Chapter 1 – DAY ONE

Ⱥ

Shit might be different if I hadn't been getting a world-class blowjob when I heard my roommate shout, “Die, motherfucker, die.’ Better, worse. I don’t know, but different for sure. Yeah, here I am, so, obviously, things worked out, but, still. Could’ve been different. But, anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself as to the story. The basics of which we have discovered, discerned, hypothesized and figured out over time. So, let me start from the beginning.

My name is Rick West. Actually, I was baby baptized into the Lutheran Church as Ulrich von Sachsen-Westlichen, but, when my parents immigrated from Argentina to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the good ol’ U.S. of A, they decided to ‘Americanize.’ So, they legally changed our names. Bam! ‘Hi, call me Rick.’

Anyway, my younger sister Erika and I did the private school thing. She did cheerleading and chick sports. Volleyball, archery, shit like that. Damned good at it too. Two universities offered a full-ride Title IX scholarship for v-ball, but father considered it would be an ignoble act to accept when our family could easily afford the cost to any university in the world. I played all the stud sports, football, lacrosse, baseball, rugby, and soccer. Being a history nut just a single generation from Europe, I also got really involved in competitive sword fighting called Historical European Martial Arts, or HEMA. I had to cut back on some school sports, but I won most of my tournaments.

It worked for me. It turns out I enjoyed fighting so much I ended up adding a stint in mixed martial arts. Got offered sponsorships and thought about going pro. Yeah, I was that good.

And then, in one of those life-altering moments that are not uncommon at age nineteen, I found my dream girl. The one. You know what I’m saying? ‘The ONE.’ The one who steals your heart, the one who makes you feel all squirrelly inside, the one who makes it so you can’t think of anything but her. That one. I was so in love, it was disgusting.

Within a few weeks, I proposed in a real romantic setting. Spent three hundred bucks to make it rain rose petals in the restaurant as I knelt and asked for her hand in marriage. She said, ‘Yes. I was her king, her prince, her knight, her everything, and she wanted to be mine alone forever and always.’

Made a video of the proposal and put it online, even. What a dumbass. About three weeks before the wedding, I got a minor injury at a workout and left early, walked into our apartment and found the love of my life taking it balls-deep in the ass from her so-called ‘ex-boyfriend.’ She claimed my father had paid her and her ‘ex’ to get back together. I believed her.

Nope. Didn’t kill anyone, just turned around and started walking. Eventually, I wandered into a strip mall and sat on the curb. Crying like a little bitch.

After a while, a dude walked out one of the little office unit things and took a seat next to me. Smoking a cigarette. Yeah, he was in uniform.

“Got bad news?” he asked, smoke wafting from his mouth and nose as he spoke.

I wiped tears from my eyes and replied, “Yeah. Caught my fiancée. Her ex-boyfriend was working her booty like he was running a jackhammer.”

“Hmm. That sucks, bro. Fuck your life.”

I coughed up a weak-ass laugh. “Yeah. Fuck my life.”

Imagining all the things she had probably done with him when she was only supposed to be mine made my chest hurt. Real bad. My fists clenched and once again, tears were wrenched from my crushed soul only to be forced from my eyes. I felt like a weak-ass pussy. A wordy poetic one.

“Hey,” he said as if he just had a new idea, “you probably want to kill somebody, right?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“Well, as it so happens, I’m in the ‘kill-somebody-business,’ and we’re looking for pipe hitters to take care of business. You look like a hitter to me. You a hitter or a quitter?”

“Was. I was almost pro-MMA, so, I guess, yeah, I’m a hitter.”

“Why don’t you come inside and we’ll talk.”

So, yeah, that was my recruiter, Gunnery Sergeant Roger Sinclair. The motherfucker. ‘Join the Marine Corps and kill some folks.’ Shit.

More like, ‘Join the Marine Corps, experience almost endless misery and mind-numbing boredom with occasional moments of greater misery and heart-thumping excitement while some raggedy ass, goat-fucking, shit dicks try to kill you, but you kill them first. Go through the enlisted commissioning program, complete the training to become a junior officer. Get selected for Marine Special Operations Command, known to all and sundry as MARSOC, and earn the title of Marine Raider. Even better, deploy again as a guy with no job, a watch and learn position called ‘supplemental officer-in-training’ and get almost immediately blown up by an IED and lose a leg.’

Good practice, though. Got me here. Still alive-ish.

Anyway. So, six years later I’m a twenty-five-year-old second lieutenant in 1st Marine Special Operations Battalion, choking on Afghani goat-smelling moon dust gusting off the tires of the MRAP in front of me when my world blows up for the first time. Weirdly, I’m pretty sure I saw Abe’s white donkey about half a second before I went flying through a red and dark-brown cloud of destruction.

After a few bouts with Navy surgeons, and I’m not complaining because they saved my life a couple of times, I found myself in Landstuhl Region Medical Center. Thanks, Uncle.

Again, I ain’t whining. The Army doctors did a great job. They stitched me all back together, gave me a top-notch prosthetic leg and I was going through the last rounds of rehab and got to do shit off-base every now and again. That’s how I found myself with a roommate, another peg leg, Army Corporal Luis DeSantos, in Geneva. Both of us were in rehab, and kind of fell in as buddies, even though he was Army and only a corporal. Luis ran a heavy machinegun section in the 82nd Airborne 505th PIR.

I found out that the most famous member of Luis’ unit, in his opinion, was John Ringo, an author. Dude wrote science fiction and shit like that. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Anyway, DeSantos was a good troop, but he was fully geeked into games, computers, tabletop, whatever. And science fiction. And fantasy. While we were at Landstuhl, that little shit was either reading books, playing games, or watching a space movie.

Honestly, I’m don’t even think he watched porn. Hey, I’m not judging. Just saying.

Here we are on liberty in Geneva Fucking Switzerland, my luggage has normal tourist shit in it and DeSantos has an Xbox and a PS4 with about a shitload of games and movies on flash drives or whatever. I played online games maybe twice, so to my mind, this kid was a game junkie. If Xbox had a needle, he’d be covered in track marks. Anyway, the story.

We’d been granted a ninety-six-hour pass, so, of course, we had gone to Switzerland. While out in town we’d had a few beers, and ran into some red-blooded patriotic college girls from Idaho, or Iowa. Some state that starts with the letter ‘I.’ Indiana, maybe. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter.

As my good friend Murphy, the god of malicious luck, arranged it, there were twins for me, not identical, but actual twins anyway. Destiny and Delight. Names and reality.

Destiny was studying to be a chemical engineer, and Delight was working on getting a degree in electrical engineering. Their Dad owned a company that had chemical plants doing something with polypropylene or polystyrene. Fuck, plastic or something, and they were checking the boxes to get great jobs so they could take over when they grew into rich old women. Anyway, back to the story.

DeSantos had arranged to hook up with another one he knew, a Cajun girl named Bonita Thibodeaux who was so sexy-fine-sexy it almost hurt your eyes to look at her. She was also a gamer chick with her own online channel on YouTube, or Twerk, Titch or something. Who cares? Anyway, apparently, that was her job when she wasn’t studying to be a medical doctor. I couldn’t believe people get paid for that shit.

The twins decided I was going to be their ‘away from home boy-toy’ for a bit. Sounded like a plan to me. So, there we were, I’m in my room with both Destiny and Delight both going after my jimmy like zombies pawing and gnawing a baby’s face while DeSantos is in the other room playing a game of fucking HALO with Bonita.

My eyes briefly passed over the bobbing heads to my travel bag when a reflection of light caught my attention. I saw the iconography of Saint Mattis of Quantico, Patron Saint of Chaos, on a card my buddies at OCS had laminated and then stitched to the outside of my case when they found out I was MARSOC. I grinned at the card with a quick wink and thumbs up and thought, “Twins, sir! Twins.”

Life was good at that moment. Right until bad shit happened.

From what we’ve all sort of discovered slash figured out since then, there was some weird-ass cult of Satan worshipping freaks working over at the CERN site damn near right around the corner. That’s right, you heard me correctly.

Okay, a satanic cult, sure, no-biggie, ‘But,’ you ask, ‘CERN? What’s CERN?’

In it’s original French, it’s Conseil européenne pour la recherche nucléaire. The English translation is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. My translation is ‘Stupid French bastards who, through ignorance and arrogance, bring hell on earth and destroy my life and the lives of billions.’ But, hey, who’s to throw stones? CERN ran the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Trying to create a God particle. Whatever they thought a God particle was, that was one of the goals of their quote experiments unquote. And here’s one clue they were stupidly bad-news from the get-go, their logo, apparently, is a hidden 666 or some stupid shit like that.

Just hearing myself describe it, the whole thing sounds like a giant, mountainous, pyramid of incredibly bad ideas piled one atop the other. ‘Dude, let’s use giant magnets and shoot incredibly accelerated particles at each other until they hit and see what happens. And, hey, let’s do some sort of devil magic at the same time and make some really cool demonic shit manifest.’ Now, say that in your head with a bad French accent and then tell me it sounds genius.

Fuckwits.

Story. Right.

So, I’m laying there on my rented hostel bed in Geneva, Switzerland, right at six foot tall, almost white blond hair, blue eyes, all that Germanic shit, watching two college hotties going after me with mouths and hands working my rig like two slobbering, meat-starved cock hounds. Twins, damn it, twins!

It was at the very moment I’m looking at Saint Mattis while grinning like a redneck sitting down to a full pan of buttered cornbread and honey when I heard DeSantos shout ‘Die, motherfucker, die!’, my combat instincts, finely honed by three tours in a warzone, spun-up instantly and my world blew up again.

Flash!

I immediately felt a searing pain in every cell of my body. My brain screamed in blood. What in the fuck? Screamed in blood?

Yeah, roll with it.

It seemed as if my soul was ripped out, torn away, and shredded into excruciating bits of misery and horror. Anti-buena. That’s my made-up Spanish for the opposite of good.

Then I was consumed by darkness, deeper and colder than being buried in a cave at the bottom of the ocean. In space. Outer space far from the sun. Yeah. It was that fucked up.

Even more fucked up was when it all came back together.

∞

Jim Mattis, formerly the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America, as well as a retired United States Marine Corps four-star general, knelt with his head bowed and held the hands of the two people closest to him in the prayer group gathered in the home of his very good friend, Bishop Clarence Darrel. As the words of the Lord’s Prayer echoed slightly within the living room, a strange feeling washed over them all as if a spiritual strainer had ripped through at the speed of light. The words of the prayer were fumbled by each person present for the briefest of moments, then all continued with their normal reverence while engaged in their act of deeply held faith.