The Sword of Michael - eARC (14 page)

—bounding up the stairway at me a goat-soldier *and* a vamp, the vamp a full body male, strong and springing from wall to wall, I dropped my M4 in the VTAC sling and drew my revolver
BOOM BOOM
two shots did for the vamp but the goat soldier got off a burst that ricocheted off the wall, at least one graze or maybe a through and through on the meat of my leg, I turned the revolver on him
BOOM BOOM
, four shots down, hope they don’t send any more vamps this way, working backwards I stumbled and sat down hard on my ass, which saved me since there was a burst of fire over my head, courtesy of an IR equipped goat-soldier, and I got another .357 into his center of mass, punching a ragged hole in that very nice Mayflower chest rig—

—Dillon had paused on the upper landing; I could see his shoulder laboring; it was hard physical work anyways, especially after the fight in, but we had to move—

“Dillon! RUN!”

I slammed another speed loader of my hand loads into the .357 and started jogging up; the body count had slowed down the pursuers, though I wished I had a…

“Dillon!”

Pant, huff, pant, huff, “What!”

“You got any hand grenades?”

Pant, huff, pant, huff. “Yeah. Wait one.”

Thump, thump, thump…rolling down the stairs to me. A M-46 frag.

“You got any more?”

Pant, huff, pant, huff. “Yeah, gimme a minute…”

Thump, thump, thump, thump…two more.

All righty then.

Two turns down the cautious approach, light and nimble, goat-footed almost, a soldier came up.

I doused one grenade in Holy Water, murmured a quick prayer over it, pulled the pin, counted One, Two, throw it!

And threw it down the stairs.

Way too hard, as it bounced right past their point man and rolled further down…

…and I hurried up the stairs, where the heck was that thing and then…

CRACK!

The overpressure compressed my ears, even a floor above, and the screams of goat-soldier shredded with holy water soaked shrapnel rose.

I ran.

Dillon was leaning against the wall. He looked as though he’d run a marathon.

“Marius, you take her, I can’t anymore…” His legs were shaking with the effort.

The stairwell was wider here, we were only two levels beneath the house. Above, I could hear the battle between Tigre and the demon still raging

Hurry, Marius, you must get clear…

My white tiger.

Burt swirled past me a wreath of black smoke that sprouted brother crows like feathers; they filled the stairwell beneath me and bounding up the stairs behind came First In Front, a warrior’s grin on his face, he stopped and waved me on.

I got up in next to Dillon. There was barely enough room for us abreast on the widening stairs, but it was doable.

“Drape her over both of us, Dillon.”

He let Sabrina slip and kept one arm around his neck, I draped the other around mine and we staggered up the stairs—

—one flight, one more—

—and then we were entering the house, which was shredding to pieces right in front of our eyes,
Tigre and the demon still tangled up, shredding the house in the Other Realms and in this one—

I doused the two remaining hand grenades in holy water, pulled the pins with my teeth with my best John Wayne panache, chipping a tooth in the process, and then tossed both grenades down the stair well, turn to Dillon and said…

THE ENTIRE HOUSE lifted, shook, shattered into a million pieces of lumber, brick and plumbing, and Dillon and I and Sabrina were tossed like rag dolls in the hands of a furious toddler, end over end, to land in a heap in the field, a good twenty-five yards from the shattered foundation of the farmhouse that was no more. Debris landed all around us, but not on us, Thanks be to God.

“Dillon?” I said.

A moment, and then his voice, utterly spent and still wheezing. “What?”

“I’m glad you’re alive. Sabrina?”

“She’s here. Breathing. Not hurt that I can see.”

“Dillon?”

“What?”

“What the hell did you put in those grenades?”

“Nothing.”

“Frags won’t blow a house up like that.” I paused. “I mean, will they?”

“Maybe they hit a gas line.”

I pushed myself up. In the ruins of the house, straining at the end of an invisible leash, the Threshold Demon raged at us, like a guard dog barely restrained.

Tigre stood above me. She was covered with demonic blood, but looked otherwise unscathed.

How do you do it? I thought.

If you were a woman, you’d understand, she said. She licked a paw and groomed herself. You need to go, Marius…

I pushed myself all the way up, reached down and grabbed one of Sabrina’s limp arms and looped it around my neck. Dillon looked on the verge of a heart attack.

“You know, I love her,” he said.

“I know. So do I.”

“How can a woman weigh that much and not be fat?”

I laughed. “You better look at her now, Dillon. She finds out you even thought that, you’ll never see her naked again.”

We staggered off, our unconscious medicine woman between us.

A sudden brilliant light illuminated us, the smoldering wreckage of the house, everything—fields, road, everything—for at least a quarter of a mile.

I looked up.

A gigantic glowing disk hovered above, moving slowly, like the Imperial battle cruiser in
Star Wars
.

Dillon looked up. Looked at me. Looked at Sabrina. Sighed.

“Marius…tonight I’ve shot it out with goats, clones, demons, possessed humans, fought my way into Hell and back, carrying a heavy-ass woman I love dearly, been blown up, shot, stabbed and almost drank dry by a vampire. The LAST FRAKKING THING I NEED
NOW
IS A FRAKKING FLYING SAUCER!!!”

“Uh.…” I didn’t really know what else to say.

We moving, but a blast of light descended from the saucer and tore up the road in front of us.

Just like the house behind us.

That’s what we would call a clue.

So we stopped.

“You got any grenades left?” I said hopefully.

“Nope.”

The saucer descended. Landing gear extended and it touched down. It hummed and glowed with light. A port opened in the side, and a long ramp extended from it, touched the ground in front of us. A backlit figure, humanoid, stood at the stop of the stairs and then descended to stand in front of us.

Human. Late thirties, early forties. Black hair closely cropped, burly fit and very tall, a cylindrical head like an artillery shell, white skin, a neatly trimmed mustache and several expansive saber scars across his face.

The Nazi Wehrmacht uniform was pretty sharp, and his knee high leather boots gleamed with fresh brushing.

His voice was, as you might guess, heavily accented and German. “My name is Otto Skorzeny,” he said. “Come with me if you want to live.”

Chapter 17

Okay…so we’re in this flying saucer…

That sounds strange.

Let me back up and start again.

A shamanic practitioner, by definition, must be able to grasp and participate in at least two different realities—at the same time. Someone much smarter than me, in the ordinary reality, said that the sign of true genius is to embrace simultaneously two different and opposing perspectives. Someone else said that’s the sign of true mental illness and psychosis.

So you make your choice and you take your pick.

Me, I hew to the shamanic view. I was Chosen for this Path. I had to learn how to embrace at least two realities at the same time.

Or I would have gone mad.

That happens to neophyte shamans or apprentices or people Called within a society that doesn’t know what to do with shamanic initiation except to define it as illness and try to legislate or medicate it out of existence. Like our society—rife with sorcery and curses, controlled by people who deny that—despite the overwhelming evidence from traditions much older and deeper than our own that show us the way.

So there’s what Michael Harner calls “ordinary reality.” That’s the world where we have to pay our bills (and our child support and alimony), stop at red lights, talk over the fence with our neighbors, watch mindless TV, be a good citizen and neighbor.

And then there’s “non-ordinary reality.” That’s the reality the great indigenous cultures all over the world define as the reality that surrounds and permeates us, the reality that is just a dream—or journey—away. The Other Realms, the Realms of the Upper, Middle and Lower Worlds, the Realms of powerful spirits, malevolent and benevolent ones, the world of magic and insight, of healing and sorcery, the Realms where shamans—good, evil, competent, incompetent, student-apprentices, masters (though they dislike that term)—traveled to gather information and power to further their agendas or the agendas of the Great Powers or to do healing or divination or other work on behalf of others.

If you like the duality of that model, then “non-ordinary” reality is where you might put phenomenon like flying saucers, the Cabal’s military involvement, time travel, age regression and other topics most often found in conspiracy theory websites or the “New Age” section of the bookstore.

But like anything else, you have to practice discernment to filter out what the truth is—in the Middle World especially, there are sorcerers (often called politicians, reporters, media people) who manipulate perception to deceive and distort and muddle—propaganda, the Big Lie. The advertising industry was one “beneficiary” of the expertise in propaganda developed during the Third Reich by the visionary Joseph Goebbels in the service of Adolf Hitler—The Big Lie.

Remember what I said about the Father Of Lies?

Remember this, because we’ll come back to it.

I was privy to a discussion, at a teaching, by one of the best shaman in the country, a brilliant (and beautiful) and gifted teacher and practitioners, and the leading exponent of “compassionate depossession”—utilizing the Light in a gentle fashion, more in alignment with the belief of the Tibetan Buddhist than, say, traditional Christianity, to do releasement for the suffering being (i.e. possessing spirit) as well as the client with the presenting symptoms. She was responding to one student-practitioner who was mocking a belief in flying saucers and especially aliens or extraterrestrials.

“So you believe and practice a modality that accepts spirits and powers, but you deny a reality where aliens or extraterrestrials might exist? How do you draw that line?” the teacher said.

It’s a good question, isn’t it?

Willing suspension of disbelief aside, as any good reader of urban fantasy or science fiction does, do you accept *everything* or do you reject *everything?*

I look for the Middle Way in all things.

I’ve seen and experienced enough things that can be defined as strange, bizarre or insane—and I have no dog in the fight about convincing others that I’ve seen or experienced something. My belief is mine and I don’t force it down the throats of others. And those the Creator brings to me generally are satisfied with the evidence of their own personal experience, which may be completely different from my own.

Which brings me back to the flying saucer.

Any depossessionist who practices long enough will run across extraterrestrial or extradimensional beings. Extraterrestrial possessions are often experiments run remotely; or lost ETs without a way to phone home. So in essence the same procedures used in a standard depossession apply—we help them find the Light of their Home, and away they go. They are Spirit, or energetic beings.

More rarely, a practitioner may encounter clients (or have the experience him or her self) who have physical encounters with ETs, including abductions, experimentation, and, yes, flying saucers or other aircraft.

Some of these are Cabal interventions/experiments with technology given to them by ET or extradimensional beings (extradimension is a fancy term for the inhabitants of the Other Realms; in the Cabal’s case demonic, in those aligned with the Light, angelic…); some are genuinely ET—not always benign, either. But key to having a workable comprehension of this end of the phenomenon spectrum is accepting, up front, that a human will never completely understand the mind and thinking of an ET…unless that ET is also human.

Does that open a Pandora’s Box for you?

It sure can.

But back to the flying saucer…

“So there we were,” I said. “In a flying saucer piloted by Hitler’s bodyguard and personal assassin, and the Patron Saint of Military Special Operations, one Otto Skorzeny, escaping from the Portal that leads to Hell, leaving in flaming wreckage behind us one farmhouse, dozens of dead goats and clones that looked just like local law enforcement, a number of seriously pissed off demons and the closely controlled humans who made up the infrastructure of a seriously cursed town…”

“You missed the part about batshit crazy,” Dillon said. “This is all…”

Skorzeny laughed. “You have good humor. I like this.”

I had to admit, I kinda liked him, Nazi or not. He had, after all, plucked us off the battlefield where who knows what was about to happen.

We know what, Tigre opined.
She was curled up in one corner of the spacious cabin of the saucer, disturbingly retro in design, like a ’40s dirigible run through Architect Digest and run through the latest technoware from Akihabara in Tokyo.
He is your Unlooked-For Ally…

Burt perched on the back of one of the luxuriously upholstered (leather?) seats and cawed once. Then tilted his head and said in his best Brooklynese—Yep.

First In Front hovered over Sabrina, looked at me and nodded…

Okay. Disbelief suspended. A legendary Nazi commando, long dead, appears in a flying saucer and plucks me and mine off the battlefield. Okay.

“So now what?” I said. “What do I call you?”

“Otto,” Skorzeny said. “Or Ed. As you wish.”

“Ed?” Dillon said.

“My American name.”

“Ah,” Dillon said. “I thought I was confused before.”

“I like Otto,” I said. “May I call you Otto?”

Otto tilted his head in agreement to one side, a surprisingly delicate movement in so big a man, but then, he was flying the aircraft, or saucer, to be precise. His hands were huge, oversized frying pan huge, and they rested in what looked like molded cutouts on the armrests of the command chair in the cabin. It appeared that small, precise movements of his fingers controlled the aircraft.

“Of course,” Otto said.

“There’s so much I want to ask you,” I said.

Otto laughed. “I enjoyed that film very much. Classic.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
. Yes?”

“Dude, you’re the *real* Otto Skorzeny? Not a clone? You’re the Guy? The one who flew a paraglider in to rescue Mussolini?” Dillon said.

“You are a student of history?” Otto said.

“Military history, yeah,” Dillon said. “You’re the Patron Saint of modern military special operations.”

“Ah, you flatter,” Otto said. “Yes, I am the real Otto Skorzeny.”

“Look, not to interfere with the military fanboy thing or nothing, but let’s stay on task here—where are you taking us?” I said.

“I am returning you to your home in Minneapolis, Marius,” Otto said. “Your woman requires your assistance.” He looked at me. “You are a fortunate man to have such a woman. She is very powerful.”

The lights of Minneapolis grew in the dark; he’d followed the highway straight back, the glow of the ship somehow hidden from eyes below.

“How do you know this?” I said.

“We will have a long conversation, Marius. Probably many. Right now, you must return to your home.” He looked at Sabrina. “There is a greatcoat in the panel behind you.”

Dillon opened a panel and found a full length leather greatcoat inside. He draped it over Sabrina, still unconscious.

The craft lowered, hovered over my house, right below, the lights on.

“Step into that chamber, there,” Otto said, nodding towards what looked exactly like an old elevator from a ’40s musical. His huge hands were delicate on the controls.

Dillon and I lifted Sabrina into the chamber.

Otto looked over at us. “Till we meet again, my friend. I will return in a less ostentatious conveyance, yes?”

He pushed a button and the chamber door closed.

We descended in a cone of light and were left on my back lawn, all three of us. Above our heads, only the stars…and a wrinkling of the night sky’s fabric as something big and unseen flew away…

“Cloaking device,” Dillon breathed. “Just like the Romulans.”

“I don’t know if we’ve gone where no man has gone before, but I think Gene Roddenberry would have given his left arm to go where we just went.” I said.

Standing in the rear door, framed by the light behind her, Jolene.

“I left the lights on for you,” she said.

I swept her into my arms. Or words to that effect.

She was exhausted. Long lines on her face, dried sweat and/or tears on her face, her dress damp with perspiration, long arms and legs trembling.

But she was my Jolene.

She pulled away, her hand lingering along my cheek and jawline, touched Sabrina’s head.

“Bring her in, set her in the bedroom,” she said.

We carried Sabrina in and laid her down in my bed. And only once we laid her down did she blink open her eyes. She looked up at Dillon, at me, then at Jolene. Down at herself, naked, and the black leather great coat she wore. She ran her hands over the rich leather.

“Damn,” she said in a shaky whisper. “Musta been *some* party…”