My name is Kit Cloudkicker. I suppose in the grand scheme of things, who I am doesn't really matter. But I think there ought to be some account of these events, just in case the history books decide to take an interest.
Where I came from is irrelevant. And I don't really know anyway. Suffice it to say that I was an orphan, at least until I met some very special people. People who saved me without any of us realizing it. Until now, but of course, now it's too late. What is important is that midway through my ninth year, lost, wandering, outcast, looking for someplace, anyplace to belong, I met Don Karnage. From the standpoint of a lost little boy, he seemed grand.
Here was man who did what he wanted, went where he wanted, took what he wanted. He was a pilot, a man of action, a commander of men, captain of a great ship. The sky's version of Nautilus. Self made, self sufficient, self-confident. And he was interested in me. Why, I didn't know and I didn't care. I was going with him. Yo ho ho, a pirate's life for me.
Now very few people really know the kind of man Don Karnage is. He is usually seen as more of a nuisance that any true threat. Dangerous, maybe, but only in the short term. And if you're looking only at the big picture, if he can be avoided, the time and expense of hunting him down simply isn't worth it. But the true Karnage is a very different man. Megalomaniacal, paranoid schizophrenic, bipolar, obsessive compulsive, delusional. Sadistic. Evil.
Yes, that word is extreme, but also very accurate. And when you combine that with a mental state more fluid than the air currents in a thunderstorm, you get a very very dangerous man. But that highly fluid mental state is also what keeps him from being truly dangerous to the world at large. He is unfocused, and his attention span is shorter than a small child's. But his men know him. And in only a short time, I also came to know him. His treatment of his crew was…inhuman. In fact, his true crew consists of only a dozen or so masochistic individuals. A list of the other hundred or so people in his organization tends to change frequently. And my two and a half years with them was about two years more than I wanted.
I offer you words of true wisdom. Wisdom that most people never gain until it is too late. Hold onto the people you love. Cherish them. Tell them every day how much they mean to you. Because regret is a spiritual acid. It eats away at you slowly, mercilessly. There is nothing any more painful, or any more futile, then wishing you could have that special person back for just one more minute, so that you could tell them one more time how much you loved them.
I met some very special people when I finally escaped from the Air Pirates. Rebecca. Molly. Wildcat.
Baloo.
If you're from around Cape Suzette, you may have heard of Higher for Hire. You may even have met these people. If so, feel privileged. We all met each other in a transitional phase of our lives. And none of us truly realized at that time that we were all searching for something. At least not on a conscious level. And we found that thing in each other. Of this group, only two are actually related. But we were as complete a family as any other. Perhaps moreso.
Now something else you need to know about Karnage. He was possessive. And disproportionately vindictive. When I left, he felt I betrayed him. With good reason, I did. And reflecting over the last three years, I think he may also have seen me as his heir. Certainly not a son. Not even the worst father treats his son that way. But despite his delusions of grandeur, he was aware of his mortality. And that someday he would be gone. Of course, by that time he expected to have an empire beneath him. Someone was going to have to run it. I guess he expected that someone would be me.
Perhaps he was already thinking that when he took me in. A young boy, lost, afraid, and searching. Someone he could mold into a carbon copy of himself. Whatever it was, I can only imagine the fury my leaving him caused. Because I didn't just disappear one night. Like I said, I betrayed him. I stole from him. And I destroyed the one plan he ever had where he was able to stay focused and look at a long-term goal. The one plan he ever had that would have worked. That would have laid the foundations of that grand empire.
I think that's why we had such a propensity to run into each other. Certainly he attacked plenty of other people. But I haven't known anyone else to have had so many encounters with him. I think he was deliberately targeting me. That makes me responsible for what happened. But it's also the reason we decided to arm the Sea Duck.
That's the name of the pugnacious but noble Conwing L-16 you're standing in that served Higher for Hire as cargo conveyer. A truly great aircraft. Powerful, agile, stable. Capable of a full range of aerobatic maneuvers it was never designed to do. But still not an airplane you'd choose to be flying in aerial combat. And every time we encountered Karnage, he became more aggressive. So even though it was highly illegal, we bought a .50 caliber M2 Browning machine gun salvaged off of a P-51, and Wildcat installed it in the nose of the airplane. Totally concealed, of course. When you arm it, a door in the nose about 18 inches above the waterline opens and the barrel slides out on a rail and locks into place. An ingenious system, even for a technical wizard like Wildcat.
Needless to say, the next time we encountered Karnage, it did not go as he had planned. He jumped us as we were coming out of Decatur Island. He and three of his cronies. Now Baloo could fly rings around any of those bozos, and evade and escape was always the plan before, and we wanted it to remain that way. If we could avoid tipping our hand to Karnage, we certainly wanted to. But he had us trapped. He was using three airplanes to keep us in a single block of airspace. They would take potshots at us when they could, but it was obvious that wasn't their primary objective. Keeping us in that block was. Karnage, on the other hand was circling outside that block, letting loose with his cannon every time he lined the barrels up on us. We were starting to take heavy damage, so we had no choice.
Karnage's playful banter and insults over the radio went deathly silent when Baloo lined up the first airplane and put about a hundred rounds through it, sending it burning toward the ocean. And after he downed the second, Karnage decided the fun was over. He and the other guy bugged out. But not before warning us we had made a big mistake. We heard threats like that from him all the time. We didn't think….
A week later, I was walking home from the library just after dark. I noticed a strange light in the sky, a sort of wavering orange light. I stared up at it as I walked, wondering what it might be. Then as I got closer, I heard voices. When I realized they were not just voices, they were screams, I broke into a run, my heart rate tripling in an instant. I came over the small rise that then leads down to the dock. In front of me, Higher for Hire was ablaze. There was a metal cage roughly four feet square and seven feet tall chained to something to keep it from falling (or more specifically pushed over), probably a joist, on the balcony of the upper level. Inside the cage was my family. All of them.
There are three things you need to be aware of at this point. One, is that the balcony runs all the way around the upper level. The cage could have been placed anywhere. But it was placed in the exact spot where it would be directly in view when I came over that little rise. Two, is that at this time of year, there is always a strong offshore wind. This wind would keep the majority of smoke from engulfing the cage, preventing an easy death by smoke inhalation, and ensuring those inside would burn alive and aware.
The third is that the fire investigators were able to determine that the blaze was started in the only stairwell by an extremely generous amount of accelerant, most likely gasoline. So even if the ground floor had not been fully involved when I arrived, as it was, I would not have been able to get to them.
I will spare you the graphic details of what I was forced to watch and hear that night. I think your imagination will do.
Days later I was not surprised to find that Rebecca had a very generous life insurance policy. She was a very practical woman. I was surprised that I was named as the secondary benefactor of that policy. I was suddenly very wealthy, though the money would have to be held in trust until I was eighteen. I was also an orphan again, and was remanded to the custody of the state. I didn't even stay in the orphanage twenty-four hours. I slipped out in the middle of the first night.
The Sea Duck was in a maintenance facility undergoing an annual inspection the night Karnage murdered my family. Otherwise he probably would have burned it too, and I would have had no hope for vengeance. Fate, it seems, is not without some sense of balance. I slipped into the dock where she was moored and stole her.
How I obtained my flying and navigating skills is irrelevant. But you can guess what my destination was. An important factor here is that with no money, I only had what fuel was already on board. But it was enough to make it to Pirate Island, just barely, but enough. And I had an advantage. They wouldn't see me coming.
Most boys have an uncontrollable desire to seek out every nook and cranny of their territory. I was no different when I was living on Pirate Island. And although there was no way to get the Sea Duck inside, there was a passage just big enough for a boy to crawl through. I had grown quite a bit since I left, but I was fairly confident I would still be able to get through it. I beached the Duck as closely as possible to this passage and set out. It was definitely a squeeze, but I managed to make it through.
Once inside, it wasn't hard to move about unseen. Their primary defenses aren't set up to guard the interior of the complex. But as it turned out, it was going to be easier than I thought. The pirates were out on a raid. This left only a dozen or so individuals to be avoided. And that was easy. With the Captain gone, they were slacking off. The downside to this was that Karnage could be gone for days, even weeks. But I had things to occupy myself.
The slack guards would not be inventorying the armory, leaving me to come and go as I pleased. Over the next two days I hid enough charges of 808 and comp B to destroy the place twice over. All hooked to an electronic detonator I carried with me at all times. If caught, I was going to blow whatever charges I had already planted. After that, it was a waiting game. Finally, after six days on the island, the Iron Vulture returned.
The moment I heard the alarms, I headed straight for Karnage's quarters. It was always the first place he went when he got back. I hid in the closet and waited. I didn't have to wait long.
He came in muttering about the imbeciles he had to work with. I stealthily exited the closet, took up a position behind him, raised my pistol, and said his name. He whirled in shock, drawing his sword, but froze when he saw the gun and who was holding it.
I had spent the last two weeks dreaming of this moment, planning the things I wanted to say and do. I wanted him to beg, to grovel, to suffer. But now that I came to the moment, my contempt and moral outrage over everything that the man was overrode my desire for vengeance. Now, I simply wanted to exterminate him.
A long ten seconds of silence passed between us, then he suddenly lunged at me. I shot him between the eyes. It was a far easier death than he deserved. Looking down at his body I felt no pleasure, no satisfaction. Nothing more than I would've felt removing a rat from a rat trap. But purely by blind chance, someone must have been in the corridor. He came bursting in, stopping when he saw the scene, disbelief in his eyes. I shot him as well, and ran.
Voices rose behind me, attracted by the gunfire, and suddenly I was being pursued. Shots rang out behind me, bullets flew past me. I was almost home free. None of them were small enough to follow me through the passage. Then I was hit. Pain like I have never before experienced flared through my side, but I didn't let it slow me down.
I made it to the Duck and got into the air. I didn't know how far away I had to be to survive the explosion, but I wasn't going to take the chance that some of them might make it out trying to pursue me. As soon as I lifted off, I removed the detonator from my pocket and activated it.
The shock wave nearly knocked me out of the sky. And I doubt it went unnoticed. If it didn't register on earthquake equipment somewhere, the tower of smoke is sure to attract aircraft. Maybe I have a chance.
The Sea Duck made it twenty miles before it ran out of fuel. Farther than I expected. Now, adrift on the ocean, I hope that someone might find me before it's too late. The wound wouldn't have been life threatening if I had made it to a hospital. But I can't completely stop the bleeding. The only question now is will I bleed out or die of thirst? Either way, I've only got another day or two.
So whoever you are, carry the news back that the Air Pirates are finished. Dead. Don't praise me, don't memorialize me. I'm not a hero. I'm just a boy who did what had to be done.
The Captain looked down at the small boy. The pilot's seat was soaked with blood. His sense of injustice was fully aroused. The boy had been clutching the pages against his chest when they boarded the drifting airplane. His body was still warm. If they had arrived just a few hours earlier, they might have been able to save him. He handed the bloodstained pages to his first officer, then knelt and held the boy's hand as he read them.
"Bloody hell," he said when he finished. The Captain looked up. There were unshed tears in the man's eyes. He stood and took back the boy's story. He looked down one last time.
"I'm sorry, Kit, but I'm afraid we won't be honoring your last wish. By tomorrow, everyone on this earth will have heard the name Kit Cloudkicker."
He clapped his first officer on the shoulder.
"Come along, Number One. This is a job for the corpsmen now."