The Shamans at the End of Time Read online

  The Shamans at the End of Time

  Florian Armas

  ***

  Copyright © 2019 Florian Armas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without written permission of the author.

  Cover design by Fictive Covers

  ***

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 - Vlad

  Chapter 2 - Vlad

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 - Vlad

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6 - Vlad

  Chapter 7 - Vlad

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11 - Vlad

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21 - Vlad

  Chapter 22 - Vlad

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 1 - Vlad

  Technically, I’ve been a soldier from the day my conscription orders arrived seven months ago, on the day I graduated from university. The bright future in front of me is no longer bright. I am not a fighter. This is true. I never wanted to fight and, for all my training, I’m still not able to hit a moving target. The cold black rifle in my arm is a soldier’s best friend, but still a strange object to me. I am better with a bow, or a sword, but modern wars are not fought with antiques. While this is not my first mission, there’s been nothing like this before, and I wonder how my poor skills will cope when they attack us. Or my mind. Our enemies are of course moving targets. There is a strange irony in my being in the Special Forces. It’s not for my shooting skills. Having two black belts in martial art helps in close combat, though. Two years ago, I was the European champion at judo. This year I should have been the Olympic champion, everybody was expecting that, me included. It will not happen. Catalin or Andrei can shoot a fly, at three hundred paces, with their rifles. I have to watch their backs, but who will watch mine?

  Morning comes slowly, an opening eyelid over a giant black eye morphing into dark blue. With the binoculars attached to the top of my helmet, I can see the enemy soldiers around the hill we occupy. My device can track five targets simultaneously – the most dangerous ones – and feed them directly into my goggles. There are only seven of us, not even a platoon. On my arm, the tactical display records the movement of our enemies on the map: red spots sliding slowly across the screen. They are still far away and, hopefully, unaware of our presence. Down in the valley, the morning mist is sneaking along the river. Perhaps so is our death. There must be some iron ore in the entrails of the surrounding hills; the lazily flowing water has a reddish hue. The cursed color makes me look away.

  “When we get back, I will have someone Court Martialled???,” Dan growls, the fingers of his left arm dancing gently in the air to control the movements of his binoculars, his right hand gripping the rifle tightly. He never lets AI control his binoculars.

  If we get back. As if he hears my thoughts, he turns toward me, and I struggle to avoid his stare.

  There was no need to say what everybody already knows: we are surrounded. Dan is our lieutenant, in charge of our lives as well as his. His frowning eyes betray some inner search for a miraculous escape plan. We trust him, but what is coming now is something that none of us have encountered before, not even him. We can’t even communicate with our base; our transmission would be intercepted instantly, and a missile would pay us a courtesy visit.

  My eyes move again from the enemy soldiers swarming on my screen to Dan’s face. Impassive, it reveals no feelings – as if his growl was just an illusion. He is a good lieutenant, or at least he has half a year more fighting experience than us, plus time at the military academy. I understand his apprehension. We are on this hilltop because the wrong coordinates were sent by a lazy soldier who did not take time to check the encrypted order he sent to us. Maybe he was dreaming of his girlfriend, or maybe his brother was killed in action. Or maybe it wasn’t anything like that, just plain negligence. One wrong digit in the coordinates Dan received sent us into this hell. I can’t say we were totally unlucky. Passing unobserved through the first enemy line during the night was a lucky shot, especially when we knew nothing about it. We even hummed a tune, walking through the forest to replace our comrades in an observation post that was supposed to be safe, at our edge of no-man’s land. Instead we found ourselves on this bloody hill.

  “This place is magical,” Catalin whispers, a few paces in front of me. His left hand makes an ample gesture, to include the whole hilltop in that magical spot. The hill resembles a half-bald man’s head, thick hair on his nape, and a full beard. There is an old oak forest on the lower parts, some trees so large they could hide a car. The bald area is partly covered by old ruins that we had no idea about until today, no more than a few decayed stones arranged in a small circle between larger natural rocks. Propelled by some strange curiosity, we tried to find them on the maps, but there was nothing. “I can feel the energy surrounding us.”Fingers spread wide, his left hand is now rigid and stretched in front of him, trying to feel what he calls the ‘energy’. The quiet excitement in his voice transfers into my mind too, I don’t know why.

  Catalin is a math teacher. I’ve known him since childhood. The same quarter of the city, the same school, the same dreams. Almost. One year older, he finished university the year before me. His dream was already taking shape: for one year, he taught children the beauty of math. “Life is like a math equation,” he used to say. “It’s up to you to find the most beautiful solution.”

  What solution did our marvelous politicians find? The last economic crisis went on for almost a decade, and they decided that war was the best way to end it. At least no nukes have been used yet.

  What are my chances of getting out of here alive, returning home and fulfilling my own dream? My dream is to build planes, or even better, space planes ready to fly to Mars. Last year, I applied for several jobs, before graduating. By the time they answered, I was already in uniform. My parents informed them, and they promised to hire me when I got back from the front. With two permanent bases established on Mars and weekly shuttles to the Moon, there is a definite shortage of specialized engineers.

  Catalin is not just a math teacher. Some years ago, he found, in his grandfather’s cellar, a box filled with strange books about spirituality and hidden mysteries from the past, and his life changed. He loves legends about energetic portals linking unknown places and time lines. I have heard them all. I don’t believe in such things, but Catalin is a colorful storyteller, recounting lost civilizations that may never have existed and esoteric mysteries. No one can prove that Atlantis or Lemuria were real, but Catalin is my friend. Why should I upset him? And he sees things that others cannot. I will believe that when I have proof, but I never contradict him. He takes my silent behavior as an endorsement of his peculiar beliefs.

  “The main vortex is right there,” Catalin points at the stone resting my back and, involuntarily, I touch the stone. It’s cold.

  A cold vortex, I almost laugh, and bite my lip, unwilling to upset Catalin. Convinced that there is nothing to see, I don’t turn around.

  “It goes a hundred feet into the sky. These
ruins…” he continues, scratching his beard, his face thoughtful. “They must have been a temple a long time ago. What a pity to fight here.”

  What a pity to fight, period.

  “Shut up, Catalin,” Toma growls. In normal circumstances, he would choose to ignore the story, and Toma is not the only feeling annoyed one right now.

  “Let him speak,” I say – better listening to Catalin’s fairytales than thinking about a hundred ways to die. There are so many ways to vanish in a war. I had no idea about most of them in my previous life. There is more for the imagination in a real war than in a hundred movies. All morbid. “Your vortex must go underground too,” I tease Catalin.

  “Yes,” he says quickly, unable to feel my friendly dig; it’s so easy to get Catalin to talk about the hidden things that no one but he is able to see. “It’s like a hidden fire. Fire, walk with me,” he casts something resembling a spell from his old books, his eyes tense and searching.

  “Will this do it?” Andrei flicks his lighter and laughter fills the hill; the enemy is too far away to hear us.

  “I’m afraid that your vortex won’t help. What about a flying saucer? Can you summon one?” Dan jokes in his most serious tone, and that provokes more laughter. Even Toma joins in, a bit later, like an afterthought.

  “Only a flying can,” Catalin replies, still laughing. “Make your choice. I have chicken or chicken.” Our usual meal for more than six months already. Swiftly, he opens the backpack, and tosses a can out. Then he does it again, and again, his repetitive movements resembling a peculiar metronome, counting the seconds of our lives.

  How I’d like to eat something cooked by Mother. My mind slips back to a past that has nothing to do with war and destruction and killing people like us. A past of love and happiness. A present of attrition and despair. Even the most regular meal with the family, a thing you used to ignore and take for granted, is now just a pleasant, distant dream you crave for.

  “They are coming,” Dan warns, watching the tactical com attached to his arm, and in sudden silence, we take up firing positions between the stones.

  The first projectile hits the ground just thirty feet in front of our position. Alerted by the whizzing sound, Andrei and I withdraw a few seconds before the explosion, our backs pressed to the old stone protecting us, its coldness passing slowly through our uniforms. It’s calming. We stare at each other and our nervous laughter fills the silence before the next explosion. We escaped. In the corner of my eye, I catch Catalin squeezing the trigger of his rifle, which has a silencer, and I know that one enemy is down. One of many. Another explosion shatters the earth to the left of our hell-hole. It seems distant, and I am not bothered by it. Unexpectedly, a lone shard of shrapnel hisses through the air in front of us. With a muffled sound, it hits a stone covered with dried moss, on our right, and recoils, leaving behind multi-colored sparks. Andrei bends in pain and grunts loudly. I hear gurgling, and his head rolls. My mind registers its fall with an unwanted level of detail. It seems impossible, but Andrei’s head rolls down from his shoulders and falls into my lap. His body bends, then slips aside, away from me. In a few moments, the grass below changes from green to red, my camouflage trousers too. I can’t move; I can’t react in any way. I can still breathe. Logically, I realize that I am in a shock, not only because I am paralyzed, but because my mind has shed its self-preservation mechanism. Andrei’s eyes are serene, like he is resting, like he is still alive. I have the foolish hope that he will wink at me and smile, telling me that it’s all just a joke. All war is a bad joke.

  My breath comes out in spurts, one in and out each second, and I feel as if I’m breathing like a dog trying to cool itself down. My pulse goes up; I am hyperventilating; the oxygen in my blood is 100 percent, my pulse 187 heartbeats per minute, and the monitoring Lifeband around my head sends messages to my tactical com, warning me. It’s useless, my pulse still goes up. I feel an electric shock from the Lifeband, and I realize that I passed out for a while. The com shows me that I was unconscious for 3.7651 seconds. I don’t understand the need for so many decimals, and I blink rapidly. Andrei’s head is still sitting quietly in my lap, his blind eyes staring at me. Death is like sleeping. I look into his glassy eyes. All I can think now is to calculate the probability of that shrapnel hitting him and not me – a useless, yet somehow calming exercise, or at least numbing.

  “Our planes!” Dan shouts with sudden joy, pointing up at the sky. He taps frantically on his tactical console, and I assume he’s risking contacting our headquarters. “Nothing,” he growls. “They are jamming us.”

  Andrei’s head is still in my lap. I stare back with numb detachment at our front lines from where the planes were supposed to come; Dan is right. The moment I turn, a batch of missiles leave their places under the wings, and I follow them with the desperation of the dying man looking for his salvation: silvery fishes swarming the sky. Small at first, they grow with each second, approaching the hill, and spread out in a fan-like shape I saw in a medieval movie, some time ago, before the war. They look so beautiful in the sky. As I watch them, I’m still calculating the bloody probability that killed Andrei and not me.

  “Nooo!” Dan shouts.

  I don’t realize what’s happening until one of the missiles alters its course, coming straight toward us. “The probability,” I laugh like a mad man, embracing Andrei’s head. “The probability is so small...”

  Explosion. A red column of dust and hot air covers our hell-hill. My nostrils are burning.

  “I didn’t expect you,” a voice whispers in my mind.

  That’s the last thing I remember.

  My eyes open again to reflections of a dazzling sun shining from patches of snow on the high peaks, and to a sky deep and radiantly blue, in a place that is not the hell-hill. It’s not a hospital either. I am lying in the grass, in the middle of a meadow with coniferous trees here and there, surrounded by high mountains, similar to the ones around my grandparents’ village, yet unknown. It’s a calm spring landscape as lovely as a dream. There is no long tunnel and light at the end of my vision, no angels, no trumpets, yet it looks like the afterlife. I had the vague impression of some kind of tunnel. A hot and dark one. If this is death… I can’t complain, at least not right now. Flying high, a predatory bird reminds me of the hell I’ve escaped from and that bloody plane. Explosions still reverberate in my mind, and I have a brief impulse to check if I am wounded. My laughter fills the silent place; you no longer care about wounds when you are dead. Can I walk? Can I fly? The bird is calling to me, and I jump up easily, unable to avoid a surge of dark images of the many wounds I saw during the war – other people’s wounds. It was impossible to escape unwounded from that explosion. That much I know. And for sure, you can’t die if you are not badly wounded. When I half-turn, I see Dan. He is dead too, and he is definitely wounded. The lower half of his body is missing, from the navel down. Why is he like that? I stare at my lower parts, fearing that they might vanish in a blink. Everything is in the right place, even Andrei’s blood staining my trousers, small and almost dry rivulets running from thighs to ankles. Where is his head? Irritated by my own thought, I make no attempt to find it. With annoying pedantry, I observe more blood on my left leg. My fingers touch the canvas: the blood is still viscous, and I have to fight a sudden impulse to smell and taste it. To avoid my macabre urge, I check the tactical com. It’s dead. Who needs such things in the afterlife?

  “Vlad,” someone shouts, and I turn further. It is Catalin, walking straight toward me. He is wounded too: a thin stream of blood runs down the left side of his face.

  That’s when I finally understand that I am dreaming, and I worry that, safe inside my dream, I have been badly wounded in real life. I shiver, and my teeth clack with a noise that sounds half comic. For a moment, I want to wake up. Why? Enjoy the dream. Or maybe I am too scared to return to a reality that might look like Dan. Or Andrei. Any moment I fear that his head will materialize in my dream, flying around me like the Ch
eshire Cat, all eyes and fangs. With unwanted precision, the memory of the explosion, which I am trying so hard to ignore, finds another way to resurface: the missile, whooshing as it falls on us, the blast, the hot dust in the air. Just a few seconds of a dark movie, repeated, over and over.

  It’s my dream, and I don’t care to share my knowledge with Catalin, not even when he embraces me tightly.

  “We escaped,” he cries, his tears running down my face together with his blood.

  “Yes, we escaped.” I pat his back. At least, I escaped... There is no way to tell him that he may already be dead. Before the explosion, Catalin was twenty paces in front of me, and Dan was a few paces in front of him. It makes sense, I glance at Dan’s half body. Where is Andrei’s head? I fight against my impulse to look for it.

  My dream has a strange clarity. Dan’s open belly is a grim lesson in anatomy, and his blood soils the grass. Closer to my eyes, Catalin’s blood looks so real, and the spots on my pants too. Again I fight the urge to taste it. Disengaging, I glance around, still patting Catalin’s shoulder. I can see many trees, and even see small branches and leaves. Rocks, a large river gleaming in the sun, delicate shrouds of cloud in the sky. The predatory bird is still flying above us, and my eyes follow it. My dream is strange not only in its content, but in the level of detail too. We have to bury Dan... I don’t know what significance that might have in a dream, but I feel the need to do it. With a sigh, I turn my eyes back to the landscape.

  “Don’t worry,” Catalin tries to soothe me, his right arm still around my shoulders. “We will survive.”

  “Yes, we will survive,” I parrot his words, mechanically, with no intention of mocking him – a voice void of feeling.

  The burial is easy – we find a small crevasse in the ground with boulders around it. The hard part is carrying the corpse;, not because of its weight, after all it’s only half of the real Dan, but because we want to avoid losing some more of him as we drag hid body along. Sobbing, Catalin prays, then mumbles something that I can’t grasp about Dan’s energy going back to Mother Earth.