Black-Feathered Craven

A constant pain shot in Aldous Craven’s side as he staggered down the moonlit sidewalk. His teeth clenched harder with each step he as agony amplified throughout his body. Blood streamed from a fractured nose down weeks of unshaved blonde stubble, and his glass-lacerated hand clenched a large stain of soaking red on the right side of his torso.

Aldous staggered through the quiet suburban neighborhood on the fringe of unconsciousness, but the sight of his destination spurred him onward. It was that damnable house – 1066 Hastings Avenue – with its two stories of perpetually curtained windows and darkened lanterns. He had been watching that house and its sole occupant for over a month now, and his carefully calculated, albeit horrendously botched mission was finally being put into gear.

The wounded assassin staggered past a residence, glancing quickly at its address – 1068. Hope lifted Aldous’s crushing soul and declining enthusiasm, and he rushed around a hedge divider into the side yard of the target house.

Aldous fell against the house’s wall of peeling white paint next to a decrepit side door that looked as though it hadn’t been used in decades. There was a large square window on the door, peering into a laundry room with a glass pane so filthy it was nigh-on opaque. Clutching the wretchedly throbbing wound on his side, the dark-clothed assassin ran a bloodstained hand through his long, grimy blonde hair, pulling it back behind a face that gleamed with sweat in the dim, sullen moonlight.

Without warning, exhaustion yanked Aldous’s reins. He dropped suddenly to his sliced and glass-embedded hands and knees, coughing and hacking and unleashing a violent storm of bloody phlegm. A horrendous surge of nausea was resonating from deep within his guts, threatening to upheave in a burning surge of wretched agony. The trembling arms that supported Aldous’s weight felt like fragile wooden sticks, readying to give way and snap at any second.

Aldous clenched his eyes shut and hacked one last time, spitting up a final thick wad of blood and phlegm into the grass below him. The assassin was dizzying and beginning to sway drunkenly – he was engulfed in agony’s grip and closer than ever to succumbing to death.

The young, blonde-haired man groaned wretchedly, one hand lifting from the grass and holding tight onto the grazing bullet wound under his soaked sweatshirt. Pain resonated in his skull and he could feel a burning wave of bile traveling up his intestines.

The assassin gazed endlessly at a dark abyss through shut eyes. Nothing but raw agony glared back at him.

---

The steel chair sailed through the glass window of the second story apartment with great ease. A surge of shattered glass came down with it, raining over the long, rectangular lawn that ran parallel to the apartment building. The chair was followed almost immediately by a figure in dark clothes who threw himself with the desperation of a man evading armed pursuers.

Aldous Craven slammed into the glass-littered lawn, wincing as a tormenting pain shot through his arms and legs. Trickles of blood were streaming from tiny wounds of embedded glass in his shins and forearms; Craven’s face deformed wretchedly, his dark green eyes overflowing with agonized tears.

Without another moment’s hesitation, Aldous leaped to his feet and launched into a staggering sprint, his body pumping with a nigh-on lethal dose of adrenaline as he fled through the cold night to a quiet city street.

A set of sharpened blue eyes watched from the shattered window as Aldous made a maddened escape. It was a tall man, slender yet muscular, who stood by the empty pane of Craven’s apartment, with long, wavy black hair streaming down his light-skinned neck to his broad shoulders. He was dressed in black SWAT-style tactical gear with three large white letters printed across his Kevlar vest: CTA.

Edward Vernon’s growl burned like a fuse as he watched Craven escape. Aldous’s two compatriots had been killed at the cost of two of Edward’s own men, plus one injured and in critical condition – yet the bastard himself had escaped.

To watch the assassin hop in his dark green sedan and speed away was an absolutely excruciating experience. A long month of strenuous work and a hard-fought personal crusade had dissolved in seconds right before Edward's eyes.

“What do we do, Lieutenant?” Vernon’s comrade asked from behind him, having witnessed the spectacle himself.

Edward glanced back, his frustration glaringly obvious in his growling eyes. The operation was meant to be swift and, for the most part, beneath public notice – a high-speed city chase was far out of the question.

“Radio HQ and tell them to send backup to the subject’s house. Now!" Edward barked. "It’s all we can do at this rate.”

The lieutenant hated turning his cases over to higher powers, but there was nothing else he could do. A human life was in grave danger due to failure on his own part. Now he could only sit back and watch the shitstorm boil. He didn't care what his superiors might have to say to him; the one thing on Edward's mind was his shattered ideals.

Lieutenant Vernon glanced back out the paneless window, rage brewing within him as, elsewhere, Aldous wove hastily through quiet suburban city streets.

The green sedan was swerving around corner after corner. “Shit, shit, shit, shit,” Aldous spat angrily as he sped through the night-shadowed city. “This whole thing’s gone to hell. No goddamn way I’m surviving now – got to get this done at any cost.”

Obliviously sleepy houses were racing by Aldous as the speedometer reached fifty-five. The assassin slammed his breaks, whirled the steering wheel, and floored the gas, sending his dark green sedan whipping around a corner at a blinding speed. Just as he did this, he was confronted by one of the most terrifying and heart-sinking sights imaginable: flashing lights atop a black-and-white Crown Vic blocking the middle of the street.

It was too late to avert a tragedy. The dark green sedan hurtled on and slammed into the side of the squad car where an officer stood talking into his radio with the driver’s door open. After Aldous’s introduction, the officer’s body was no more; he was flattened into a mess of twisted metal that was an amalgamation of Aldous’s car and his own.

After a horrific impact, the enormous perversion of warped steel merged with flesh slid quickly to a halt. Aldous Craven opened his eyes.

He was seeing doubles through intensely blurred vision, and he could feel a river of blood falling from the excruciating rod of pain that plunged straight into his face. Aldous lifted his head from the blood-soaked steering wheel, looking about his ruined sedan littered with glass and pulpy human flesh.

For a brief moment of infinite horror, Aldous thought his own body had become entangled with the collision’s wretched mess, but he was coldly relieved to realize it was merely the officer’s – and, fortunately enough, the cop had been alone in his squad car. The assassin let out an elongated groan – one that could only be made by a viciously wounded and dying animal. As far as Aldous could tell, he had received a broken nose, possibly a concussion, and who the hell knows what kind of brain hemorrhaging or internal bleeding.

But none of that was important. All that mattered was the mission – and it had to be done quickly.

The driver’s door of the dark green sedan flipped open, and Aldous’s battered body came flopping out onto the debris-littered asphalt. Dazed and wounded immensely, the assassin glanced about at his surroundings – just past the twisted steel-and-gore T-bone, there was a three-way intersection where Dudley Street passed Hastings Avenue.

Sirens were closing in quickly from the distance. Guided by the dim light of a moon hidden behind sullen November clouds, Aldous staggered down the sidewalk from the scene of a horrendous atrocity, rounding the corner and advancing quickly on his target’s home.

The black sky’s shadow-clouds licked momentarily away from a crescent moon, bathing Hastings Avenue in an eerie, surreal glow. The pale radiance swept in from the sky and brought Hastings Avenue to life, monstrous shapes looming in the shadows of the houses that lined the street. They all seemed to gaze perpetually at the wounded assassin, beckoning him onward and grinning fleeringly.

Aldous Craven decided that the darkest of the cosmos had merged on that night and wrested control of destiny’s winding course, tearing reality asunder and twisting fate in his favor. This strange and insidious union must have allowed him to transcend probability and carry out his diabolical mission unhindered.

---

The door burst open, and two men equipped with assault rifles and tactical armor rushed through. A cry came from the first agent that was quickly cut off by the cacophonous eruption of gunfire; “CTA! Get on the flo—”

Two men – one in a blue suit and one in a gray – were standing in the apartment’s small living room, patiently awaiting the arrival of the federal agents. The muzzles of each man’s submachine guns erupted in rapid flashes as the blasts echoed loudly in the room.

The first CTA agent in the room was cut down in a red mist by the spraying submachine gun fire. The second was struck several times and sent screaming to the floor, clutching the trigger of his assault rifle with an iron death-grip. A stream of shots swept diagonally across the room, cutting across the suspect in blue and taking him out in a spray of blood. The gray-suited suspect roared furiously, continuing an unrelenting storm of bullets on the open doorway as a stream of empty brass shells clattered against the hardwood floor.

Without warning, a small black cylinder sailed through the doorway, flashing in a blinding light and deafening the suspect with an ear-shattering blast. The gunman stumbled backwards, wildly brandishing the barrel of his submachine gun in his dazed and desperate attempt, seemingly unaware that the weapon’s magazine was depleted.

Unseen by the man in gray, a crouched figure leaned out from the apartment hall into the doorway, aiming down the sights of a 9mm pistol. With a single flash, the suspect’s skull popped and he slumped forward, slamming face-first into the wooden floorboards.

Lieutenant Vernon rose to his feet and lowered his pistol, gesturing into the living room with his free hand. Three more CTA agents and two medics rushed inside the apartment, and Edward Vernon followed promptly behind.

On point, Agent Jenkins took the next flimsy wooden door down quickly with a single swift boot. As soon as the door flew open, there was an echoing explosion, and Jenkins’s skull burst in a gushing spray of cranial matter.

In the next room – a tiny kitchen with a round steel table in the center – smoke rose from the barrel of Aldous Craven’s enormous .44 magnum. The assassin discharged another two daunting roars from his pistol through the wall next to the open door, more in an intimidation attempt than hope of blind luck.

With lightning fast movements, Aldous stuffed his magnum in the shoulder holster concealed under his black zip-up hooded sweatshirt. The assassin lifted a metal dining chair from the round table, drew it back, and catapulted it through the wide window overlooking the city street two stories below.

Craven broke into a sprint and dove for the empty window frame just as a small black cylinder rolled through the doorway and burst in a blinding flash of light.

At the precise moment that Aldous went flying out the window, Edward Vernon had rushed through the doorway and fired off a single 9mm shot at the fleeing suspect.

“Fuck!” Edward spat through gritted teeth as he lowered his smoking firearm. The blasts were still ringing in his ears and the air was stained with the stench of gunpowder. “I think I just grazed the bastard!”

---

Aldous Craven stared at a bulletin board hanging on the wall of his living room, neurotically running his hands back through his rough, filthy hair. The assassin looked carefully over the papers stuck to the board with thumbtacks: blueprints to Ms. McClure’s home, a chronological outline of her daily schedule, various photos of her and her property, and other intelligence accumulated over the past seven or eight (or perhaps nine?) weeks.

Aldous had been spending a great deal of time looking over that board as the day of action drew nearer. He had employed two guns for hire – John and William O’Reilly – to aid him in his plot to raid the McClure house the next afternoon when she privately met with her corporate executives. When the three men occupied the house and took its inhabitants hostage, they would all be executed one-by-one in front of McClure before she met a bloody end herself. Then, the three would escape – done and done.

Even that was merely a stepping stone in Aldous's ultimate scheme. He had big plans for Deftel Corporation – oh, big plans, indeed. Just the sight of that huge corporate headquarters – with its glamorous neon logo and bright, reflective windows – was enough to send Aldous into a bloodthirsty rage. His life would be made complete the day that building came down in a glorious blaze of rubble. Nobody in the world of Corporate America would ever forget the name Aldous Craven and what it stands for. Corporate leaders would think twice before building vast financial empires that defined American capitalism.

The unkempt assassin was broken from his hypnotic trance of inner dwelling as the door to the kitchen swung open.

“Aldo!” the man in blue cried as he rushed through the door, followed quickly by the man in gray. “The goddamn Feds are here, I’m sure of it! That same van keeps rolling down the street – they’re spying us out, man!”

Something clicked in Aldous’s mind. “No,” he responded, his voice grimly low. “They’re planning something. John, you and your cousin guard the door. I’ll be back.”

The two suited men, each armed with a submachine gun, stood in the small living room and kept silent watch on the door to the apartment hall. Aldous hurried through the opposite door into the kitchen and rushed to the wide window on the far wall.

The street was dark and empty now, except for the dark green sedan among several parked cars at the shoulder of the road.

It was to Aldous’s dismay that, from the view of the street he commanded from his window, he could not keep watch on the apartment building’s northern front door – he merely saw the city street and the narrow side lawn that separated it from the east wall of the complex.

On the other hand, he had become well aware when the Feds arrived. After all, he had landed a spot on the Counter-Terror Administration’s known terrorist list after openly threatening to bomb the Deftel headquarters a week or so earlier.

A heavy fist thumped loudly against the front door of Aldous’s apartment. “Open up, this is the CTA! This is your only warning!”

Aldous Craven stood by the window overlooking the street and waited, his heart and mind racing. A trembling hand pulled a large .44 magnum from his black zip-up sweatshirt and pointed the barrel at the door to the living room, finger wrapped tightly around the trigger waiting impatiently to pull.

---

Edward Vernon’s gripping blue eyes devoured every minute detail of the plans that were posted on the wall before him. He had reviewed the operation again and again prior to that fateful day, yet no amount of double-checking could sate his need to be fully prepared.

“The team’s in position, Lieutenant,” Agent Jenkins spoke from next to Edward. The CTA lieutenant glanced over his shoulder at the agent that kneeled in the armored van with him. He was a younger man with neatly-combed brown hair and light amber eyes. “We’ll move in on your go.”

“Hit the bastard now,” Edward barked. “I’m sick of waiting – I’m going up with the team.”

“Roger,” Jenkins replied, hopping out of the open back doors of the large van.

Edward glanced quickly over the mission blueprints on the van’s inside wall one last time before slapping a loaded magazine into his pistol and yanking back the slide.

Today was finally the day – the climax of his month-long investigation into the suspect. Aldous Craven was his name. A man with no known past or family who was tried for stalking and assaulting a young woman, ultimately determined by a jury to be far too mentally ill to take responsibility for his actions. After a quick trial that achieved zero public attention, he was sentenced indefinitely to an asylum. Due to a technical human error – and this angered Edward more than anything possible – Aldous was back on the streets again within six months.

Recently, locals had noticed a mysterious stranger lurking along Hastings Avenue in Dale, Washington – Craven’s hometown. The descriptions fit Craven perfectly, who at the time had just been released from Portsmouth Asylum by some deadly accident. After an extensive in-depth investigation into Aldous’s personal diaries (which had been used as evidence in his last case to help prove his insanity) Edward Vernon discovered that Craven harbored a brutal hatred for one particular woman who lived on Hastings. Much of what Edward had read were angry, long-winded tirades about the free market economy and big-time multimillion dollar corporations – in particular, the privately-held Deftel Corporation and its president, Elaine McClure.

Aldous seemed to have some sort of history of deeply-seated disdain against McClure personally, but his diaries gave little insight as to why – only seemingly reasonless ravings against a specific woman who held to business ethics that might be simplified as ‘conquer or be conquered.’

In short, Aldous Craven was a violently obsessed zealot of anti-capitalism – anarchist extremist, Edward believed was the technical term used by the Administration.

Perhaps, Edward had considered, Aldous was once a smalltime businessman whose company was erased by McClure’s financial empire. The lieutenant looked into this possibility, but found Aldous had no known previous connection with McClure. It seemed most reasonable to Vernon that Aldous was simply a grotesquely imbalanced moral zealot who despised McClure’s greedy, self-centered business practices (which had been widely exposed and denounced in tabloids and local newspapers).

No matter what the man’s motives were, Lieutenant Vernon had spent the entire month working to obtain a search warrant for Craven’s residence. A judge had finally granted one when McClure discovered noose hanging in her front doorway, tightened over a written bomb threat signed –Aldo C. Edward managed to convince the judge that it had come from Craven, comparing the note’s handwriting to Craven’s diary – it was an exact match, although the name ‘Aldous Craven’ meant nothing to McClure.

Edward hopped out of the van and took a deep breath of the cold, smoky November night air. It was time to wrap up a long, wearing month of strenuous investigation.

Finishing cases like this seemed to lighten a weight on Edward's soul. Yes, people make mistakes, and yes, sometimes these mistakes release individuals who should never have been in society in the first place. That was just a part of life.

But nothing was quite as cathartic to Lieutenant Vernon as the feeling of righting a wrong. At times, he felt his life's sole purpose was to correct mistakes like Aldous Craven – to protect society from those who cheated the system and got off free. Finishing cases like this one made Edward feel like a valiant, golden-armored defender of innocence and righteousness. It made him feel like his duty actually mattered in life's grand scheme. It made him feel like he was actually upholding the safety of the public.

It made him feel like he was making the world a better place, one small piece at a time. All he had to do now was not screw everything up.

As he tailed the squad of eight agents to the front door of the apartment complex, Lieutenant Vernon thought of Craven’s prior accidental release. He vowed silently that he would not allow the courts the chance to lose him again; he would personally be sure Aldous Craven didn’t live to see the sun rise tomorrow morning.

---

Aldous rose unsteadily from the blood-glistening grass, a surge of vomit still brewing madly within him. He was uncontrollably dizzy and his vision had nearly tripled now.

The assassin turned and threw himself weakly at the decrepit side door of Elaine McClure’s house, but the decayed frame refused to budge. Aldous pulled the magnum from his sweatshirt, drew his arm back, and smashed the butt of the steel grip against the old door’s dirty glass window, shattering it completely.

Aldous reached through the broken window, opened the door from the inside, and rushed hastily into the house – McClure must have heard his graceless entry. The assassin staggered through a tiny washroom strewn with dirty clothes before entering a darkened kitchen. Craven stopped in his path, panting and clutching the moist sweatshirt over his bleeding side as he gazed about the shadows.

The kitchen was nigh-on pitch black, but Aldous could make out silhouetted outlines through the shadows. There was a wide square island of bleak marble counter in the center of the kitchen, and just past it was a short human figure with some long slender object trembling in its hands.

Aldous’s eyes widened. He dove to his chest on the tile floor, wincing as agony amplified in all his wounds, and the room filled suddenly with a blinding flash and deafening thunder.

“Out of my house, you bastard!” an older, gray-haired woman screamed hysterically. She pumped the slide of her shotgun, bellowing smoke and the stench of gunpowder from its scalding chamber, and an empty shell clattered to the floor.

Aldous crawled through the darkness of the kitchen, taking cover behind the island in the room’s center. There was another flash, echoing blast, and pumping slide – a shot in the dark.

She’s lost me, Aldous thought, magnum clutched tight in his sweating hands. The assassin cringed in agony as he pushed himself to the right, sliding along the tile floor with his back pressed against the counter island.

McClure leaped out from Aldous’s left flank and fired a shell downward just as the assassin rounded the island’s corner. Aldous seized the moment as the woman pumped her shotgun, leaping to his feet and firing an ear-rupturing blast from his massive revolver.

Elaine McClure screamed in terror and fled from the kitchen as the enormous magnum round burst a cabinet on the wall behind her. Aldous transcended his overwhelming physical pain and pursued his victim in a staggered sprint, rushing through the door of her escape to an adjacent hallway that extended to the left.

The assassin threw his revolver forward as soon as he entered the hall, and the daunted older woman retreated quickly through an arbitrary door. A sharp click emitted from the darkness as soon as the door slammed shut.

Aldous tried the door – locked. Without hesitation, he pointed the barrel of his bulky revolver at the handle and squeezed the trigger. The sharpened pierce of the ringing .44 blast drowned out the sound of McClure’s elongated screams as a small chunk of the door itself was blown away, completely obliterating the doorknob mechanism. Aldous threw the sole of his foot at the wooden door and sent it flying open.

Elaine stood at the opposite side of a bedroom, shotgun aimed at the hallway. Aldous strode slowly inside, magnum forward in two violently trembling hands.

“Oh, God,” McClure coughed weakly as tears streamed profusely down her cheeks. The luminescence of the moon shone through two small windows, illuminating the face of the silhouetted assassin who stood feathered in the blackness of the shadows. The shotgun dropped from the woman’s hands and clattered against the carpet. “Jeremy? Is that really you, my little angel? I haven’t seen you in almost five years…”

Aldous was sobbing now, and his face was deformed with a hideous amalgam of sorrow, regret, and retribution. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

A blast roared in the tiny bedroom, and Elaine McClure’s face caved into itself in a river of cranial matter. The woman’s corpse slammed back against the blood-drenched wall and slumped down into a miserable fetal position.

The assassin stood sobbing uncontrollably for several moments, blaring sirens now just outside McClure’s home. There was a loud crash at the front door, followed by some shouts and a wave of dozens of heavy bootsteps.

Jeremy McClure – now known almost solely under his pseudonym Aldous Craven – turned and faced the door to the hall, standing in the center of the room in a growing pool of his mother’s blood. After the longest, most agonizing two seconds of his life, the doorway was filled with bulky uniformed figures dressed in black fatigues that read CTA.

“HANDS IN THE AIR!” one agent screamed furiously. “DROP THE WEAPON AND GET DOWN! THIS IS YOUR ONLY CHANCE!”

The assassin stared momentarily down the barrels of the flashlight-mounted assault rifles before making a swift decision. Aldous lifted his magnum and placed the warm silver muzzle against his own temple. Without wasting another second, he squeezed the trigger.

Click.