by Mike Duran
REQUIEM 4
By
Mike Duran
REQUIEM 4
Mike Duran
© 2017 Mike Duran
Published by Blue Crescent Press
ISBN-10: 0-9909077-7-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-9909077-7-0
Cover design by Kirk DouPonce
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
1.0
1.1
1.2
1.3
2.0
DID YOU LIKE THIS STORY?
“That there is a Devil, is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influences of the Devil.”
― Cotton Mather, On Witchcraft
1.0
They called me Naomi, back before the hordes came and their crude weapons rent my flesh. After that, the migration started. It was through the waterless straights and on to more pleasant, habitable climes. We searched them out and found them. We always did.
In Phoenicia I bathed in marble pools and the handmaidens strung garlands of sweet flowers around my neck. Then it was on to Carthage through the loins of warrior-princes. Sword and shield were my companions, and like a puppeteer, I wielded them deftly. And imbibed. Man, woman, even beast, when necessary. But the plague struck us down and we fled; it was northward, on to the land of rock and rolling green hills, where the swarthy, blue-eyed hunters bred with pale, brown-eyed farmers. And a new clan was born. Less savage, yet still bent. There, we took shelter, Mother and her children. Slumbering in flesh and bone, crypts and barrows. For generations. Wakened by ritual and magic. Sometimes by hunger. Waiting. Always waiting.
Through the Age of Bronze and Iron, we traveled. The collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Atomic Age, we witnessed them all. We watched as acclaim gave way to power and war and carnage. A collage of futility. Mankind cannibalizing itself and regurgitating the excess. Strife. Pollution. Neuroses. We laughed and dined on the spoils. Still, we were there to woo them, to whisper delicacies, and give them rest. But that rest never lasted. How could it? Sheol herself is never satisfied. Much less, her inhabitants.
Yes, we have seen much—the rise and fall of empires, the making of elixirs and engines; the hubris of Man. We watched them pierce the earth and the sky, the spires and satellites rose unchallenged, only to fall to earth again. We studied their ways. Like a tigress hunkered in the grassland, peering at the crippled wildebeest. So we watched them. Hungry. Prepared to eat. And there was always food enough.
“Do it, Preacher!”
As in a dream, I heard the words. The fog of sleep still clung to me. Yet someone had called. Mother, is that you?
Naomi. Rise.
And I did. I rose from my long cold slumber. Vague forms took shape. Others encircled me. The lost unit. Paladins of my youth. Ever vigilant. Still waiting.
Awaken, my love. My daughter. They have come.
Yes. They had come. I was drawn to their movement; they'd finally come in search of their brethren, come to purge our dwelling.
Our sweet vacant ones had arrived.
No time to waste! I left the family and the moist recesses and sped upwards, past the gulfs and shrieking abysms, past the succubae and their captives, upwards to a wedge of light overhead, to the world of men. Where my gaze rested on him.
He stood between the headstones, fumbling in his pack. A crucifix flecked with mud and ectoplasm hung about his neck. Before him rose a spirit. She still bore the wounds of her suicide. Pity. As a military chaplain, the lead sciocist on a cemetery sweep, you'd think this would be status quo for the man. Yet I could smell the fear in him, taste the disquiet. Which explains why, at first, I was unimpressed with Aguste Lax. Unlike the muse or enchanter, there was no aura about him. And unlike the true believer, there was the vacancy of accommodation. That much was evident, and that alone would be my ingress.
“Preacher! D’ya hear me?”
The spirit bristled as it faced Aguste, flushing through shades of grey. It swept forward leaving a trail of mist dissipating in its wake. Aguste stumbled back. Surely he had encountered such entities before. Nevertheless, his skin prickled with fear.
The Requiem 4 unit spread out behind the chaplain and leveled their QVACs at the specter. Did they know of Aguste’s fear? Surely they would mock him if they did.
I turned my attention to the unit.
We had grown very familiar with Requiem units; they were an odd but useful bunch. Mother loved men of war. They were strong and resilient, she said, beings of constitution. They often brought knowledge of faraway places. Occasionally, they carried useful memories and even random coordinates for our travels. Most of the Requiem units we’d encountered were unconvinced of their mission. Strange indeed. Apparently, they despised the label of scientific exorcist deferred by the public, and had shortened it to sciocist; however, they'd just as soon vaporize the entire graveyard rather than provide last rites for what was little more than latent subatomic energy.
Or so they believed.
Their quantum vacua weapons whirred to life, the barrels glowing fiery blue. One burst was all it took to disentangle the entity. It was the other possible graveyard denizens that they really worried about—the rebel pigs, the believers, the blathers and revenants. Just some of the divergent strains in this ever-changing world. Yet this was to our advantage. The unit’s helmets grew dull under the gathering storm as they hunkered behind sheared obelisks and uprooted grave markers, weapons aimed at a single ghost.
A pathetic group. But they would do.
Enlisting in the Requiem unit had become, for most of them, a fast-track out of UniGlobe conscription. Everyone rendered service to the hierarchy now. Everyone except the rebel pigs. For the rest of them, military service just greased the rails. It was hard to refuse oversight and a lifetime of subsidies when one saw food, shelter, and narcotics as the pinnacle of existence. Fools, the lot of them! Exorcising graveyards of ‘lost souls’ was not simply procedural, for Requiems it was redemptive. It was a way out. They had to make way for the Sprawl, and if that meant jumping through the hoops and feigning some noble cause, so be it.
Was Aguste the lone exception here? Did he really believe what he was doing? Time would tell.
I studied him—the sweat beading on his forehead, the trembling in his thighs. He could reach out and touch the spirit if he chose. Did he really think that the apparition hovering in the graveyard before him, the one that Requiem 4 had their quantum vacua positioned at, was in fact a human soul? We’d yet to meet a chaplain that really believed that any longer. And the more I watched him, the more I scoffed at the possibility that August Lax might indeed be such a true believer.
Of course, the accuracy of my appraisal would require time and take some probing on my part. But probing is what I do.
“C’mon, Preach!” They called her Djema; she was their Captain. She adjusted her spectral goggles and leveled her QVAC past Aguste to the spirit that rose before them. “Hurry it up! Or we’re blasting that damned thing.”
“Wait!” Aguste rummaged through his pack, likely struggling to remove the electronic tablet. “Not yet. Let me…”
He was looking for the purgatio
rituali—the cleansing ritual used by most field chaplains. I was sure of it.
Aguste found the tablet and peeled the leather back, tracing his grimy index finger along the screen shell.
It had started to rain again. This time, there was hope in the air, for the acid came with it. They hated the acid. It stung their flesh and reeked of chemicals. They’d geo-engineered the climate so much that it had no recourse but to bite back. I watched, rather delighted at this development. For if the sky opened, they would have to seek shelter. And I knew just where to lead them.
The wind whipped the heavy jacket about him. The fact that Aguste didn’t use the spectral goggles, the polarized lenses designed by the ORSAG techs to detect quantum entanglements, was curious enough. Perhaps he had developed the sixth sense, that unusual ability of some humans to articulate what others only saw as a disturbance, or a shadow. Some of the older chaplains, it was rumored, developed such abilities. We had met few and concluded that this ability was anomalous to the species. Perhaps one more reason why Mother may be interested in this man. And unlike the others, he wore little armor, just a neural vest with appropriate magnetics. The body suits were initially designed to protect the scientists from radioactive residue they might encounter in the field. Radioactive residue did not concern us. However, the Requiem units’ gear had been modified to include a magnetic exoskeleton to disrupt any potential quantum irregularities they might encounter.
Though magnetics confused ghosts, they only humored the rest of us.
Aguste adjusted his helmet, wiped the rain out of his eyes, held his finger in place on the screen, and looked up at the specter. It hovered but a meter away, just off the husk of a charred tree and its trunk, which lay splintered and moldering between toppled headstones and rusty shards of shrapnel.
With his sight fixed on the spirit, Aguste strafed to his right and steadied himself on more level ground. Unlike many chaplains he seemed fit, albeit his body now reeked of adrenaline. There, he crossed himself, pressed the crucifix to his lips, and read from the tablet.
“Our help is in the Name of the Lord, Who made heaven and earth. Show us, O Lord, Thy mercy. Let my prayer come before Thee.”
The spirit trembled, her scars pulsing angrily at the words.
Aguste had engaged it.
I almost howled at the pitiful design of this spectral creature. So easily swayed by human compulsion. How pathetic! Mother had taught us this about mortals. In death so as in life. One could not pass between dimensions and not bring the particulars of their psychology. The ghost hovered like a pale gray fog, buoyed on the dank air. Yet its eyes were now fixed on the preacher.
“For this Thy lost child, we pray. Grant them rest. May their sins be forgiven and peace be granted.”
A lesser being would have fled at such an invocation. I simply scoffed at the absence of palpable efficacy.
He crossed himself again. But as he began to read, lightning snapped, sending neon branches tracing across the murky horizon. The clouds blushed and thunder followed, reverberating in the stone and marble.
Then came the squall.
“Bloody hell.” A large bearded man with metallic teeth flipped his goggles up, lowered the quantum-vacua weapon, and gaped at the approaching storm; a compact, cyclonic wall of toxins rumbling into the graveyard. “We gotta move, Captain.”
“Hurry it up!” Djema demanded of the chaplain.
But you can’t hurry these things.
Aguste mumbled something and grappled at the tablet. His trembling noticeably increased and the device slipped from his hand, slopping into the mud. Without removing his eyes from the spirit, he squatted down, feeling for the tablet.
“Shi-i-t! Leave it!” Djema shouted to Aguste. “It’s a squall!”
She lowered her rifle, rose, and began scanning the area for cover. Apparently they were too far from their IMV. Because of the landslides and mortar craters, Requiems typically parked back in the Valley of Peace, which was at least an hour’s walk south for them. The unit joined Djema in looking for a place to hurriedly take shelter amidst the crypts and mausoleums. Two males, however, were scrambling to erect canvi, the emergency canopies they used during impromptu chemical showers.
“It's too big!” said a tattooed female. She bore a patch with the name Cali embroidered on it along with black flowers, bloody knives, and a skull. “It's coming too fast! We don't have time!”
The specter remained, oblivious to the commotion, her gaze still resting on Aguste. But he was no longer engaged, which left her fading into the mist, returning to her interminable transience. Aguste removed the device from the mud and quickly turned to the unit.
I saw my chance and unfurled, uncoiling my limbs. All of them. Blossoming multiple folds. I swept from the mausoleum where I’d been nestled, towards Requiem 4. Yet I remained focused on Aguste the entire time, radiating malice and thirst. He was attuned to the dark. Chaplains usually were. He couldn’t miss me. He couldn't be that dull. And he wasn't.
Our eyes met.
We had built a city and laid its foundations deep. Mother and her children. Graviton Cemetery proved the perfect place. It was a staging area, you could say. They appointed me as guardian, a station I was most honored to occupy. And there, once again, I was Naomi. Queen of the Lost. Possessor of the Vacant.
I looked away from him and inverted, folded into myself, and fled back into the mausoleum. Knowing that Aguste Lax and his unit would surely follow.
1.1
My training as a military chaplain had not prepared me for this.
“Preacher!” Djema called to me. “Get outta there!”
She pointed and I turned to see a squall of toxic rain approaching quickly. It glistened as it roared along Graviton Cemetery, a vast metallic curtain, tearing up chunks of soil and toppling headstones as it came. I’d never seen a shower this size.
However, something else had caught my eye, something which now captivated me.
I turned around and looked past the unit, fighting to see against the stinging rain. “Over there!” I pointed toward a large mausoleum some ten to twelve meters away. But the apparition I’d glimpsed was gone. The team followed my gaze. Before I could even caution them about what I'd seen, Djema had the team heading that way.
But what had I seen? It wasn't a ghost, at least not like any ghost I'd ever encountered. It’d been quite large but with indeterminate parameters, like a dimensional wormhole, a spatial smudge that uncoiled inky tentacles. And there were eyes inside it—nuclear portals fixated upon me. Chills skittered up my spine just thinking about it. I thumped my helmet with the heel of my fist. Toughen up, Lax!
Graviton was playing with my head. I knew it. Hallucinations were common in Level Three settings and above. And Graviton was clearly on a Level of its own. Which meant that whatever I’d seen could either be a figment or a full-on poltergeist grade entity. I had never encountered a poltergeist and worried I was not up to such an encounter. The old timers said such fear was essential to expelling demons; that hubris was the devil's own blade. However, my disquietude seemed far more crippling than it did empowering.
Still, I didn't have time to negotiate. I glanced back at the ghost. She was still there, graying out, but watching. Pining for our acknowledgement. That’s how they did it. They wanted witnessed. They wanted to finally be known, to finally be seen. It was unnerving. And terribly sad.
MiChaps called these apparitions Type Twos, the most common of all disembodied souls. Graviton was full of them. It was the loci of the Requiem units’ mission. But Type Twos were rather negligible. They were everywhere, really. Especially in Graviton. Of course, most of the other Requiem 4 members didn’t care about the religious implications. As far as they were concerned, my role on the unit was strictly procedural. Military chaplains all were. We were just there to pacify the public’s concern. And ORSAG was hyper-aware of public concern. Until the centuries of archaic, primitive religious belief were finally shed, Requiem units would still be
required to cleanse all remaining cemeteries, shrines, and churches, to make way for industry, for expansion. For the Sprawl. It just happened that Graviton was the biggest, oldest, and, as many described it—usually in hushed, pensive tones—the most haunted cemetery in this hemisphere.
It just happened to be standing in UniGlobe's way.
Even though she was now little more than a filmy silhouette, I could feel her gaze boring into me. Languid. Longing.
I had to do something.
Even after all those years in UniCon training, I was still not accustomed to seeing these disembodied spirits. Most MiChaps I knew had become agnostic. That wasn’t a big surprise. After the coups and insurgencies, followed by UniGlobe’s iron fist response, the death tolls were astronomical. Earth had become a virtual morgue in three short years. Now the average chaplain was so accustomed to such encounters that they didn’t seem to care anymore. Even worse, they believed the ORSAG rhetoric that it was all about quantum triangulation and other explainable phenomenon. Of course, it didn’t help that the entire military complex saw us chaplains as obsolete, if not complete fools.
Men like me were becoming the exception. The apparition before me wasn’t just an impression upon the subatomic weave of the universe, a quantum anomaly summoned by the emotions of a sentient observer. No. She was a person. She was real. And she wanted to be eliminated. Eased of her suffering. The scars on her wrists were evidence enough. If believing these things made me a crackpot, so be it. I may not have a spine of steel, but I couldn’t surrender that easily to ORSAG indoctrination.
“Let's go, Preach!” Djema shouted to me. “Dammit, c'mon!”
Seeing my hesitation to leave the ghost, she ran over, gripped my shoulder, and pulled me back. I tossed my tablet aside and shrugged free of her hold. Then I gripped the muzzle of her QVAC with both hands. This surprised her, as it should have. Before she could wrestle it free and reprimand me, I said, “Lemme do it.”
