Dead Sky Read online

  First published 2019 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-192-3

  Copyright © 2019 Weston Ochse

  Cover art by Clint Langley

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  For everyone who has ever served in Afghanistan, knows the taste of dust in their mouths, hates driving down the pot-holed roads, stares warily at passers-by, and looks lovingly at T-Walls.

  Thanks especially to Screamer, Rocko, and Private Pile.

  This book is for you.

  “Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.”

  —Søren Kierkegaard

  Chapter One

  Our Lady of Atlas in Exile

  THE WORST THING about having other people inside your head was that not only were you forced to come to terms with everything you’d done and seen yourself, but you’re presented with an entirely new universe of someone else’s PTSD. Flashes of women he’d never seen, alluring, kissing, cuddling, then dying, the emotion of it choking off his air. Flashes of a young boy standing on a train platform as the train pulls away, the point of view getting farther and farther away until the child is nothing but a dot on the gray English horizon, never to be seen again, the regret an impossible weight. Flashes of a woman’s fingers scratching the skin of an orange. Flashes of hundreds of men dead and dying on battlefields, spears, arrows, and jagged bones jutting from their bodies as their eyes sought salvation from a cold blue unforgiving sky. All of this and more slammed over and over into Boy Scout’s shattered mind until all he could do was drool, his mind reeling from the invasion and terraformation of the intruder.

  Boy Scout sat in the corner of the Hermit’s Cabin, face half lost in shadow. His chest heaved. What could be seen of his face was pale and covered in sweat. His hair dove in every direction. His eyes stared blankly at a place thousands of miles away that he’d never been to. His breathing eventually slowed, and for the first time in an hour he moved, a hand coming up to wipe the drool from his mouth, and then after wiping it on his pants, scraping the sweat from his brow.

  He’d been back in Afghanistan.

  Just not his Afghanistan.

  Not any Afghanistan he even remotely knew.

  But that was his new reality. When he was tired or lacked control, they surfaced like bodies in backwoods swamps that wouldn’t stay down. Putrid, rotting things whose stench was of dead and bloated bodies, oranges, and dry desert air. So far he’d counted four of them—entities or whatever they were—all inside of him, all unfortunate souvenirs from the monster that had chased him while he’d been in The White.

  The memory that had just had him in its greasy grasp was of a warrior. More importantly, he’d been a survivor. Still, the memories had been like his own, and he’d relived them as if he’d been the one in battle, the very idea of him so comingled he was becoming more and more uncertain of what was his own and what was from the others. He, him, I, was, is… all of it merging into a single being who was irrevocably not himself.

  Like now, the memory of the battle still beating in his chest like his heart was a spear smacking the edge of a shield at the instant two armies collided. Just moments ago, he’d been laying beneath bodies, the stench of death and offal enough to make him want to retch, the crushing press and weight of his brothers almost too much to bear. He didn’t dare move. That he was still alive among so much death was his secret and to move or make a sound would reveal his presence, even as British troops staggered drunkenly and exhausted between piles of the dead. His eyes were open and his entire horizon was the dead face of Ahmad, his friend and brother in arms, eyes open and glazed, teeth visible through bloody cheeks from the savage cut to his face made by one of Her Majesty’s cavalry swords. And it was through Ahmad’s glazed, dead eyes that he was able to see the reflection of what was occurring outside his pile of bodies.

  The occasional cry was cut off, then followed by laughter and rough language.

  Gunshots were few, probably conserving ammunition when the blade of a bayonet or sword would suffice.

  Everything else was silent, so much so that his own breathing seemed impossibly loud. He tried to regulate it as best he could. That he was buried beneath the flesh of his own people had been a godsend. Had they not mistaken him for dead, he’d be at the end of a sword himself. But as it was, he’d passed out when the British soldier had struck him in the head with the butt of a rifle. Even now the side of it felt broken open like a pomegranate that had over-ripened on the tree.

  Suddenly he smelled smoke and burning fat. He knew what it was before he saw the orange and red reflection in Ahmad’s eyes. The soldiers were setting each pile of bodies on fire to rid themselves of the need to bury them. He felt the rise in him at the incredible sacrilege, but then realized he was in one of the piles. And it wasn’t long before it was his turn.

  He saw the burning torch come and light Ahmad on fire. He felt the heat of his friend, even as it raged hotter and hotter until pieces of Ahmad dripped on him. He fought the urge to scream, then realized he was losing his ability to breathe. He wanted nothing more than to push his way out of the pile, to be free of the bodies of those he’d so recently fought beside. His hands and arms began to shake. His legs quivered. He felt himself release his own feces into his pants as he tried against every impulse not to move. Finally, he couldn’t take it any longer and gasping for air, pushed Ahmad off of him and clawed his way through his burning brothers to solid ground. He rolled to quench the flames that had begun to lick at his skin, then when he came to a stop, he opened his eyes, expecting the swift brutal ending from a sword.

  But all he saw was black sky, the glorious stars that had been there since he’d first stared up in awe as a child obliterated by the smoke from his burning brothers. He turned his head and watched as the soldiers in red coats moved away from him, lighting pyre after pyre of the dead, each burning pyre a bonfire of memories never to be shared over more friendly fires during more friendly times when his country wasn’t being invaded by the selfish. And then he saw it, his stars, not in the sky but recreated on the terra damnata of this smoking, hard-scrabbled slag, the burning never able to be reflected in the billowing dead sky that had so recently been the perfect heavens he’d once walked proudly beneath.

  A SHADOW DARKENED the rest of Boy Scout’s face as the door opened. He lifted the great weight of his head and peered from the darkness towards the doorway. He was pinned to the back wall by the stark ray of bright like a butterfly pinned to felt. The black silhouette of a monk stepped into the light.

  “The abbot wishes to speak with you,” came a trembling voice from someone who could not have imagined an inkling of the horrors Boy Scout had seen.

  He opened and shut his mouth several times, but his lips were impossibly chapped, peeling and bleeding in places.

  The monk stepped forward and held out a water bottle.

  Boy Scout took it and glanced at the label, something he’d bought h
imself thousands of times at a store.

  As if in apology the monk said, “It has been blessed.”

  Boy Scout unscrewed the cap and drank without touching the plastic. The water was cold and invigorating. He drank it down, feeling more alive and more himself with each gulp. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the young monk, noting the shifting of his feet, the fists balled at his side and his slight lean away from the man in the corner as if what he had was contagious.

  But then, Boy Scout was possessed of a sort. Not William Peter Blatty possessed, or at least he didn’t believe so, but he was possessed nonetheless, and the brothers and sisters of Our Lady of Atlas in Exile knew it, which was why he’d been given the Hermit’s Cabin. The recent death of their hermit had made it unoccupied and they had yet to select another.

  Boy Scout let the hand grasping the empty bottle fall to his lap. “Time,” he managed to say. “What time is it?”

  “Sext has just concluded. The abbot wishes to speak with you.” The monk wore the simple brown robe of a Trappist. Sandals on his feet. Hair cut evenly around. Fresh faced and still free of lines that would one day etch all of his worries. “One of your friends has come. She… she has news.”

  Boy Scout brightened. Lore. Preacher’s Daughter. He’d barely seen her since his return to the States. Then again, he’d barely seen anyone. He had his own personal drama to deal with, something he’d kept from the prying eyes of the military doctors, camouflaging his multiple possessions with his too-real PTSD.

  He struggled to stand.

  The monk shuffled from one foot to the other, still not willing to come closer.

  Boy Scout found the edge of his chair and used it to push himself to a standing position. He hadn’t exercised in months and his body felt like it. The only other time he’d felt as weak was back in the fugue when he’d been overweight and a junkie. But that hadn’t been real, just a projection in their minds as he and his team had lain mentally incapacitated in an ancient cistern complex in the ass end of Afghanistan. He fought back a lump as the memories of the deaths of Criminal and Narco and Bully assaulted him, almost as fresh today as they had been when they happened, memories of them never far from his thoughts—when he had his own thoughts.

  He let the young monk lead him out the door of the cabin and down the well-manicured dirt path. Ponderosa and sugar pines hugged the sides of the walkway like sentries, shrouding the walker forever in dappled gloom. The pine scent was strongest when the Santa Ana winds blew. After a few moments, the pines gave way to a wide-open space of freshly cut grass, the smell of it and loam heavy on the air. A wide, multi-armed one-story white stucco building sat in the middle of the lawn. Once the home of a Golden Age Hollywood director, the structure had recently been turned into a monastery, after the original Atlas monastery in Algeria closed down due to the wanton murder of monks by a savage and uncontrolled terrorist cell. The roof was made from mud red tile and shadowed by royal palms and California black oak, the latter already turning bright orange, the color of the flames he’d so recently seen reflected in Ahmad’s eyes. At the corners and off to the left were areas of solitude. Beside each were planted Pacific dogwoods, their willowy branches delicate compared to the stout thickness of the sprawling oaks.

  This had been Boy Scout’s home since he’d returned from Landstuhl Medical Center, where he and his surviving team had recovered. Nestled in the heights of the San Bernardino Mountains, the abbey was a place of contemplation that many had used to discover who it was they wanted to be, and most often whether or not they were close enough to God. God had nearly nothing to do with Boy Scout’s presence however, except for it being the bright flame that had been the inspiration for the abbey and the calling of those who named it a permanent home.

  He got more than a few stares as he emerged into the clearing.

  The other monks knew of him and many had seen him, but Boy Scout kept to himself, trying to master the things inside of him that kept trying to surface. And there were the day visitors, those up from Los Angeles or other points south, coming as a Christian tourist to experience, if only for a moment, how the Trappists lived in their solitary lives so near one of the most pulsating centers of modern civilization and the universal heart of worldwide cinema.

  Boy Scout knew he looked like a wild man, with his six weeks of unshaven beard, hermit hair and disheveled, sweat-stained clothes, but he didn’t care. What he did care about were the people. Not that he was worried someone might do him harm, because no one would ever think to look for him here, but his anxiety from his last deployment and everything that had transpired had set him on such a fine edge that more people than he could keep track of made him feel overanxious. So he hurried, head down, eyes scanning, to the side door marked Private. It wasn’t until he was inside that he breathed a sigh of relief.

  The young monk escorted him into the Trappists’ private dining room—red tile floors, white walls, rough tables made from great slabs of hewn redwood. Most of the tables were filled with silent, hunched monks, using chunks of bread and a spoon to eat whatever was in the bowls. Five nuns sat at a single table, doing the same.

  About half of those present glanced at Boy Scout as he entered, but the moment they saw him, they turned back to their meals.

  He clocked each of them but kept his head lowered, the pressure of being around people almost too much.

  They stopped at a table occupied only by a single monk, older and bespectacled, his face heavily scarred. He smiled when he saw Boy Scout.

  “Monsieur Starling,” he said in a French accent. “Would you please join me?”

  Boy Scout had met Abbot Dominic de Cherge the first day he’d come to the monastery and seen him several times hence, but they’d never really spoken. Boy Scout’s best friend, McQueen, had arranged Boy Scout’s stay through an old acquaintance from the French Foreign Legion. The original Atlas Abbey—Abbaye Notre Dame de Atlas—was located in Tibhirine, Algeria, and was the site where seven monks were kidnapped and murdered during the Algerian Civil War. The abbey was all but shut down after the incident. Many of the surviving monks went to the monastery annex in Fez, Morocco, but a large contingent, sponsored by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, traveled to the San Bernardino Mountains and reformed the Abbey in Exile. The abbot was the brother of one of the monks who had been killed, and after tracking down the Algerian terrorists who’d done the terrible deed, gave himself to the church. So as Boy Scout sat, he was aware that de Cherge was not only the head of the abbey, but also a former brother-in-arms.

  “Thank you for joining me, Monsieur Starling.” The abbot waved his hand and two monks arrived, one with pitchers of beer and water and the other with a bowl of stew and some bread. “Please, eat and let me tell you of some news.”

  Boy Scout stared at the man before him. Once handsome, burn scars now puckered the entire left side of the man’s face. But what Boy Scout noticed was the calmness emanating from the man. Here was someone who had led before and knew the benefits of remaining calm.

  He nodded, lowered his head, and tested a spoonful of the stew. Fish of some sort in a thick broth with potatoes and onions. He tore off a piece of bread and began to eat in earnest. He was hungrier than he thought he’d be, but then he’d been living on raw fruit and vegetables with only the occasional pot of broth for weeks.

  “I know some of what happened to you in Afghanistan,” de Cherge began, his accent making the words dance but still intelligible. “We have been watching for any Mevlevi Sufi and have been increasingly aware through our association with the Archdiocese that the Mevlevi are searching for something, probably you.”

  A voice whispered in Boy Scout’s mind, please don’t kill me daddy, then was gone. He’d become so used to the interruptions that he didn’t even pause. He poured himself a beer and closed his eyes. “I have something they want,” he said.

  De Cherge nodded. “So it seems. The center of the activity surrounds the Turkish Consulate in LA. We’ve been tracking the
Mevlevi, but there’s really no way they would even know where you are.”

  Boy Scout glanced up at the same time a woman’s voice said, I remember when you used to care about things other than yourself. A feeling of self-doubt and loathing blossomed and died inside of him. Boy Scout pushed it aside and asked, “Have you any experience with…” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

  “If you mean do we have experience with possession, then yes. I have witnessed it, as have several others, although the official line from the church contravenes the obvious.” De Cherge grinned, his lips twisting only on the unburned side. “You are not possessed. I’ve been close enough to feel the evil that comes from such things. What you are, however, is unknown. You say there are many inside of you?”

  “I can never be sure. It seems as if there are four distinct sets of memories that must come from the consciousness of former travelers. One appears to be from the eighteen hundreds, probably around 1842 during the first Battle of Kabul. I call him Ahmad’s Friend and he was a warrior. Another seems to be more recent—henpecked, no self-confidence; I have visions of a modern Arab city, but not Afghanistan. Maybe North Africa. I’m not sure at all who or what he is. He’s been mostly silent. Then there is a boy with memories of a mother and oranges. I still haven’t figured him out.”

  “And the fourth?”

  “He’s been hiding. I get a few things now and again. I think he’s English, but there’s something about him that’s different. It’s like he’s two people. One fairly recent and another who’s far older than the others. Maybe one or two hundred or even a thousand years.”

  “So old,” de Cherge said.