章節 14: WHEN YOU HAVE NO CHOICE, WELL YOU HAVE NO CHOICE (5)

Faced with an unexpected situation, Moa demonstrated great lucidity. First of all, he put on his boy's briefs he had finally failed to insert into Ferrash's mouth. Then he put on his pants and finally rushed toward the eighth floor.

On the sixth floor, he met the soldier who checked the invitation cards. He was indeed one of the soldiers who had participated in the third joust. Because of his age, it was clear to see that he had not been in the third regiment for a very long time.

This was probably the reason why he had showered so quickly, hoping to take advantage of the premature end of the last joust to arrive before the others at the refectory and to have a greater choice in desserts. He as collared as soon as he left the locker room, and since then, he had promised himself you wouldn't catch him doing that again. In any case, he had not received any specific order to stop Moa and let him pass after having checked the authenticity of his invitation card.

Under exceptional circumstances, it was necessary to display exceptional behavior. Arrived at the door of the meeting room, Moa did not bother to knock, and he directly entered.

From the start, he showed that the situation was not normal.

Everyone, himself the first, knew that he was not welcome, so he did not give them time to get out of their stupor and to protest against his irruption, both inappropriate and outside the regulatory framework.

Moa went on quickly, a speech rate kept under control but fast, enough not to leave his audience the slightest chance of interrupting him despite the risk of running out of air.

It was awful, what was he saying, it was horrible, catastrophic, calamitous, cataclysmic… the apocalypse was falling on them and as he had exhausted all the synonyms he could think of, he went on. After he met with Ferrash at the cultural center doorstep, Moa hadn't left for the mess right away; his audience understood, or at least had to understand because Ferrash was just a loafer and it was never quite possible to trust a loafer completely. If there was one quality that all had to truly appreciate with Moa, it was his professional perfectionism. He had to make sure that Ferrash had delivered the report. His reputation was at stake. Otherwise he could not have eaten quietly and it would not have been very good for his already dysfunctional digestion.

But hey, that was not the subject, he got lost in his story. So, while he was downstairs waiting wisely for the return of Ferrash, Commander Hacion, Dekor, came for the meeting. Everyone knew him. He was never on time. With him, punctuality meant that the sky was about to fall on their heads, it was the imminence of the end of the world; it was the Last Judgment, Armageddon, Ragnarök, all at the same time. Again, Moa had drained his ideas of synonyms.

Anyhow, it was not the subject, he got lost again in his story. So the commander had arrived, as always, a few minutes late, and surprised that Moa was still downstairs and not yet got into the building for the meeting. Commander Dekor Hacion, they knew, he was someone close to his men, and the little worries of his men were his own worries. Everyone who frequented gay-friendly hangouts was aware of this, Moa himself did not frequent these places because it was not his thing, he was straight, but according to rumors, several of them frequented those places so they had to be quite capable of to judging the personality of the commander, better than he could.

Anyway, it was not the subject, he got lost again in his story. The fact was that the commander had started talking to Moa. It was a worldly conversation, nothing very professional but quickly, what was bred in the bone came out in the flesh, the two men had started to comment on some actions of the morning jousts and Pom's, the referee's behavior and decisions. A leopard could not change its spots, Moa was himself someone who was not very comfortable when it came to having a banal conversation and the commander; they were certainly more intimate than him with the latter to judge his personality, speaking about work, he was a chatterbox.

It was not worth telling him, he already knew it, it was not the subject, he was losing focus again, but they had to understand, the shock, it was not easy to relate what had just happened.

Okay, just a moment to organize the information in his brain and Moa continued. Suddenly, there was a noise. It was difficult to qualify it without the use of onomatopoeias but to put it simply it was like a broken glass. The uncommon thing was that this sound came from just above them. They could believe him, because of his role as a death counter, Moa had acute senses and he could recognize the origin of a sound, even in a space like the street below which could reverberate the waves and produce echoes, it was not beyond his abilities.

Okay, okay, he was concise now. The noise was quickly followed by a shower of shards of glass, which confirmed the nature and the origin of the noise, a broken glass right above their heads. Actually, above their heads, there was just the facade of the cultural center so it had to come from a glass panel, somewhere on the frontage.

Everything was a little muddled in Moa's head, they had to understand; it was the shock. So, at one point it was either just before or just after the glass rain, but it was not very important, both events were more or less concomitant. The two men had looked up, probably to double-check the source of the noise and put words on the phenomenon. And what they… glass was not all that fell.

There was a body. By the time he had looked up and had made sense of what was going on, the body had already started to fall from the fourth floor. From such a height, the free fall of a body took barely two seconds to make the journey, by calculating, it must have been one second and seven tenths, it was a fairly short time. Finally, even if their brains were not involved in the reaction a reflex response took a few moments, and mobilizing their muscles to avoid the body in time was almost impossible, too many synaptic connections were at stake. One second and seven tenth, he didn't know if they were aware, but it was a very short lapse of time.

The body crashed onto the commander at a speed of, calculating it must have been 17 meters per second or more than 60 kilometers per hour. They could imagine the impact.

Moa had escaped by the skin of his teeth because ultimately, it could have been him. A lucky escape of less than two meters, they could imagine the shock. As for the noise that ensued, even a series of onomatopoeias could not describe it. There was the noise of a first impact, a deaf noise, and then the noise of broken bones; it was because the street was quiet that it was perceptible. After that, the noise of another impact, a dry noise, and finally, the noise of other broken bones, easily discernable this time...

Thinking about it a little more, because he did not have time to do it yet, the series of noises made sense. The first impact, for sure, it was the one between the two bodies. The commander was plump, even a bit chubby so the deafness he perceived. When something hit a fluffy surface, it was generally the result it produced. The first sounds of broken bones, those almost inaudible, must have been the commander's bones. A muted sound testified that these bones were in a deafening sound box, that the commander's body could well have been. However, Moa couldn't say for sure that all the bones belonged to the commander; perhaps also some might belong to the man who had fallen but from where he was standing, identifying precisely which bones and from whom were fractured, it was outside the spectrum of his abilities. The second impact, the dry sound he heard was doubtlessly the head of the fallen man on the cobblestones. The noise was sufficiently characteristic, and at 60 kilometers per hour, it was one hell of an impact. The last sounds of fracture, it was easy to figure out. The head of the fallen man had violently hit the ground, the sutures all around the cranium which at his age would have united the skull in one entity were divided and new lines of fracture had appeared. In this instance, Moa was experienced with regard to the craniofacial traumas which were frequent during the jousts. To put in another way, he knew what he was saying.

Yes, he got lost again, but it was the shock, they could understand, without realizing it, he had just escaped death. To come back, even if the damage to his head was significant, based on his morphology and that no one except him had any legitimate reason to be on the fourth floor, Moa could certify that the person who had fallen was Ferrash. Suicide, it was certainly a suicide. Ferrash should have ended his life himself. If asked why, Moa was not a psychologist, and although wide open, he couldn't get into his head.

Ferrash was not the problem, in the end, nobody cared about him. The problem was the identity of the man he had come across. He was the commander and this commander was dead. They could believe his judgment for these cases; it was one of his areas of expertise.

The accident was tragic and Moa did not see what he could have done. The fall had been fast. It was his first live defenestration, and really he didn't see what else he could have done.

It was a disaster and he repeated this word until no one could track the number of occurrences.

It was the reason he was forced to disobey the order he received not to go up. After all, he was forbidden to go up to give his report on the deaths during the jousts this morning, but not to go up to prevent new deaths which rendered the first report obsolete. Ferrash had come down, well, but his condition no longer allowed him to report on the situation.

He hadn't knocked on arrival, this was the truth and he was really sorry about that, but they could understand, it was the shock.

Finally, here it was, the death toll was three. In their misfortune, two of the deaths had occurred before the unbelieving eyes of the death counter and not before the referees so they would have no influence on the final result.

Moa stopped there, he would have killed for a glass of water. He had no saliva, his throat was dry. He let his audience digest the flow of information that had passed on to them.