The Last Hellfighter
Page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Intro
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Acknowledgments
About The Author
Also From DW
Copyright © 2018
The Last Hellfighter
First Published in 2018
Copyright © Thomas S. Flowers 2018
.
Published by Darker Worlds Publishing
Edited by : Jeff O'Briebn
Cover by Michael Bray
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
ASIN: B07FFND86J
Dedication
To the brave men of the 15th New York Infantry, the real Rattlers of New York City, the Harlem Hellfighters, for your courage to your country, to a people who did not at the time love you as they should.
The Countess Arrives
2042
"And all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire's time has come."
― Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot.
"No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood."
—Edgar Alan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death.
"Hey, Mr. Green. Any ships due in tonight?"
"Huh?" the older man grunted, his full attention glued to the small box television set. Family Feud was on and Silas never missed an episode. As long as Julius had worked with him at least, in these past four months on the night shift, the seasoned longshoreman who acted very content with his life—who moved slow and never liked causing "trouble," as he called it, to his superiors, could recite the most complex trivia questions.
Julius looked back to his monitor. Part of his job was to watch for ships that may have wandered off course, or even scheduled docks on the quay. The program displayed on his monitor was linked to AIS Marine database that monitored all vessel traffic around the world. He kept the screen displaying his assigned port—which showed a few red, which meant docked and inactive. The one that concerned him was another ship, inbound and blinking green.
"Mr. Green?" Julius pressed.
The older black man sighed loudly, turning away from his small TV screen. "What? Why the hell would—listen son, you can't let this job spook you. Working nights on the dock, I know, the long hours can get to you. But trust me, this sure beats working days out in that sun all day offloading ships."
"But look," the younger longshoreman pointed his screen.
Frowning, Silas rolled his chair over to the computer monitor. The green blinking ship reflected off his thick glasses. He pushed them back up on his nose, "That ain't nothing, probably just a glitch in the system."
Julius looked at the screen and then out the large window that overlooked the Port of Jerusalem. He'd just moved to town not more than six months prior from Bangor and he wanted to make a good impression.
"Okay," the younger man said.
Silas nodded in quiet victory and rolled back over to watch his show.
Julius continued glaring at the blinking green ship as it approached the port on the screen. He swallowed hard as it inched closer and closer. He glanced at the old man as he howled at some man on the TV having missed a question that Silas thought was a "no brainer." On the monitor, the green blinking ship was upon them. Beads of sweat dripped down his forehead.
Closer.
And closer.
"Mr. Green, I don't think is a glitch," Julius protested.
Exhaling loudly, Silas stood and turned. "Listen, young blood, I've been doing this job for twenty years and I've never heard of no ship coming in that wasn't on the manifest."
Julius shrugged. "Yeah, but..." he gestured to the screen.
"There is no ship coming—"
Just outside, a large wave crashed against the port levee walls. A thunderous metallic screech vibrated off the walls of the little trailer office on the wharf. Manuals and notebooks and ship logs fell from the shelves as the ground itself felt as if it was opening. The small TV still playing Family Feud rattled off the table and crashed to the floor, sizzling out. The florescent bulbs above them burst raining shards of glass and casting the room into a yellow gloom. The horrendous grinding seemed to go on forever, shaking and shuddering the world.
And then it was over.
Silas Green was the first to prop himself off the floor. Looking around cautiously, as if any wrong move would send the world into chaos again.
Julius propped himself up, moving into a crouch. He peeked through the blinds. "What the heck was that?"
"Shit!" the older man hissed.
Julius glanced over his shoulder at him. "What? You okay?"
Silas held up what remained of his TV. "No, damn tube is busted."
Shaking his head, Julius peered back out the blinds. "I think we should go check the dock." He stood, not waiting for approval and went through the door of the office.
"Hold on, young blood." Silas gave the TV a final kiss—he'd had the device for more years than he cared to confess, and then set it down on the floor as gently as he could. Standing, he opened the bottom drawer of his desk and retrieved a flashlight.
Outside, Silas trotted to catch up with Julius who was standing at the edge of the wharf looking up into the gloom.
"Somethings out there," the young man said.
Silas wafted the fog around his head. "Can't see shit out here."
"Use the flashlight," Julius suggested without taking his gaze from in front of him.
"Oh," Silas grunted, flicking on the switch. A beam of bright white broke apart the misty smoke like haze. He shined out toward the wharf and at first still could not see anything. And then the fog parted as if controlled by some unknown force, separating and unfolding around a large cargo ship.
Silas traced the hull to the edge of the ship deck. "Mother of God," he whispered, taken back by the sudden massive size of the ship. He'd never been this close to one. The larger vessels normally dock at Freeport.
Julius stepped toward him, asking, "What do we do?"
The older man couldn't think—this wasn't on the schedule, the ship manifest, nothing. This ship shouldn't be here. The harbourmaster would have
said something. Hell, his superintendent would have damn sure said something. It would have been on the log. Silas moved the beam of light to the wharf itself, noting the broken shards of rock in the thick cement and the thick crack in the hull of the ship. It was taking on water for sure—it hadn't even bothered slowing down. It ploughed into the quay. But why? Wasn't there someone steering this damn thing? This wasn't right. Something about this—everything about this wasn't right.
"Mr. Green?" Julius pressed, whispering hotly.
Silas looked at him, the kid was rattled; he was rattled. He took a deep breath. "Okay, listen, I'm going to call this in—pray the lines in the office are still operating. Here, take the flashlight." He handed it to Julius. "Stay put, yell out if you see anyone. Some dumbass is going to pay bigtime for this screwup and it ain't going to be you or me."
He gave one final glance at the monstrous freighter and started off for the office. Inside, he could use the phone on the floor. He scooped it up and dialed his supervisor.
"Green, there better be a good fucking reason why you're calling me at—" Silas's superintendent started through the speaker of the phone.
"A ship crashed into the port," Silas blurted.
"What?"
"A ship, some damn cargo ship. Large motherfucker."
"Are you fucking with me?"
"No, I ain't fucking with you, sir. A cargo ship crashed into the port, took a good-sized chunk out of our wharf too."
"Was it on the manifest?"
"No—that's what I'm saying. This ship ain't supposed to be—"
A scream from outside on the dock jarred Silas from the phone.
"Julius, what the hell was that?"
"Green, what's going on?" his superintendent asked, sounding more and more irritated.
Silence.
"Green?"
"Hold on, sir." Silas set down the phone, ignoring the muffled protest from his superintendent on the line. He glared at the open door and crept toward it. There were no other sounds, and he didn't like that one bit.
Stepping outside he called, "Julius?"
It was hard to see through the fog as it rolled across the walkway.
Silas squinted, peering through the gloom turned yellow by the glow of the dock lights. "Julius, what's going on?" he called to the dark shape in front of him.
And then he heard it.
A sucking sound.
He stopped.
The dark shape unfolded.
The fog parted slightly, revealing a tall, bald woman with pale skin. Her eyes burned red. She was looking at him with an expression of mild satisfaction, the look of a thirsty soul finally getting a cup of water. She was holding Julius, cradling him almost as if they were dancing.
"Who are—" Silas started, until he saw her teeth, her large fanged front teeth, salivating in blood. He took a step back as she let Julius go. His body crumbled to the wet dock.
"No," Silas managed to say, like a child refusing to go to bed.
And then she was upon him.
First Interlude
2044
"This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war..." -All Quiet on the Western Front.
'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's headAnd he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men..."
--The Listeners [excerpt], Walter De La Mare.
Chapter 1
For one hundred and forty-four years, almost to the day, Benjamin Harker has lived. Of those far too many years, he had spent most of it on the doorstep of what was once called No Man's Land. And in some respect, he supposed this place was still. Stretching just south of Boise City, Oklahoma, on the most northern tip of Texas, travellers will come across a little farming town known by a green sign as Champagne, population 186. The old man had not always lived here. It was after reading an advertisement in 1925 from the New York Post about cheap land in what the white folks called God's Country was when he finally decided to leave behind the overcrowded streets of Harlem and all the noise and depression of city life. To make a fresh start for himself. But most of all he wanted to leave behind the spectres of his past,. As if the war—the Great War, the war that was supposed to end all wars, could ever be silenced, nor the tragic murders of his friends Jim Europe and Henry Johnson
Both Jim and Henry had survived the trenches of France, of the horrors within the Argonne forest, the race riots and all the horrible bigotry, all the while with a smile on their face and a tune on their lips, always wanting to play some ragtime tune. They were the bravest men Ben had ever known, and without them the appeal of New York, of Harlem, of the old life, tasted sour.
No.
That wasn't completely true.
There had been another reason too.
Ben had a childhood friend.
Brothers in arms, even.
Blood for blood—and betrayal.
The name escaped him. For the past one hundred and twelve years he'd refused to speak his name out loud, no less think it.
But the pain of his absence, the sting was still there, like an old itchy scar.
Champagne, christened strangely to those horrid thundering bombardments of France, was supposed to be a place of refuge from that life of sorrow. Gusty winds and never-ending hills of green replaced the juxtaposed memories of scorched mortar holes and ruined earth. The quiet here seemed to Ben like solitude. Respite. A place of humble contemplation. Not entirely free of the limitations imposed on his race, but he'd fared better than most black men. He'd seen his share of white boy's weep in the face of this land's fathomlessness.
True enough, No Man's Land was hell for most, he supposed. Even the most hardened he'd seen shudder in the face of the utter silence that creeps from the dark soil, seething from the whispering stalks of hay, and squeezing on the heart. The best he can describe the sensation is something akin to claustrophobia, the way he'd felt on his first night in a muddy dugout pit along the trenches near Albany, only in reverse. Standing on the top of a hill, one could gaze out forever and wonder how far the mind can really imagine before snapping like a rubber band and recoiling back in on itself, forever warped.
Ben Harker mused over these thoughts as he rocked slowly back and forth, listening to the creak of the wooden rocking chair and the slow wind tickle the grass blades in the fields that surrounded his estate. When he first broke ground here, more than a hundred years ago, he had owned over one hundred acres, now all that remained that was his was a pitiful ten. The Roosevelt administration had taken their share following the Worst Hard Time, as the survivors called it, the rest of America called it the Dust Bowl. And over the years more and more were swallowed up, for one reason or another. National Conservation Act. National Food Crisis Endowment Administration. The Federal Farmers of America Delegation. In a way, he supposed he was lucky to have what he did. Not many Americans owned this much land that wasn't subsidized to whoever ran the government nowadays. Particularly not a black man, even by today's race-sensitive attitude. Not that he should care. He was much too old for farming anymore. He survived well enough on his veteran pension and disability, and what little th
e government hadn't taken away from his Senior Welfare Entitlement.
And through the century, what farming had he really done? Ben grimaced as he chewed on his corncob pipe, remembering of what he could—as memory was getting to be too much to pin down, of all the hunts, the traveling, searching for what had come in the clouds of dust in 1932 and taken from him, so much more than the war ever had.
How many hunts? he wondered.
How many failures?
How many deaths?
Endless pain and loss...
And for what? What was won?
Nothing.
Yet—something...
Something is going to happen.
Soon.
I can't...
...I can't put my finger on it.
Something horrible.
Something good.
And I think I'll see Mina again—wouldn't that be something.
Ben reached down and picked up a sweating mason jar of iced sweet tea and took a sip. The sun was hot and humid, perched high above his farm house. The drink was mercifully cold and soothed his dry throat, and he was doubly thankful his porch was shaded by the yawning roof he'd built after his return from a hunt near Auschwitz in 1945, and the open screens of the walls allowed a good breeze to drift through. Champagne hadn't always been so humid. There had always been a dry heat here in summers past, especially in late August. But over the last year, a heavy thick blanket rolled in and never truly went away. It was as if the earth itself was festering with some kind of sickness. A warning, perhaps, a sign of some dark impending evil itching, swelling, and ready to burst and puss out the wound of society.
The only respite from the never-ending sweat was during the winters when the ice and snow and cold would settle upon the land. And winter couldn't come soon enough, he thought, despite what it did to his arthritis.
Rooting in his front overalls bib pocket, Ben pinched a loaf of tobacco and bit down on his corncob pipe. Striking a match on the wood floor, he puffed until white smoke billowed and burned a sweet tangy aroma. He inhaled and exhaled slowly, enjoying the spice on his tongue, all the while keeping a hazy milky eye on the stretch of road leading out past his land. On the horizon, dust clouds stirred in the distance as a convoy of white sedans came rolling along steadily.