Air Born | Generation Icarus #1

Tyler - Runaway

Of all the stuff I had to leave behind, abandoning my phone was the worst. The notifications had maxed out before I'd even got home, but all the hysterical messages from my friends (and the crazy notes from internet weirdos) had to remain unread. As desperately as I wanted to reach out to my friends, to reassure Nico and Hayley that I was still the same Tyler, I knew I had to cut myself off from them. It would be far too easy to track me with the GPS.

At first, it was kind of exciting. Blame the adrenaline junkie in me, but I imagined I was in some sort of spy movie or action flick, dodging bad guys and always one step ahead. That lasted for a few hours, until my final home-cooked meal wore off and total exhaustion set in. All thoughts of action heroes seemed idiotic and childish. Days passed and I was living a weird half-life. Sleeping for no more than a few hours at a time, stealing what food I could, and thinking only about survival, I sometimes forgot that I'd ever been a normal kid in a normal family.

Fear and exhaustion turned to anger. I wanted to kill that doctor. And what was it all for anyhow?

My wings were growing. Quickly. When I'd first had a decent look at them in the hospital room, they had been the same length as my outstretched arms. A few days later, each wing was nearly a foot longer on each side. I still hadn't changed my t-shirt, partly because I had a feeling I wouldn't be able to get my wings through the new back slits I'd cut without ripping the whole thing apart, and partly because I couldn't see the point. But one day soon, I was going to have to figure out what the hell passed as practical fashion for a mutant bird kid. In the meantime, I kept my wings hidden by folding them as much as I could under my faithful no-longer-baggy sweatshirt.

It occurred to me, as I examined a loose feather in the flickering streetlights, that, apart from some mottled lighter markings, my wings were the exact same colour as my hair. I recalled from Advanced Biology class that hair, nails, feathers, and horns were all made of the same type of protein, keratin, so it made a sick kind of sense that my hair and wings would match.

I tried to remember everything I'd ever learned about birds. Their heart rates were typically fast, which might explain why my own resting pulse rate was now about a hundred per minute. I assumed that my amazing new vision and hearing was all part of the bird thing too — and maybe even the increased body temperature that had got the doctors so worked up during my short imprisonment in the hospital.

But none of that made me feel better, or helped me figure out why this had happened, let alone what I actually was now. It definitely didn't help my constant hunger. And nothing could take away the bitterness of knowing that I'd been so close to graduating high school a year early; all that hard work so that I could enter officer training with the Air Force, and now I would never have the only future I'd ever wanted.

Instead I lived with the constant fear of discovery in a world where cameras were everywhere. And anyone under the age of 25 who caught sight of me instantly reached for their phone. I'd never sprinted so much in my life. I was totally focused on getting away — but had no idea where I should go. Without ever making any definite escape plan I found myself heading northeast and just kept moving.

When I ended up in some small town near the California/Oregon border, I thought maybe my luck was starting to look up. I found a diner where the waitress looked old enough to have never heard of social media and she served me two helpings of waffles with everything, without giving me a second look. But after loading up on food to go, and when I'd got as far as the parking lot, a girl my age squeaked with excitement and made the horribly familiar gesture of raising her phone.

As always, I ran. Which was not a great feeling, given the number of waffles I'd just put away.

And that was how I found myself on a hiking trail, heading deep into a national forest, still with no idea of what the hell I was going to do next.

I spent a couple of hours following the trail before I realised I needed to find somewhere to settle for the night, and decided to head off-track. The further I got from the trail, the more alien and threatening the forest became, even though my eyes rapidly adjusted and I could see quite well with the moon and starlight filtering through the forest canopy. I kept my hearing on high alert, until I was completely certain that I was alone. Still, I had to move quite a way, hiking uphill, before I felt safe enough to burrow into a pile of leaves beside a fallen log, using my wings as a blanket. I briefly hoped Dad would be proud of me for remembering all my cadet training, and the stuff he'd drilled into me on hunting trips in the good old days.

Despite my exhaustion, I could only drift into brief snatches of shallow sleep. So I snapped wide awake as soon as the night sounds of the forest were disturbed by the gentle rhythmic crunch of footsteps in the leaf litter, the hairs on my arms and the feathers on my wings prickling and rising. Concentrating, I decided the footsteps were quite some distance away but seemed to be heading in my general direction as the noise grew steadily louder. Checking my watch, I saw it was 3:30 am. I doubted it was a ranger on his rounds. But the steady, regular steps suggested it wasn't someone trying to conceal their presence, so it was unlikely to be a hunter. And again, I thought, who would go hunting at 3.30 in the morning?

I eased myself out of the pile of leaves and began creeping down the hill toward the footsteps, trying to keep my breathing and heartbeat under control. My wings twitched as if in anticipation. Flight or fight, I figured.

If only flight was actually an option ...

Through the sparser trees along the edge of the trail below, I caught a glimpse of movement, and froze. The steps continued, and now I could also hear a low humming. I frowned, vaguely recognizing the melody. The shadow moved closer and the humming grew louder and clearer.

Who the hell hikes through the forest in the middle of the night, humming Amazing Grace??

Now I absolutely had to see.

Timing my own movements with the footsteps, I eased closer to the trail and climbed into a tree, the bark rough under my hands. I scrambled a little higher until I was half-lying on a limb about ten feet above the path and hooked my backpack over a broken branch. There I waited, my eyes fixed on the corner of the trail. My wings continued to twitch, and my breath was rapid. I wondered if the person would be able to hear my thudding heartbeat, but it was too late to move.

He finally appeared in the gloom about fifty feet away. I choked, unable to believe what I was seeing.

Dark wings, roughly the same shape and size as my own, were open behind him. His pack was hanging off his chest, his hands gripping the straps by his shoulders. His steps were loud and shuffling as his feet dragged through the fallen leaves. I could see enough of his face to know he was about my own age. The poor guy looked exhausted — and I knew exactly how he felt. I wondered how long he'd been holding his wings half-open like that for. And why. It was hard enough holding out my arms for that long, and they weren't brand new limbs with poor motor control and limited muscle strength.

All of this I absorbed in a few seconds, and the sense of danger quickly faded. He looked like he was going to keep walking on automatic pilot all freaking night. As he shuffled past underneath me, I took a good look at his wings and knew that he was the real deal.

There were two of us.

I gripped the branch tighter and rolled off it, landing with a light thud.

He stopped cold. Weirdly anxious, I waited.

It took him a few seconds to turn around. His pack dropped on the leaf litter. He looked me straight in the eye. I slowly opened my own wings.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Tyler."

A smile slowly spread across his face. "Thank God," he murmured, before taking a deep breath. "Hi, Tyler. I'm Miguel."