The Sword of Saint Michael
Page 1
The Sword of Saint Michael
D.C.P. Fox
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
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A Word From D.C.P. Fox
About The Author
Copyright
Acknowledgments
For Heidi
Chapter One
Day Zero
The cashier was sweating profusely, her eyes sunken and her skin as pale as could be.
Alexander Williams narrowed his eyes, inspecting her closely as one would a Petri dish in a lab. Her eyes were closed as if she were about to take a nap on her feet. “You look awful,” he said.
“Mind your own business.”
“But you’re handling my sandwich. Whether you pass on whatever you have to me is my business. Do you have a disease? Although it would be very early for the season—”
“I don’t have the flu,” the cashier snapped.
“Well, you clearly have something. If it’s not—”
“What I have is no sick time and no money in the bank to handle the loss of a week’s worth of pay.”
“Ah. I see.”
She had his tuna on rye, wrapped in plastic, in her hands. Alexander wanted nothing to do with that plastic.
“Put it back. I’m suddenly not hungry.”
She grunted, closed her eyes, and took in a deep breath. Alexander turned and walked away before she could exhale near him.
Some people are so stupid. Didn’t she realize she should be in bed?
He left the building and walked outside into the bright sunshine. From his vantage point atop the ski trails covered in green grass, Alexander took in the beauty of the Colorado Rockies—jagged and lush with evergreens, some bald on top. The valleys also lacked the thick evergreen forests, the mountains steep enough to cause the lift of the storms, cooling the clouds and forcing them to condense into rain. Or at least that is what he’d told the pretty, young girl that came up and talked to him. He had had to get rid of her. He may have been alone, but he was a married man.
It was then that he heard the screams.
Smart people typically ran away from screams. And while Alexander knew he was a brilliant man, he knew instinctively he was also very stupid in this regard. So, as people rushed out the doors of the cafeteria, Alexander went against the flow of human traffic and stopped at the wrap-around glass wall, cupped his hands, and peered inside. He saw the cashier with a visible sore on her face that wasn’t there before, bashing a customer’s skull against the corner of the counter.
He stood transfixed. Blood covered the victim’s head and neck. He watched as she cracked open his skull and pulled it apart. The strength the whole process must have taken was off the charts. It was impossible.
In shock, Alexander couldn’t move, couldn’t stop watching this terrible scene playing out before him.
Everyone else, it seemed, was screaming and running. But not him.
The crazed woman pulled the body, the head, up onto the counter, and leaned forward to put her mouth into the head cavity. It took a few seconds for Alexander to realize she was eating the person’s brain.
Alexander merely stood there watching the scene, in horror, sure, but also in fascination. What could possess someone to do such a thing? The raw animalism of it shocked him and got his adrenaline pumping.
Suddenly, he realized he was the only person left anywhere near the woman. But he was so mesmerized that he couldn’t move.
She seemed to have finished her “meal.” Alexander was incredulous at what he witnessed next: the woman picked up the pieces of skull she had carelessly cast aside and carefully put the victim’s skull back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Of all the things she had done, this was the most bizarre. The woman was obviously completely out of her mind. The entire process, from violently attacking the customer to piecing his skull back together, must have taken less than two minutes. The mentally ill woman, after completing that task, looked around and made eye contact with Alexander.
Day One
Jocelyn Radomski slid down the twisting tunnel through the earth at blazing speed, her sword secured firmly in its scabbard at her side. Her personal animal spirit guide, Skunk, smiled as he perched on her chest. Skunk, by his nature and mere presence, provided balance in all things, representing the left pillar of darkness and the right pillar of light—of yin and yang. Without him, in addition to her medication, she risked falling into the black abyss—leading to despair and depression—or into the brilliant white—leading to mania and paranoid delusions.
They fell through a magical door in her Inner Temple on the astral plane. Some would judge the temple a mere construct of her mind, but they would be wrong.
Falling onto the balcony on the stone tiles was not painful—her temple, her rules. She could remake it at will. But she stuck with the balconies around a courtyard, and an altar area just outside the atrium, with various astral ceremonial magician tools for performing magic on the astral plane. Flat mirrors stood from floor to ceiling on the altar side, with each mirrored panel doubling as a doorway to the real world. She wouldn’t have to go far if she needed to sprint back to the material plane.
“Well, that seemed . . . off. Don’t you agree, Skunk? The absence of any animal spirits in the Earth garden?”
Skunk looked distracted. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe.”
“Skunk, don’t be coy. What’s up?”
“What? Oh, nothing’s up.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re lying! You’ve never lied to me before.”
Skunk sighed. “OK, it’s snowing.”
“That’s it? It’s snowing?!” She looked around the garden and the temple atrium, up at the towering balconies and doors. There wasn’t any snow. He had meant on the material plane.
“It is the end of August,” Skunk replied, “and we always thought—“
“I know the date,” she snapped. “August twenty-sixth.” We knew it was possible it would snow at 12,000 feet up in the Colorado mountains. “But you’re trying to change the subject; that can’t be what you’re afraid of.”
“Who says I’m afraid?” Skunk did a terrible job of sounding nonchalant.
She looked at his fearful but otherwise inscrutable skunk face. “You do want what’s best for me, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Always.”
She sighed. “Then there
’s no point in trying to get it out of you. Will I find out soon?”
Skunk looked relieved that he didn’t need to keep lying. “All too soon.”
“That bad, huh?”
“I’ve said too much already. As long as you don’t abort your vigil before it’s time, 1:06 p.m. when the sun is at its zenith tomorrow, then you’ll be fine. Until then, you’ll have to watch the snow accumulate.”
“Not a moment sooner?”
“Well, you can leave the cabin sooner, but seeing any human will jeopardize your—“
“Like the other day on the trail.”
“Yes, I tried to steer you away, but that particular time, seeing a human wasn’t enough to break the spell. Talking with a human will though. So, to be safe, you should leave after 1:06 tomorrow.”
“You know, Skunk, it really creeps me out that you can influence me on the material plane. But, oh—” She took in a deep breath and sighed it out on the material plane. “I can’t wait for this to end. A month in isolation is far too long.”
“If you want to become a shaman, the month-long vigil in isolation is required as your final test.”
She was annoyed at the reminder, but also that no one alive would know to call her a shaman after this was all over. She knew shamans were traditionally medicine men for so-called primitive tribes, but in this modern world, in the early twenty-first century in the USA, there were very few who believed in shamanism. Of those few, most were Neo-Pagan, but as a Catholic, that was not the right path for her.
Instead, she must wait for a proper calling, her grandfather had said, and she would know it when she saw it. She felt deep in her bones that he was right about this.
Despite her vigil, she was not alone. She spent much of her time in meditation, traveling on the astral plane, and communing with various spirits. But today had been different in that she had found no one to communicate with.
“Okay, it’s time to go back, I’m hungry,” Jocelyn said. “I will see you later.”
Skunk jumped onto her shoulder and dug in his claws. It didn’t hurt. He rubbed up on her cheek. “Goodbye.”
Without speaking, she counted herself up from one to thirteen to go up from a deep meditative state to a light meditative state. She wiggled her fingers and toes and counted from one to twelve to get back to reality.
Day Zero
The eyes locked on Alexander did not seem to be that of an unbalanced woman—more like those of a fierce, hungry, wild animal.
He made the sign of the cross, turned, and fled for his life. Everyone inside and outside the restaurant had deserted, except for one man in a gray suit, talking on a cell phone. His eyes were wide with shock, so he must have seen some of what happened.
“Run!” Alexander exclaimed to the gray-suit man.
Instinctively, Alexander ran toward the nearest chairlift.
Halfway there, he turned his head to see if he was being followed. Not only was the homicidal woman following him—blood all over her face and apron—but she was gaining on him.
What he had not expected to see, however, was the woman’s first victim apparently alive, upright and biting the neck of gray-suit man.
How could this all be happening? Is this all a nightmare? Will Teri wake me up any second now?
But it was too real to be a nightmare.
A victim coming back to life after being killed? What are these? Vampires? Zombies? In fact, this whole thing reminded him of zombies from TV, except that these people ran very, very fast. It was impossible. And yet it was happening.
Alexander found an inner strength he didn’t know he had and picked up his pace. His calves screamed and his lungs were on fire. He was sore and exhausted. It had been stupid to walk up the mountain instead of taking the damn ski lift, and although only two thousand feet in elevation from the valley floor, it was still a tough hike. A self-proclaimed nerd, he wasn’t in the best of shape. Well, at least he had made it to the top. That was something.
This time he didn’t look back as he headed for the chairlift terminal. When Alexander arrived, one man on the ground was bleeding profusely from a head wound. What looked to be his family surrounded him, unsure of what to do. There were no “zombies” in the area, only the family and people in chairs traveling down the mountain, many of them looking back in disbelief. Five people crammed into a chair meant to only fit three. One of them rubbed his fist.
“Get on! She’s coming!” exclaimed Alexander. The man with the head wound stood up, but there would not be enough time before the insane woman got to them. Meanwhile, empty chairs were entering and leaving the terminal. Though distraught for the family, Alexander knew he could do nothing for them. In fact, he figured she would most likely catch him if he waited for the next chair, so he ran and leaped off the chairlift platform, grabbing onto the underbar of an empty chair. If he fell, he’d probably at best break his leg, and she’d get him for sure. If not right away, then after attacking the family. Knowing it was unrealistic to hang onto the bar for the entire trip down the mountain—a good five to ten minutes—he pulled himself up and grabbed the back of the chair with his right hand. The chair wobbled so much that he feared it would jump off the cable or shake him loose, but he brought his other hand up, got his feet onto the lower bar, and eventually climbed into the seat, holding the back of it tight as it swayed in the cool wind. Once the swaying died down, he pulled down the crossbar.
Then a child screamed behind him.
He chanced a fearful look back.
His imagination didn’t disappoint. Frightened children and probably their mother rode two chairs behind him, and the mother, sobbing, clung desperately onto them as if doing so was the only reason they didn’t fall off. Further behind them, at the terminal, lay two more victims: a small boy, no more than ten years old, and what must have been his father—the one who had been prone on the ground. The crazed woman chowed down on the head of the father but left the boy alone.
Maybe she had already finished with the boy. Sure enough, Alexander watched, almost in hysteria by now, as the bloody boy got up and ran down the hill at breakneck speed. He was faster than the chairlift! And two figures ran down the mountain ahead of the boy at an even faster pace.
They resembled the initial victim and gray-suit man.
As Alexander moved away from the gruesome scene at the platform, the boy ran past him along the chairlift. Then he spotted the woman running behind him. And before Alexander could come to grips with this situation, the father ran past him, too. That made at least five crazed people running down to meet him at the end of the lift.
Day One
Jocelyn’s grandfather’s sword weighed heavily on her forearms as the wood stove with no thermostat heated the cabin to a stifling eighty degrees. Opening her eyes slowly after emerging from her meditation, Jocelyn causally examined the sword—sharp with a groove through the middle to keep the weight manageable.
But it wasn’t her grandfather’s sword anymore—it was hers. She sheathed it in its old leather scabbard and leaned it against a wall before taking off her robe and leaving the windowless cabin naked. Sure enough, a light snow was falling, an inch on the ground, and she breathed in the fresh air and pine of the trees. She headed for the outhouse, then returned to roll around in the snow, “washing” off her stink.
There was no running water, and she dared not risk being seen by people by going to the lake. But the snow invigorated her, and immersion made her feel cleaner than she actually was.
She went over to the woodpile to gather firewood. The stove needed to keep burning throughout the night’s sub-freezing temperature.
The snow continued to fall throughout the day.
Late in the afternoon, Jocelyn ate a can of stew heated on the wood stove. She was still naked as the heat of the cabin afforded her that luxury. A month of nakedness made her comfortable with her body, and only during meditation did she wear her ritual robe.
After eating, she put on clothes, including her winte
r jacket. George, her “landlord,” had insisted she buy the coat, along with the snowshoes, and she was glad she hadn’t argued with him.
Snowshoes strapped on, she went outside and hazarded a peek onto the road leading up to her car. It hadn’t been plowed, but then she remembered George had said that if it snowed, he wouldn’t plow the cabin’s driveway until after she completed her vigil, lest their eyes meet and risk ruining the vigil.
At least a foot of snow covered her Toyota. As a Californian who didn’t ski, she had never seen so much snow in her life. She shivered in the cold air; her thermometer—weather station outside, wireless display inside—registered twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit. She wondered how much sun was required to melt or sublimate the snow in sub-freezing temperatures, but at some point, the temperature would get back into the fifties or sixties. Still, she didn’t expect a lot of melting, and so for her to leave tomorrow, someone would have to come and plow.
Snowshoeing proved to be great exercise, and as she wandered through the forest of pine and birch, the trees were silent except for the occasional falling of snow from the weighted branches, as there was no wind.
She remembered she might have the ability to communicate telepathically with the birds. It was rather difficult to digest everything she had learned over the last four years, and she understood why her training stretched out over ten. She stopped, closed her eyes, and envisioned a breeze blowing on her face. It came at once. She Willed it to increase, and it did, and when she Willed it to calm down, the air became still.