Fill the Air with Eagles

Oneshot

“Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer, comin’ in on a wing and a prayer…”

The patient lifted his head at the sound of Gerard’s quiet singing. He had heard the leader sing to himself on several occasions, but never before had he sounded so distant. He stood and paced over, slowly and methodically, to the edge of the float where the black-clad man sat. He was staring out at the city, as usual. It had been threatening to rain all day; the patient was surprised it hadn’t yet, and he wondered if the sky only held back because Gerard had told it to do so, with that same wordless presence of power he always carried with him.

“Though there’s one motor gone, we can still carry on…”

He paused and pulled something out of his jacket., looked down at it, and sighed. “Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer.”

The patient glanced over Gerard’s shoulder and glimpsed the white corner of a photograph before it was hidden by the leader’s hand. “Is something wrong?” he asked without turning around. The patient lowered himself to sit next to Gerard, letting his bare feet dangle freely over the side of the float.

“I could ask you the same question.”

Gerard turned and met his eyes. “I always thought it would only be death. I remember thinking that. But I was never afraid of it.” He uncovered the photograph and let his eyes drop to it again. The patient studied it curiously. A wooden biplane took up most of the frame, with a birdcage of struts and wires holding the wings together. A white star with a circle in the center marked each wing, a symbol belonging to a military of days long ago. The long, lean body of a woman graced the top of the fuselage. One leg wrapped around a strut, she was leaning toward the tail with both arms free as she met the pilot in a kiss.

“Neither of us were.”

“You were a pilot?” the patient asked incredulously.

Gerard nodded, then suddenly glanced away from the picture and lifted his gaze to the haze-filled sky where bombers had left trails of smoke among the clouds. The sun hadn’t broken through yet. The city hadn’t seen the sun since the war had begun, and Gerard was determined to do something about it.

“Did something happen?” The patient’s voice broke through his cloud of thought.

“I got drafted.” He sighed again. “Even then, though, I wasn’t afraid.”

“My dad was in the army,” the patient muttered. “When I was a kid, we went to see a parade for the GI’s…” Gerard actually began listening. “That was the last time I saw him,” the frail man lamented. “He was shipped out the next day. A few weeks later he was killed…”

“Happiest day of your life, wasn’t it?” the leader asked him. “That parade?” The patient nodded silently, mind wandering. Gerard stood suddenly and pulled the patient to his feet. He raised a gloved hand and swept it across their view of the city. The loud growl of massive engines shattered the air and swallowed the delicate silence around them. The patient realized with a start that they were inside an elongated metal cylinder, heavily ribbed and decorated with the occasional rivet-studded window.

Four figures huddled around a flickering flashlight against one wall. The patient crawled over to them. Their faces were young, but layers of black dirt and trails of stubble made them look older. They wore fishnet-draped helmets and heavy jackets colored a sickly olive green that matched the walls around them. Their eyes gleamed ghostly white against the darkness, and none of them smiled.

A sudden rain of gunfire punctured the roar of the engines. One of the men clamped his hand over his ears. Another older man put a hand on his shoulder and gave him an encouraging smile. “Don’t worry, kid,” he said, hardly more than a kid himself. “These flyin’ fortresses can take a lotta damage. We’re fine as long as those Mustangs are there to escort us.” The patient gasped. Flying. He was in a plane. A plane going to war.

The soldier nearest to the patient was staring at a slip of paper in his hand. It fluttered dangerously fast in the freezing air blasting in through the open ports where the abandoned machine guns of the waist gunners stood. The soldier to his left glanced down at it. “Who’s that beauty?” he asked, tapping it with one finger. The man holding the piece of paper glanced up at him for a moment, then returned his gaze to what the patient realized was the same photograph Gerard had shown him.

“That’s Lindsey. My wife,” the man replied. His face showed little emotion. He hardly seemed sad or scared, and his eyes had gone dull, too soon for someone so young. “Used to be my wingwalker before this.”

“Ah, we’ve got ourselves a gypsy pilot,” the oldest of the group said with a sly smile. “I thought barnstorming was dead.”

He barely managed a breath of a sigh. “Yeah. Dead.”

The other soldier’s smile vanished. “Hey, nothin’ to worry about, Gee,” he half-shouted over the engine noise. “You’re lucky. She’ll be waitin’ for you when you get back.”

“No she won’t.”

Footsteps resounded from the front of the aircraft, and the patient glanced up to see another olive-clad man standing on a narrow catwalk between the cockpit and the fuselage, a tiny room filled with massive metal cylinders on either side. “Look alive, boys!” the man shouted. “Target’s directly below!”

The group sprang to their feet and scattered. The patient tucked himself out of the way where he could see everything. One man sat at the back of the aircraft, surrounded by oiled black guns and sheets of bullets. Another had disappeared into a tiny gun turret set into the floor. The waist gunners pivoted left and right as they shot, piling up empty shells by their feet that rolled away when the plane turned and clanged against the walls. A terrifying scream of air whipped through the plane as a hatch was opened under the catwalk, and the patient turned in time to see stacks of gray-green bombs plummet to the ground, whistling through the chilled silver clouds. Thunder rumbled below as a dark haze spread beneath them. The patient shivered, more from fear than cold. He looked around and suddenly realized Gerard was gone.

“Look out!”

A deafening explosion rocked the plane and sent it veering dangerously to one side. He felt his feet drop from under him as the aircraft sank towards the earth sideways, and he was violently pinned against the wall. He saw a flash of movement as one of the soldiers ran past him and seized control away from the pilot, settling quickly into the seat. “Mikey!”

A cry of agony was overtaken by a painful, growing whine as the plane now dived straight down. At the last minute, the plane’s nose began to arc up until it was flying level, and the force crushed the patient flat to the floor. He could see through the bomb bay that they were flying much lower now, just above the few remaining treetops. Houses had been reduced to piles of scattered bricks and splintered wood. Around them, the city was full of blinking lights as more bombs fell from the sky and blew holes in the ground with white flashes and black smoke. Discordant sirens rose into the air, finally meeting in one long, wailing tone as families fled to corrugated half-pipe shelters in their backyards. Military trucks flooded the streets like roaches in the dark haze. Soldiers leapt from them and swarmed over the destruction, ants overtaking a grotesque picnic. Higher overhead, airplanes flew in scattered formations and dropped their lead hail on the city as the buildings knelt and crumbled in surrender.

The patient backed away from the scene of the carnage and suddenly found himself seated in the airplane’s cockpit, staring at a panel of impossibly complicated control dials. He looked to the left and saw a thick cloud of smoke being carried away into a trail leading back to one of the engines. His eyes found the pilot’s face. The man was staring straight ahead and holding onto the control yoke with both hands, arms shaking from the effort. The world rolled by below in a patchwork of blues and blacks littered with the blinking stars of exploding bombs.

The patient looked over his shoulder. The injured pilot had a deep gash in his arm filled with shining shards of glass blown free from the same rocket that had disintegrated the engine. He looked back at the pilot, who didn’t dare remove his eyes from the broken windshield, and saw the crew members standing there behind him, watching with disbelieving eyes as the man began to sing.

“Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer…” His voice was quivering, but still his eyes remained dull, void of the fear all the others felt. He visibly relaxed at the sound of his own muttered singing. “Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer…though there’s one motor gone, we can still carry on-”

The rest of the song’s words faded away in moments. The patient was seated on the float once again, with the battered city spread before his eyes. Gerard was there as well, but more defined, awake, alive. There was again a spark in his eyes that had been lost before, a gleam of power and assuredness that terrified the patient more than he thought possible.

“I told him trying to be a pilot was too dangerous,” Gerard said, first to break the sudden, strange silence. “But he always wanted to be like me.” He looked down, holding the photograph again, and it was as if he had never moved. He let out a quiet sigh and tucked it away, then stood up. “We left the city for dead that day, and it’s been dead ever since. Look there.” He raised a gloved hand and pointed to the sky. A pale patch had appeared in the clouds, glowing a dim gray that appeared milky white against the murky darkness. “The sun’s almost through. We’re going to help it.”

“How?” the patient asked, staring up at the tall, imposing figure Gerard created when he stood against the sky. “That’s…impossible.”

The leader shook his head. “We’ve been trying to return the city to light ever since that day. But to do that, we’ve had to wait for your help.”

“Why me?” The patient looked down at himself, his dirty, rumpled hospital gown, the plastic bracelet encircling his wrist, his frail hands, and sighed. “This place needs a hero. It needs you.”

“I am not a hero,” Gerard said quietly. The determined expression fell from his eyes, leaving them dull and dead. “I’m only here to guide you.”

“But…how can I do anything? I can’t magically fix everything,” the patient said indignantly.

“You’ll have to figure that out yourself,” the leader answered. “However…I believe the parade will help.”

“The…parade?” The patient stood up and looked Gerard squarely in his lost hazel eyes. “What’s that going to do?”

“What all parades do,” he answered. “It will help people forget. Let them be happy.”

“…it’ll give them hope.”

Both Gerard and the patient turned around at the softly spoken words. Another one of the leaders stood there, darkened hair swept to one side and smiling faintly. A gleaming gold and black medal was pinned to the front of his uniform. The patient finally understood.

“We have to try, at least…to…carry on, y’know?”

The spark of determination returned to Gerard’s eyes. He nodded in agreement, then, waving a hand toward the back of the float, he stopped and stared for a moment at the crowd that had gathered behind them. He could hardly believe it. They didn’t want to watch the parade.

“They…are the parade,” the patient realized aloud. Gerard returned to the front of the float and opened his arms wide. Thunder rolled through the clouds above, and a light sprinkling of rain began to fall, finally breaking free of the leaden clouds. He tilted his head back and looked up to the sky, barely managing a smile.

“This is the Black Parade,” he murmured softly, “and we will carry on.”