Native Hunt
A Shadowrun Short Story
(pdf here
http://www.fizzygoo.com/ww/native_hunt.pdf)
The elements were in alignment. The four points created the symbolic diamond of the mystic gem which flickered like infernal fire, glistened like oily water, opaque as smoggy air, and solid as torn earth. In the center was the nearly-dead; the perfect coalescence of the antithesis of the Philosopher’s stone: Philosopher’s Rot. He had been easy to reach, that now nearly lifeless professor of comparative religions who lay face down within the twisted hermetic diagram. A prize easily won by silent stalking through the college campus’ shaded groves. He was taken in the night under the statue of a Tyrannosaurus Rex; one of University of Wyoming’s, now University of Sioux’s, oldest surviving statues.
Steve - no one called him Steve anymore, only hushed whispers in the dark that mouthed the name "Nightmare" - raised his pestle high, his hands gripping the handle with the head descending towards Earth, and slammed the tool into the mortar. The bat-like pestle’s blunt head crushed the brain within the large bowl, cracking the mortar into four pieces. The body at the center of the ritual exhaled its last breath.
Blood dripped from Nightmare’s nose. He felt as though his spirit had faded; his soul in search of the medium through which to move his body. But it was not done. The professor’s body melted into an acidic molten mass of steam and viscous fluids that ate away at the clothing and enveloped the professor’s steel-rimmed spectacles. Nightmare could feel the torment spread out around him; the ritual a dreaded epicenter of suffering, loss, and extermination. As the radius of terror grew, the oozing body at the center of the ritual grew to a great height. And as the morbid mass grew, the torment spread out to nearly a kilometer in all directions of the forgotten prospector’s mine; plants wilted, animals fled, metahumans knew despair.
Nightmare felt the voice as much as heard it from behind him, a deep grating voice he had become intimately familiar with over the past two years, "bind the spirit now," it said as if pointing out the avatar of the banal.
"I know," Nightmare thought to himself as he completed the ritual, binding the great form toxic spirit to the coagulating and malformed substance which had been the professor’s body.
* * *
"The intel is good, goddamnit," Missouri Pete said over his commlink to the rest of his crew as he reached the crest of the hill’s ridge. He turned and looked down. Several meters below him, Whiskey John, Alex, Max, and Lovage worked to maneuver around the granite boulders covered in lichen and avoid the cactus growing in between. Where there wasn’t cactus or boulders, there was sagebrush which Alex took great joy in crushing under his massive troll-sized boots.
"I don’t give a devil rat’s ass, Pete," Whiskey John messaged back as he pulled himself up a two meter slab of granite. "Crazy Horse?! Fucking shit-speck hole on I80 in the middle of fucking nowhere! Why’d you pick a target out near Crazy Horse?"
"The intel is good, John. The toxic’s head in these hills is worth the money." Pete messaged back to the John as he watched the big man climb up from below, though he knew the rest of the team was listening. He stretched his back and took in his surroundings. To his left, the east, and in front of him lay the small town of Cha-O-Ha, which used to be called Rawlins back when the U.S. still controlled the area. It fell on hard times when the mines, railroad, and BLM moved their jobs elsewhere in Wyoming. It then became a base of operations for the Natives during the Ghost Dance War. As part of the effort to wipe Anglo influences from the new nation, the Sioux Nation renamed the city in the early 2020’s in honor of Crazy Horse, using his birth name, though most just referred to the town as Crazy Horse.
"We’d get a million clean if we just handed him over to the Draco Foundation," John replied.
"Half that for the head, and we don’t have to worry about taking him alive," Alex responded cheerfully, "sounds like we have a better deal this way."
Pete turned from looking at the town and his crew. To the northwest he could just make out the Sioux military base at Sweetwater, some sixty kilometers away. He could see the dark line of the airstrip and the nearby artificial lake; a byproduct of the old U.S. uranium mine. To the north, there were two more ridges of hills, only one of which his crew needed to cross. Past the hills, in the haze of the distant horizon, Pete could make out the fault scarp white cliffs of the Ferris Mountains, "they look like eyebrows," Pete said to himself in reference to the mountain’s cliffs.
"What?" Max asked as she pulled her self up next to Pete.
"The mountains there, in the distance. Looks like eyeless eyebrows."
Max took a moment and studied the bluish peaks, "so they do."
"You feel that?" Lovage said, her voice tight and low as she came up beside Max and Pete.
"The wind? Yeah, it’s been blowing since before the mountains were here," Max said pushing stray raven-black strands of hair that had escaped her braids off her brow.
"No," Lovage said as she glared at Max for the flippant remark. "It’s not right h…look!" She pointed down the slope to the northeast.
"What’d I miss?" Whiskey John said on reaching the ridge and seeing everyone’s attention turned towards the same area.
"Lovage was just informing us," Pete replied.
"Look at the cactus…and the sage."
The four of them scrutinized the plants as Alex brought up the rear, his enormous backpack bulging with equipment. "What?" John asked.
"The cactus, the sage, they’re all dead. This place is tainted." Lovage said, her magical senses attuning her to land and sky. The horror of it forced tears to fall from her face. The rest of the crew looked out towards the next ridge which was sparsely covered in wilted wind battered scrub pines, dead sage, and desiccated cacti.
Max looked at Lovage and saw her gaze distant and unfocused. She knew that look; the mage was perceiving the astral space. Max decided to do the same. Though she could not project her spirit through the astral realms, nor could Max cast spells, she had learned how to see into the astral. Max relaxed and began to breathe in the rhythm that she had discovered allowed her to see the other world but a spike of pain shot through the base of her skull, twisting around her brain and weaving jaggedly down her spine. Max cursed and stopped focusing, "I can’t see into the astral."
"The taint, it taxes us gifted. Even you, Max. It dampens your abilities. It must be attuned to the toxic…his power here will be inversely greater with respect to our weakness."
"Greeaat," Whiskey John moaned.
"We’re getting close then. Final check," Pete commanded.
* * *
The mine, which cut only thirty meters into the side of the hill, hadn’t been in use since the 1920s. But just before the Ghost Dace War, the mayor secretly ordered the fire department to store hazardous materials at the old copper mine with the hopes of using the site as a possible national radioactive waste storage site. The contracts for such a site promised to be lucrative and the mayor had even had closed-door talks with Shiawase about selling the rights solely to the corporation. But the war changed everything. The mayor, outspokenly anti-native, was found hanging from the third story window of the Old Wyoming State Penitentiary. The hazardous materials were forgotten as the front lines swept through the town. Slowly, one by one, over the years the canisters began to leak and as the chemical soup brewed within the mine more canisters degraded and spilled their contents until finally the floor was covered with a foul sludge, the air thick with acids that etched away at the walls like mad otherworldly Neanderthals.
Nightmare squatted at the mouth of the mine, his back towards the darkness, looking down at a black oily pool he had fashioned out of earth he had “stolen” from the uranium reclamation pit at the Sweetwater military base. He swayed slightly to his left and right, his gaze falling past and through the pool into the dark depths not of this world.
"Half-breed," he heard a thick guttural voice call out behind him.
"Do not call me that," he said still lost in the pool.
"But that is what you are," the voice responded, this time sounding as if it were several voices speaking in discordant harmony.
"The Newe is dead. I am no longer half-breed, only half."
"You know that is only half true. You cannot exist as a half, yet you live."
"True."
"Then," the voices began to merge into the singular, "what are you?"
Nightmare’s jaw ground out the word, "half-breed."
"But if the Shoshone within you is dead, then what is your other half?" The voice asked with horrid glee.
"You."
"Very good," and with those words Nightmare fell through the pool, descending thousands of kilometers through lightless festering worlds of madness, rot, and pain. He focused on his goal and began to glide on acidic winds until the pallor of a putrid-green sun began to tear through the smog of void. Seeing a dark malignant spot, like some pitch festering tumor, on the desiccated landscape Nightmare began to descend. He drew in close and could make out the dark spot. It was a malignant festering stump of what was once an ancient magnificent oak tree. Upon the stump sat a grey chalice that looked as if it were made out of poisonous lead and half melted with tears of hardened metal running down its sides.
Nightmare drew his dagger, the orichalcum etched blade, the jaw-bone of his father, sat upon a hilt of steel and bone. Its black satin wrapped bone handle warm in his hand. He stepped up to the trunk, his other hand reaching for the chalice. It seemed as if to absorb the light of the hellish sun, shadows on its surface, light weeping from the edges of the tears.
"As below, so above," he incanted and grabbed the object.
A great shadow arose from the far side of the stump, coalescing into madness itself. A form like that of a four-armed man, only rotted and pulpy like a diseased tree from which criminals are hung, took shape and roared, "you dare!"
"I succeed!" Nightmare roared back and swiftly drew his blade across his forearm. Sending the chalice to his dagger hand, he let the blood flow into the cup.
Shades arose from under the exposed blackened roots of the stump, pulling upon his legs. But Nightmare stood fast. The pustulent tree-thing rose up, towering over stump and man, and the roots of the stump began to tear free of the sickened ground. But Nightmare heeded them not. He pulled from a pouch the gory brains from his earlier ritual and dropped them into the chalice and then grabbed the cup with his bloody free hand.
The shadowy talons of the shades at his feet tore into his calves and he nearly fell. Haunting visions of failed quests for the chalice filled his spirit, ancient souls from the past age of magic trapped for eternity, driven mad, stripped of self. Punishment for their failure.
Nightmare roared again and drove his dagger into the contents of the chalice. Noxious steam exploded into a cloud and he deftly threw the contents upon the stump. Greenish fire leapt up where the gore struck the dead tree and the great spirit’s scream shattered the essences of the shades. The fires gave birth to a conflagration that consumed the stump and spirit alike. In a flash, all was silent, and the putrid sun shown down upon a still and lifeless landscape.
"I succeed," Nightmare hissed and then began to ascend towards the pool, chalice in hand.
* * *
"Goddamnit!" Alex yelled over the commlink. He was sitting safely at the far end of the valley which ran northwest to southeast and curved to the south, blocking his line of sight to the mine.
"What?" Whispered Missouri Pete.
"This wind! It’s playing havoc with the fly," Alex was nearly nauseous as the augmented reality window of the MCT Fly-spy video, fed directly to his brain via his commlink, swirled and spun as the five centimeter drone was buffeted about the sky above the canyon.
"Bring it low, the walls of the valley are blocking much of the wind," Pete said.
"Right," Alex replied and sent the mechanical insect into a nose dive. The wind pushed it several meters laterally and even lifted it back up several times before it finally came low to the ground and regained control. "That did it," Alex smiled and mentally commanded the machine to fly low to the ground, then up the side of the valley. He parked the drone on a large rock some ten meters outside the mine’s entrance.
A hundred meters further down from the drone, Missouri Pete lay flat on a lower ledge of a thirty meter cliff that ran along the northern side of the valley. His Walther MA-2100 sniper rifle’s barrel extending several centimeters past a dead sagebrush, the branches cleared to allow the scope a clear view of the mine and its entrance.
Lovage crouched down on the southern side of the valley, up a small ravine. She was intently watching the mine, waiting for their target to emerge. She could barely make out Whiskey Pete and Max who were crouched above the mine waiting to leap upon their target should the others fail. Max was focusing inward, fortifying her body for the battle to come through her mystical connection to her own essence.
A patch of red to Lovage’s right caught her attention. She turned to look and there, from the base of a boulder, three Indian Paintbrush flowers bent where the wind directed. "They aren’t dead?" she whispered with a smile and then reached out as she drew her ceremonial dagger. She whispered a prayer to the spirits and cut one of the three flowers free and then gently placed it in her talismonger pouch.
"Holy shit!" Whiskey John’s words electronically projected to his team members via their commlinks.
"What?" Pete replied urgently.
"You won’t believe this," Max said, "The fucker is emerging from the pool!"
"What?" Pete asked confused.
"Got it, here’s the feed," Alex said and piped the video feed of his drone, which sat on the bolder that blocked Pete and Lovage’s view of the event, to the rest of the team. The video displayed on Pete’s cybereyes and on the HUD of Lovage’s glasses.
"Holy shit," Pete whispered. The video feed revealed a shaven head emerging from a pool of brackish oily liquid that could only have been centimeters deep at best. Rivulets of the foul waters ran off the man’s smooth scalp as a hand emerged and reached out for solid ground.
"Now?" Whiskey John pleaded.
"No. Hold," Pete replied sharply.
"It’s a portal. The pool’s a gate, a rift!" Lovage relayed to the team.
"I thought you couldn’t take your body into the astral?" Max said, her grip tightening on the handle of her hand-made spear as the unnatural emergence continued.
"I know, right? This guy’s way over my head," Lovage cringed as if hiding lower behind the rocks would block out the vision being played out on her glasses.
"Just keep to the plan," Pete messaged to his crew as he eyed the video feed while looking through the rifle’s scope trying to time the moment the toxic magician’s head would rise into view from behind the boulder.
Lovage squinted at the video feed, the man held something in his left hand, it looked like a dull grey opaque melted wine glass.
The bald oil-slicked head rose up, cresting the horizon of the boulder like an apocalyptic moon, and Pete fired.
The armor piercing round traveled at nearly a kilometer per second and would have reached its target at just over a tenth of a second, but after traveling for 0.096 seconds, just sixteen meters from piercing the base of the target’s neck, a shimmering field of ethereal force enveloped the now standing, toxin soaked, man. Reactively, the man jerked as his protective shield took effect, and the round merely grazed his shoulder, blood, mingling with the chemical sheen, began to gently leak down his arm.
A fifth of a second later the man heard the muffled shot coming from up the valley.
Max leapt from her position just as Whiskey John fired two rounds from his Ares Predator. From the mine blazed a sulfurous oozing mass of chemical chaos. So large and swift, it intercepted both Max’s descent and John’s bullets. The rounds hissed harmlessly into the acidic mess as if hellishly embracing the added lead. Unable to control her parabolic arc midair, Max landed against the mass and kicked her self off of it to land on the ground nearby. Jelly-like slime steamed as it slowly ate away at her clothing and boot until it reached her flesh. Her eyes welled up from the pain.
To either side of Max rushed shimmering nearly-invisible spirits that manifested on the physical plane; one as a dust-devil whirlwind, the other a column of flame. Both tore into the terrible oozing chemical horror. "I don’t think my spirits will be able to…" Lovage was cut off as Pete fired another round from his Walther.
This time the shot knocked the man down just before he could complete an incantation. "Target down," Missouri Pete said as he watched the final moments of the man’s fall through the video feed of the MCT spy-fly drone’s camera, "Focus on that thing."
* * *