He spent his first day stranded there in the noise and rank smells. He walked through the old central area looking at the ancient stone buildings. The chemical he carried highlighted in the mass destruction’s most wanted list. When night fell, he put the dangerous canister down by a public rubbish bin and kept walking away from it. He slept on a concrete doorstep in an alley. He was ten feet away and separated by a wall from sleeping Roman beauties. Wives who dedicated their lives to their husbands. He had nothing to eat and nothing to drink.
In the early midnight hours before morning a woman gave him a simple meal with tea. He followed her to her apartment door. He asked her to let him in, and she did. She told him to keep quiet. He asked for a wash. She replied that for him to do that he would have to pay her money. He had none past the five centimes and that was not enough for her wishes.
He decided to call his employer in England. That involved finding a public telephone booth. A phone where he could place a collect call to the Trentham base. It was where he had departed six weeks ago. They accepted the call charge but could do nothing to retrieve him from Italy. They had no advice besides making a sarcastic remark. The suggestion was that he should walk across Europe to England. That he ought to leave a swathe of dead bodies to his left and right as he passed with an M-16. Then they left him with piece word of advice. A plane carrying American officers was leaving Rome in nine days’ time. “Do not, whatever you do, do not be aboard that airplane,” said the contact. Then the call was over.
He tried to call his family in New Zealand but exchange could not connect to that number. As far as he could find there were no embassies in Rome. He was stuck with ragged clothes to claim charity until his luck turned. Without the obsequious machine gun of his employer’s dreams he decided to walk anyway.
It is a long way to leave Rome by foot from the coastal centre if it. After a day following the coast he finally reached a road. It skirted along the top of a cliff which dropped to a white beach leading north. He began to climb down the cliff to the beach. It is also difficult to evade the officers of the law after being homeless right before their eyes. Especially while hoping that they would overlook the can in the middle of a city as busy as that. It was the only trail needed to set a fleet of police cars after him. They waited for him further up the road.
He did not want them to intercept him and held. He trusted his rock climbing skills as he descended the cliff in the dark. It was not far until he reached the beach, but the sand was deep and soft and he sunk in it to his knees. For safety’s sake he climbed up again to the waiting arms of the law.
The officers were not rough with him. They took him to a cell in a station not far away. They started their routine of questions. The whole routine jinxed from the outset by their language barrier. The story came out that he had recently pressed a final code into a soviet arsenal control board. He had travelled far and wanted to go home. He denied knowing anything about the can of chemical waste by the bin. He asked for repatriation to England. Denied. The police had another idea for him. “You can work your way there. We will take you to a place which can help you earn a wage. You will have to stay there. And we are calling the Americans about what you said,” they said.
They drove a route which returned to the busy city district. The car stopped at a mechanic’s workshop in an alleyway. Inside was a group of greasy dishevelled men. The cops discussed with the manager of the workshop the ins and outs of the matter. Within minutes John found himself filling a role. He was a stand in mechanic’s assistant, a spanner hand. This was more than he had expected from the Italian police. When they left in their cars, the manager expressed his terms to Johnny. He'd be working there for simple tea and sandwiches. Plus, a cash donation of denarii three a day. That if he did not work hard he would by force leave the workshop to walk the streets again. It seemed that the law respected a uniform higher than anything else. No matter how ripped and stained the uniform was. Inside this fallen empire seemed to be a long memory of authority. He hated the thought of facing the most previous hardship again. Cold steps and effeminate rejections were disinteresting. So he picked up a spanner straight away.
Within five days he had nicked skin off every knuckle. He had oil poured over his face from the drainage well of car engines twice. And he received an acceptable bundle of woollen trousers hat and brown shirt. The city had a massive insider charity system. He was yet to earn his shoes.
The work in the mechanic’s shop came as a relief. The most recent weeks took in hard travel and diabolical behaviour. There had been periods when he did not know how to provide full communication. He could not access help from outside or eat for stretches of up to five days at a time. But he was young and fit and in a captive situation.
He had one simple meal a day and repaired cars. His boss let him sleep in a corner of the yard on a rubber mattress with a blanket, and he never swore at him. It was warm in the yard overnight and the gasoline and grease smells lulled him into a slumber. He did not have to load guns or have sex with unknown women or attempt flying missions which he could not perform. He turned the spanners and beat cold metal at an even pace. He worked with five men who did not demand too much beyond meeting necessary time limits at the work. This support continued until a new turn.
Someone started a conversation inquiring about his attitude towards the Jews. In a country which had a history as it had, he replied in a candid manner. He told them that he had seen the remains of the main concentration camp and had felt sorry. They said that they were also sorry. Although these sentiments stood, the manager stated something else.
He said that things like that happen because of money and economies. Johnny said that he thought that it had all happened because of a short little man who had hated them. This provoked a series of histrionic jokes from the team of Catholics. They laughed about stand up men who were overrun by the pressures of demands placed on them. Johnny said something to them as they were acting out this scene. They told him to keep quiet, and they continued in an imitation of soldiering. Then two policemen arrived and demanded that Johnny go somewhere else. This is while they had a serious talk about something with the full-time mechanics.
A man whom he had met before arrived. He had met this man during some wage earning time in Germany. He was a tall blond type, who said very little in English. The mechanics told him to get into his car, and since the situation at the yard had turned uninviting, Johnny did so. The German drove the Fiat for more than a thousand miles. He went northwards from Rome and across the border North of Florence to France. It was in that country that he stopped it in an industrial warehouse in Lyon. He had keys for a roller door, and he and Johnny entered a gun storage unit inside.
The man uncovered a stack of rusted weapons beneath a greased tarpaulin cover. The guns were of several types and varieties. There were weapons from grenade launchers to machine guns to flame throwers. Johnny asked where the hell they came from. The man said that they had got transported there and left over from the Vietnam War. He ordered Johnny to load them into the back of the Fiat.
That job done, they went to a cheap restaurant. Then the blond man drove the entire distance in return to the small mechanic’s shop in Italy. Johnny had hitchhiked with the German man’s passport on the borders. It seemed that the sauerkraut allowed a passenger carry-on of one person on his passport.
When he walked into the workshop, the manager smiled at him again. Then told him that the situation had changed. He told Johnny that he was to put him onto another job for three days. This is so before he earned his shoes from the Church, ‘the real church,’ said he. The German unloaded all the guns onto a bench at the back of the workshop, and closed and locked the front doors.
“Build something with them,” ordered his boss. John considered his prior orders from his home nation. He realized that as a submariner he had an order which was yet uncompleted. To construct a dangerous weapon of war and use it with success.
He said he needed a metal plate. The bonnet of a Fiat Bambi provided this. As was a welding set and cold metal kit and all the nuts and bolts he wanted. “Complete your orders you foolish bastard,” said the manager and walked out.
John was alone in the workshop for the rest of the day. He had some of the most lethal weapons ever invented. These coupled with a slab of metal and tools and a memory of a demand from the Navy which he had not yet completed. It was time to think with a creative mind.
He worked all day. The bonnet bent into a tight twisted dome shape. Then he arranged six of the guns into a hexagonal star shaped pointed arrangement. All their barrels were facing to the outside edge of the dome. He fixed a control trigger in the centre. He found some chains and an ignition unit, and began welding and screwing. By the end of the day he had his invention. It was a grenade-launching backpack, with an electronic starter button on a belt at the waist.
His employers came back to the yard and saw what he had done and laughed, saying that he had acted like the devil. They made him sleep outside of the yard that night. He returned to the house of the woman who had rejected him for poverty six days before. She let him inside this time, and allowed several favours to lavish the boy. He returned to the workshop in the morning.
“We aren’t ready yet,” said the manager. “Piss off. Go and play on the motorway or something.” There was a police car at the top of the road. Jonathon was getting a bad idea about the whole scene. He walked around the perimeter of The Coliseum that day. A man in a white suit approached him. He invited him to a speech in the Vatican, and John was keen to witness the secret city from within.
“We have heard that there is no risk now,” said the man in the white suit. “And you, well you sir. I have been in conversation with the law about your recent achievement in a strange enemy land. You must come, congratulations. Now this way please,” he said as he took Johnny by the arm. He led him down several long narrow alleyways to a heavy wooden door. He came to a covered cubicle at the end of the alley.
“Wait before you step inside,” the man said. In much the same manner as Johnny, he knocked loud on the door. Johnny recalled knocking on the door of the monastery in Romania when he had held the baby in his arms. “Now be quiet,” the man said. The two of them waited restless for over an hour in the darkened shadows.
When the ominous door finally swung open, it was by three soldiers carrying swords. A quick conversation in Latin from the stranger in the white suit to the soldiers’ rank leader. This caused the men to part their formation and let Johnny into the city. He found himself shaking hands with five men in a line, and given a white rosary to hang around his neck. The air smelt of Frankincense and water. They showed him along a passage to an office with leather couches. Here he met another fellow, who also shook his hand. The match said that it was a great relief to meet a soul who had taken into his own conscience to act. That he worked in the benefit of other men, in much the same way that the Saviour had done. To all Johnny’s remarks the man replied with measured amounts of lecture and reproof.
“Our intelligence is correct,” said the fellow. “You have to make a speech to the people, and the Holy Father will be there. Thank your lucky stars. Now, we have written something for you to read. You will not mind, no? Be of your best appearance for this. You must.” Johnny could do nothing else but agree for his sudden appointment to speech maker. At a shower and basin by a closet and he washed, shaved and found a suit and ties with shoes which fit him. Then he waited on the leather couches again. He read and practiced the page of script which the Vatican assistant had put into his hands. The fellow gave him a meal of roast lamb with potatoes and salad. He was even allowed to sleep overnight on the couch beneath a fine woolen blanket.
The time for the meeting was ten am. the following day.
In front of Saint Peter’s Basilica is a wide plaza between buildings. A crowd of thousands gathered facing a stage platform on its stone steps. It was there that Johnny read his page of script during a presentation which he did not interpret. The speech stated that the world and its history was now safe from risk of annihilation by winter. That friendly victorious nations dismantled the enemy system. It was simple though shocking, and as he read his words a man next to him translated them into spoken Italian.
He looked up at a window in the buildings in front of him and to his left hand side and saw a man wearing white robes. The man leaned above the crowd raise his hands in a genuflection of a blessing. This was Pope Jean Paul the Second, witnessing the servant’s speeches that day in his city. After Johnny made the speech a tall guard invited him to see the halls beneath the stage steps. Since he had little else to do he accepted out of curiosity. He saw through a low door which led to a narrow downward leading stairway.
The hall looked more like a dungeon than any salubrious meeting space. There were brass bars on swinging gates on the sides of the passage. Torch braziers leaned from the walls. The tunnel continued to a corner in darkness, but Johnny chose to come back up to the sunlit surface. “That is a warning to you, if you get out of hand we will put you there,” said the tall guard, laughing. “It was place we were going to hide if the bomb had gone off.” Johnny caught on to the joke and asked if he could leave the audience view and return to the outside city. He had had enough of the religious dictatorial tone of the performed directions.
He let himself out of the secret city through the same door as which he had entered, in the hidden set of passages. The man in the white suit showed him back to the mechanic’s workshop and shook his hand and thanked him. Johnny redressed in woollen hat and shirt and trousers with his broken-down army boots again.
The tone of the workshop was one of preparation for something. A discussion had a busy and secretive air. The manager told him to wear his cumbersome invention and go with the team. Some black shirted national guardsmen led him back to from where he had come. Although now along a different route. The steel of the multitask unit was almost too heavy for him to carry and he struggled. So the guardsmen put it into a Fiat and he walked with them to a main entrance to St. Peters Plaza. It was there that he shouldered it again. He followed their instructions and stepped across a white line on the pavement. As he did so, a black shirted man bowed and said, “Welcome to the Vatican. Step across the line.”
The crowd in the square had dispersed and was as busy and sparse as any typical day with goggling tourists. He maneuverer the equipment to the approximate centre of the square. He looked up at the surrounding windows that ringed the plaza. He saw a silent watching national guardsman occupy every single one. Their black shirts and trousers contrasted against the white stone of the building. He looked to the top level of the curved elevation. Above them stood a red headed woman dressed in cotton rags alone.
Time became disjointed. At this point she held her hands before her facing him. He experienced a noise like a crescendo treble shriek. He felt as though she was an apparition that had emanated an occult force. At the same time, he heard a voice next to him. “Press the button,” the voice said.
He reached a finger to the ignition button at the waist belt of his machine and pressed it. The electronic firing functioned as set. Projectiles flew about the square at the inexorable force of the soulless machine. From the six guns he had wired and welded together came flame explosive and bullets. It all leaped across the pavement and through the air. Then he fell backwards, driven by the unruly weight of the machine. It left him moving his arms and legs like an inverted insect on its back. He struggled out of the shoulder straps and ran away from the scene of the crime. Again he went back to the road by which he had entered the holy square.
Outside the perimeter of the Vatican a squad of police arrested him. They knocked him unconscious in the ensuing struggle. He was aware of nothing but a burbling hubbub of voices. This was so until his walking entrance as a hostage onto a brass airplane. The behemoth idled at Avenna airbase landing and take-off runway.
The wing that they led him under had three jet engines hanging off it. An air force officer wearing stripes and gilt edge on his stuffed shirt told him that he was entering. He would take him onto the airplane as either a hostage or a free man. It was his choice, and he demanded a statement on which. He replied that he would rather do it as a free man by choice. The officer said that it did not look like he was doing it in will, so he must be a hostage.
At the rear of the plane was a ramp set down on the tarmac. The crew walked up this ramp, and as they did so a reporter documented them with a camera. A news network report introduced him as an eighteen-year-old Mafioso mobster. This reputation he found hard to bear. They identified him by his original sergeant's name.
Inside the hull of the plane were a line of cot beds before a dividing wall. The inner hull walls of it made of a black material, which he later heard was graphite fibre. The outer shell of the hull made of brass. Its construction could withstand immense heat.
Johnny walked up the ramp into the first rear section. Anonymous men in camouflage uniform and wearing grease paint stood at intervals. They told him to lie down on a cot and rest before the flight started. He did that. A raised nylon stretcher with bent tin supports.
As soon as he lay, an unreasonable fatigue overwhelmed him. It took away his reason and care. A man to his left asked a question about his identity. He did not answer nor even knew how to say the simplest things. The surrounding tunnel of the hull faded from sight. A merging static visual cloud, as much as did the sounds and words around him. The man told to have some respect. Johnny did not know how to repair himself to decorum.
The man next to him placed a glass of champagne on the floor next to his cot and told him to drink to celebrate victory. He guzzled the drink straight back and put the empty glass down near the spot where it had first placed. The alcohol gave him a splitting headache. He lay there as journalists fussed and Navy Seals surveyed the occupants. While the American heads of State sipped their expensive champagne. He wished to the thin atmosphere around him that he was not there.
After the niceties the great ramp which served as a gate into the warship rose and shut. Noise from the jet engines increased. His attention attracted to a single man who stood at the dividing wall in the craft. He looked across the distance between him and the man, and did not know who it was until a Seal said his name. His memory cast back to a time in the past of recent events during the mission.
Johnny had been driving a basic army truck across Bulgaria. He had switched radio channels. He talked with a man who identified himself as the same man who was now standing in the plane. Johnny had spoken with him and all the accompanying and invisible spies who were privy to the line. He had told that they were working with a booby trapped system. That there was little they could do but prepare for the worst. He had told him to get all his people into fallout shelters.
The man had responded with a riddle about an ancient Greek tragedy named Medea. In this which a woman whose husband cheated her murdered her family. She did this out of revenge for the infidelity. He then went on to claim that he was like Demeter who ventured into Hades. Demeter was to rescue her trapped sister Persephone from damnation. That like her he would return the world to a living state again.
Not having had enough of the riddles, he continued. He claimed that he and the little man in the truck in Bulgaria were two of the three Fates sisters. Like them, they weaved the world’s future together. It had been at that point that Johnny had heard enough of the madman’s fables and switched channel. The man he spoke to on the radio had named himself as the same man as this character. He stood in the plane in reality in a black woollen suit. The Seal had said it was Burton Starling.
Johnny could not imagine what bungled cycle of official referrals had put him in the plane. He was a hostage by a previous Commander in Chief and ranked colleagues. He got up from his cot and walked across the floor towards him.
He felt that he should show some deference to the man’s authority. At Starling’s left hand side he knelt on one knee as though he was a knight of olden times addressing a royalty. “I shouldn’t be aboard this plane. All I did was press some control triggers. I haven’t any idea what they were and I’m homeless. In any case you’re a fucking apocalyptic nuclear nightmare. I want to go home please,” he said to Starling.
The face of the politician continued to stare ahead of him with drooping jowls and hooded eyes. “Get back to your place,” he said.
A Naval Seal echoed this demand. He threatened to kill him if he spoke to the President like that again.
“You’re all totalitarian,” Johnny said and walked back to his small cot and sat on it.
A Seal smiled at him through the stinking glob of grease on his face. “That’s a President actually and you should have some respect for authority. There are more and others with the same rank in this Aeroflot,” he said.
Johnny replied that he didn’t care less. That he lost his way.
Starling’s lips moved again. “He’s a trigger presser. We’ll make an example of him,” he said.
Thirty minutes remained before their gargantuan flying penis took to the skies. Preparations continued before the pass on its spectacular crossing. Backpacks needed parachutes packed. Seals told Johnny to stay where he was. He watched a small team of three young blonde UN. cadets go to work doing this. The cadets were female and wore blue denim jeans and jackets over white t-shirts. The last chute hung on a hook at the front right of the hull space. It was at the furthest place away from the ramp. On the opposite side of the hull from the door which led through to the rest of the plane. A Seal spoke to the women when they reached it.
While speaking to her he called her Candy and grabbed her ass. She responded with an emphasized “Yes Sir,” and went to work at petty assassination. There is only one correct way to insert a parachute into a backpack. It ensures that it will unravel for a skydiver during a free falling descent. This Air Force One carried a chute for each occupant. The UN staff packed correct each one except for this last one.
They unravelled this last chute on the deck then inverted so it was inside out. They then inserted into the backpack in another direction. This swapped the place of the chute canopy with the place of the strings connected to the harness. In other words, Candy and her sexy young friends had packed this chute backwards and inside out. This done with full witness of every authority in the rear tunnel section of the plane. It carried several of the world’s most powerful persons. They had high public profiles in some of the wealthiest countries.
The King of Portugal protested against the unfair treatment. “You shouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Keep quiet or I’ll sanction you,” said Starling. He then lifted his chin in a defiant posture. “See that he doesn’t get any salami.”
When the UN handed around thin rolls of salami, the hand that gave them avoided Johnny on his cot. He could have garnered more trust and respect from street kids in any ghetto.
Johnny was delirious with exhaustion and undernourishment. The other fighting troops plotted for to the flights conclusion. There were to be spas and Vaseline at Camp David.
Starling sneered at the powerless youth from New Zealand. “Repair that in mid-flight when the ramp’s down and the air suction’s high if you can. You’d be too weak,” he said. He sighed and went into the front section of the plane.
Johnny followed him in there. He opened the door and saw a group of the power elite. They sat sitting on vinyl chairs and bent over cheap takeaway meals in aluminium foil trays. President Ruth and other fat men wore white brocade uniforms. The first man to notice him was Ruth, who said that the entire crew and occupants had saved the planet. He then showed Johnny an equation drawn on paper and asked him for his interpretation. Johnny said that it could be a derivation of relativity. Ruth shook his head and told him that he should have attended school more often. He and the officers discussed probability within time. John felt unenlightened and returned to his section.
There had been crew preparations before take-off. The entire entourage aboard had wiped on to their skin chemical crèmes. The conversation about them had mentioned zinc, and cadmium, and titanium and lead. The treatment by swab was to protect them from the deadly effects of radiation.
The flight was ready to begin. A thundering announcement came from a special trained soldier. The contents of the words and statements of this lost to the poor hungry man. Within brief minutes the shock wave of take-off overwhelmed them all. Sound coupled by a strange noise which sounded like music. As the plane flew, a fleet of screaming jets accompanied it alongside.
The cabin pressurized as the craft gained altitude and careered east. It headed on a guidance path which was going to take it over Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and China. Then over the Pacific Ocean, finally leading to the States. Lights flashed green on consoles in the graphite fibre walls of the hull. The pilot’s name was Henry. His voice informed them of needs and events. Seals attended to the political passengers. They made inquiries about their sensation hearing and vision.
Johnny blacked out on the allocated stretcher. As he did during the flight that had taken him from Queenstown to India in his previous year. The winds of the Asian mountains buffered the plane from side to side a little. He didn’t come to his senses until bombing began when they were above China.
The ramp gate at the rear of the plane lowered. A machine lever beneath the occupants’ floor section of the hull raised. Rolls of steel cylindrical drums lifted to the floor. Seals assisted Starling to send these petrol bombs out of the plane. They seemed damned pleased to do so. They talked about vomit and poverty and not knowing any different and teaching them a lesson as they did so. The sixty kilograms of explosive in each plummeted down through the sky. In lines they landed on field, farm and village alike. In the bomber the theme of comments changed. They included the scorched earth policy and sending them all back into the stone age.
When the behemoth reached the skies above the Pacific, the theme of the bombings changed. It was not petrol that hurled out of the hold. Instead heavy mines designed to sink into the ocean. They remained volatile in its green and blue closing. The Seals stepped aside now and told Burton that the pleasure and privilege was all his. This was his operation. The madman rolled them to the ramp with an obvious glee. His emotion increased to grandiose proportions. “If we can’t have it, they can’t either! Damn them all, and good riddance,” were his accompanied comments.
It was half way through this undertaking when the plot altered. The staring youth was witness. A team of short men stormed up from the bomb hold beneath the floor of the airplane. Then carried with them a long and thick hessian rope. With it they tackled the once Commander in Chief and tied him up. When they had finished, they restrained Mister Starling. Loops of heavy fibre prevented him from moving his arms and legs. He fell over inside them and pleaded for help.
“It’s not our call, Mister President,” the naval seals said. They laughed a little and lit cigars. Then one of them turned to Johnny and apologized. The ramp was still wide open. The short men put on their chute packs and ensured to lock the bomb hold firm and secure. There were no more nuclear devices on the deck of the hull. The flight was traveling over the western Pacific by now. One by one the expert short people jumped out of the air craft and left Starling struggling on the floor.
It was time for the pilot to begin his report of what the scene ahead was like. Night was falling as the giant bomber rushed forward into it at high altitude. Henry announced that he could see eight great flaming orbs of light. They were the detonations of the Russian missiles. He said they were ranging in wide position. From above Alaska in the north to over Canada they went to California and Mexico. He reported that the explosions were happening in outer space. The plane was flying at forty thousand and elevating to forty-five thousand feet. It could go no higher. The centres of detonations of the bombs were at sixty thousand feet. He analysed that the diameter of each explosion was thirty thousand feet. So the plane was due to travel through part of the range of radioactive firestorm. He requested advice.
Through the complex static influence of many signals, a decision concluded. They were all to evacuate the air craft. Jets followed close behind it above and beneath. All the crew and passengers took action to wear the backpacks with the parachutes. From the lowest rank to the highest and one by one they all jumped. They were like lemmings leaping out of the top window of a burning brothel. Spreadeagled and screaming. Accompanied by the Seals. All the officers except for Henry and Johnny departed the burning heavens. They went to go and plummet through the sky, some to live and some to die. Jets circled further downwards. The ocean beneath waited to swallow them like a thirsty mouth.
The pilot was still at his cock pit joy stick duties. The retired president was the penultimate conspirator to jump. Johnny’s chute unravelled and billowed without control. The kid attempted to reinstall it into the back pack. “See how impossible it is?” said the top ranking man to him. He said one last thing before entrusting his body to the terrible weight of gravity. And air to lead him forty-five thousand feet down to the California coast. “Serves you right. See you, sucker,” he shouted. His voice lost in howling wind as he dive-bombed into the blowing maul of night.
Henry came back to the hold. “This is my parachute. You have to put this plane on auto pilot now.” Johnny took it that he had been set up as a sacrificial burns victim for the world’s head politicians. He told Henry this, and Henry showed him the console to operate in the wall of the hull. “Turn on the water sprinklers. I’m sorry,” he said. Then the American Air Force’s top battle flight pilot did the same as everyone else aboard had done. He disappeared into the void. Everyone but Johnny had performed a dangerous high altitude leap for life. They'd escaped the oncoming firestorm which their air plane headed towards.
Johnny turned to the control panel in the black wall. He raised the ramp and then went into the cabin to check the controls. The transmission static on the radio was as quiet as a haunted building. The craft careened out of control on a long crash course. He found the right switches. He trusted to a leap of faith. He switched the monstrous machine onto an automatic controlled flight path. The radio still said nothing. It was possible that others left him for dead in the flight. It had departed under the guise of saving the planet. But it had flown with all mad intent as any antisocial criminal vendetta. The plane corrected its course.
The heat was rising and in front of the pilot’s view window was a sickening orange light.
A sprinkler system in the roof equipped the air craft. This was the only medical defence which John had to fall back on in his hopes to survive the explosions remains. He knew little how the disaster ahead would affect him. He could only pray in the desperation that a hostage feels when facing certain death.
The heat rose slow and steady until steam filled the hull. The temperature climbed until it was over five-thousand, five-hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Johnny’s skin seared and he screamed and thrashed his limbs about in his captive solitude. Particles passed through him and knocked molecules apart in his body. He shrieked until he could not hear himself any more, and jerked until he fell.
He elevated into a black space above the airplane. Five mysterious figures discussed questions of fate with the dying boy. A line of men wearing togas stood beneath him. The man closest to him hummed and mumbled about what had happened there. Johnny asked him for his name. He said he was Anaximander and his mate next to him was Anaxagoras. That Zeno couldn’t be there although he sends his apologies. That Eudoxus was with them and Theophrastus had visited also. Theophrastus said there were a number more spectators. But since he had missed a proper introduction he could not provide their names. He admitted that this was a bit lazy considering all the time he had available for contemplation. Anaximander was looking down at all the smoke and fire. With a finger placed to his lips, ‘I was trying hard not to do that. Yet it happened. Why am I such an incompetent?’ he said.
‘I'm wondering, man,’ replied Eudoxus.
Theophrastus told John to talk to the man above him. John looked upwards. He saw a thick layer of fumy white smoke. Beneath the layer was an adult man’s legs seated on a crafted wooden stick throne. His ankles were bare between a hairy thread tunic and leather sandals. He had hair on his legs and his hands were reaching towards him. The unknown man’s hands stretched down towards Johnny from within the layer of smoke. The face and all the rest of the man’s body obscured.
“What has happened here? Are you alright?” the man said.
“I am hurt. In fact, I have died,” Johnny said.
“What has happened to my lovely world?” asked the man.
“Missiles destroyed it,” Johnny said.
“I am sitting here above it and can still see everything. But who had done this?”
“A madman. He hated what I did.”
“Mankind has done the devil’s work again. And I cannot tolerate that. It is my footstool.”
Then Johnny saw God’s eyes. They were penetrating and psychedelic. The eyes stared straight at him with a psychotic and passive violence of insight.
The next news network covered the story of the war plane landing unmanned at JFK. airport. The plane had flown around the world. The plane had opened and rescue staff entered. Journalists photographed a single young man lying on an ambulance bed. A white sheet brought to his neck. Tiny wheels left on the landing strip. Doctors said that the burns victim was ninety-eight percent lifeless.
Johnny remembers watching his body from above. For forty minutes a group of rescue staff fussed around him. Medics hooked up an adrenaline bag. A clerk handed over insurance records. Photographers clicked shutters. An ambulance opened its doors. Johnny saw how blackened the skin was, and wondered why he couldn’t breathe. He also thought of the manic fuss being so unnecessary. Things were alright for him as he looked down on himself. He was in no pain.
A doctor in a burns ward in the Boston hospital looked down on an injured man. Cool gas filled the room. Furniture crafted by patients provided natural rest. Tight fitting clothing was not allowed so loose robes substituted. There had been a miracle.
