Kaia the Argent Wing

We were inside for only a minute or so before thunder began to roll continuously.

“What the heck is that?” April asked, and then we both got it at the same time.

Charles was using the massive sheet of metal and the hammer to make a huge racket and stun the crowd back into placidity. Something else was bothering me too— sitting there in the back of my mind like a tumour, but there was so much going on. I wasn’t getting the time I needed to chill and reflect.

“Why do I feel like I’ve forgotten something vitally important?” I asked, glancing over at April, then the other guy in the workshop.

Without a word, April shrugged.

“Did you leave the stove on?” the guy asked with a nervous chuckle. God, I’d forgotten his name already.

“Not sure… but I want to peek outside and see what’s happening,” I said, and approached the closed workshop door. Carefully, I peeked out. Charles had stopped, and he was yelling at the crowd with that stern but fair tone he used when someone made a mistake in the workshop.

A gust of wind snatched away his words, but I could get the gist of it. He was telling everyone to stop being fuckwits and calm down or their herd-mentality fear would kill us all.

The crowd was still angry, and with a dead body lying just feet away, I wasn’t surprised. At least the dead man didn’t appear to have any relatives or loved ones in the crowd… that would’ve been extra horrible. To see someone you cared about die in such a senseless way… god. Even seeing a stranger die like that was something that would sit in the back of my mind like a parasite for years. Was that how we were all destined to go out? By accident?

I just hoped the crowd would listen to Charles and calm down. Anger and fear were poison to any group trying to survive in a harsh environment.

The Captain, thankfully recovered from the hit he’d taken, addressed the crowd once more. “This is what happens when we allow fear to rule us, people! Have hope! We’ll get through this and help will come! Nobody else has to die a senseless death.”

A woman stepped forward and pointed at the squad leader who was looking visibly ill while he stared down at the dead man. “What about—”

The rest of her words were swept away when another gust of wind raced through the high school courtyard, and this time it brought a smattering of rain— wait no, it was little pieces of hail. I could see them bouncing off the pavement.

Oh no, not only was it windy and hailing, but the wind was coming from the opposite direction that it had an hour ago.

“Ain’t no what about in this situation, woman,” Charles bellowed, then he shook his head. “If I have to come outta my workshop again I’ll be using this here hammer to crack some skulls instead of playing a merry tune, hear me?”

Ugh, we were spending too much time arguing about nothing useful, to the point of getting someone killed. The storm was turning back on us while all these people yelled at each other!

Putting my fear away, I rushed out through the patchy hail and towards the mob. “Captain, Captain!” I called, shielding my face from the weather’s onslaught with a hand.

“What?” he asked, giving me a harried look.

“The wind’s turned! The hail isn’t coming from the same direction,” I blurted.

He scowled and shook his head, “So?”

Everyone was looking at me now, and I felt it down in my boots. Regardless, I pressed on, “Earlier today the storm came in from the opposite direction, almost like it was a living thing. Blew up the gas station in the process. Now it’s suddenly turned around? After all the scary shit that’s happened over the last two days, I don’t trust a storm that suddenly starts retracing its steps.”

“The kid is right,” Charles said, backing me up. “My bones are starting to hurt something awful. Something’s coming.”

The captain stood there for two full seconds, then turned to the squad leader. “Sound the alarm. Get someone to put the body somewhere out of the way.” Then he directed his attention to the crowd, now quiet and listening with a much more placid fear. “Get inside. If any of you have new abilities that could be of use somehow, let a firefighter know and we’ll coordinate. We might—”

“The houses nearby are full of stuff,” someone interjected. “If we form teams with a few protectors and a group of non-combatants, we could quickly grab anything useful from them.”

“Yeah!” Someone else from inside the crowd called. “Let us help! I’m sick of being stuck inside!”

“I’m not forgetting they just killed a man!” A woman said, and a few others gave further voice to that sentiment. Boy, the crowd sure was losing its angry cohesion wasn’t it?

Lightning lit the dusk-dimmed sky, forking and winding overhead. The thunderous clap of its report shook the school, the trees, and the people huddled in their shadow.

Following the thunder came another sound, high and hollow. It echoed on and on, rebounding through the sky as though it were a cave carved from centuries of water rushing through the earth. Just when we thought it was over, it called out again, but with more definition this time. It sounded like… like some sort of eagle, but bigger. Oh shit. The huge thunderbird from earlier. Was it controlling the storm?

“Fuck,” the captain swore, then turned to the crowd. “That giant bird is coming back. Everyone who wants to go out on a scavenging party, meet in front of the school in five minutes! Everyone else, get back inside!”

As soon as he was done giving orders, he turned and stared right at April. He held that look while he walked over. “April. Word is you can contact Silver. I don’t know where she ran off to, but it’s time she stopped messing around and based herself in the school.”

Oh shit. I really shouldn’t have mentioned April. What if they managed to connect Silver back to me?

“I… um…” April stammered, glancing in my direction for a moment.

The captain sighed. “Please?”

April squared her shoulders and raised an eyebrow at the man. “Right, let me just give her a call. I can’t just throw a bat signal into the sky Cap, so you’ll just have to wait and see if she shows up.”

He grunted. “True enough. Alright, send her my way if you see her again.”

“I mean, I can but you don’t actually control her, you know that right?” April said, placing a hand on her hip.

“Oh, I am well aware of how far my authority goes,” he said, gesturing at the body that was collecting the odd piece of hail.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means if I had anything other than emergency authority, I’d have sent out scavenging— no, looting parties much earlier and that man would still be alive and happy on a soft mattress,” he said, shaking his head sadly.

“Well, maybe we should all worry less about what might happen once things calm down and more about getting to that point in the first place,” April said pointedly. “Anyway, Kai and I have work to do…”

“Right, right…” he muttered, and for a split second he just looked… lost. Then he slipped his mask of calm confidence back on and turned to go.

“We might have real tools soon, sir,” I said. “We just got the monster metals to melt and we were able to cast them into some dagger blanks. We’ll need to hammer them out, grind an edge onto them, and make some handles, but yeah. Then we’ll see about mass producing some axes for your people. Assuming you still want axes.”

“That’s good news,” he said without any real enthusiasm. “Axes are good, it’s what we trained on.”

“Alright, we’ll get to it…” April said, clapping a hand down on my shoulder. Weirdly, when I glanced over at her I found we were very close in height. I swear… wasn’t she shorter than me before? I couldn’t remember.

We turned away from the Captain without another word and headed back towards the workshop with the wind howling through the school around us like some sort of ghostly lament.

“I’m going to start working the daggers into shape… hopefully the heat won’t leave the metal too fast with this sudden cold weather,” April said, looking up into the storm-dark night.

Like my eyes had been replaced with flashbang grenades, I remembered what I was forgetting. “Oh! April!”

Fishing around in my pockets, I produced the orb I got from killing the big truck-boar earlier. With a whisper, I pressed it into her hand. “Take this. It’s an ability orb. This one lets you like… keep heat in a place? It’s hard to discern.”

“Oh…” she murmured, turning the orb between finger and thumb. “Yeah… I can see what it does. Let me—”

The orb dissolved, vanishing from sight within half a second. I waited expectantly until she nodded. “It worked. Time to test it!”

We returned to the workshop, but this time we went our separate ways. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do to help her with forging the blades onto the dagger blanks. Plus, our people needed protection, not just implements of death.

My plan was to make some armour, but as soon as I sat down with some paper and a pencil, I began to realise just how stupidly ambitious that was. I just… didn’t have the knowledge to do it, and without the internet I couldn’t jump on youtube to see how it was done. Shit, it might be worth adding the local library to the hit list.

So, if I wasn’t going to be able to make armour, what the hell should I do then? How else could I give my friends the ability to protect themselves? Think, Kai. Kaia…This wasn’t just some fun tinkering project. There were lives on the line. People were already dead…

Shields! The thigh plates that came from the monster squirrels were perfect. If I nailed four of them to a frame, then added a fifth as the funny dome thing you saw on shields, I could give people some rudimentary protection. It probably wouldn’t be enough, though. People would still die because I didn’t have the damn skills to make armour. Fuck.

Deep breaths, deep breaths. One thing at a time or I might not get anything done at all.

With that in mind, how would I actually… ah, crap. Working metal was always such a pain.

“Hey Charles!” I called my voice still shaking with anxiety. “Do we have any way of drilling through metal right now?”

His reply was cut off when the workshop door—which we left ajar because April was working outside—slammed shut with the full force of an angry and possibly sentient storm. Whatever I did, I needed to get it done soon because it seemed that the apocalypse was not done with us yet, not by a long shot.