“That would be a long journey. And without knowing why the communications are down, it still sounds dangerous.”
He shrugged. “We live in dangerous times.”
“Oh, and the cat?” How could she have forgotten about the cat?
“We have reunited her with Janice.”
She smiled at that.
Day Thirteen
The next day, Jocelyn tried astral projection, but she still didn’t have enough magical energy to do so. She wanted to learn all there was to know about this bunker. Ruminating on her astral projection, she wondered if she could persuade someone, by placing thoughts into his or her head, to release her from quarantine. Could she do it like the voices she would sometimes hear?
And then she had a stunning thought.
What if her mental illness—her voices, her paranoid conclusions—originated from some entity somewhere astral-projecting and harming her? Who would do such a thing? What would prevent someone from masquerading as Saint Michael while astral-projecting thoughts into her head?
Space aliens certainly were capable of that. At least some of them. And the archangels had alluded to the existence of space aliens.
What if she didn’t have a mental illness at all, but was under constant attack from space aliens clever enough to show up as her voices when not on medication but stay away when on medication? That made her think, erroneously, that she suffered from a mental illness requiring that medication?
Someone, or something, had been manipulating her for the last four years. This made sense. She had developed symptoms at age twenty-six, her illness a recent phenomenon. If she truly suffered from a mental disorder, wouldn’t she have developed it much earlier?
Her conversations with Saint Michael? Illusions originating from alien beings.
But why would anyone do such a thing? Because she was special, immune to the draugar disease. Because space aliens caused the draugar plague to wipe out Earth’s population, perhaps as a prelude to invasion, or perhaps to loot Earth’s natural resources.
It all made perfect sense. Why hadn’t it occurred to her before? Maybe because her medication blunted her reasoning, kept her from figuring out the truth.
She concluded that she shouldn’t tell anyone about her illness or take any medication of any kind.
Maybe the alien overlords occupied this facility, shape-shifted to appear human, immune to the disease. Maybe Francis was an alien. That would explain why they had survived.
Or perhaps someone implanted the entire zombie apocalypse experience in her mind. What if the world was normal, but she suffered from delusions given to her by aliens?
And she’d let them take her prisoner. Francis had even called it a cell.
God dammit.
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A Word From D.C.P. Fox
Thank you for reading The Sword of Saint Michael. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing it.
The story continues in the forthcoming novel, The Elixir of Da’ath. Sign up for my Reader’s Club newsletter (see below) to be notified as soon as it and other publications are available.
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Like quirky science fiction with a heavy dose of real-world magick? Don’t miss The Osiris Facility, out soon as well. You can find a description of it on my web page at http://dcpfox.com.
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About The Author
D.C.P. Fox is a speculative fiction author with a background in software engineering and a fascination for religion and the occult. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and cat.
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This book 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 events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by D.C.P. Fox
All rights reserved.
First edition.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Acknowledgments
I first want to thank my wife, Heidi Fox, for all of the support she has selflessly given me over the years. Many thanks go to my beta readers, Shelby Branam, Heidi Fox, Amy Marsden, Gaby Michaels, and Kathy Verry, for helping to take this novel in the direction it needed to go.
