ALICE

Chapter 80: HOPES

 Chapter 80: HOPES

 Gormon continued to fly, but thanks to the missile they were losing fuel very quickly. He struggled to keep the craft straight as he navigated the skies.

 Gormon considered himself a very skilled pilot, possibly the best in The Resistance. He was intuitive, had good reflexes, but he also had just worked very hard at being a pilot. Gormon’s father had been the one to show Gormon the beauty of flying, Gormon’s father, who had been drafted by the LSF in his twenties, but was now a pilot on hire, flying pretty much anything anywhere – for the right price.

 Gormon went on his first flight with his dad when he was four. His mother died that year, and with no way to keep their house on just Gormon’s fathers’ smuggling money, they took to the skies and lived in his dad’s chopper. His dad, named Chuck, had a spacious chopper he had spent a tidy sum of money on. It was a junker at first, but after two years of working on it secretly, it was a beautiful craft that flew faster than anything else in Landerwon. He called it the Faux Tortue, the ‘False Turtle’ in English, the name was terribly misleading, and he revelled in it.

 Living in a helicopter for most of his life urged Gormon to become a pilot, and Chuck was happy to oblige. He let Gormon fly the helicopter for the first time when he was thirteen. He appeared to be a natural flyer, and after that, with, and without his father’s permission, he went on dozens of flights. He honed his skills for two years, until he was almost a better pilot than Chuck.

 One late night, Chuck had been drinking after his cargo – a shipment of criminals on the run from the LSF – had been found and killed by the Landerwon Special Forces. He would have been arrested himself, had he not bribed the guards with thousands of dollars. He was angry, sad, and drunk, a bad set of things to be in the sky with your son.

 Chuck got in a fight with a sixteen year-old Gormon, and he pushed his own son right into the control panel in the cockpit. His chopper, the Faux Tortue and his pride and joy, was sent hurtling to the ground.

 Neither of them were killed by the crash, at least, not just by the crash. Chuck remained unharmed for the most part thanks to him strapping himself into a chair, but Gormon had been knocked unconscious, and when the helicopter hit the ground, his left arm was severed from his body at the shoulder.

 Chuck apologised profusely – and endlessly, but he couldn’t give Gormon his arm back. Nothing he said could ever make Gormon forgive his father.

 Gormon gave up on flying, and on Chuck. From what he heard, he took up drinking, more-so than before. When Gormon was eighteen, news reached him that his dad had killed himself, by his own hand. By this point, Gormon was homeless, living on the streets, or, more accurately, the roof-tops of Threader City. He picked up electronics, and using scrap wiring and other parts he found in dumpsters and stole from offices, he made himself a beautiful prosthetic arm, crafted from polished wood and carbon fibre.

 When war broke out, he almost immediately joined up with the LSF, which supplied him with a standard prosthetic arm. In normal circumstances, they would have turned him away, but there was a draft anyway, and they were taking anyone they could. He lied about his experience and natural finesse as a pilot, and he was put as the exact opposite, shooting the planes down.

 He endured the fighting for a few weeks, but every time he shot down another plane, he hated himself more as the craft fell to the ground. He found himself rooting for the other force, The Resistance, as they called it, more and more, until finally, he killed his gunner crew and joined them. Ever since, he had been given charge of the Black Smith, reclaiming the husk that was at one point used for flying the LSF general –who, at that point was Kendo- around, and finally working on it for two years. He reminded himself of his father, which wasn’t such a bad thing, he supposed.

 On his twenty-ninth birthday, Gormon considered his work done. It was truly something to be reckoned with.

 And now the Black Smith was ruined, and even though he navigated his handiwork steadier than the rate of rising gas prices, he was crying, silently so as not to be questioned. To the three, no, four people behind him, this was just another expendable chopper ready to be abandoned in the desert, but to Gormon it was his life. With every bullet that had slammed into the armour of the helicopter, Gormon questioned his allegiance.

 When Gormon landed his ruined helicopter in the desert for the last time, he found a pistol from a small metal box under his seat. He opened it up to reveal a vintage revolver, with six shots shining back at him from the chamber. His father’s revolver, cleaned of the blood now, was held in his own hands.

 Gormon took off his helmet, the ops mic at his neck, and his sunglasses. He left these things on his chair, and without a word, he brushed past Alice, Angel, and Romeo, stepping over Cole Redd, a man he had once had a drink with. He walked out of the Black Smith, not taking one look back at his pride and joy. Chuck’s revolver was tucked into a pocket in Gormon’s coverall, and he gripped the handle as his boots gripped the loose sand under-foot.

 He ignored the yells from his four passengers and the others who survived the dogfights. When he was so far away that the only trace of them was a plume of black smoke from the Black Smith, he collapsed into the sand, his back making a puff sound as it hit the ground. With a moment’s hesitation, he drew the revolver. He admired its metallic, silver sheen in the sunlight, and then spoke out loud.

 “I guess I’m not unlike you so much after all.”

 He pulled a small hip-flask of the rarest thing in Landerwon. WillyWack branded scotch whiskey. A discontinued import, he could have traded anything in Landerwon for just a shot of the alcohol. He gave a quick ‘what the hell’ before raising the flask slightly.

 “Here’s to you Chuck, you old son of a bitch.”

 He sat up slightly, and drained the small amount of scotch in the flask, revelling in the taste and aroma of the fine liquid. He lay back down, and staring up into the bright blue sky, he pressed the barrel of the revolver to his forehead.

 “No.” Gormon said to himself, “No, I’m just like you dad.”

 From far enough away, the snuff of Gormon’s life was a quiet bang, a flash of light, and then nothing else.