.
Brood of a New Age
102
Travis sat in the morning sun at the disaster site in the open back door of the OB truck. He had long since removed the blanket that helpers had given him. Firstly, he was not cold, and secondly, he would not even begin to make himself comfortable in the role of the "victim".
Some of the younger, brasher colleagues had tried to pounce on him to get a story. On him, of all people! Exactly the pack of which he had been afraid yesterday. How ridiculous this fear seemed to him now. They would always be puppies. He was light years ahead of them in experience and courage. Or ... he was simply in shock, completely traumatized by last night and refusing to come down from the high he was feeling despite his exhaustion.
He didn't even blame the young reporters that they saw him as prey. He looked just fantastically gruesome, so filthy, with his shirt ripped open and his hair still sticking with blood even after the paramedics had disinfected and stitched the cut on his scalp. But even if he looked like that ... he was not lying on the ground. He would not bleed out because of terror and trauma so that the other vultures could pick him apart and climb up his back. On the contrary. He wasn't just doing the story - he WAS the story. At least a part of it. HE would be the mouthpiece of that night and everyone would want to talk to him. He would carefully consider who he was talking to so he could reach as many people as possible. Good Morning America and Oprah- by all means Oprah. Too bad Phil Donahue didn't do anything more. Travis would make history. Not for himself. He didn't give a shit about the Pulitzer. He was going to spread a story for the first time to really make a difference. To really influence people's views. If even one person thought about their behavior after his report ... he would have already won. If Fran could change ... surely others could too.
The other reporters and photographers had already left after they realized that they could not get anything out of him and that there would be no more interesting gargoyle sightings during the day. The people in the exo suits and these Xanatos robots continued to trudge around on the now considerably shrunken mountain of rubble. Another truck with concrete fragments just drove away and an empty truck replaced it.
He drained the third mug of coffee and heard Susan and Stuart muttering behind him in the van - as they had been doing for minutes. Not that he had been listening to them, the two tech nerds were chattering to each other in their own language. Something about frames, image exposure and blah blah blah. They had obviously been taking footage of the night's rescue work like everyone else and were trying to improve the image quality for replay. Marshall looked at his watch. Half past six. The sun had been up for an hour. He wondered how the gargoyles were doing. Especially how Nash and the human girl were doing. He wished he could have gone with them. But - oddly enough for someone in his line of work - he hadn't seen a way to enter the gargoyles' minds. Not when they were fighting for the life of their child. He would have felt disgusting. And he no longer had that device on his body that could transmit and store signals if the radio car wasn't near him. Marshall smiled at the memory. He couldn't believe Lexington had built a damn defibrillator out of that device and a Quarryhammer. Because of his help, a life had been saved. That made Travis extremely proud. It dulled the pain of probably having grilled all the footage from that night. He had sacrificed the recordings for that. And it was worth it. He didn't know if Nash would survive. But Marshall's sacrifice had given him a chance. A tiny chance.
"You save one life, you save the whole world," he whispered, laying his head back and enjoying the morning sun on his face, letting the salty, a little greasy New York-East River air waft around his nose. He should do this a lot more often. Just ... be content and enjoy the day. He heard footsteps behind him and Susan joined him in the open doorway.
"Okay. I have some good news and some bad news," she said.
Travis didn't open his eyes, just enjoying the shrill cry of a distant seagull flying by.
"It's okay, Susan. The recordings weren't that important. People will want to hear my story with or without the footage. Of course the pictures would have been moving and many will choose not to believe my words but-"
Her soft chuckle made him open his eyes and look at her. She looked like the cat that had swallowed the canary.
"What?" he asked, and his scalp hurt as he raised an eyebrow.
"You are SO old, Travis. You don't get how this new technology works."
At his questioning silence, she explained further, grinning widely.
"We have everything. Every minute. We followed the Sky Sled as long as you were on it-where we were too far away the box on your belly saved the footage until it reconnected to our car and could transmit it again automatically. But everything at "The Granary"- we could receive without the help of the box and the memory chip. How do you think the volunteers knew how big your air chamber was, how careful they had to be, how many volunteers could even move around it? You fed us the info in real time."
"And man, are the shots good. And the sound is A-plus most of the time, too," said Stuart, who was still sitting in his chair in the van.
"We got it all from; 'Test test, one two three, this is Travis Marshall. Castaways and Dracons negotiating, their disgusting handling of Nashville, how the shooting starts, how Broadway saves you, and everything, EVERYTHING under the rubble." Where Stuart had always seemed pretty indifferent before, now he was grinning and shaking his head in disbelief. "I laughed at the way the Gargoyles treated each other - they're so funny. And I had tears in my eyes when Nashville prayed with that red female. And when his father pleaded him to stay with them. When he promised him the world. I've NEVER cried at a recording, Marshall," he wrinkled his nose and pulled a handkerchief from a Clenex packet moved alone by the memory.
"You ... and the people in charge of the recovery team have seen the footage?" All of it? Everything from down there?" Travis tried to wrap his mind around this fact that supposedly not a single image of the night had been lost.
Susan nodded. "Everything before and after the collapse. Hell, in the minutes you were unconscious we were both crying our heads off. We thought you were dead. Sure there's a lot of shaky, dusty and pretty dark stuff in there too - but we were able to improve a lot of the shots. Travis - this is gold. From top to bottom. Not just a snapshot of what the Quarrymen are like. But also what gargoyles are like. Every funny line, every expression of affection, the prayers." Susan leaned forward to get a better look in his eyes.
"The prayers, Travis. The rosary! Castaway will NEVER be able to spew that mindless shit from soulless demons and godless creatures again. And animals? Like Yale said? We have seen how a family fights for their child. How a father begs his child not to leave him. We got every tear, and your glasses still transmitted when Lexington ripped the box off your stomach and tinkered with it to make a defibrillator. No one will ever doubt their intelligence again." Susan had gotten all moist-eyed herself and was wiping her cheeks.
Travis wasn't quite sure how to feel. Of course, his reporter heart was beating 180 miles an hour with happiness. He really was a lucky bastard, the Pulitzer again within his grasp. But ... especially the few minutes since the gargoyles had noticed that Nashville was bleeding. That was so private, so intimate. It was heartbreaking and would further push the increasing acceptance of the gargoyles, after the court case and the events with the kidnapped teens in May. But ... to exploit such moments ... was somehow unrighteous. Travis shook his head. This footage was more than a family's suffering - as cruel as it was to say. This footage was proof that gargoyles were NOT monsters. They were not unholy, not uncaring. They joked, laughed, cried, mourned like humans and loved so intensely that these recordings would not only move people to tears but would also sweep them away. THAT was the higher goal. Even if later an angry gargoyle clan would be on his heels ... because of ... violation of privacy or lack of piety - Travis knew he had to get as much of this footage on the screens as possible.
"We've already talked to the network chief on the phone," Susan babbled on. "He believed my lie that with this new OB, it's not yet possible for me to play the wireless live recordings directly to the channel to be broadcast on the TV screens. I hope you know that if the lie is discovered, I'll lose my job. But -" she nudged him in the shoulder- "I wanted to wait for our star reporter and until I could render the best shots. The boss and the bigwigs at the station are quite happy you're not dead and are SO hot for a montage of the best moments along with your comments as a participant in the story. An inside-the-rubble view from Travis Marshall. You are the hot shit! I've edited good scenes for a two minute feature. Plus two minutes of reportage of you with pictures superimposed. They'll put you on the seven o'clock news if you're ready. Biggest audience in the morning. And that brings us to the bad news.
Travis sought eye contact again.
"What would be the bad news now?"
Susan grimaced and didn't look at him as she spoke. "Because of the morning rush hour, we can't get a makeup artist or an intern to come here with a new suit for you."
Travis laughed out loud. An exuberant laugh, so genuine and so rare in recent years that just that he could laugh SO made him laugh even harder.
"THAT is the problem?" he asked, gasping for air. Susan and Stuart laughed, too, although their laughs also included some concern and uncertainty as to whether their assigned reporter had a concussion or brain hemorrhage that caused him to react that way. Susan, swallowing her last chuckles, tugged at his torn shirt. Travis realized his belly was hanging over the waistband of his pants. Yesterday he had tried so hard to pull it in. Could he blame Susan and Stuart for now assuming his disastrous physical appearance was a problem?
"Travis. Your shirt is torn, you have lacerations on your face, your hair is bloody and is - just calling you filthy would be an understatement," Stuart said.
"I know."
"Maybe Stuart can give you his T shirt."
Travis glanced behind him. Stuart didn't look thrilled at the prospect. And Travis didn't find wearing a T-shirt that said "My pain is chronic, but my ass is iconic" on his report enticing either.
He cleared his throat. " I'm keeping on what I'm wearing now. It supports the impression that I was in the middle of it. I want this post to be as real as possible. Nothing will be glossed over including me."
Susan smiled wryly. "That's ... pretty cool."
"For an old man."
"Generally ... Okay, so if you're okay with that, then the program bosses have to sign off on the material first. The bosses want, in addition to your short report, an extra one-hour special tonight. But... you said that you want everything to be real. But we all know that your six hours of footage will NOT fit into a one-hour report. And they may forbid us to play the most emotional recordings. I mean ... we kind of recorded a child dying."
"A gargoyle child," Stuart muttered, cringing under Susan's grim gaze.
"It was a recording of a child," Marshall voiced Susan's thoughts. "We don't know if he's dead."
Travis took a deep breath. It was really likely that they were being censored for "sensitive" content. But the world had to see everything. All the footage without editing, so that no gargoyle-hater and critic could claim they had glossed over anything. But how?
"You're the best technician in town, Susan."
"Except for Lexington," the young woman agreed, and Travis nodded.
"Do we have a way to broadcast some of this stuff citywide or even nationwide?"
Her eyes widened and she exchanged an astonished look with Stuart. "Nationwide - impossible with just this OB truck."
"I assume so, then we also have no way to prolong my broadcast. I have a little more to say than I can fit into a five-minute report.
"There ... you'd have to have technology that would jam our own transmitter. Not with this car."
"Even if it could, and that would be extremely cool, we could all lose our jobs over it. You'd be sabotaging the program directors' plans. You must have been totally shaken up by the whole thing if you'd consider something like that. Who are you and what have you done with Travis Marshall?"
Travis grinned wryly and Stuart grinned back. Yes. Who was he? Not quite the same person as last night- that was probably true.
"It would be fantastic if we could show the world everything," Susan murmured thoughtfully. Stuart made a sound of agreement.
"If only ..." Travis shook his head. He hadn't believed anything earth-shattering would happen at the beginning of the evening. He hadn't been sure hours ago that all gargoyles would be as understanding and intelligent as Goliath in the court footage, and he'd been proven wrong in every way. And he had not believed that anyone, let alone a gargoyle could build a life-saving device out of scrap metal. He had witnessed miracles tonight. Perhaps more miracles than a single human being could be granted in his entire life. But ... Just one more. Just one more miracle, beyond all limits of common sense and reason. He raised his eyes as a shadow fell on him.
In the glare of the morning sun stood ... David Xanatos and another man.
The billionaire flashed his so well documented smile that always spoke of how he knew so much more than everyone else.
I've heard that you want to share the footage beyond the city limits, bypassing your station and showing it in its entirety to the world," said the man whose castle walls were supposedly home to a gargoyle clan (not that Travis had any doubts about that after that night). THIS man ... who looked natural even with his dented, futuristic combat uniform. This man had shipped a medieval castle from Scotland to New York and planted it on a skyscraper. This man made miracles happen. He was not even surprised that Mister Xanatos knew about his thoughts.
Travis looked to Susan and Stuart, then back to the billionaire.
"My people are going to need new, well-paying jobs after this. What's your plan?"
David Xanatos stepped aside before the other man approached and introduced himself to Travis (but mostly to Susan and Stuart). A man, who was in fact the team leader of the obfuscation and cleanup unit. The person who had technology in his own vans that normal people couldn't even imagine (some of it equipment that had also allowed Demona to bypass all the other signals back then to cause the lost nights citywide). The man smiled broadly as he explained the plan. Never before had his team had the task of spreading the truth. Never before had they been given permission by Mister Xanatos to use all the technical possibilities to spread the word as widely as possible. For him and his team, which had just grown by two people, it was Christmas in August.
.
.
Walter Miller had to clasp the hand holding the spoon with his other hand because he was shaking so much. He was at the end of his tether again. He wanted the morning to be normal. Normal would have been if he had left the house at five in the morning to open his kiosk. Normal would have been sitting in his little cubbyhole where the normal, odd, but rarely nerve-wracking typical New York weirdos passed by his little house. Instead, Dante had made an appearance. The Mobster Gargoyle had entered through a window again just as Walter was about to leave the house. What's more, he'd brought a fucking CORPSE with him! A corpse corpse CORPSE! At least Walter was very sure that the figure, wrapped in a carpet and tied up tightly, with only the shoes sticking out at the bottom, was a dead body. Walter did not know why Dante had come back, why he was dragging this luggage into WALTER'S home and why the gargoyle looked as if a house had collapsed on top of him. And why had Dante wanted a pen and notepad? And why had he taken one of his son's old pairs of sports socks from one of the cupboards before slamming the door in Walter's face and forbidding him to even stick his nose in that room during the day? Nothing had been cleared up by Walter before sunrise. Dante had only said ... in his calm but always dominantly threatening tone, that he would need shelter for one more night. Just for one night. He and his ... CORPSE, BODY, STIFF!
Walter dropped his spoon into his bowl and oatmeal drowned in milk splashed up to his chin. He COULDN'T eat anything. He couldn't "have a quiet, normal day" as Dante had recommended. Having a gargoyle in his son's nursery was one thing. Having a gargoyle in there with a mafia-style carpet-wrapped corpse was a whole other matter. Should he go to his kiosk after all? No, he would sit in there and stutter around like a psycho every time someone came to his window, maybe even burst into tears. He knew that Mister Dante thought of him as a friend in a weird, monster-mobster way. He trusted him not to rat him out to cops or GTF or Quarrymen. And he wouldn't because he was still hanging on to his pathetic life and snitches got stitches and gargoyles with red monstrous faces and red glowing eyes would seek revenge. Walter jumped up so that his hips cracked, poured his cereal down the sink. God, he was about to have a nervous breakdown. Normal day. Normal-what was normal again? Yes. Watching TV. Sipping a beer and watching TV- staring himself silly, turning off his thoughts and getting drunk, maybe so wasted that he wouldn't wake up until the night and both Mister Dante and the carpet corpse would be gone. It was only two minutes to seven but if he wanted to get really wasted he would have to start now. He got a beer from the fridge. One of twelve - he had only been shopping yesterday. That was enough to get sloshed. He plopped down in his recliner, picked up the remote and- What if Dante was gone but not the body? Tonight? He had said he would repay him somehow for his hospitality. What if, among gargoyles, instead of a greeting card and flowers, it was customary to give away bloody human corpses!
How was Walter supposed to get a corpse out of his place? How to dispose of it? He wasn't strong enough to pull that off- the police would arrest him as a murderer and he'd spend his last few years as a doormat to a guy called Angry Assad, or Bad Boris, or Cuddly Curt- whoever was currently in charge at Rykers. Walter swallowed the fear with a big gulp of beer and turned on the TV. Normal normal normal. News were normal. Yes - the misery all over the world would distract him from the misery in his son's nursery.
And as if his traumas had decided to prolong their guest appearance, the first thing that appeared on the screen was the red demon face from his kiosk! Walter cried out and fell backwards out of his chair, his beer fell to the floor on the carpet where it toppled over and lost its contents gurgling. Walter shook and gasped in fear, noticing his years of cigarette consumption as his throat almost completely closed up in rising panic. He heard angels praying for him and concentrated on that, as he was obviously having a stroke with halucinations.
" - good what you have to lay unfinished out of your hands, until one day he himself will complete everything." But ... the pleasant female voice with the Italian accent was interrupted by a deep, stressed voice.
"How's it looking, Lex?" Walter blinked in irritation, his hands still clasped together above his head, waiting for the paralysis from the stroke. A frantic boyish voice spoke now, along with cracking sounds and a noise that sounded like electrical crackling.
"In a minute. In a minute. Maybe - it could work. Two minutes. I can get it. "A loud crack from the direction of the television made Walter flinch. "If I bypass the voltage fuse here. The batteries might take the force out of the blow enough that it doesn't grill him. But then the device gets fried along with the memory chip."
"Never mind! Do it! Do what you have to," shouted a voice that sounded one-to-one like that host from Nightwatch. Then the voice of the female angel became more dominant again.
"God bless your heart, all that has bound you in love with others along the way of your life. Give you the peace that only he can give us: the peace in your heart that surpasses all our comprehension."
Walter's heartbeat calmed as he now heard from the television the first man's distraught, grief-pressed voice.
"Nash. Nash! Stay with us. Stay with me. Halloween, Nash. Friends. You deserve friends. A-a whole world of friends. I'll get them for you. We'll give you the world, but stay with us. You are our divergence! You make us work."
As the next part of the prayer became audible due to a pause from the other speakers, Walter managed to turn his head and look out from behind his chair towards the screen. And on the television, the face of a red-skinned woman. Trapped in the tube TV, trapped in her pose where she was obviously holding up, with a lot of effort, some kind of concrete ceiling with cracks running through it. And she looked so desperate. And she was crying. And she was sublime and aesthetic in her agony and why did this sight remind him of the copy of Michealangelo's Pietà he had seen in the museum years ago? It wasn't the concrete dust that powdered everything and everyone. It ... was that the monster he had seen in his kiosk window? This inhuman Mater Dolorosa was so much more tragic precisely because she had no one in her arms. Her wings a protective cloak, her gaze desperately pleading towards heaven, that one could forget that none of them could see that heaven. Walter's heart tightened with a new feeling as he walked around his chair, unable to take his eyes off the screen. Pain. So much suffering, so much pain. In the eyes, in the gestures of the ... gargoyles on the screen. The red female above the scene, a kneeling human woman in front of a lifeless smaller gargoyle, to whom she was giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, whereupon another gargoyle - red like the female with a beak longer than Dante's - immediately continued with chest compressions. Walter dropped into the chair, indifferent to the damp coolness of his spilled beer seeping from the carpet through his socks. The scene, remarkably well lit thanks to light sources such as flash lights and the headlamp of a small gargoyle playing with something on the floor, abruptly changed (capturing the figures of two people lying on the ground) to a large turquoise grey gargoyle standing at the other end of this ... cave of concrete and rubble that seemed to be holding that part of the ceiling and had large crocodile tears running down its face as it spoke.
"Please Nash. You can do this. You have the strength to do it. You're a warrior, you can't ahhh!"
Briefly, all sounds were drowned out by cracking and the pervasive scraping of concrete on concrete. The image shook violently as if in an earthquake and hands were raised in protection directly in front of the camera, making it look as if a person's point of view was the camera itself. The scene was filled with dust when the shot became sharp again. And yet you could see the little gargoyle with the strange wings and one "I've got it!"placing a silver box on the little lifeless gargoyle's chest. And oh, there was blood everywhere, why was Walter only noticing this now? Oh god, was this coming from the little gargoyle. Or from the delicate human boy whose hand the little gargoyle seemed unwilling to let go of even in death? More dust and concrete crumbs trickled and it seemed as if the ceiling was slowly lifting. Shouts that seemed to come from outside (wherever that outside was) became audible, a beam of light from "outside" cut through the scene but no one in the chamber cared.
"Everybody back," the little bald guy shouted and Walter nearly fell out of his chair again at the harsh buzzing and hissing electric blast that briefly bathed the image in bright white light. You could only see in the dying of the white light how the body of the lifeless gargoyle reared up and slumped back to the floor. The flying squirrel gargoyle tore the burning box from the charred chest of the child (God, only now did Walter realise that this had to be a CHILD of the gargoyles! The red one had called him Nash before). After the little bald one announced the heartbeat, the human woman screamed that he needed emergency care and the red one grabbed the little apparently not yet dead gargoyle whereas the flying squirrel gargoyle seized the human child. And together they crawled out of the now larger gap. Then this transmission stopped. Only to show Travis Marshall. Dirty and bloody. He was silent for a few seconds (seconds of silence - like for a dead person?!) and then raised a tired gaze that didn't seem to come from the usually smooth, seasoned reporter but was so much more human, more approachable, more wounded. But Walter didn't even hear the first words, which were probably apologies for the traumatic images. He jumped up and yelled at the television. "Shit! WHAT! No! What's happening? What- The kid! The kids! What about Nash?" He gasped and fell back in his chair, struggling to calm his emotions and his sympathy and curiosity surging like a spring tide. Maybe Marshall was saying what was with Nash? What about the human child? What about the other gargoyles? Or maybe he'd said it before the footage and Walter had missed it? Shit! He gritted his teeth, pressed his nails into the padding of his armrests, and stared at the TV more intently than he ever had, not even at the Superbowl.