying. Dodge once again cursed his shortsightedness in failing to acquire a pocketknife; he was going to have to do this the hard way.

He turned his eyes to the bars running vertically down the sides of the cage. All of them were fashioned from thin but mostly straight tree branches. The rough bark had already sloughed away, leaving gray weathered wood, likewise bound with twine. He selected one at random and gave it a sharp kick. The entire structure shuddered and started to spin, but there was no turning back. A lone pirate roaming below had already raised his eyes to observe the strange behavior of the captives.

The near ancient pole fractured on his fifth kick, splitting down nearly half its length as it broke in two. Dodge wrenched the longer section loose, initiating a second round of vibrations that prompted his fellow prisoners to clutch at the remaining bars. The crocodiles below seemed to sense that something was afoot; the long black reptiles began rolling around in their enclosure, gaping their jaws skyward in anticipation. Dodge decided not to disappoint them.

“Get ready!”

Using the broken branch like a saw, he began rubbing it vigorously across the single rope that held them fast to the tree branch. The fibrous line yielded quickly to the friction and in a few moments the remaining strands, stretched to their breaking point, snapped in two and the cage plummeted.

At the last instant before the break, Dodge and his new friends grasped the overhead bars and lifted their feet off the lattice-like floor. When their prison abruptly dropped more than three stories into the crocodile pit, they were spared the initial impact, but the reprieve was infinitesimally brief. Instead of taking the crash landing on their feet, it was their hands and arms that blossomed with pain as the full weight of their falling bodies hit the stopping point.

The cage’s flimsy construction alleviated some of the burden however. It did so by disintegrating. When it hit the shallow pool full of ravenous crocs, some of the kinetic energy was absorbed by its collapse. The crocodiles were stunned by the unexpected crash, but their leathery hides spared them mortal injury, and after an initial moment of animal panic, they regained their voracious ferocity. That moment was enough however for Dodge and the others to wrestle free of the wreckage and escape the death trap.

Dodge gripped the length of wood and brandished it like a sword as he splashed out of the pit and onto solid ground. The pirate sentry was still staring in stunned disbelief, but his body language revealed a conflict of priorities — sound the alarm, or take action to halt the escape? Dodge knew that he had only seconds to prevent the man from doing either, and as the fellow clutched at his holstered sidearm, a swipe from the cudgel eliminated both threats simultaneously. By that time however, the commotion had alerted the entire camp. Dodge wheeled on his compatriots and pointed toward the river. “Swim for it!”

The native men acted without hesitation or fear; the uncertain threat of deadly creatures lurking in the water was preferable to the unequivocal response that would be meted out by the pirates. On by one they leaped from the pier and splashed into the muddy water. Dodge lingered at the water’s edge, determined to make sure that every one of the captives escaped, and was thus in a perfect position to see Claude and another young man abruptly turn back into the compound.

“Claude, no!” His shouted denial fell on deaf ears. The two men knew what they were doing; they had worked this out in advance. Biting back a curse, Dodge charged after them, headlong into the growing pirate menace.

The mayhem provided a strange sort of concealment for Dodge; he was just one more white face wandering amidst the fatigued and confused men of the compound. The pair of dark-skinned Africans stuck out like a sore thumb, but most of the attention was directed toward the larger body of escapees that had plunged into the river. Dodge muscled past the milling pirates and caught a glimpse of his former cellmates ducking into the second hollowed out baobab.

He was never more than a few paces behind them and it was evident that Claude and his companion had only a general idea of where they were going. At one point, as the two frantic young men were backtracking from a dead end, Dodge caught them. He clapped a hand down on Claude’s shoulder and spun him around so that they were face to face.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” he shouted, hoping that the urgency of his tone would serve in lieu of a translator.

“L’femmes!” Claude wrestled free and hastened after his comrade who was already scrambling up a rickety ladder to the next level of the fortress.

“Damn it!” Dodge tucked his club under one arm and commenced a hasty ascent just a few steps behind the native. Before he reached the top however, a bloodcurdling scream split the air. Even more ominous was the sudden silence that terminated the cry.

Claude quickened his pace at the sound and pulled himself onto the catwalk, out of Dodge’s view. The latter raised his head level with the catwalk, wary of whatever had caused the outburst, but he was still unprepared for the sight that greeted his eyes.

The first man up the ladder — a native whose name was unknown to Dodge — lay at arm’s length from the uppermost rung, staring sightlessly back at him, wreathed in a corona of bright scarlet. The coppery smell of fresh blood hit Dodge like a slap and he had to force himself to look away from the hideous image.

Claude stood a few paces to the left, facing the unseen enemy that had slain his companion. He moved, as if to sidestep a blow or throw one of his own, and Dodge caught a glimpse of motion beyond — a swift, violent movement that ended with a strangled gurgling sound. Claude sagged forward, his legs no longer supporting his weight, but did not fall. He remained suspended in mid-air, twitching spasmodically as if held in the jaws of a predator, then was suddenly thrown sideways, out over the edge of the catwalk.

Dodge’s horror-numbed gaze followed the now lifeless shape as it crashed down to the first level of the fortress. It seemed impossible that the living, vibrant individual Dodge had met only a few minutes before was now nothing but an empty shell. He tore his eyes from the macabre scene below and found himself once more facing the pirate king, Johannes Krieger.

Krieger’s wooden mask looked even more demonic splattered with the blood of his victims, but it was his hands that grabbed Dodge’s attention. Krieger had no fingers, but instead wore twin fans of curved knife blades, like the talons of a raptor rendered in gleaming steel. Krieger laughed menacingly as he brandished his steel claws at the latest victim to land in his web. Cradled in the razor grip of his deadly prostheses was a still beating human heart.

A primal beast deep within Dodge’s core began urging him to flee — to descend and run for his life. His fellow escapees were beyond his ability to help; there was no longer any reason to linger here and face this savage murderer. But instead of scrambling down the ladder, Dodge pulled himself onto the catwalk and swung his cudgel back and forth to challenge the pirate leader.

Krieger laughed again, but seemed less confident. No one chose to stand against him, not since Captain Falcon and his army had brought the Ninety-nine to their collective knees. Still, what could this weakling hope to accomplish, armed only with a broken piece of wood? He cast his bloody burdens aside and flashed his claws at his opponent, accepting the implicit invitation to fight.

Dodge kept his gaze focused, not on the blades, but on the narrow eye-slits in Krieger’s mask. He couldn’t see the man’s eyes, couldn’t detect the subtle cues that would presage an attack, but reasoned that Krieger might not realize how completely the covering shielded him. In fact, as menacing as the carved visage appeared, the wooden facade severely limited the pirate’s field of vision.

Krieger slashed tentatively, trying to drive his enemy back over the edge. Dodge took one careful step back, luring the other man closer. He sidestepped a more decisive attack and slashed at Krieger’s forearm as the blades sliced the air where he had been standing. Krieger spat a curse in his native Afrikaans, then launched a two-handed assault that seemed more like an animal scratching wildly than a deliberate attack, but the net effect was the same. Dodge gave ground, skirting the edge of the catwalk as the finger-blades hacked closer. When he could retreat no further, Dodge parried with his club.

Krieger’s knives cut deep into the wood, but lacked sufficient mass and momentum to chop completely through. Instead, the thin metal blades stuck fast in the cross-grain. Krieger made a futile attempt to wrest his claws free, and inadvertently gave Dodge the opening he’d been waiting for. He jabbed the end of the club, with Krieger’s right hand still bound in place, into the pirate’s masked face.

The jagged length of wood struck right between the narrow eye slits, with sufficient force to split the carved image down the middle. Krieger lurched backward, ripping the club from Dodge’s grip as he fell. He reached up instinctively to protect the wound, but his steel claws instead sliced deep into his now unshielded countenance. For the first time in a decade, Johannes Krieger’s face was revealed. And just as ten years before, he was screaming.

Disarmed, Dodge could only stare at his stricken foe. Krieger’s face was streaming blood from numerous slashes, including a vertical gash where the mask had been driven down to the bone. Yet, beneath the new injuries was a tapestry of scars that bore witness to the violence that had prompted him to hide his features from his fellow man. The pirate king’s face was a tiger-striped pattern of twisted purple and white scars; ten years ago, consumed by madness after being buried alive, with fingers scoured down to bloody nubs of bone, Johannes Krieger had tried to tear his face off.

The unmasked pirate struggled both to sublimate his agony and to wrench his right hand free of the club. He succeeded in the first effort, but the knife claws remained fixed in place. Panting from the exertion, Krieger relented, and turned his gaze back to his opponent.

“Do you think you’ve won?” he hissed, a froth of blood forming around the corners of his mouth.

Dodge balled his fists warily but disdained to answer. His minor victory had severed the pirate’s tenuous connection to sanity; the man, like a wounded wild animal, was capable of anything now. Nevertheless, Krieger’s next action was completely unexpected.

The pirate extended both hands toward Dodge — the club still bound in the grip of his right — as it to bestow a blessing. It was only when the smell of burning wood scented the air that Dodge saw violet sparks rippling across the metal surface of the talons. He recalled the parting words of the hooded villain to Krieger. The gift I have given you….

The dark god had given the pirate king the gift of lightning.