As a general rule, I don’t post published freelance material. This is an exception – Bruce Baugh, one of the developers involved with shoehorning it into print, posted it as a teaser for The Book of Oblivion (Wraith 20th Anniversary Edition), the book in which it saw publication. As it’s already been released into the wild, I don’t have an ethical issue re-posting it here.
This serves as the introduction to the section in BoO (boo scary boo!) in which I got to write about ghosts in disasters. I’m an emergency manager in my day job, so this may have been the apotheotic intersection of my “normal” and gaming work. That’s probably one of the best pieces of game writing I’ve done, and I’ll always be a little sad that it’s tucked away in a supplement that maybe twelve people will ever read.
The opening image had been stuck in my head since the summer of 1996. I can’t thank Bruce enough for giving me the opportunity to get it out at a time in my life when I could write something like this. Catharsis, in an odd way that only other writers truly get.
I don’t do a lot of fiction work. This is one of two or three pieces I’ve ever written that I actually liked at the time and still like after the fact.
Early morning over the wounded city and our pilot is flying blind.
Five crews are on this op, ferried in on the last Midnight Express run, our birds tarped down on flatcars. We briefed before dawn in the railyard as the train pulled out, taking everyone who can’t or won’t fight or work. Siege conditions: evacuate the noncombatants. Oblivion is hungry today.
Blackwell is in the right seat, visor down to hide what’s left of his face after it lost a fight with a Vietnamese 57mm shell. Thankfully, it doesn’t affect his aviating. We’re in a slow clockwise orbit, scanning for survivors through two-bell winds and everything they carry. The living don’t know what’s coming – the forecast says the first bodies won’t hit the ground for another six hours – but here, the Maelstrom is already building.
“Got a tasking,” McGuire murmurs from the left seat where she’s running comms in a shared waking dream. “Augur says three on a rooftop by the university.”
Blackwell double-clicks the intercom by way of acknowledgement and breaks off to point us in that direction. It’s a short flight, even with bone hail clattering off the windshield, and Castaneda and I double-check our safety lines and lean out the doors to search.
“Fast-mover inbound,” McGuire reports. “On our six, going for the tail.”
I crane my neck and see a streak of green teeth and black robes coming at us. True to form, it’s relying on a living memory of aerodynamics, and it vomits out a tongue like a barbed anchor chain to ensnare our tail rotor and spin us out of the sky. Blackwell just grunts and holds us steady, giving the Spectre an easy target.
A noise like a handful of rocks dropped in a blender overpowers a brief squawk of dismay as Stygian steel replacement blades don’t even slow down. The chain wraps and pulls its owner in, then the Spectre hits the fan and rips apart. We barely feel a shudder. Laminate rotors were the first thing we replaced, dumbass.
“Mark, mark, mark. Torch at eight o’clock.” While I’ve been watching the show, Castaneda’s been on mission. Blackwell brings us around as I start checking my gear. We don’t want to put the bird within reach of what’s in the water, so I’ll rope down and we’ll winch those wraiths in one at a time.
That’s the plan for the next thirty seconds, anyway. I’m about to go on the line when the screaming from below – can’t hear you over the Pathos turbine, guys – intensifies. Then the wind gives us a shove toward a bell tower as a stroke of lightning splits the air where we were. I grab for a handhold and twist toward the door in time to see the first caul bob to the water’s surface, and I realize I’m hearing the screams from across the Shroud. That means the forecast was wrong and people are dying now, and this storm is about to eat us and everyone else in it.
The smart thing to do would be to firewall it and RTB, but if I were smart, I wouldn’t be in the back of a relic Huey in a Maelstrom. So instead, I lock eyes with Castaneda. “Plan B?” I ask even as she’s reaching for my harness.
“We gotta go out. We don’t have to come back,” she confirms, and then we’re out the door at a totally unsurvivable altitude. Her wings come out at the same time as my hatchets and as she turns, I can see a nihil chewing away the corner of the building. Our survivors aren’t screaming any more. They’re too busy fending off the cousin of the thing our tail rotor shredded. It’s a race to see whether the Spectre or the Labyrinth gets them first.
The Spectre, the Labyrinth, or us.