Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta destruction. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta destruction. Mostrar todas las entradas

martes, 29 de marzo de 2016

From the gutter to the sky

   Grant Tower used to be a gigantic building located in the limit between downtown and the industrial districts. It had been abandoned for many years until it was bought by a mysterious person who recuperated its former splendor. In a city filled with strange things happening everyday, the destruction of Grant Tower did not go unnoticed. After all, it had been Captain Incredible the one to destroy it during his battle with his arch nemesis, Doctor Perdition.

 The battle had taken place all over the city. The superhero and the villain were able to fly, so they moved from one area to the other and the destruction was palpable all over the place. Captain Incredible had promised it would be the last battle to fight in the city as, according to him, every other gang and criminal organization had been dismantled. Only Doctor Perdition stood in the way of a pacified city. So every single person affected by the last battle, tried to understand what was as stake.

 Many inhabitants of the city fled beforehand, others just locked themselves home (if they had a basement). The battle took several hours and affected every single inhabitant in the same way. They knew what they would get in exchange, but many were already pissed at both the bad guy and the good one because for years and years, their battles against the other side had caused devastation once and again. People were tired of all of it and Captain Incredible knew he was risking a lot by saying that was going to be his last battle.

 Inspector Paulson was the first one to arrive to the site of the former Grant Tower. The battle was still going on but it had moved to the port, where they could be less damaging to the people. Pieces of the tower had fallen all over the neighboring streets and some of the neighbors were attempting to move the pieces by themselves. Others were looking for objects to recuperate from the destruction.

 Delia Paulson put on her gloves and entered the destroyed building. Only a couple floors were still standing. All the other seventy floors had disappeared. She used a mask to walk inside and join two men of her team who had gotten there before her. Neighbors had told them that a sound could be heard coming from the building, from below the ground. So they had to look where it was, probably a bomb made by Doctor Perdition.

 Inspector Paulson descended towards the lower levels of the building, that had received no damage, and encountered the noise was coming from a boiler room. The machine that used o heat up the water from the tower seemed to be about to explode. A rapid move by one of the policemen, helped to bring the pressure down.

 When he moved away from the boiler, with a face of triumph, the policemen pushed a pipeline that changed positions. But not only that, it also opened a door on the wall, just in front of the boiler. The inspector told everyone to be on the lookout and entered first; illuminating her path with a flashlight she took from her long coat.

 She walked slowly, covering her face because the air was charged with dust particles, probably because of the violent movement suffered by the building when it had been destroyed. It was a long corridor and then a path that seemed to descend in a spiral, down into the ground. Paulson ordered one policeman to stay at the entrance and was only joined by two of them, one being the one that had stopped the boiler from exploding.

 They walked slowly through the narrow passaged until finally they could see artificial light. They arrived at a massive room, carved into the natural rock. It was very humid but there wasn’t as much dust as there was above. They could breath at ease and not feel trapped anymore. The policemen were visibly scared because they remained just behind Paulson and she didn’t say anything because she was scared too. What was that place? Why was it there?

 On the wall, there were dozens, hundreds of screens showing different TV channels and also some footage from closed circuit cameras. Paulson saw the inside of the Central Bank, the security cameras from the police department building and the mayor’s office. It was all live. Someone had them all cornered and they hadn’t realized it.

 One of the policemen attracted her attention to one of the screens. It was a news channel reporting that the battle between the superhero and the villain had ended: good had one versus evil. The two men cheered but Paulson did not say anything. The existence of that room was proof that things did not stop with Doctor Perdition. She kept walking to find more clues and all she saw were plans of every building in the city, including Grant Tower, weapons of every kind and a diary hidden on the drawer of a work table.

 She started reading and, at first, it didn’t make much sense. It was all about a boy telling his sad high school stories. Apparently he was mocked because of the way he dressed and the way he looked. He hated people for laughing at him but would only find solace in one friend he had away from school, another kid. Paulson kept on reading as the policemen looked around, still happy that the last evil plaguing their city had finally been defeated and was dead for good.

 Paulson kept on reading and realized the diary belonged to no other than Doctor Perdition. She then raised her head and told her men to stop walking round and touching everything. She did so just in the moment were one of the weapons fired a set of arrows against a wall, piercing the wall with incredible strength. The men decided to get closer the inspector, who told them to bring their scientific team in order to bag every single thing in that lab.  She told them they had probably gotten the big prize of the night.

 The two men went back upstairs but Delia stayed behind to wait for the science team and in order to keep reading. She didn’t excuse Doctor Perdition for what he had done; after all he was a felon that had served time after killing people and doing the most unspeakable acts of violence. But she kind of felt sorry for him, as she read more and more of the diary. Apparently, he was the only son in a family of only women and he had been mistreated by his parents because he wasn’t the man they wanted him to be.

 He also hated his family. Paulson wondered if he had them killed at some point but the diary didn’t say. It only spoke about his childhood and the most beautiful pages, because they actually were, were dedicated to his encounters with a friend that shared his vision of the world. He was a bit younger but seemed older than him because of his convictions. He was a strong believer that people that did wrong should pay, no matter what is was that they had done.

 She stopped reading and looked for more diaries in the drawer but it was the only one. When the scientific team arrived, she ordered them to scan the room for hidden compartments and traps. They found a small hiding space beneath a huge metal table, which the inspector moved by herself. There, covered in dust, she found something else. There were no diaries but papers that assigned this property to the kid she had been reading about. If the kid was Doctor Perdition, the building must have been his. He was the one to renew it, all those years ago.

 There was also an electronic book, which could be turned on but had a password to protect it. A member of the scientific team helped Paulson bypass the password in order to read whatever it was she had on her hands. And when she was able to read it, she almost dropped it on the floor. Because what was in that book was not only a diary or some legal papers. There were pictures, and statements and videos and text that talked about that other kid, the one that had been Perdition’s friend when he had been bullied in school.

 That friend had helped him seek revenge, which had resulted in the death of at least two children and it had been Perdition who had put a stop to it.

 That kid… That kid was Frederick Edwards AKA Captain Incredible.

miércoles, 27 de enero de 2016

Home

   The place had been abandoned for a long time, or at least that’s what could be inferred by the state of the house as a whole. Some glasses had broken, due to the wind or objects hitting them with strong force, moss and fungi had grown in the most humid places and every single object was covered by a very thick layer of dust, except the things near the terrace, through which the rain and the wind of many days had entered and sort of cleaned the space a bit. It didn’t look better as there was a lot of sand from the beach below and fragments of plants and other things. The place was a mess but there was some magic to it even like that.

 Formerly, that house had been part of condominium where only the richest people had houses by the beach, places where they could escape if they needed so. Maybe they had very busy lives in the city or maybe they just wanted to change views from time to time. There were even houses that were visited only once. But the one described was the last one of them all. The others were in ruins: they had been affected by the cliff crumbling into the beach or had just had less luck than the house that still stood there, almost defiantly.

 There were pictures of the people that used to live there or at least own the place: most of the photos showed a couple in their fifties, smiling or hugging and one where they kissed in some sort of celebration. There was only one picture of other people, most likely their children but it could be anyone as humidity had taken its toll on the picture and faces could not really be compared to the others. The point was that it seemed to be the house of people that were probably retired and had decided to have a place far from the chaos of the cities.

 The largest room was the living room, with the dining table just adjacent to it in a sort of platform that made way to the balcony, that had gone unaffected by the disaster that had claimed so many of the other houses. If a person could have been there, they would have seen a fiery ocean outside, a possible storm forming in the horizon and little to no wildlife in the vicinity. In the house, there were some small rodents and insects but no big animals, something had scared them off, or maybe the lack of people was unappealing, maybe they had learned to deal with us.

 Everything in this room was obviously expensive and that was obvious because of how it had stood against the wind and the humidity. The wood used all over the place was obviously of high quality as was the steel by the fireplace and even the fabrics in the furniture. The couple had probably spent lots of days planning what to buy and how to install it inside, how would it look best.

 But now, no one was there. Same for the bedrooms, which the house had three. The biggest one, of course, was the master bedroom that also had a balcony but smaller. The couple probably loved to look at the ocean every morning and talked about that view often. Or maybe, as many humans do, they never acknowledged their privilege, because when people already have something they’ve yearned for long, they decided to move on to some other things and the magic that used to exist is just lost. People are very hard to please.

 The bed and linen smelled awful but that was caused by the broken windows and the fact that rain had somehow created a giant puddle beneath the bed. It was almost a death trap because beneath that puddle laid all the pieces of broken glass from the windows. A human would have to be very careful walking around that room, as large as it was. There was a sofa there and a TV that had stopped working some time ago (there was no electricity) and a very large bathroom inside.

 It had a circular bathtub by the window overlooking the ocean and a lot of space for clothes and to be naked around. It should have been a really nice place to hang out as a couple or even alone. The glasses here had not been shattered yet so the room seemed less chaotic than the rest. The drawers were still filled with things the woman that lived there had bought but rarely used: many types of creams and lotions, bath salts for the bathtub, soaps in every shape, form and odor and several other things that would make a hotel manager blush out of embarrassment.

 The other two rooms were smaller. The one across the master bedroom was a bit larger and its windows were also shattered. It looked towards the entrance, were the cars would have been parked. It didn’t really have anything personal around except a teddy bear that was still sitting on the bed. It was impossible to know who had been the owner of that bear: there were no pictures in the bedroom and there were no other objects to relate it to. And the whole place was done in white, so one it was probably not a child’s toy but who knows, maybe it was.

 The last bedroom was smaller, also overlooking the parking area. That room’s particularity was the fact that it had a rather old computer on a table on the opposite side of the bed. There was a calendar besides it and a small cactus that was the only living thing in the room. It was strange to see that patch of green next to all the rather dull colors of the rooms. It was, without a doubt, a sign of life. But no one was really there to appreciate it anymore. There was even a small pink flower on top of it, but no one would ever see that. No way to know if they did before.

 Suddenly, the room shook as if another tremor had occurred but the force that was shaking the house did not come from below but from above. From the small bedroom, something could be seen in the sky, sort of a shadow slowly moving among the clouds but making the ground shake a lot. It was very high up and its shape or trajectory was very difficult to pin down. After a few moments the vibrations stop and only the sound of one of the paintings in the living room falling to the ground broke the silence. It had held on to the wall as long as it had been able to but the forces of nature had finally won.

 The last space in the house was the kitchen, which appeared to have been frozen in time. Everything there was just as if someone had come and clean it everyday since the couple had left the house. The pans and pots were very still in their places, also the glasses of wine and the entire silverware. It looked ready to be used but no one would ever use any of it again. It was nice to imagine what they had cooked in such a great place, such a clean and white space. Maybe they had thrown parties with lots of canapés and alcohol. Maybe they had been more intimate, and had just cooked meals for the two of them.

 It was weird not to see any grease of any part of the kitchen and the fact that there was no fungus in there but other parts of the house were just invaded by it. Maybe one of them was very into cleaning or had a special love for cooking. That was also interesting. Imagining who they actually were, what had made them laugh in that kitchen, what shows they liked to watch on TV, if they had eaten many times only the two of us in that dining table or if they had spent many nights feeling the night air in their faces and just looking at the ocean.

 The same ocean that now seemed a bit gray and that, strangely, was slowly pulling back. The few birds that remained it the bitch went away and there was only the house to face the destiny that had been set for the world. That house had known love, hope and laughter but also sadness and anger. It had been a house were some humans had decided to live and enjoy their time together but they had been made to leave and cut short what was going to be a long stay. They probably planned a proper life there.


 The ocean was coming back, tall and monstrous. The house, and many other houses inland and far from there, where going to disappear. And with them the memories of thousands, maybe millions of people which only dream was to have a place to go back to when things got unbearable, where they could be with the people they loved and just enjoy the simplicity of human life. But that was no more. That time in that place, came to an end in a moment.

sábado, 19 de diciembre de 2015

Pilot in the stars

   The rumors were true. The whole colony had been dreading it would happen again, some day, and it had finally happened. Scouts and explorers coming in and out of the Field confirmed the destruction of an entire planet. According to them, the explosion was still visible in the nearby sectors and it was impossible to pass through the area. Many freighters had to take longer routes to rich worlds nearby, as the rocks that were floating around were sampling to big for such slow ships to handle.

 For the colony, this was especially difficult news. After all, it had been established many years ago precisely because a mad man had destroyed their former planet and they had to resettle in an asteroid field. Somehow they were the only ones, or at least had that idea in mind, that understood how real war felt like and how scary fanatics could be. That’s why they knew it would happen again and it did.

 Some of the colonists cried when they heard the news of the destruction, even more when they learned it had been a planet with a very large population and that had no why of responding to an attack of that magnitude. They had just died, with no way of even knowing they were going to die. The small room that served as temple to all religions in the colony was filled with flowers, one for each inhabitant. The guy that owned the flower shop was both happy and sad.

 Younger colonists, like Gregor, were not as hurt by the destruction of the planet as their parents. They understood it was something awful but hadn’t been old enough to feel their planet been destroyed in order to have something to compare the feeling to. Besides, Gregor’s parents had been mining in a far away planet when theirs was destroyed. According to them, it was something they felt deep in their hearts and it their minds, but Gregor was too young back then and did not remember feeling anything.

 Young colonists also worked and had responsibilities like helping around in the cargo area or in the commercial zone. The idea of the colony was that everyone could give something of themselves to make it all better for all inhabitants of the colony. It was a nice sentiment but difficult to handle as many passers by came in their lives for a few days and even a few hours. Ships came and went from the colony, used as a stopping point to refuel or have a decent meal before preceding their journey.

 Pilots were normally very talkative people and the colony was rather closed to the outside world so every piece of news came from them. It was often boring to hear them talking about the same old subjects but sometimes they did have very interesting insights about the other inhabited planets in the galaxy and the power players beyond the Field.

 Gregor was always interested in hearing the pilots talk. There was something in the way they told their stories, something so intimate and also universal, that made him want to leave the Field and get to know the world for himself. Once, sitting around fixing a machine in his family’s quarters, he decided to test the waters and get a conversation going with his parents about pilots and what they thought of them.

 His mother was a bit scared of them, not only because some of them were aliens, and she wasn’t still very used to that, but because they took so many risks when going from one place to the other. In her mind, the galaxy was a very dangerous place, filled with villainous creatures. His dad was, on the other hand, very interested in them but knew that their job was very difficult and sometimes even deadly. Pilots took many risks and not everyone was built to be one of them.

 Silence followed the conversation and Gregor broke it, by announcing he would love to be a pilot someday. His parents reacted in horror, dropping what they were doing, and looking at him as if he was sick. It was the first time they told him to go to his room and stay there doing nothing. They always wanted him to be helping, to be doing stuff, but now they just wanted him to be isolated and locked behind a door so he could think about what he had said and they could think how to counter that.

 The thing is, of course, it wasn’t and idea he had elaborated on that day. Gregor had been thinking of becoming a pilot for a long time. He even discussed it with a couple of pilots that told him that new blood was always needed but that it was essential that he had the courage to do what they sometimes didn’t have a choice of doing. Some of them had killed people, defending their cargo, their crew or their passengers. They were skilled not only in flying ships but also in different kinds of combat.

 It was a difficult thing for Gregor as any type of weapon was forbidden in the planet and any fights meant jail. The colony had gone out of its way to ensure that its inhabitants could live a life better than the one in other places. They thought that by banning violence, they would avoid it altogether, forever. But that wasn’t the case. After all it was a spaceport and fights always broke out and authorities couldn’t just arrest pilots transporting important cargo.

 That night he spent in his room; Gregor used it to think about what he was going to do with his life.  He really wanted to go away, to leave the colony and get to know other places and he was sure he could be a great pilot, even if he had never even tried to pilot anything.

 Decided and realizing his parents would never let him to do what he wanted, Gregor decided to just leave one night and try his luck in the outside world. He knew he could die or something worse but he didn’t mind. He was sick of staying behind, of just waiting for things to happen in his life. He wanted to be amazed by the galaxy and to see all that every planet had to offer with his own two eyes.

 One night, he went out of his room and left home with only a small bag with clothes and other essentials. His parents had not talked to him after their failed conversation and he was still hurt by it so he didn’t left them any kind of letter telling them what he was about to do. He just left and ran through corridor and hangars in order to get to the cargo area, were ships were refueled and taken care of.

 Gregor hid behind some crates containing food and waited until the workers left. It was well known that no ships could leave for some hours in the night, so he just waited there for all the workers to leave. The flight prohibition was only good for a couple of hours but it was more than enough for him to sneak into one of the ships and hide inside it. Once they realized he was there, it would be too late and no pilot would go back just for a kid escaping his parents.

 He entered the nearest ship, a typical cargo freighter, and hid between the tanks it was transporting. As he was not very tall and skinny, he could easily hide sitting down among all those tanks. After some minutes, he realized those were fuel tanks and decided it was maybe not a very good idea to travel near any of that. After all, it could blow it in any given second and his journey would be over.

 The ship next to that one was transporting cages and something made an awful noise inside of them. The third and last ship carried the typical crates and he went for it but wanted to go back as soon as he felt the awful smell in his nostrils. It was really awful, probably some kind of food considered a delicacy in another world but certainly not in the Field. He was about to leave when the ship closed its back door and he was trapped.


 He hadn’t realized the prohibition was over and all three ships departed at the same time. He had to hide there, among the stench, and try not to be detected. But after a while he just couldn’t hold it and started coughing like a lunatic. It was too loud for the pilot to ignore it. The door to the cockpit opened and Gregor was surprised to see a very tall women look at him and say: “You’re gonna die if you stay here. Come”. And he did and that’s how his big adventure started.

lunes, 21 de septiembre de 2015

Queen of tragedy

   The devastation brought by the wave could be seen easily from the castle, which had been built in a peninsula that shoot straight into the ocean with a very high elevation. The waves that attacked the city did not really affect the castle or the people inside it, although they did feel the arrive of the killing water and saw how it engulfed the whole fishing town that was located very close to the castle. Every little boat and those small and weak houses were rapidly destroyed by the wave. The people didn’t even have time to pray or to scream. The wave was just too fast and too destructive, it didn’t leave a thing standing. The people in the castle, including Princes Ariana, were all horrified. She sent some soldiers after it happened but, as they were about to go out, another wave, even taller than the last one, hit the beach.

 No one could have survived that. And the thing now was that, because of the second wave, the access to the castle had been flooded. Until the waters receded, they were all trapped there, without any communication with the rest of the world. Ariana’s father, the King, had left the day before to attend a very traditional ceremony in an inland town and her mother the Queen had also left to visit her brother who was a duke in some region south of the castle. Ariana was alone and needed desperately to talk to someone, as she was very perturbed by the images of water hitting the fishing town with such vile and strength. She remained in the chapel for a whole day, praying and asking God for the souls that had been lost. She asked “why”.

 But, of course, she never got an answer. After that time, the princess tried to help the people that were inside the castle and organize everything for every single person to have a ration of food. She had no idea how much time that could last but she would at least try to help them as only she could do it. At the end of the day, the castle was hers, her domain, and everyone inside it had to hear her until the King or the Queen came back. The day after the waves hot the coast, the castle started to receive various letters sent by aerial means (pigeons, mostly). Many were soldiers informing of the situation on their towns and others were people, asking for help as the situation was very dire. It was a surprise to see letters from far inland and the Ariana’s heart stopped for a moment.

 She asked her helpers to look for letter from a specific location. There was only one letter and it was from a farmer. He said the wave had flooded his field and now his crops had been destroyed, so he had no means to sustain his family or to trade with others. He also mentioned, although briefly, that the nearby town had been flooded too and festivities had been cancelled. Ariana breathed out. Her father was probably okay but she needed to be sure. She asked her servants to answer the letter she had just read and do what they could to locate his father and help that poor man with his crops. She owed him, or at least she felt so.

 Ariana did the same thing to know if her mother was okay but there were no letters from that region in the big pile that had arrived during the day. More pigeons entered the castle during the day, but almost all came from very nearby, were apparently the stench of death was already hard to ignore. People said that there were no victims, as the people who sent the pigeons were merchants that traveled from town to town and saw what happened all around them. Apparently the fishing town couldn’t be saved and the most awful part of it all was that everyone could easily see the ruins of the town from the castle. It was so close but at the same time it had such a different faith than the people hidden in the castle.

 They received a letter from the King the day after that. He informed the people that he had been injured by the flooding, that had taking everyone by surprise. He was in bed with a very swollen ankle, product of a fall as he escaped the water towards higher ground. The doctor said that it was easy to cure but that he had to stay there for some day, at least a week, to make his leg better. Ariana read the letter in front of everyone and even shared with the people the nice adjectives he had for her. He said that the castle was in hands of the princess and that everyone had to respond to her orders and listen to her lead, as she was the only person with authority to be there with them.

 These words from her father made Ariana feel very happy and also very important. She had never done much in the castle or even in her life, only being a nice girl that sits correctly whenever an important visitor comes and that leaves for her room to do nothing at all there, except if you consider combing your hair or looking at your dresses some sort of job. The truth was that Ariana was thrilled to finally have some responsibility and taste, however short it may last, the sweetness and pleasure to share her kindness with her people and with everyone that wrote the letters that kept coming into the castle. On the fifth day, the waters finally receded and soldiers were sent to every single nearby that to assess the situation.

 The small fishing port had not been the only one to be destroyed completely. A very large portion of the coast had been devastated by that same wave, ten meter tall or more, so many towns had suffered the same faith. Even some soldiers that decided to check on the state of the castle came with urgency to see the princess and asked her to put some men to work. Apparently, the bases of the castle had been shaken very seriously and repairs had to be made in order for it not to fall into the ocean. A small army of men was hired to do those works and the proper army was tasked with burning every corpse they saw and help survivors, if any. There were not to many.

 The first week was difficult for Ariana, specially when a merchant that sold fur came into town and old everyone how the wave had destroyed the region south of the castle. He swore the smell was too overwhelming and bodies piled up on both sides of the roads. Ariana felt awful and sent some soldiers right then but it was useless. The man was right; there was nothing but destruction, especially because in the south there were no hills or mountain. It was a big plain and now it was something like a swamp, with flies flying all over it and over the bodies of hundred of people. One of those was the Queen, who had died with her brother as they were outside the duke’s house when tragedy came. Being inside, wouldn’t have changed a thing, though.

 The princess tried not to cry when she received a pigeon telling her of her mother’s death. She only asked for the soldiers to bring her body and that of the duke, if they found him. Some days later the dead body of the Queen arrived into town and a rapidly organized funeral was arranged. Ariana would have loved to have her father there to comfort her but was now having a very dangerous fever and his doctor recommended for him to stay were he was, as any trip might be too dangerous for him. So she had to bury her mother alone, in the family mausoleum. Many people attended the funeral and she wasn’t surprised, as her mother had always being loved by her people.

 Ariana, in the inside, was devastated. Now she didn’t want any responsibility or to grow up, she didn’t want to be the woman who ruled over the kingdom. And even if she was the last royal, she would have to marry to be able to exercise her role as Queen. It hurt her to be thinking of such things, as if her father was dead too but he wasn’t, he was just injured and she wanted to be with him but then no one would stay behind to help the people that needed the family. Some of her father’s helpers wanted her to leave to have a free reign over everything but she refused to go and even jailed some of those who pretended for her to leave the city and stay away from the corruption.

 Only two weeks after the waves hit the coast, the King came back to town. But Ariana suffered once more because he wasn’t doing as well as the doctor had said. Unsurprisingly, the doctor had left the party that accompanied her father. She ordered soldiers to execute him if they ever saw him. But the most important thing for her was to see her father, which whom she talked privately and summoned a religious authority and a lawmaker. After some days, the King was too weak to keep talking and he eventually died from his wounds and mistreatment. His funeral was attended by all and he was buried in the crypt next to his wife.


 Everyone was more surprised, however, with the fact that a new law had been enacted the day before the king’s death. It liberated his daughter of marriage and gave her the power to rule the kingdom as Queen. People didn’t know whether to celebrate or not. But eventually, they would know the answer to that question.