Spirit Wars Read Online Free PDF Page A

pipelines. In all
the confusion, my restraints slacken and I promptly do a reverse head-butt.
    I feel blood flow in an instant. There’s a flush of heat, a blur,
and then everything turns to black.
    ****
    I was out for an uncertain amount of time. As I drift back into
consciousness, I hear nothing but silence; tomblike and earsplitting. I
fearfully open my eyes and take in my surroundings while doing a mental check
of every ache in my body. I’m alive and, all things considered, still in one
piece in Death’s office.
    Death has an office. This impression is only the second one I get;
the first that actually entered my mind was: mind-blown. 
    The room I’m in is the exact scene of my persistent nightmare. In
all four directions, floor to ceiling the walls are covered with computer
monitors, every one of them showing a different video feed. The only thing I
wasn’t able to foresee is their outlandish, hexagonal shape and how they all
fit one another like the inside of a beehive. The material that makes up their
edges is crude and looks like a whitish, waxy substance secreted by some insect
of horrifying size. Also, it’s not liquid crystal inside the monitors but water
somehow engineered to flow upwards instead of down, probably from yet another
enchanted river.
    The noise that the computers emit is eerily accurate, however.
There’s no mistaking that hybrid insectile-mechanical drone. It’s the white
noise that has surrounded my entire life; this perverse sound of death.
    Each and every monitor in the room is showing a scene straight out
of painfully innocent human lives: people going about their everyday affairs
oblivious of these very powerful spy cams trained on them. At first, the feeds
look like home videos but the longer you look at them the more you see that not
all of them are memorable or even properly focused; they’re just your candid people seen from both routine and God-worthy perspectives
– standing in a jam-packed subway, kneeling in church, making love in a
run-down apartment, passing a joint at a
party…
    It
finally hits me as more of the same thing enter my consciousness: all the
people have what appear to be white balloons attached to their necks. These
things are floating and bobbing after their owners like real balloons but
they’re sort of meatier and softly lit like paper lanterns, from the fat
strings to the ovals themselves. These balloons also have varying lengths of
string for each person and thus reach more than one height. Some kiss faces
while others tower as high as skyscrapers and yet, inexplicably, the humans
live their lives completely unaware of this excess baggage. And whenever the
string of a balloon gets caught somewhere or crosses that of another, they
never get tangled but dissolve and reconstitute themselves in a flash.
    I
recall one other place I’ve seen them: down the River Akheron where they float,
deflated but recognizable.
    Umballicus , their name
echoes in my ear, in Kharon’s ogre voice.
    The thing that really knocks the wind out of me though, even after
all I’ve been through, is the fact that in one of the monitors nearest me I can
see Samantha. Sam. Simply thinking of her name makes me feel old, ancient; and
home feels like billions of light-years away, both in space and time.
    Sam’s umballicus-bearing image is sitting on a bed in a room that
looks faintly familiar. She’s hugging my dusty, stringless guitar and sobbing
piteously. It takes a moment for me to realize that she’s in mourning. For me.
And all at once through another psychic sitrep, this time with the force of a
4G bullet to the brain, I come to have a very vivid picture of everything that
has transpired in my absence:
    In the hospital, the sight and sound of all those machines
surrounding my bed reminds Sam that the substantial part of me, that which once
made me me is in danger. The man lying in the hospital bed is Nataniel Cuervo
but at the same time not him. Right now a very thin line