Turner examined the corpse with an exhaustion that seeped down far
past his bones. He still wasn’t ready to give up his post, but he no longer had
the energy to keep fighting. He sighed, his joints creaking in protest as he
crouched next to the limp body lying on the asphalt.
The girl couldn’t have been more than twenty years old but it was hard
to tell from the state her body was in. She must have been flying home from the
grocery store, there was a bag caught in the branches of a tree and a couple of
broken protein bars. A dented can of soup lay nearby as if it had fallen from a
high altitude. Her fall was probably due to mechanical reasons, after all, even
if she was blown slightly off course or performing reckless stunts, there was
nothing that she could have had a collision with in the deserted strip of
country. Besides, the carnage looked like a straight drop, not a drunken skewed
flight path ending in death. It was true that there was a small village down
the road where once a week a supply plane would bring the villagers their
rations, but the planes took a different route. Occasionally a few young people
like the woman on the ground would take a trip to the market to get essentials
or food for special occasions, but generally this section of sky was
unoccupied.
Turner sighed again. This was the third mechanical failure this month.
Wasn’t this new model supposed to prevent this from happening? Of course
mechanical failures were always a terrifying reality when the only thing
separating you from the ground is beating of feathered strips of aluminum strapped
to your back, but before these new Icarus models deaths were counted annually,
now they were being tallied monthly.
Turner suspected foul play, but with Dad in power, he didn’t have the
resources or the boldness to investigate too deeply. Ever since the war and the
rise of the dictator called ‘Dad’, the independent police force had been
steadily waning. Once Turner worked with more than twenty other people, each
man specializing in a specific field, whether that be mortician or inspector or
detective, but now only Sebastian Turner was left. It wasn’t too difficult,
Turner had learned to cope by himself, but he was tired, and he was just trying
to stave off his retirement just a little bit longer.
There was nothing intrinsically wrong with Dad’s police force, but
Turner was a firm believer in having empathy with the people of the town being
watched over. It was true that Dad’s agents had better training and more
resources, but they didn’t connect with the people and Turner wasn’t quite
ready to allow the police station to be in the possession of those kinds of
people. He was losing the battle though, so all he could do was think longingly
of the coffee machine at the station and carefully load the girl into the back
of his van.
Vans had become a rarity in recent times. So many people relied on
their wings for their daily transport that the crowded roads had been abandoned
in favor of the open sky and honest people no longer used them. Turner was very
proud of his van, he’d scrounged it out of the dump ten years ago and was able
to scavenge all the necessary parts to make it start working again, but he’d
learned not to talk about it in polite company.
Ever since the common man’s abandonment of them, the roads belonged to
the criminals. It galled Turner to no end that every day he drove past these
delinquents, but he didn’t have the resources to arrest them, and if he started
to drive them out but didn’t finish, he would no longer have use of the roads. Good
citizens called in a government plane when they had loads that were too heavy
for them to fly with, only suspicious characters who didn’t want the government
to know what they were carrying used the roads instead. Turner tried to keep
any contact with his new government to a minimum, so he felt that the odd
judging glance or awkward conversation was worth avoiding the planes.
The constant
rousing jostling of the decaying road served to keep Turner somewhat awake on
the long moonlit drive back to the station. He had started swerving a couple of
times in the last ten miles, but the roads were empty and he made it to the
station safely. After messily pulling up in front of the station, Turner unloaded
the van, fumbling with his keys as he unlocked the station door and dragged the
girl’s body onto an examination table, messily hiding the corpse under a sheet
and telling himself he would deal with the proper examination and paperwork in
the morning. Then, realizing he would probably fall asleep on the road if he
tried to drive home, he retired to his office and fitted his body into the
well-molded dips and depressions of the couch that he had fallen asleep on too
many times.
(Full story can be found in Carry the Light, page 140, available on Amazon)
