F.E.A.R: Origins
By Genoscythe
Chapter 6: Shouting at the Devil
AN: Since it's been requested, I can do one update per day if you'd all like. The thing is, the story is only about nine to ten chapters long (I'm not quite done with it yet) so if you want it to be over more quickly, then I'll update daily. However, if you all want it spaced out like it is, then I'll keep it that way.
Thanks for reviewing, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the story!
Jankowski yawned and looked down at the priest. For some reason, he was stumbling and leaning on one of the girl's bedposts.
"Dude…what's wrong?" he asked. The ceiling partially collapsed on his head, but he didn't notice.
"What do you mean?" Father Meringue cried. "The room is shaking like an earthquake!"
Jankowski glanced from the snarling girl strapped to the bed to all the rattling furniture, finally letting his viewing lens rest on the priest again.
"If you say so, padre."
"Pay attention! I need you to help me recite these bible verses!"
"Stick your cock up his ass!" The devil barked.
"Whoah. Gay," Jankowski snorted.
"Jankowski, say the damn bible verses!" Jin cried through the receiver in his helmet.
"Which ones?" Jankowski asked Father Meringue.
"You don't know?" he reprimanded.
Jankowski cocked his repeating cannon, an added feature that did nothing but look menacing. "I'm not exactly an altar boy, padre."
"Here! Take this!" Father Meringue stumbled forward, grabbing the immovable rock that was Jankowski's heavy armor and shoving a tiny book into his hands. After the priest and the soldier spoke their lines back and forth, occasionally stopping so Father Meringue could tell Jankowski how to pronounce certain words, the possessed girl fell back against the bedpost and started growling.
Meringue took his cue, and produced a vial of holy water. "Now, follow my lead."
Jin snickered through the receiver.
"The power of Christ compels you!" Father Meringue cried, throwing a handful of the blessed water onto the scarred teenager. The demon roared, and the straps holding her down were torn apart.
"Say it with me!" Meringue yelled over the noise.
"But it's not helping," Jankowski pointed out.
"Are you an exorcist?"
"No."
"Do you suddenly know how to perform an exorcism, then?"
"No. Look, it's all I can do to keep from stuffing a grenade down her throat. In F.E.A.R. we don't deal with spirits the same way you geezers deal with demons, and from my experience, words don't do jack shit. Sorry, padre."
The devil began floating above the bed, and an eerie calm crept over the room.
"Please!" Father Meringue begged.
"Fine…" Jankowski groaned.
"The power of Christ…"
"…compels you."
"Good. Now we need to do that about fifteen more times."
Fifteen repetitions later, Father Meringue was steadying himself against Jankowski's leg as another tremor shook the room. The possessed girl sank back to the bed, and Jankowski couldn't tell if that was a good thing or not. He was about to tie up the girl's hands again, but he realized that he would have to move around Father Meringue, and that wasn't possible in the heavy armor.
The priest himself bound the girl and sank against the wall. She still lay quietly, almost peacefully if she weren't so disfigured.
"Are you tired?" Father Meringue asked Jankowski.
"Well, I'm bored," he replied.
The priest sat, deep in thought, at the top of the stairs. Jankowski still didn't know how to sit down in the heavy armor, so he simply leaned against the interior of the suit.
"You nervous?" Jin questioned.
"Not really," he responded.
"Scared?"
"Not in this armor."
"But you're dealing with a malevolent spirit. A demon. Armor doesn't matter to them."
"We'll see about that."
"Jankowski, we want you to run some tests on the girl," Jin asked.
"What for?" he shot back almost immediately.
"Well, we've never really studied a demon before. When everything's all said and blown up, the only parts left are just harmless springs and chunks inscribed with pentagrams. You just proved that we don't know whether armor will do us any good in fighting demons. Find out for us, will you?"
Jankowski sighed. "I guess. How?"
"There's several test kits in your bag. We'll tell you how to use them."
Excusing himself, Jankowski grabbed his handbag and shuffled into the girl's room. Normally, his breath would have solidified in the bitter cold, but with one of the world's most advanced climate control systems installed in his heavy armor, he only noticed the change in temperature through a slightly higher whine coming from his backpack. The possessed girl, to his surprise, was sitting upright on the bed, unrestrained but not attempting to escape.
Jankowski blinked, and suddenly the girl was an old woman.
"Dimmy…?" The old woman croaked in a hard-to-place accent.
"Nope. Name's Spen," Jankowski corrected her, moving to the side of the bed and ripping open the handbag. Among other, more deadly things, several clear plastic containers spilled out.
"Wait. You're Damian Karras, right?" The old woman said, this time in the voice of the demon.
"Nope. Name's Spen."
"Oh…" The demon paused, as if suddenly barred by a gigantic mental barrier. "What kind of a name is Spen?" it finally managed, albeit weakly.
Jankowski scoffed. "What kind of a name is Pazuzu?"
The demon was silent again, and as it digested this it shifted back into a bound teenage girl. "Touché," it conceded.
Jin guided the point man through several blood and pea soup tests, most of which turned out to be perfectly normal for a human. Even – unexplainably – the pea soup levels.
"Well, this proves it," Jin declared.
"Proves what?"
"Either it proves that the demon is insubstantial, or it proves that she's making the whole thing up."
"Okay, I saw her float off the fucking bed. Did she make that up, too?"
"Well, it says on the report that she starred in a movie about an exorcism as a child. The production left her partially traumatized, so she could conceivably be faking.
"She's a pretty damn good actor if she can still float without special effects."
"Right. So, it's the first one. Which means your armor will likely be a hindrance to you and not to it."
"I'm not taking it off."
"Why not?"
"Because it's badass! I feel like a fucking tank."
"Which you aren't," Jin pointed out dryly. Jankowski was about to reply, but he looked up to find Father Meringue in the doorway. The old priest had a determined look in his eyes as he stared at the possessed girl.
"Ready for more, padre?" Jankowski asked.
"I believe so," Father Meringue answered. "The sooner we attempt to drive this unholy spirit from Linda's body, the easier it will be."
"Look, I gotta take a piss first." Jankowski got up and trudged to the door. As he squeezed past the priest, he gently patted him on the back and nearly killed the old man right there. "Save some of the exorcizing for me, eh?"
Ten minutes later, after Jankowski had unzipped, unlocked, unbarred and uncovered everything necessary to urinate through the suit but before he could actually finish, a wheezing scream echoed through the house. Jankowski shook himself off, spent five more minutes securing the literal and proverbial hatches, then burst hurriedly into the girl's room.
Father Meringue lay very still at the foot of the bed, with the possessed teen hunched over him. Jankowski moved as fast as he could to the spilled contents of his handbag, eventually hefting the Highlander over his shoulder and aiming it at the girl. If Father Meringue wasn't as dead as he looked, then Jankowski hoped to save him.
However, he couldn't help but hesitate firing on a young girl (which goes to show he would have never made it in Delta), and the pause gave her time to latch onto him.
"Hey!" he cried, whirling around and thrashing rather unsuccessfully in the giant suit of armor. "Don't take me! Get away from me! Fuck, don't take me!" A horrible wailing, like the sound of pigs being slaughtered, emanated from the girl and seemed to pour itself into Jankowski. The massive armored figure stumbled backward, crashing through the wall and pitching over the side of the house. It hit the convenient stairway below helmet first, flopping on its side and tumbling down one of Oregon's longest, most dangerous flights of stairs.
Even in the bulky suit, the figure's limbs flailed about wildly after each bone-crunching impact with the step below. Several passersby had plenty of time to stop and watch as the heavy armor crashed, one stair at a time, to the pavement at street level.
By the time it made its last wincing flop, a crowd had gathered that included policemen and paramedics. The police weren't sure if they were sent to help the thing or shoot it, and the EMTs had to have a group huddle on how to lift it onto a stretcher.
Miraculously, before anybody could decide on anything, the armored beast moved. First, it pushed itself up into a sitting position. Then, it ran a hand across its helmet. Then, it ran a hand around its rear. The helmet rotated from side to side, looked up and down the flight of stairs it had just descended.
The heavy armor laboriously got to its feet and exclaimed "WHOAH!" It turned to the stunned crowd. "Thank god somebody else saw that."
Jankowski hadn't felt so much as experienced the ride down, and it had been one of the most exciting things he had ever done as part of F.E.A.R. He almost wanted to run back up to the top of the house and do it again. Unfortunately, the suit suddenly went rigid, and the pale turquoise HUD on the inside of his helmet turned blood red. As an afterthought, a squiggly pentagram signed itself in the middle of Jankowski's viewscreen.
"What the hell?" he murmured.
"What the hell indeed," the familiar voice of Pazuzu growled, seemingly coming from all around him. "I aimed for the skinhead, but instead I got the suit." The heavy armor waved its arm, forcing Jankowski's along for the ride. "Well, it'll get the job done."
With that, the armor raised the Highlander, still clutched in its stiff fingers after the trip down the stairs. The crowd gasped, panicked, and tried to flee. The police, believing themselves to be dealing with a robot, opened fire without the mandatory and unnecessary "Freeze!". When it turned out that this failed to even catch its attention, the police dropped their weapons and ran for their patrol cars.
"Wait a second," Jankowski spoke quickly.
"What?" Pazuzu snapped.
"The safety's on."
The demon turned the Highlander over in its hands. "Huh. Son of a bitch." Casually, it flipped the switch from straight to decap. Jankowski badly wanted to chew on his nails, but the suit prevented him from doing so.
Please don't kill me, please don't kill me…he silently prayed. The demon aimed the Highlander at the nearest police cruiser and pulled the trigger. To Pazuzu's apparent surprise, the sword that emerged angled downward, bounced off the hood of the car, and flew back in the direction of the nearest and most exposed neck – which was his.
In the case of a normal human being, it would have been possible to dodge the incoming katana. In the case of a suit of armor weighing approximately the same as a pickup truck, it was far less possible. Lacking the ability or the foresight to move away from the sword's trajectory, the armor stood motionless as the katana plunged into its cyclopean viewing lens. The blade stuck through the muscular aid system, the sensory receptors, the main CPU, and the climate control processor all in one clean stab.
From the outside, the heavy armor didn't even wobble. It simply folded up under its own weight. The police took it as a sign that God wanted them to live, so they backed out onto the street and drove away. Several moments of uncomfortable silence followed, until the approaching clack of footsteps heralded a small Korean woman in a dark green uniform.
"Jankowski?" she cried, shaking the lump of Kevlar. "Jankowski, are you still alive?"
In response, one of the suit's arms raised slowly and laboriously, shoving off its skewered helmet and then flopping uselessly back onto the pile. Jankowski's face was beet-red and drenched in sweat.
"It's so fucking hard…to move…without the power on…" he wheezed. "And it's hot as hell. Get me out of this thing." Once he had crawled out of the suit, Jankowski took a look at the discarded helmet. The katana had stabbed straight through the circular tube, stopping barely short of where his head had been. It was so close, in fact, that Jankowski hadn't been able to see it when he was still wearing the helmet.
"Tell Armacham…" he gasped, still struggling for air. "They'd better work on that helmet design."
"Should we send it back to them?" Jin asked.
The point man kicked the heavy suit vengefully. "No. Let's feed it to Oscar. Just in case there's some demon left."
Jin raised her eyebrows. "Finally thinking logically, are you?"
"Yeah, I must've hit my head on the way down."
End