fallenhero

Fallen Hero

The entirety of his body was covered in impenetrable rough black layers. A fortified casing that was his skin. No hair, no lips, no nose, no eyes. Just a head. Just arms, fingers. Just legs, toes. Just blackness. A featureless, yet remarkable blackness.

Below him, a militia of flames crept nearer as floor by floor it savagely consumed the high-rise building. Even as the structure began to show signs of buckling into itself, he remained calm, concentrating outward on the world around him and gauging the task at hand with a rare hesitation.

Peering off the corner of the rooftop, through the night sky, grey/green with pollution, and down onto the dozens of lower buildings, most of which smoking in a fusion of anarchy, he measured the entire human race: This… is what they've brought upon their own world? He thought. This madness? This chaos?

From place to place darted a shadowed form, and then another. Elsewhere burst a flicker of bright light and a bang; a screech and a thump; a scream and silence. Never one or the other, but all and more.

Much more.

Trash littered the city. Small fires crackled, big fires blazed. Rather parked, wrecked or plainly abandoned, cars, trucks and buses scattered the streets, hidden only by the variety of drifting smoke billows.

Below his perch, he watched as a dozen or so looters poured out of a slender alleyway door with their arms full of merchandise. They jumped over scattered items and split off into all directions to fend for themselves.

He distinguished, with an unmistaken certainty, the whites from the blacks even in the darkness. He saw the Asians and the Mexicans and all sorts of other blends of what to him, appeared equally as human imperfections. He thought it peculiar how such a barbaric race could unknowingly come together in unison, yet all they could successfully accomplish was, “Chaos,” he said again, but aloud, with a thousand different alien voices synchronized into one.

As the smoke from his own burning building thickened the air around, he continued to look down on them. On those that didn't attempt to cover their faces with mask or scarves or anything else equally sufficient, he observed their embarrassment and shame, but also, on more than a few, the excitement as they fled. They knew it was wrong, yet they told themselves otherwise. That the government owed them, that they had to take care of their family… like the television or radio or video game in their grasp filled that vital void.

Down the avenue, a crowd made their way from window to window shattering them out with projectiles of all sorts, but not stealing. The stealing came from others—followers, scavengers, pillagers— as if in this disorder, specific roles had in fact been assigned. Along a different street, a smaller group of only three young men set fires, etching proof that their existence does indeed belong to the dwindling stock of humanity. First a mattress, then a news stand. The way they tossed the newspaper and magazines down into piles on the street would have reminded him of Ray Bradbury's, Fahrenheit 451. That is, if he had been versed in the history of humans even the slightest before being assigned by a galactic council to determine their fate. But as it is, he could only judge on what he witnessed. And none of it, to him, made any justifiable sense.

Numerous fist fights crackled like the fires all around. Most waged their own battles, while some had joined in the brutality of beating a defenseless truck driver who made the unfortunate mistake of driving to cautiously through their crowd. Looking down, he saw as other drivers of the primitive vehicles below, learned from his mistake. They sped through, swerving as bottles and rocks slammed against their vehicles and yells of anguish chased close behind.

A lone woman, jacketless, hobbled down the street, her lip bloody; her red dress torn down over her shoulder, a rip at her waist... tears streamed down her face trailing mascara. She clutched herself, shivering in the drizzle beginning to fall.

Closer still, a horde of people surrounded a Greyhound bus. They shoved at it, rocking it from side to side to get it to tip. An urge pushed at him to fly down and help, to do the right thing. But another urge began to tell him not to bother, that this race was a lost cause. A moment later the bus crashed over, glass shattered about and the pushers cheered their victory.

Their failure.

The more he watched and judged the more he hated himself. How low he had fallen… and the sickening feeling kept poisoning him as he saw the madness yet did nothing. Gunshots still rang out, coupled with camera-like flashes in the smoky darkness. Each fleeing shadow only ran from one danger into another. Nowhere did this constant replay of suffering end. He felt himself overcome by a rare sense of futility and gazing down from his perch, he noticed something else. There were no sirens. The night was dead. Why, he asked himself, is no one willing to do the right thing?

Far off, through the now heavy downfall of rain, past the hundreds of scampering rioters still stealing, fighting, and damaging. Past the comparably minor fires, he spotted a high-rise, taller than his own, giving way to an inferno. An elderly man dropped his cane and crawled to one of its thousand windows, placing his hand on the warming windowpane as he panted for air. He pictured himself in the old man's predicament with the suffocating smoke as an allegorical representation of mankind. Hundreds of years into the future their unending failures, even after all he had sacrificed, choked the life out of him. Their failures would become intertwined with his own. He both saw and believed this, and knew it would cause a constant strangling of his heart.

They would not change.

Across the way, the old man's shaky hand slid down the window and disappeared into the smoke. Even from the distance, he heard the fire's sardonic giggles beginning to spread. He smelled its thickness smothering those inside.. There was no need to visualize what they saw, since the same was simultaneously happening to his building. The smoke had reached the roof, crawling out from windows and scurrying up the sides of the building like a surrounding army. It thickened so much around him it was as if curtains were drawn closed and he stood in a pitch-black room. He knew if he were human, he would have long been suffocated. In that moment, he realized what it must be like to be so fragile. How, so much had to be crammed into such a diminutive time, multiplying the importance of seemingly simple possessions. He thought, looking down on them, how he had come across dozens of other species likewise confused by the priorities of life's possessions. That they all had benefitted with the proper guidance. Eventually.

The flames hurled closer, scorching up the walls and across the floor around him as the rooftop burnt away section by section. Yet, he remained. Looking out at this strange world with no concern for the fire beginning to attach itself to his leg and crawl with its fiery fingers up the length of his body until the layers of his being were engulfed. He let it tickle his skin unhurried as all his frustration boiled to its peak within him, inching its way towards an eruption. The people below, for the first time, turned their attention upwards, drawn in by the blinding red aura radiating off his body. With a surprising suddenness, he let loose a roar that ripped out into the air. The flames on and around him, flickered out and the smoke dissipated. Windows vibrated viciously then shattered, sprinkling down to the sidewalks below as humanity fled.

His eyes held a pain conflicted with duty and forfeit. Gazing down, he leaned and let his body fall… down… down he fell… the wind blowing against him as floor-by-floor of flame-engulfed buildings twitched past like strobe lights. Each flicker made him feel as if he delved deeper into a universally acknowledged underworld and this pleased him. Too properly rid a weed you pull by its root. Hell is this weed, he thought. Satan is this root.

He didn't let himself hit. Instead, he braced and swooped over the trembling and confused onlookers to do what a hero does, despite the way his soul ate at him to let them destroy themselves. He'd start with the old man and work his way around from there.

Billons of lives needed saving. None were unworthy.