I – When the Stars Fall

(Part 1)

“We are live from our helicopter over Highway I-81, where the Skulls are escaping from what specialists are already describing as the heist of the century...” Buzzed a bright TV in a minuscule dark bedroom. The flashing screen revealed posters of colorful heroes and anime covering the dim walls. “Phillip, how are things looking?” asked the news anchor. The image of a lowrider speeding down a highway surfaced. Flames sprung off the vehicle’s wheels.

“It’s utter chaos here, Carolina!” narrated a journalist from inside a helicopter. The camera unzoomed and revealed a carpet of a hundred cars pursuing the lowrider like wheeled centipedes. “Early in the morning, the Skulls have arguably stolen an inestimable cargo from the 2,000-men-strong US ‘Othello’ Armored Train convoy. The infamous Glitcher known as the Thief Queen, the supposed leader of the Skulls, has described the heist as her grand finale. She has been streaming the theft online for over 8 million people all over the worl—”

Jet turbines stormed the skies and silenced the man. The helicopter rattled, and the live coverage fell. The nervous glare from the news anchor replaced the footage of the heist.

The woman sputtered to the cameras:

“W-We apologize to our audience, it seems we’re having some technical difficulties—”

“Please come back, please come back!” pleaded a curly-haired boy who watched the TV alone in his bedroom. He clasped his hands as if he prayed for a miracle. His elbows supported themselves on a pile of unfinished homework. “Please come back—”

“We are back to the chase!” announced the News Anchor, thrilled. “Phillip, what’s the situation?”

“This is absurd! Is that jet gonna bomb us?” the man ranted. “Channel 8 doesn’t even pay us life insurance—”

“Phillip, you are back on the air! What is the situation?”

Her questions were futile. The man had yanked his hearing device from the ear.

“—this was supposed to be my day off! This company’s just bull—”

The production turned off his microphone. Only the footage from the high-speed chase remained.

“Wait,” faltered the boy as he realized that the vehicles from the National Guard braked, “why are they stopping?” The distance between them and the Skulls’ lowrider grew by the second.

The Skulls did not hesitate. Their lowrider only went faster.

Yet the silence of the pursuers’ wheels bothered the gang’s driver. Sweat drizzled off his nervous head. He pushed the central rearview mirror to face a woman with long pink hair. Her face hid under a witch’s hat and a skull mask.

“Queen, I think you’ve finally done it,” said the driver with a sarcastic grin, “you’ve finally killed us all! The Jets will fire any time now!”

“They won’t, Jumper,” replied the Thief Queen without bothering to look at him in the eyes. She frowned upon a shoebox, where a heart appeared to beat inside. “They wouldn’t risk destroying their precious treasure just to kill us,” she said, embracing the shoebox. Her voice carried a thick English accent. “I love this already.”

“Just drop this thing off a window!” bewailed Jumper as he wiped the sweat from his blond hair.

“How far are we from the Wrong Warp tunnel?”

“Less than a mile,” replied Jumper as a hill gained shape on the horizon. “But I’m not liking this,” he glimpsed at the stopped vehicles in the rearview, “they got a State Glitcher there, I’m sure of it! I think they know about my Wrong Warp! They’ll catch us; they’ll study me and find all my hideouts—”

“If I listened to your pathological fatalism, I would not leave my bed in the morning.”

“It’s hard to be positive with you around!”

“Don’t worry,” said the Thief Queen with a sly smile on her face, “after today, you won’t ever see me again—”

A girl with fiery hair laughed. She wore a biker’s jacket stamped with the word ‘Pyre’. She toyed with a lighter. “That’s what you said the last time, Queen,” remarked the woman.

“And the time before that,” said an eerie tall man with a breath that smelled like the one of a corpse.

“Good memory, Fallen,” commented the red-haired girl as she rested her head on the shoulder of the sinister figure. Her lipstick was bright like red neon. She narrowed her eyes at Queen and mocked her, “we’ll see you in a month to steal something else. You have no cure.”

“How silly you all are! After this”—Queen tightened her grasp of the shoebox—“there won’t be anything else to steal.” She held the box like one holds the arm of a lover.

“Missile incoming,” announced a man with sunglasses and long hair who sat at the passenger seat of the lowrider. He had his legs crossed.

Jumper, the driver, partied as he heard the news. “I told you! Ha-ha-ha! I told you they’d kill us all!” he laughed and pressed the horn as he saw the disappointment on Queen’s face. “Wait—”the blond listened to his own words—“they are gonna kill us all!”

“So they’d rather destroy it than let me have it,” Thief Queen pondered, obviously ignoring him.

“Didn’t you hear GEO?” snapped Jumper. He glanced at the man with sunglasses. “There’s a missile coming!”

Fallen, the eerie tall figure, narrowed his eyes at Thief Queen. “Can I tank a Hellfire Missile?” he asked. His words smelled like the kiss of a dead man.

The pink-haired woman rose her sights from the shoebox and faced his grey face.

Numbers hovered over his head:

“Have fun,” she simpered.

He opened the lowrider’s sunroof. His head seemed to sprout out of the dark vehicle as the man appeared in Channel 8’s lenses film.

The lonely boy watching his TV recoiled. His eyes shined with excitement.

“Yes, it’s Fallen!” the boy cheered. “They’re screwed now! His Invincibility Glitch will…”

The TV turned off.

“No”—he slammed his palm against the screen—“what happened?”

“Time to sleep, Edward,” said a woman as she stored the remote control into her purse. “This is not your dad’s house, remember?”

“No, mom, can’t you see?” the boy mumbled, “the fate of the world is in their hands! This is—”

“Then the fate of the world can wait,” she replied, wearing a nametag with the words “Ms. Joy Williams (Nurse)” stamped on the paper. “I gotta go back to the hospital now,” she uttered, looking down at him as if she faced a subordinate.

“B-But…” Edward frowned. “You’ve just arrived,” he spoke in a resentful tone.

“No buts. I took away your cell phone because I did not want you watching thugs. Much less making a ruckus about it,” she said as she pointed at the corner of his room. A little chubby girl slept in silence. “It took forever for your sister to sleep. You know how Hermione is with sugar. You’re not ruining this.”

“F-Fine,” he grumbled.

“I’m going now,” she spoke as she held the bedroom’s doorknob. “Love you.”

The boy did not reply. He breathed loud and mourned his TV.

“Love you,” she repeated herself, demanding his answer.

Edward resigned:

“Love you.”

He closed his eyes and heard her steps as his mom walked away. He sighed in relief as he heard the creak of the apartment’s old door. The boy crawled to his tiny window and opened a hole in the curtain with his hands. Edward looked through the window to see if he could find anyone else watching the chase. Yet all he saw were metal bars and walls that had more graffiti than paint. The smoke trail from cigarettes and old cars blurred his view.

“Someone has to be watching, I know it”—He found an electronic tablet laying on a blonde girl’s pink bed. She sat on a bed in an apartment located across the street—“Adela, yes! She never disappoints!” he said, waving his arms with the despair of a stranded man.

“Huh?” The girl glanced at him.

She opened a coyly smile. Her long blond hair and bright teeth seemed to be the only color left in the city.

He pointed at her gadget and made hand gestures to show his intentions. “Let me see it!” he pleaded.

Adela tilted her head to the right and puzzled over what he meant.

“Fullscreen!” He made the sign of an expanding screen with his fingers. He clasped both hands together and begged, “Help me, please!”

She frowned at the device and clicked every button that she spotted, determined to help him even beyond her knowledge of informatics.

Edward giggled in admiration for her. Yet his reflection in his window robbed him of any joy. His scrawny, average and mediocre appearance left him to wonder if an angel like Adela had not fallen in the wrong world when she was born.

“There is no way we are the same species,” he suspired as he looked at himself. “I wonder if I started working out—”

Adela held her electronic tablet as if the machine’s screen were the glass of her window.

“Watch!” she moved her lips, hoping to call his attention.

The car pursuit covered the device’s whole screen. Edward recoiled, excited. “Yes!” he said, enthusiastic. He took a pair of binoculars from his drawer and watched the chase from between the bars of his window. “There it is!”

He saw Fallen standing on the roof of the Skulls’ lowrider. The Glitcher stood nonchalantly as an eerie red projectile descended from the skies like a meteor. The object was an appropriately named Hellfire Missile that was about to destroy the vehicle.

Fearless in the face of the afterlife, Fallen clasped his hands and filled his lungs with air. Grey static surrounded the man as if time and space distorted around the Glitcher.

“Matter never dies”—He told himself as his mouth enlarged to devour the missile. The projectile’s explosion took place inside his flesh and enlarged him like a balloon. Yet the man stood apathetically and laid his sights on the fleet of vehicles that had pursued the Skulls down the highway—“matter just changes form!”

He widened his mouth and released the missile’s heat from his insides. The heatwave that escaped his body was so hot that the air around the attack reddened. The heat spread chaos among the fleet of vehicles that had pursued the lowrider down the highway.

“Run away!” yelled the soldiers as they dispersed away from their vehicles. Fallen’s attack ignited the fuel in their engines. Their fleet turned into a bursting minefield.

Queen giggled as she stared at the lowrider’s rear window. Fallen left behind a wall of smoke and fire to block the road. Even the bravest soul would still not dare to pursue them.

“More relaxed now, Jumper?” she asked her driver. “In your rearview, you can see what happens to those who stand in our way.”

The driver breathed from his mouth, angry.

“Whatever,” he replied as he leaned forward to focus on his driving, “the false warp is close,” he commented as he saw the exit of the tunnel. He winked and a glowing purple wall replaced the tunnel’s exit. He announced his countdown, “get ready to fall off Earth now! Five…”

Queen faced Fallen as the countdown proceeded. The man closed the lowrider’s sunroof and faced her.

“Brilliant job,” said the woman with a smile on her face. “But you didn’t destroy the journalists, did you?”

“You don’t pay me enough to have restraints,” he replied.

Jumper continued his countdown:

“Four”—he beat the lowrider’s dashboard a couple times—“I mean Three! Four brings bad luck.”

Pyre, the Glitcher with the fiery hair, smirked at Queen’s question:

“What is it, girl? Worried about the paparazzi now?”

“Two…” Lingered Jumper, although no one bothered to give him a single glance.

Queen faced Pyre as if her subordinate’s question physically threatened her.

“Absolutely not!” protested Thief Queen, insulted. “You bloody dimwits don’t understand free publicity?”

Jumper reached the limit of his countdown:

“One!”

“No, we don’t understand publicity,” replied GEO, the silent longhaired man who concealed his eyes under the sunglasses. “All we know is that this treasure better be worth something, Queen;” he frowned at her shoebox. “No one else will die for nothing.”

He glanced at the lowrider’s empty seat. An embroidery with the name Gallant marked the seat.

Queen swallowed dry. Yet she did not allow her concerns to slip down her tongue.

“Soon you won’t have any doubts, GEO,” she asserted.

Jumper finished counting:

“Zero and we are finally here!”

The lowrider left the tunnel. Instead of proceeding on the highway, the vehicle appeared in front of an Italian restaurant in a snowy town.

The gang hurried. They left their freight and entered the closed restaurant. A chalkboard stood near the entrance with a message for the customers, “SPECIAL SALE! The Royal Sforza Cheese Pizza: 2999999.99$. April’s inflation adjustment.”

“I’m ending the stream,” announced Pyre as she touched the screen of Queen’s cellphone, “you’d better prove that whatever is in that box was worth it.”

The pizzeria’s curtains rolled down to thwart any curious eyes.

(CLICK HERE FOR PART 2. GO! GO! GO!)