Starless Night - The Ballad of Cassidy Kidd

CHAPTER III: ARE YOU JUST GONNA STAND THERE AND BLEED?

        FEAR COURSED THROUGH MY MIND, as did curiosity- I doubted that whoever- or whatever- landed on the roof was here to help me, but I had to wonder who or what exactly it was.

        That curiosity was quickly replaced with more panic, as a loud bang resounded through the room. Before my ears could recover, a yellowish-gray blur flew through the roof and into a metal crate beside me- where it left a smoking, dime-sized hole in the surface of the box. A bullet. I looked up fast enough to see a metal-clad arm slam into the car roof and begin to peel it back as though the inch-thick aluminum roofing was cold butter.
My mind was racing for the third- no, fourth time today- as the arm wrenched the thin slice of metal back, to the extent that the point where the slab met the roof started violently breaking open into slices.
         Everything in my head derailed from a marathon into an unorganized olympics tournament filled with chimpanzees. I could very nearly see a great ape biting into a silver medal like it was right in front of me.
         What the hell was I supposed to do?

The sound of metal screeching as the arm fully ripped off the section of metal made me realize I was holding my breath, woke me up from a trance that had my legs locked in place- fear, I thought. A light beamed through the newly formed hole, and I very quickly devised a very bad plan.

Bringing myself to the open car door, I leaned out, again, this time fastening a hold on the siding above me; then lifted, surprisingly effortlessly, swinging myself through the open air, which blasted my eyes straight through the wooden mask I had equipped a few minutes before. It was nearly midnight now, the waning moon above providing me with just enough light to see what I was doing, and the now much more intermittent fir trees barely reached close enough to the train car to make me worry for the integrity of my already-tattered clothing. The snow continued to fall, the chill of the night allowing it to settle on my clothing, though it was now light enough to not bother me.
Placing my normal, human arm onto the top of the car, I got enough grip to bring my robotic right limb up again, this time to the actual roof of the train. I swung up and around once more, finding myself sitting on one knee in front of an open hole. There was a notable lack of whoever made the hole.

A shrill whistle rang out again, the same that I had heard before. The one that had called the birds. I threw my head to look upwards.

Above me was the darkened silhouette of an imposing, winged, humanoid figure. My entire body shook, like a fear-induced cold chill, everything that kept my soul rooted to my being rethinking its existence exceedingly more than the average Greek philosopher. Any power that I had felt just minutes before had been sapped from my body, thrown off the train, and left in the snow.

Their wings were only buzzing, not flapping, as though they were powered by rotors rather than actual drag. Their wingspan was wider than the train car's width, and the propellers I presumed were acting as their actual source of propulsion were doing a good job blasting my face with more cold night air- the mask did a poor job of keeping me from getting frostbite.
I could make out vaguely from where I was the overly-complicated mess of mechanical systems that made up the wings, which seemed to attach themselves around the mid-back region. That only left me wondering how bad this guy's back pain must be.
         Above them were the birds- though I could tell from their metallic sheen that they weren't the birds I was used to, the reflected light from the moon glimmering and illuminating the back and outline of the figure like a solar eclipse. They circled around us, a hurricane of flapping, iron-plated wings that made me feel uncomfortably like a corpse surrounded by vultures.

My only thought was that this was becoming way, way too much like Spider-Man.

They stared down at me for a moment in the night air- our eyes would have locked, if it weren't for both of us having our faces covered- before revving up their wing propellers, nearly blowing me off my feet with my still shaken composure- and changing course to swoop down at me, arms outstretched, like the birds had done before.