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Angel Death
Posted Jun 6, 2009 6:54 AM
Charon looked up at the top of the ditch, it might as well have been a hundred miles away and all she’d managed to do was sit up and cause herself a great deal of pain in the process. The pain helped her think a bit clearer but it also made her realise she was going nowhere fast, she’d probably die and rot in this water filled hole. She gritted her teeth and took in another rasping painful breath of air and looked up at the sky, it was getting dark. She kept an image of Angel right there in her head in case she was in danger of giving up completely.
She woke up, she hadn’t been aware of even passing out in the first place so she was quite surprised to find herself staring up at the moon. She made no attempt to move other than to slowly and painfully rip strips of cloth off her shirt and stuff them into the gaping wound in her chest. She lifted her good arm and explored the wound in her head, it wasn’t as deep as she feared but there was a definite chance of brain swelling in the next 24 hours.
The man shuffled along the edge of the ditch carefully, every now and again stopping and stooping down to pick something up and shoving it into the many pockets he seemed to have in his jacket. His hair was long and unkempt and he smelled as though he hadn’t seen a good bath in many years. His trousers were battered looking army issue as were his boots and it was the rasping noise that caught his attention very quickly, his army training kicking in and he dropped down into the ditch and huddled there listening for some time. Images of war and injuries played out in his minds eye, he suddenly realised what the noise was, it was someone struggling to breath, he’d heard that same sound many hundreds of times.
He crawled forward slowly until he could see the body, the moon lit up the face like a ghost, had the rasping not given away the breathing he’d have thought she was dead. She was half sitting and looked in bad shape, she’d made a makeshift bandage for her chest but he suspected that if left for much longer one lung might collapse possibly both. He stood and approached slowly and as soon as he was within reach he could see the gunshot wounds to both her chest and head. He knew by rights she ought to be dead but somehow she wasn’t and she was still breathing. He’d seen many wounded in his time as an Army medic, some men who should have been killed somehow survived and others who should have survived died. The World was all wrong and eventually the deaths had taken their toll on his mind and he’d had a nervous breakdown. It had cost him everything, his house, wife, kids and nearly life itself but now he had the opportunity to make a difference after all this time.
He stripped off his long jacket and pulled some strong sturdy branches from the surrounding tree’s and made a makeshift stretcher. He ripped his shirt into long strips and used them to tie her to the stretcher, once he was happy she was secured safely, he hauled her out of the ditch and along the side of the deserted road.
Ten minutes later he’d reached his camp, it was well concealed and nothing or no one bothered him here. He had some water boiling on a small camp fire and threw needles and thread into it, he rummaged through his stuff and grabbed a couple of bottles of disinfectant and a bottle of alcohol. He ran down to the nearby river jumped in and cleaned himself up using a couple of the bottles of disinfectant, he couldn’t risk infection setting in on wounds to the chest and head. Once he got back to camp, he grabbed an old bag he’d bought with him, never imagining that he would ever use it again. He pulled his hair into a ponytail and pulled the white cap over it and the surgical mask down over his bearded face. He grabbed the surgical gown and the tools of his trade, an old army medical kit full of scalpels. He dumped them into the boiling pot of water and added alcohol and disinfectant for good measure. Ten minutes later and he was ready.
He laid her out carefully and made a quick examination, she had several broken bones on her left side and numerous abrasions. His best guess was that she’d been shot and then thrown from a moving vehicle. He grabbed a flashlight and shone it over the injured area’s, he worked slowly, peeling the shirt from the chest wound first and cleaning as he went. The flashlight picked up silvery strands embedded in her flesh, he looked more closely and realised it was a finely woven mesh of metal actually in her skin. He’d never seen anything like it before but he realised that it was this mesh that had saved her life. He took his time making sure all major bleeds were sutured, he made a quick search of the wound, it was deep but hadn’t breached the chest wall, the rasping was simply being caused by bruising to the organic tissues underneath and with time would subside. He now turned his attention to the head wound which worried him far more. He needed to see it more closely and so he made the decision to peel the flesh back to see what damage had been done to the front of the skull. He stared unsure what to make of it, her entire skull was criss-crossed with the same metal mesh like metal but where the bullet had hit, it had cracked the skull. The only reason she hadn’t died from her injuries was the weird metal which kept the skull intact and minimised the damage but what it wouldn’t do is stop the brain from swelling inside the skull. The bullet must have ricocheted and it would have happened so fast that the shooter wouldn’t have seen it happen. He cleaned the wound carefully and then stitched her back up. Now he would have to sit tight and wait.
He cleaned the wounds several times a day, after a week he noticed that she healed twice as fast as any average human being, her breathing had eased and her eyelids had begun to flutter which was a good sign that consciousness was fighting to make an appearance. His biggest worry was de-hydration and he had literally spent hours forcing water down her throat, he’d had to do it slowly to prevent accidentally drowning her.
The police were useless, they’d had one demand from the kidnappers, Kizmat had met it and yet still he had no Charon or Angel. They were no closer to working out what had happened and Kizmat was spending more and more time pacing up and down the hallways of Death Manor trying to work it out in his head. When he did fall asleep he was plagued by weird dreams and late night phone calls from Darkspade, who despite his protestations that he had no interest in where Charon was wanted to know what was going on. Kali had been unable to make a connection either, which she tried to cover up but Kizmat was beginning to think Charon was dead but there was the weird dreams he kept having.
Angel was kept chained to a wall in some grotty basement somewhere and she had spent most of her time running through escape plans. They’d tried to mess with her head by blindfolding her and then pretending they were going to shoot her but that had soon stopped when she’d told them to go ahead and shoot her please so that she could get out of the smelly basement.
She was a patient person and she simply waited for one of them to screw up, yesterday they had. One of the men had tasered her, it sent a huge surge of energy into her body which she’d managed to contain and kick-start her abilities, so when they came in again, two of them got blasted into gibbering wrecks. Angel had then directed the energy to the locks and sprung herself from the chains. She grabbed the chains, wrapped them round the mens throats and snapped their necks. Job done.
She then wrapped the chains round her hands and arms, she slowly made her way up the basement steps and through the door at the top. She was in a deserted shack or shed, she couldn’t be sure, there was a makeshift kitchen so she helped herself, she stuffed as much food into her mouth that she could comfortably manage, found a rucksack sitting in the hallway and stuffed that full of food as well. She slung it over her shoulder and went to explore the outside, she could see a garage. She walked slowly and carefully toward it, aware that there maybe more of them somewhere and when she reached the wall she listened carefully for sometime before going inside.
“Cool.”
There was a black pick-up truck, Angel tried the door, it was open so she climbed in, there were no keys but that had never stopped her before. She ripped the dashboard off, reached underneath the ignition and hauled out a whole bunch of wires. In less than five seconds she had the truck purring and roared out of the garage smashing the doors in against the sides of the garage. She had no idea where she was but right now she couldn’t have cared less as she accelerated up the road away from the shithole she’d been held in for nearly two weeks.
She’d been driving for about fifteen minutes before she found a road sign, she turned left and shot off her foot down as far as it would go. All she had to do was wait for a police car to pull her over but none did – typical, never a cop around when you want one!
Four hours later she was still driving like a complete nutcase. She knew she was close to home now, she wiped her eyes for the hundredth time and then wound all the windows down and turned the stereo up as high as it would go to try and keep her awake. She must have been micro sleeping every now and again because she saw the sign for Death Manor flash past suddenly. Now she was wide awake, it must have been about 3am as she crashed through the gates of Death Manor causing every alarm in the place to wind up to a noise that sounded like every bank in the known universe was being burgled at the same time.
Kizmat must have dropped off in an armchair because he was jolted awake by the klaxon like wailing of the intruder alarm. He ran to the front door where he could see a set of headlights flying up the driveway towards the front of the house like a crazed bull. He stood framed in the doorway as Angel steamed as fast as she could toward him, to the safety of her family and she stamped on the brakes as she approached, causing the truck to skid and turn on the loose gravel. She’d opened the door before the truck had even stopped and almost fell out in a heap on the driveway.
Kizmat stood staring like a statue as though he couldn’t possibly be seeing what was happening in front of him, for a second he thought he was having one of his weird dreams until Angel almost threw herself into his arms wailing like a banshee. He picked her up and hugged her in close to him even if she did smell like a trash can left out in the middle of a desert for far too long.
Hours later, Kizmat was standing in the large entrance hall where Police officers seemed to milling back and forth like ants with Angel in the centre of it all. Angel had even taken police out to where she said Charon’s body had been kicked out of the van, they’d found blood stains but no body, now they were grilling her for the hundredth time to try and get more details from her. Local officers had gone to the shack and found the two men she’d killed, confirming her story but they’d found little else to suggest there was more than two men involved and without Charon it all sounded a bit farfetched. Kizmat knew Angel though and he knew she was telling the truth but they would need to find Charon or her body.
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