The Return of Heroes by Jason Faris

Author:Jason Faris [Faris, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jason Faris
Published: 2016-05-16T23:00:00+00:00

June 7, 2033

04:18AM

Cerro Rico Mountain,

Potosi, Bolivia

Jose Luis looked up from the maps as Eduardo burst into the office trailer. He had been pouring over them with the engineers for hours, trying to find a stable shaft close enough to the pocket where the miners were trapped.

“Jose! Jose! Come quickly!”, the man shouted in Spanish, and Jose had to take a split second to shift out of the French he’d been speaking with the Engineers to understand. Eduardo looked panicked… and strangely confused.

“What is it?”, he asked.

“A message came in on the radio. The Americans said they were sending help, said to look to the north.”

Jose’s heavy brows furrowed as he responded impatiently, “And????”

“There was a great trail of fire in the sky as soon as I put the radio down to come tell you. Now there’s… there’s… I...”

“There’s what? Spit it out man!”, Jose shouted. This was the third, and worst, collapse they'd had this season. Cerro Rico had been mined so heavily for silver for so long that the mountain was nearly hollowed out. The only reason he’d even agreed to stay on as foreman this year was because the company had promised to collapse and reclamate the mountain in the fall. Now he had thirty seven miners trapped in a place where the smallest mistake could make reclamation possible tomorrow.

“You better come look for yourself amigo. Or you’ll think I’m on the coca.”

Growling, Jose swept his chair aside and stormed out, squinting north in the glaring sun until he finally spotted what Eduardo had been raving about. Blinking, he turned back to the dirt encrusted man and gave him a look that could only be interpreted as “Am I seeing things?”, to which Eduardo simply replied, “It’s an Angel Jose... The Americans have sent an Angel.”

Glimmering silver and white, the angelic figure swooped in a large circle around the cold and barren mountain before zeroing in on the trailer. Distinctly female, it looked like it had been dipped in chrome and its wingspan was wider than two tractor trailers end to end. Then it descended and came down to land gently on its toes like a ballerina. The massive wings folded down impossibly small and nestled in close to her back before she shuddered. Immediately the silver coating of her body unraveled in what looked like spiraling strips, and retracted back inside of her. The voluminous mohawk above her head spread down into a brilliant cascade of white-blonde hair, and the visor covering her face slid up until her jaw and mouth were exposed. Her skin shimmered before recoloring into a pattern they had all seen before, and Jose gasped.

“Madre de Dios Jose!... It is a Horseman!”, Eduardo whispered in awe as he made the sign of the cross, “Our sins have been called due.”

“Shut up”, Jose whispered back without moving. Eduardo was a good man, but he hadn’t finished school and never ventured far from Potosi. He was still saturated in the superstitions and religion that mixed so easily in this region.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.