Serial Fiction - Blog Posts

Center Cut - A Sam Hook novel

When the truck enters the battlefield she unleashes a flurry of hell on the enemy. Crystol, who is a unique hair stylist, working topless. Sam finds a connection with her beyond the sexual energy. Together they fight to protect each other and defeat a secret organization trying to unleash a deadly virus.

Part 6: 🦾🐚As they swim through a narrow tunnel, a massive boulder shifts above them. Ren's quick thinking saves them, but the boulder blocks their path. Using his tail, Ren attempts to move the boulder, but it barely budges. Exhausted and frustrated, he wants to give up. 💔 #ObstaclesAbound

Part 7: Luminescent Coral Polyps 🌿💡 Just when all seems lost, Ren notices a peculiar coral formation pulsating with a soft, mesmerizing light. As he approaches, the coral polyps suddenly extend, creating a glowing pathway through the dark tunnel. The polyps sway gently in the current, as if beckoning Ren to follow their lead. Ren's mother, recognizing the coral's unusual behavior as a sign of hope, encourages him to trust in the guidance of the ocean. With renewed determination, Ren pushes forward, and the boulder slowly moves, revealing a hidden path. 💪 #GlimmerOfHope

Part 8: 🌋💥As they continue their journey, the group encounters a sudden underwater volcanic eruption. Scalding steam and ash fill the water, obscuring their vision. Ren, relying on his instincts, guides his family through the murky depths, narrowly escaping the burning debris. 😰 #NaturalDisaster

Renard the sea fox

Part 1: 🦊🎨

In a vibrant underwater world, Renard (or Ren for short), the sea fox, is born into a family of legendary artists. Despite having no limbs, he dreams of creating masterpieces. But his attempts to paint with his tail and teeth are met with laughter and mockery. Feeling defeated, Ren abandons his dreams, just like everyone abandoned him. 💔

Renard the sea fox

Part 1: 🦊🎨

In a vibrant underwater world, Renard (or Ren for short), the sea fox, is born into a family of legendary artists. Despite having no limbs, he dreams of creating masterpieces. But his attempts to paint with his tail and teeth are met with laughter and mockery. Feeling defeated, Ren abandons his dreams, just like everyone abandoned him. 💔

Faustus '47: Ch. 2 - Darkness

Photo by Veit Hammer on Unsplash

Chapter 2: Darkness

  The night’s darkness descended on them as they slowly crept into the cemetery, and soon Caldwell was squinting and swearing under his breath as the Scot ahead of him kept disappearing. The clinging rain-mist that had descended was not helping either. Knee-high grass clung wetly to his legs as he hunched forward, one foot slowly in front of the other, and every so often he found himself suddenly lurching into a gravestone or cast-iron railing around a small family plot. Wicker would turn back and hiss, and Caldwell would slowly fumble onwards in the new direction, trying to home in on the hiss and instead just discovering more gravestones with his kneecaps. The darkness was absolute.

  Caldwell felt the grass underfoot changing, becoming shorter, and suddenly he was on what felt like a gravel patch. The grating of the stones overfoot sounded like a gunshot to his straining ears, and Wicker was at his side moments later, gripping his upper arm.

  “Careful now. We’re almost in the old Breton district.” Wicker breathed the words into Caldwell’s ear, the sound barely audible over the soft patter of the rain. “It should be over the little rise ahead.”

  Caldwell murmured agreement, and wondered how the Scot could see a little rise ahead.

  True to his word, after another handful of minutes of slowly shuffling up what felt like an incline, Wicker stopped Caldwell and pulled him down to his knees, and the two crept forward on hands and knees from there. Caldwell kept the Sten slung around his neck, praying that the muzzle or action would not foul on something in the grass they snaked through. The ground was cold and sharp beneath his hands and knees, and his woollen trouser legs were soon soaked through. Pebbles and stray shards of gravel dug into his palms as well, making him grit his teeth at the sharp pains that sporadically flashed up his arms.

  After almost colliding head first with another gravestone, the first hint of light ahead crept into Caldwell’s sight. Buttery yellow flickered and twisted through the grass ahead of him, and upon reaching the crest of the rise, he found himself looking down on the Breton district of the Sains Grieu cemetery. Wicker was already there, flat on the wet ground, and pulled Caldwell down beside him to study the scene below.

  The Breton district, based on the old records that Caldwell had been able to scrounge up in Ireland, dated back to the time of the Crusades - if not earlier. A long list of noble - and a shorter list of less noble - knights and lords had been buried here in those years, and the centuries since had seen the district expand with more tombs, mouldering mausoleums, and burrowing crypts as others had been laid to rest in the same area. Statues of weeping angels, broken-armed men, and a host of other funeral themes loomed into the night sky here, and only the faint light of the distant lanterns made their outlines visible. Darkness loomed thick and heavy where the light failed to fall, and created a veritable maze between their position and the light ahead.

  It was the list of less noble dead that had drawn them here, after the informant message had arrived those weeks ago. The Paranormal Division had been canvassing the French countryside for years now, seeking out old tombs and burial places - but Sains Grieu was different. Sir Jacques Montbard was allegedly buried there - the same man who had, according to the rumours, sold his soul to the djinns of Persia during the Crusade, and returned a changed man. The story had been legend and myth for centuries, recorded as a footnote in the serious histories of the Crusades - until Caldwell and the other researchers in Dublin made the link between the stories told of Montbard, and those coming out of Occupied Europe. What the stories recounted of Montbard and his deeds in France had sounded like pure fiction - until 1942 changed everything.

  Someone else had made the connection too, though, which was what brought Caldwell and Wicker to this place. More lights were going up in the distance, achieving little more than multiplying the number of shadows and pools of darkness that lay ahead of them, and after a signal from Wicker they both set off down the other side of the rise. The grass here was shorter and thinner, and crawling along on their bellies took them into the shadowy alleys between the tombs in no time. Here, over moss-caked gravel and through standing puddles of water, they wend their way steadily closer, until eventually they found themselves at the perimeter of the light. Drawing up close behind a gravestone, Caldwell took a moment to check the muzzle and action of his weapon, fumbling through the motions with cold, stiff fingers, before turning his attention to the sight ahead.

  There were seven of them.

  Four were regular footmen, clad in bulky field-grey trench coats and with the lantern light gleaming off their rain-streaked coal-scuttle helmets. They had rifles slung across their backs, and were hauling more lantern stands into position from a stack of crates further away. Drops of rain glistened on their equipment and on the damp patches on their coats, but they worked in silence, without complaint.

  The other three were as different as could be. The first was a field chaplain, with a purple sash around his neck that reached down almost to his knees. A peaked cap gave him no protection from the rain, and the medals on his chest glittered wetly. He stood with head bowed, as if in prayer - Caldwell thought he could see his lips moving, but the distance was too great to be certain.

  The second was one of what the reports were calling necromancers. His uniform was black from head to toe, and a leather coat hung around his shoulders like bat wings. He too wore a peaked cap, but where the death’s head of the SS would usually leer there was instead an eye symbol in silvery metal, lined with purple. The same purple eye was visible on the collars of the four footmen, and had become the unique identifier of the Paranormal Division in 1942 already. By now, five years later, it usually evoked feelings of bowel-churning terror wherever it surfaced.

  An articulated, cable-clad gauntlet covered the left hand and much of the left arm of the necromancer, and a faint blue glow emanated from the shoulder area where it was strapped onto the man. Caldwell squinted and tried to see what powered the device, but the telltale cables which usually linked them to a generator of some kind, were conspicuously absent for this unit.

  Wicker nudged Caldwell, and pointed at the third figure.

  “Is that our contact?” The Scot’s eyes were large in his darkened face, and Caldwell could only give a grim-faced nod in return.

  The third figure was Codename Merida, and she was already soaking wet. Clad in only a thin white shift, and with her hands bound together in front of her, the Special Operations Executive agent knelt on the ground between the necromancer and the chaplain. A livid bruise covered one side of her face, where it was visible under her wet, dark hair, and a fabric strip had been used to gag her quite thoroughly.

  In the centre of attention, ringed by the lantern rigs, stood a waist-high stone casket partially overgrown with vines. A stone statue of a knight, depicted in Crusader grab and almost black with lichen, stood with arms and sword raised behind it, warding off a sun that had already fled hours before. The lanterns around it limned the statue in orange and yellow, and its outline blurred and shifted in the thin veils of rain that swept down.

  The rain tapered off just as the last lanterns got hauled into position, and when their lights were finally lit, the four footmen began to spool out reels of copper wire, connecting each lantern rig to the other via some complex pattern. Caldwell followed their movement like a hawk, drawing a mental image of the copper outline as it took shape, and when they were halfway done he could already see what the final design would be: a giant septagram, each arm tipped by a lantern rig, and with a large ovoid eye shape in the middle, centred around the casket. The reason for the oil lanterns, and the lack of generator lines on the necromancer’s gauntlet, suddenly fell into place in the professor’s mind: they were crafting the Eye of Ankara, a ritual that was notoriously troubled by the presence of mechanical machines.

  Whatever they wanted to do here, was going to be a highly sensitive ritual.

  A plan began to unfold in Caldwell’s mind as he studied the setup, and when the footmen were briefly on the other side of the clearing, he rolled sideways and ended up next to Wicker. The Scot was a puddle of darkness and mud, invisible except for the whites of his eyes. Caldwell realised that the man’s Enfield was aimed unerringly at the necromancer, and hastily clapped his one hand over the rifle’s rear sight.

  “Don’t shoot until I give the signal.” It was Caldwell’s turn to hiss, and it took a long moment before Wicker’s eyes shifted from the Germans and met the professor’s. Caldwell saw blackness there, blacker than the night that surrounded them, and the cobwebbed voices in his head seemed to titter with glee. “They are going to use Merida as some part of this ceremony, but before that there is going to be a lot of talking and ritual. I need you on the other side of the clearing, behind that angel with the missing head. Wait for my signal there.”   Caldwell pointed to where he wanted Wicker to move, and after a brief moment the Scot grunted and lowered his rifle. He scuttled sideways behind another gravestone, drawing his rifle close to his body, and was gone from sight a moment later. Caldwell blinked and squinted hard into the darkness, but there was no sight the man had ever been there.

  In the ring of lights, the necromancer barked an order at the footmen once they were done with the copper spools, and the four men retreated out of the circle to where the distant supply crates squatted in the dark. The man’s voice was low and hard, and when he ordered the chaplain to the head of the stone casket, Caldwell caught a glimpse of hard blue eyes flashing below the black cap. The recruitment and training programme that produced these men for the Paranormal Division was a great mystery to Caldwell and his colleagues, although it seemed to favour candidates that were cold, calculating, and very much in control of every encounter and event they partook in. Shrieking demagogues and bloodthirsty lunatics did not seem to pass into their ranks.

  Caldwell shifted, trying to make himself more comfortable atop the grave mound he was lying on, and gently drew the journal from his jacket pocket as the three figures in the septagram moved into position. Merida, still kneeling, was dragged to her feet by the necromancer and taken to the foot of the casket, where a loose end of one of the copper wires was quickly wrapped around her left forearm. The Crusader statue loomed over her, as cold and as silent as the hands that worked the copper wire. Caldwell waited - prayed - for her to struggle and resist, but the woman was limp and unresponsive to the hands that dealt with her. Whatever the interrogators had done to her, had taken its toll, and now she could only shiver in her wet shift.

  One of the lanterns guttered and suddenly went out, right in front of the headless angel where Caldwell had directed Wicker. The professor found himself holding his breath as one of the footmen hurried up, tinkered with the lantern to relight it, and then returned to his previous post. Caldwell thought he could see two eyes gleaming in the dark behind the statue, but it was probably his imagination. Wicker would not be seen until he wanted to be seen.

  With his journal opened before him, Caldwell slowly paged through it until he found the section containing the Ankara notes. The lantern light was fragmented and dim here, between the gravestones, and he had to squint hard to make the letters on the page focus. It was one of the rituals they had discovered second-hand from sources here in Europe, and had never managed to replicate in Dublin. It always seemed to fail at a critical moment - after they learnt to do it far away from anything mechanical and moving - and the longer Caldwell studied the scene in front of him, the more he began to suspect the reason for their failures.

  They had never tested it with a human sacrifice.

  At the casket, with Merida finally secured and the chaplain still standing with his head bowed, the necromancer positioned himself at the midpoint between the two, and began to speak in a clear, sharp voice. His German was only mildly accented - Caldwell placed him around the eastern side of Berlin within a few words - and carried through the lit clearing with ease. With Merida on his left, and the chaplain on his right, the necromancer stood looking across the casket - almost directly at where Caldwell lay, and the professor had a disconcerting moment of terror when he imagined that the German was actually looking right at him.

  The German words soon snapped over into something else, something Slavic, and Caldwell felt his eyes drawn to matching phrases on the journal pages. The paper seemed to shiver under his fingertips, vibrating in sympathy to the words being uttered, and the first outward sign of the building power was when the lanterns started to dim.

  Merida’s damp shape seemed to come to her senses at that time, and she began to struggle, but the necromancer clamped his gauntlet onto the back of her neck and kept chanting, never missing a beat. Caldwell could see the pain etched across the woman’s face even across the clearing, but between her bonds, the copper tying her into the septagram, and the gauntlet on her neck, she could go nowhere.

  The chaplain lifted his head at the same time and started chanting something in Latin, words that Caldwell could only half-hear, as a counterpoint to the chanting from the necromancer. Frantically trying to memorise the phrases, Caldwell did not even notice the copper wires starting to glow - until the lanterns suddenly popped out, and the blue glow of the septagram was the only light left in the clearing.

  That, and Merida’s shrieking as her forearm began to glow and wither.

Eco-War One - Ch.1

Another of my serialized, field-log-style stories. This one went on for quite a while, and is slowly but surely turning into the outline for a proper novel. Alien mushrooms that take over the planet and cause an ecological crisis - what is there not to love? Welcome to the world of Eco-War One!

Diary Log: Max Denton Field Engineer 2nd Class, Eco-Corps XXXI Habitat 17 “Blue Valley” Somewhere south of Warsaw, Poland September 2nd, 2035

We got to the subterranean housing units today, finally. Three months waiting out at the Warsaw camp, and then the transports finally picked us up two days ago. Cramped beyond belief, on those fat trains with the hermetic sealing, but after Warsaw we’re all used to living ass-to-elbow by now.

We’re on the seventh floor, Blue Lane, number 300-something. Still busy unpacking and figuring out the housing unit – everything is either brand new, or still covered in construction dust. The shelter has something like fifteen levels in total, with around a thousand housing units per level, and four people (minimum) per unit. Do the math: sixty thousand people in one place, and there are hundreds of these new silos being dug and furnished every month. Plenty of UN and Eco-Corps guys here too, in their blue berets and vests, and we run through weapon scanners whenever we want to leave the level or visit any of the communal spaces. Makes sense, I guess, but I can’t imagine how long it will take before it becomes chaos down here. The “new paint” smell will wear off around the same time as the patience and goodwill of everyone crammed in here.

Do we have an option? The camps at Warsaw were meant to be a step up from the ruins to the south and west, and even those camps were rough. Food lines for hours every day, and decontamination teams everywhere to steam and acid-scrub everything two or even three times a day. Illness everywhere, from regular vitamin deficiencies – and those horrible flu coughs – to blue-lung and scalp-rot and that weird thing where your nails fall out and your fingertips go numb. Our one tent-neighbor had that, and cut his one finger off by accident while making dinner one night. Didn’t feel a thing until he noticed the blood everywhere.

Will the shelter here end up being any better? Million-dollar question. Government says yes, and the Eco-Corps signed off on the idea. On paper, quite simple: make a sterile environment, practice strict access control with decontamination, and then – in theory – you can maintain the clean environment indefinitely. We live below ground, we work below ground, we spend all our time below ground, and only the brave or stupid folks find a reason to go back to the surface again. Well: the brave/stupid and the Eco-Corps guys, although they are a different case. Good luck getting through the UN lines too, for that matter: they control all access here, to keep Shining Path and the pluon out, and are basically going to be the white blood cells that protect us.

Grim though, actually: what does that make us, lurking below the ground?

A seed, hiding out the winter and blight, to sprout again in springtime?

Or a cancer, in a dying body, slowly rotting away in the dark?

Time will tell.

September 5th, 2035

They switched on the big UV lamps in the communal spaces today, and people literally cried. People who have not seen clear skies or plain sunlight in months – or even years, in some cases – crying as those big lamps came on. Felt amazing, and I’m sure it was 90% psychological. Mary agreed when we discussed it over dinner: that feeling of being underground, of living in a can, becomes a lot more bearable if you can at least go out to a space that looks and feels a bit like what we grew up with. Even if it is just forty-five minutes per day in the Prime Zone (that’s what they call the big park in the middle, where you get direct light); the rest of the time, we can use the walkways around the light-spaces to at least catch some reflected light. Access to the Prime Zone is purely by your ID chip, although some people are already gambling and selling off their PZ times to fund other habits. Bound to happen eventually. We have vitamin D supplements in most of our foodstuffs now, so skipping out on PZ time won’t kill you, but still – people will abuse this, I can see it happening (is that my old analyst training speaking, or my general distrust by now?)

Makes me wonder how they are going to regulate the temperature here, now, with those big lamps going for fifteen or sixteen hours a day, but I’m guessing the smart people who built this place already thought of that. Probably some type of draft circulation system in the upper reaches of the habitat, getting pumped out to the agri-caverns, and then cold air coming from downstairs somewhere to replace it. Round and round like a good little hydraulic system, except this one keeps upwards of sixty thousand people warm/cool.

Speaking of agri-caverns: Mary and her team opened up the next set of tunnels yesterday, and she came home with bloody fingers and missing fingernails after installing UV streamers and hydroponic lines for her entire double shift. They are behind schedule on getting the food sections up and running. Nothing life-threatening, given our stockpiles of foam-bread and that algae derivatives from Sweden, but it will slow things down for sure here. They are meant to have protein reactors up there by the end of the month, and no-one is sure about that timeline currently. Plenty to worry about regardless.

September 8th, 2035

Mary did another double shift yesterday, and passed out on our couch in the living space. I haven’t mentioned our housemates yet – Red and Jenna Holton, from “somewhere to the west” originally – and that is pretty much just because we rarely see them at this point. Red is on the boring crew on level thirteen, breaking ground on more side tunnels (the type of excavations which Mary’s team then uses) and putting in more time than Mary, and Jenna is in logistics at the warehouse district. She only works single shifts, but seems to spend her down-time at some other place. I think she’s not a fan of my Eco-Corps uniform, and is actively avoiding the housing unit while I am here. You’d think someone in Planning & Allocations would have checked for that before lumping us together.

Which brings me to the real news for tonight: Rec Unit 173 is heading out tomorrow, and I’m in charge of Bravo team. Standard water reclamation run, all by the book. Nothing fancy, nothing new, just the usual routine of finding and moving the old hardware. We have a Peacekeeper squad in support, just in case, and we have half a sector grid to work through. It will be the first reclamation run for our habitat, so the expectations are low/high: low for success, high for glitches and speed bumps. If we can just get all the civie volunteers to move in the same direction and not touch the wrong things, it will already be a Win in my books. Bonus points if no-one dies.

I wonder how the habitat is going to handle deaths - I just realized I have never given it any thought. Mulch reactors, to recycle and compost? Or would that be too much of a contamination risk, especially if there was illness involved? Cremation is probably the safest. Graves are out of the question, we won’t have any type of space for that in the bedrock layers - and if we buried people higher up in the softer soil layers, the risk of contamination comes back into play. I should ask Mary when she wakes. I probably won’t like the answer.

Diary Log: Max Denton Rec Unit 173, Eastern Defense Sector 7 Somewhere south-east of Warsaw, Poland September 9th, 2035 Mission: Day 1

Reclamation run Zero One, night one. RR01_01 according to the file header.

What a fucking day.

I’m writing this on my wrist compad, from inside an old apartment building we managed to find a clear space in just before sunset. The trucks are parked in the courtyard below, with the Peacekeepers on perimeter duty. Can’t say I envy them the night ahead. This sector is hell.

We left the habitat around 07:30, with the Peacekeepers leading in their Mantis rover and our two fat-wheeled Solomon trucks bumbling along behind them. Ten bodies per vehicle, myself in charge of the second Solomon (one team per vehicle). Driver is a kid named Eckelson, from somewhere up north. Drives well, but has not yet figured out how braking distances work. We set off to the sector grid we had been allocated, and it took us almost five hours of driving to get there. In a straight line, on a normal highway, it would have been perhaps ninety minutes? Absolute madness. We’re in a part of what used to be Poland, and now falls under that nebulous, shifting “Eastern Defense Sector 7” label. The handful of still-standing traffic signs we passed were in Polish, I think, but Eckelson said some of the later ones were Ukrainian. Who knows what this place was called before - no-one lives here any longer. The Shining Path warlords in Belarus have apparently been probing this area, and we passed some fresh wrecks along the side of the one road. Old Soviet personnel carriers, and those strange organic-looking poly-plastic rovers they have been growing in the Hong Kong labs. Then a handful of Eco-Corps wrecks too, mostly smaller rovers like the Mantis. Looks like two scout elements that had smashed into each other before retreating. Dense pluon forests surrounded the contact point, with golf-heads and purple parasols dominating, and I’m guessing the electro-magnetic interference from the golf-heads blinded the two scout columns until they were right on top of each other. Imagine dying because an alien fungus blinded your battle-cams…

Lunchtime arrived just as we reached our grid point. It had been an industrial park on the edge of a river before - in the Great Before, like the new generation calls it - and now… just ruins, and chaos, and rampant fungal growth everywhere. Gorkassy Park, something. The pluon lay on everything like a fluffy blanket, softening the corners and blurring the lines and making everything look half-melted and organic. You have to really squint and look hard - and use your imagination - to see the industrial lines beneath it all, to spot the sheds and warehouses and manufacturing floors that had once crowded the space here. Now: just pluon. Light purples, yellows, and shades of corpse-white, in a thick wave, drowning everything. We dismounted and started quartering the area, following behind the Peacekeepers as they checked for anything  hostile. Well… hostile and able to be shot. A large part of what we face here, cares little for men with guns and bombs trying to deter it. Everyone was in an Hostile Environment suit - us in bulky suits from the science division, the Peacekeepers in their sleek neo-carapace kit - and after the Peacekeepers finished their perimeters we began to spread out and follow our own search pattern.

We lost two Alphas and one Bravo before the first hour was out. The two Alpha guys walked into a room filled with bulloa bulbs, and got blown sideways through a third-storey window when something in the room triggered the bulbs. The third guy, behind them, says they stopped to check something on the floor, and the Peacekeepers found what could be an old SP tripwire in the leftovers, but it could have been anything. There’s old industrial wire everywhere, even more now after the blast. I’m furious - and resigned, now, more than ever - about the fact that no-one had briefed the idiots about bulloa bulbs. They are basically the claymore landmines of the pluon world, and if Hollywood has taught us anything after years of Vietnam movies, it is that you do not mess with claymores. Especially when the damn things grew their own spiderweb triggers through every space they occupied. With their spores now released, the next time we come back to that same space, in a month or two, the entire room would be solid with the same bulloa. Then when that mass blows, it takes the walls with it, and the spores spread even further, and… before you know it, in the space of a year or two, the building itself will be only rubble.

The Bravo kid stepped on a plank with a rusty nail that went through the ankle of his boot. He panics, rips his boot and mask off when he hyperventilates - and gets a lungful of cryateen and blue honey spores before his buddy gets his mask back on. We managed to get him back to the Solomon before he went into cardiac arrest, but after that nothing helped. He’s in a body bag in one of the storage compartments now, along with what is left of the two Alphas after their accident. Just a kid who volunteered to help, with some spectacularly bad luck.

We finished our initial sweeps after that, gave everyone the safety brief again, and tried to find a place to secure for the night. There were old laborer apartments on the western perimeter of the complex, and someone had fired out the fourth and fifth floor in the one block some time ago. I’m surprised the entire place had not burned down, actually, but something must have stopped it from spreading. We’re on those fired floors now, using the clean spaces - if you consider the soot and ashes a safer alternative to a pluon landscape - for our night camp. Everyone in their environ-cocoons for the night, and two people on guard at the stairway at all times. My shift is next. I don’t think I’m sleeping tonight.

September 10th, 2035 Mission: Day 2

I haven’t been awake this long, without sleep, for a long time. Today was a blur: we finished mapping the industrial complex, identified the components worth salvaging, and started dismantling the smaller components. Two eight-hour shifts, back to back. This entire area is classed as Environmentally Compromised, Unfit for Human Occupation - ECUHO, or just Echo when you get tired of pronouncing all the letters - so we can take what we need. Well: we being the Eco-Corps, and only as long as we have the proper paperwork. With the UN legislation from 2029/’30 coming in to aid the reclamation projects, Echo labels now let us strip and salvage anything we find above-ground, as long as there are no living claimants in the same area. A bit like the old maritime laws on finding a derelict ship in international waters, I guess, except we’re not trying to lay salvage and insurance claims against abandoned fishing trawlers in the Atlantic. Now we call it Echo because we’re left looking at echoes of our past lives (not my observation, someone on the Mime-net channel shared that a couple of years ago). Morbid, but not entirely untrue either. I feel like a carrion eater every time I take apart a machine or compo-stack that used to do something else before the world went to hell here. Seeing all those things that used to mean so much to other people, in another time, as they went through their daily tasks and dreams - and now we take it apart and use it to keep our habitats running. One of the Bravos said it felt like stealing clothing from a corpse, and the squad was pretty damn quiet after that.

No fatalities today, and only one casualty: an Alpha kid broke his arm when a container stack shifted and pinned him to a wall. No suit breach, thank the Pope. Kid’s doped to the gills on a stretcher in the Alpha Solomon now, with a tough tomorrow ahead of him.

We also had an afternoon light show, just after the clouds pulled in. Something detonated high up in the atmosphere to the north, and we had greens and purples dancing inside the clouds for a couple of minutes before it faded again. Almost like the Northern Lights, but definitely not something as harmless as solar radiation striking the atmosphere. The Peacekeepers shared a report from their battle-net, about a strike at Halverdt Station - but Halverdt is way over to the north-west, by my reckoning, so whatever we saw was something else. Shining Path testing new cloud-seeders? Fuck knows. Black rain rolled in after that, and we kept our work indoors for the handful of minutes that it pissed down with soot and black mold and kimpani blisters outside. The blisters look like little plastic eggs stuck inside a wet envelope - an orb with flat wings curling out in four directions - and they pop the moment you touch them. They can travel for hundreds of kilometers when airborne, according to the studies, so there is no way of knowing where they actually came from. Could be the next valley, could be Lithuania for all we know. Contains a mix of spores and a mild acid, and is an absolute bitch to clean once it gets into anything mechanical. I sent two of the Bravos to hose down our Solomon immediately after the downpour stopped.

I still don’t understand Shining Path. I mean, I’ve read their manifestos and notes and e-pamphlets that they flood into the public net, and I’ve read the psych reports and analysis shows from the com-net and the late-night forum pools on CNN and NBC and MegaNexus, and I just… I don’t get them. Who in their right mind can look at this unholy mess that we are in right now, and then think to himself “Hmm this is great, I want more of this”? We - and I use the Royal We here, as in ‘we the human race’ - are facing a tangible and substantial risk of complete and utter extinction, and SP wants us to embrace that. They want us to engage with the pluon, treat it as some type of savior or benign spiritual influence, and let it “change us for a better future” as they love to say. Commune with the spirits, feel the union of Gaia and Olmaya or whatever they call this supposed consciousness-gestalt that is in the pluon.

Where is the better future? We are corpse thieves right now, stripping the dead to keep the living going for another day - and SP wants us to stop fighting? Where is this Promised Land that they keep going on and on about? China? China is a hellscape, by all accounts: the rad zones on the Russian border from the Sunshine War, massed rabies in the south, and the industrial heartland overrun by fossil-eating pluon strands like white-vein and cracker mold. Beijing bombs everything that resists CCP authority, and still - SP moves where they will, takes over towns where they will, runs openly SP-aligned settlements along the Mongolian and Vietnamese borders, and nothing can stop them. They have even started building floating settlements on the river dams now, according to the satellite views.

I don’t understand them. Pluon - this plague of xeno-fungus - is not here to save us. It feels like Judgement Day, and Shining Path has become the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse.

I need sleep. We have two more days on-site before we can head back. The wind is up tonight, and my environ-cocoon moves and shudders around me like the intestines of some giant beast that has swallowed me whole. At least the apartment floors here are still dry after the black rain.

Faustus '47: Ch. 1 - Fibres

Photo by Carl Tronders on Unsplash

  The first reports crossed our desks in 1940. The Germans were digging in Poland, in the middle of nowhere, ripping up ancient forests and tearing down old castles at a breakneck pace. Hunting for something, something that their people were desperate to find. The next year, when they turned on the Soviets and chased them out of Poland, the first thing they did was dig some more in the territories the Soviets had held. Scattered reports, unreliable witnesses, informants that went missing as soon as they spoke about it - it was a fog to us, and there were more important things to deal with at the time.

  Or so we thought.

  We suspect that between the digs in Poland, and the raiding of the Soviet science facilities that they captured, the Germans finally - some time in the autumn of 1941 - got their hands on whatever it was that had been driving them . Our informants grew frantic - and then disappeared. One by one the stations in their territory stopped transmitting. Our last report was from Warsaw, in December 1941. The agent spoke of a new German unit, the Paranormal Division, and that was the last we heard from that frequency.

  Spring 1942 saw the first dead walking in Russia.

Chapter 1: Fibres

  Caldwell stubbed out the last bit of the cigarette against his boot. The forest around him was dim, the midday rays already hidden behind a thick blanket of iron clouds. The drip and splatter of infrequent raindrops seemed to reduce the world around him to the clammy confines of his lean-to. The manual said it was a Tent, Canvas, Standard - but the reality was a bit of a wet mess that barely managed to earn its title as a tent.

  Wicker was outside somewhere, stalking along the perimeter. The Scot could not sit still to save his life, and his highlands experience made him a woodsman second to none. Here, in the damp woods of France, he could at least put that energy to use. At the Dublin camp, he had been as cagey as a hound with a sore tooth, and when their Whitley had finally taken off two days ago, Caldwell had breathed a sigh of relief. Dropping Wicker into the wilds seemed to be the only way to keep the man sane.

  Caldwell missed his books and his smoking jacket. To him, the wilds were a place best experienced between two sturdy book covers. The journal he sat with now was something else, something that felt wrong to him somehow - despite all the practising back in Dublin - and he could not look at it for long before bundling it back into its waterproof wrap again. Then, wrapped up, it would nag at him, with that little voice that felt like cobwebs in his mind, until he opened it up again.

  Footsteps crunched outside, and the tent flap opened. Wicker was dripping wet, from his tartan cap all the way down to his muddied boots, but had a smile plastered across his face that showed more teeth than Caldwell had seen in a long time.

  “I found them. On the northern road, heading east. Purple pennants on all the cars,” the Scot burred. Caldwell had spent enough time with the man to at least make sense of the accent without much effort by now. “One staff car, two trucks, handful of motorcycles. They are heading towards Sains Grieu.”

  “About bloody time we had some good news. Small mercies for informants that are reliable, these days.” Caldwell got to his feet, stuffing the wrapped journal into a jacket pocket, and reached for the over-loaded backpack that stood waiting. “I trust you can get us there in time?”

  Wicker grunted as he swung his own pack up and onto his back. Both of the men were laden with enough supplies to last them the next three or four days, if all went to plan.

  The rifles and the dynamite were there for the alternative.

  “There’s an old lumber trail that runs to the village. I walked it yesterday - dead quiet. I think even the locals must have forgotten about it.” The Scot had his Enfield wrapped in an oilcloth cover that left only the muzzle and trigger free. It went onto his shoulder, next to the pack, with a muffled clink. “We follow that until night falls, and then we should be close enough.”

  Caldwell took his own rifle - one of the last Sten guns, smuggled out of England before it fell - and made sure the waterproof cover was tight before also slinging it across his chest. The little guns were nasty and scrappy, and failed as often as they worked - but when they worked, they gave a terrible accounting of themselves. His woollen commando cap went on last, keeping the inclement weather mostly at bay.

  “Good enough. Let’s get this done with, then.” Caldwell stepped out behind Wicker, receiving a gush of rain in the face as he exited the tent, before turning and kicking in the lone tentpole that kept the canvas up. With a wet sigh, the tent folded in on itself, taking with it the loose branches that had been propped against its sides. Within moments, no part of their erstwhile shelter was visible except a tangle of fallen branches, and a guy rope which Wicker stomped on to push deeper into the mud.

  The Scot set the direction and pace from there, and Caldwell had to stretch to keep up. This region of France was far from the gleaming civilisation of Paris and Vichy, and after the culls of 1945 and ‘46, it had become an empty, dark place. The Germans had little use for this region, and left it to the devices - and ghoulism - of the Paranormal Division and its creatures. The handful of villages that survived here were fortified affairs now, walled and gated and barred against the night. Only the most critical of industries survived if they were fortunate enough to obtain a gendarmerie guard from the Occupation Government.

  Caldwell walked, lost in thought, as Wicker led them up stony hills and down mossy, leaf-choked forest paths. The place reminded him of home, of England - of the England that had been before the Germans came.

  1942 was the first time the dead walked. The Russian reports were confused and contradictory, and the British agents were hampered by the Soviets’ insistence on keeping them away from things. Communism could not admit to failure or weakness - every comrade knew this. Moscow fell when the dead from the disastrous winter of ‘41 rose from their graves, and swamped the city in their thousands. Stalin disappeared, rumours took his place. Leningrad and Stalingrad followed - the mighty Soviet citadels, overrun by their own dead. In the south, the Libyan desert twitched and stirred, and the dead there did what the living had failed to achieve the year before. Rommel marched into Alexandria by the end of the year, and the eagle of the Reich flew over the Nile.

  The next two years were chaos. The Soviet front collapsed, infighting and petty politics turning the communists against each other as they scrambled to make deals with the Germans. In England, there were reports of German paratroopers landing in the countryside, and the dead there too rose. Caldwell received a last frantic letter from his family outside Cornwall, and then he was on a boat to Ireland. Poison gas fell on the cities from bombers at night, and the dead would rise by morning. Buckingham Palace signed the surrender documents after that, while Churchill fled to Canada. Ireland played up their neutrality, like Spain, and managed to escape an invasion - but the Germans sent their agents over anyway, and one by one the resistance members and “government in exile” voices fell silent. No-one was brave enough to make a fuss about it.

  The Americans sued for peace in December of 1944. They had no bases in Europe any longer, and the fighting in the Pacific had achieved nothing. Russia had fallen as well, and the Lend-Lease ships turned around and went home. The Germans agreed, everyone shook hands, and the Atlantic became mostly peaceful again - at least on the surface. It was a big ocean to carry a grudge over.

  Wicker’s hiss broke Caldwell out of his reverie. They had approached the edge of the forest, and the distant outlines and hazy smoke lines of the village of Sains Grieu swam through the fog and the murk ahead. Its boundary walls were wooden palisades over a brick base, with lone watchtowers swimming in the fog. Blind sentinels that watched the forest, yet saw little. The two men found a lightning-struck tree as a landmark to stash their backpacks, unwrapped their weapons to do a last ammunition check, and then carefully transferred the waxed dynamite sticks to their knapsacks. The rain had not let up, nor had it gotten worse, and the pervasive damp was raising all manner of paranoid alarms in the back of Caldwell’s head. The Sten would not like it - nor would the explosives. Caldwell had a backup revolver, but in a firefight it was barely one step above having a letter-opener. You were already royally sunk if things deteriorated to that point.

  In his coat pocket, the journal with the drawings and the phrases still waited, wrapped in its waterproofing. The voices were silent now, for once. Caldwell did not trust those voices.

  Lightened and with weapons in hand, the two snuck the rest of the way in. Wicker had a knack for finding gaps and spaces to move between the foliage, while Caldwell felt like every branch and twig and errant bit of foliage somehow ended up in his face. The Englishman gritted his teeth and pushed on, trying to not lose sight of the flitting Scot ahead of him. Raindrops rolled down the back of his collar, icy cold against the sweat from the ruck march, and the forest floor swallowed his feet up to the ankles, soft moss parting and shifting as his boots came down.

  The cemetery was surprisingly large for the size of the village, and was located at least partially up the side of one of the small hills that dotted the area. Caldwell’s first look at the overgrown space left him with an impression of blackened trees, heavy bramble hedges growing up and over rocky walls, and a strange procession of tombstones that twisted and tilted in every which way. A neck-high stone boundary wall looped around it all,  the grey stones capped with wicked cast-iron spears that seemed to keep the clouds propped up from below. There appeared to be little rhyme or reason to the layout of the place, and while Wicker loped down the boundary wall to look for a gate, Caldwell burrowed into one of the wall-hugging shrubs. His hidden vantage point allowed him to peer over the wall and study the cemetery’s interior, the iron spears beading with moisture this close to his face.

  What was it about this place? Caldwell could not put his finger on it, but the longer he looked at it, the more it felt like there was something pulling at the edge of his vision whenever he looked for too long at any one area. Random jumbles of headstones would suddenly seem to form a pattern just aching at the edge of recognition - and then he would blink, and the fog would shift, and the pattern was gone. A black tree split in two as he watched, the trunks widening and moving away from each other as if born on the backs of some subterranean beast - but then they were one again, and dripping silently and unmoving in the grey that swirled over the ground.

  Caldwell felt his mind starting to spin into the pattern of dread that he had come to associate with the practice fields of Dublin. There was an energy here, something that spoke to the journal that lurked against his chest, and it was reaching out for him with fingers of ice and fear.

  Wicker was at his side the next moment, silent as a ghost, and Caldwell’s lurch of surprise almost sent him toppling back onto his backside.

  “I found a way in. There’s an old breach about a half-mile thataway,” The Scot pointed back the way he had come from. “The rest of the wall is brambles and spikes all the way, we’re not getting over it without a fight.”

  “Any signs of life?”

  “Dead quiet, all the way. The main gate looks to be past our breach, I reckon the main focus will be there.” The Scot had his Enfield in hand, the rifle cradled expertly under his one arm, and with the other hand he dug up a handful of muck from the forest floor. “Put this on your face, and then we can go.”

  Caldwell shuddered at the touch of the slimy soil and leaves against his skin, and soon both men were muddied and darkened. The sun, long lost to the clouds overhead, had been sinking towards an unseen horizon all afternoon, and the gloom of evening was fast approaching.

  “So, professor - are you ready for this?” Wicker’s voice was low when they were finally ready to set out.

  “Can I lie and say yes?” Caldwell tried to smile, but instead of relief felt only the trickle of mud down his cheeks. “I do not have great faith in our chances.”

  “I have great faith in this,” Wicker replied, and patted his bag of dynamite. “It’s not every night I get to hunt Germans, and I have never - in the entire history of my family line - heard of anyone in my family who has hunted the beast that we face tonight.”

  “An interesting perspective, for sure,” Caldwell muttered.

  The Scot grinned toothily again.

  “Come now, professor - how often do you get to tell people that you spent your summer hunting necromancers in France?”

  “Hopefully never, if we survive this - and then hopefully never, because of all the paperwork we signed.” Caldwell sighed, and rolled his shoulders to try and lessen the tension there. “You know we can never talk about this, to anyone.”

  “I know, I know. So we better make sure it’s a big beast then, to match the size of the secret.” Wicker winked, and set off down the side of the wall. Caldwell gave one last look at the cemetery on the other side, then crossed himself briefly before setting off after the Scot.

  In his jacket pocket, the journal voices started speaking again.

  They sounded hungry.