Conquer (The John Conquer Series Book 1)

by Edward M. Erdelac

  “Yo, did y’all hear that?” Presto hissed.

  They listened, but heard nothing but the echo of shifting gravel under their own feet.

  “Hit that,” Conquer ordered, gesturing to the tunnel mouth and stepping into the yard. “Big as you can.”

  “Is this really gonna stop it?” Rockwell said, as they attacked the tunnel mouth with paint. “I mean, it can’t go past it, right?”

  Conquer shrugged. What did the kid really want to hear? That he didn’t know? Conquer shined the shotgun light up and down the lines of gleaming cars. Nothing moved. He lit the ceiling where he could, but the beam was too weak.

  “I need every exit covered,” Conquer said. “The idea is, we seal off the yard, then hit the walls and the cars in a square, start moving into the middle, corral this thing in smaller and smaller till we got it trapped. You dig?”

  “Man, that’ll take forever,” Presto whined.

  “Ain’t nothin’ as forever as dying, baby. Let’s move.”

  “We could cover more ground if we split up,” Rockwell suggested.

  Conquer didn’t like that. It was cramped down here, bumping around in the dirty dark with something out there.

  “You wanna wind up like your boy Mad Bomber?”

  “So gimme a gun and I’ll be straight,” Presto argued.

  “Yo,” said Rockwell thoughtfully. “What if we used the trains?”

  “Huh?”

  “We crack a window in one car, slip in, we can walk through the cars to the end of the tunnels, slip out, bomb ‘em, and get back in. Nothing can get us if we in the train, right?”

  “We’d have to bomb all them windows to keep it out,” Presto said.

  Conquer considered for half a moment, then went to the nearest car, slung the shotgun from its strap, and motioned for the crowbar.

  “Snoopy, go with him,” said Conquer.

  “I’d still feel safer if I was packin,” said Presto.

  “And I feel safer if you ain’t,” said Conquer, cracking the window. “Snoopy agrees, don’t you?”

  Presto looked at the silent kid. He rubbed his eye and avoided his partner’s look.

  “Man, whatever. Boost me, yo.”

  He grabbed the edges and Snoopy crouched to heft him in.

  “Don’t forget to tag the windows, or it’s your ass.”

  While Presto and Snoopy crept through the silent train, spraying the sigils on each window and grumbling about stencils all they way to the far end of the yard, Conquer and Rockwell picked their way through the narrow spaces between the cars.

  It was hotter than hell down here and about as well lit. Conquer unzipped his suit and covered the kid while he worked, the spray can hissing, all of it reminding him of the way one of the guys in his unit had described the Vietcong tunnels with their two-step snake traps.

  That was about when he saw the thing looking at him.

  It had come down silently from the hard to reach shadows of the yard ceiling, he supposed, and lay flat on the roof of the train car, long, spindly arms drooping down almost to the ground, where oil black nails curved on the end of its ape-like fingers.

  Its head was bulbous and oversized, tapering into a narrow chin and small lipless mouth. The eyes were huge, lidless, and black. It looked like what it was; an overgrown, exaggerated human fetus, its yellow-pink, translucent flesh blackened from moving in the filthy tunnel.

  It watched him curiously for a half a second, then slid off the roof of the car and came towards them both, hunkered down, duck shuffling, its long arms reaching out.

  Conquer’s shotgun boomed loud in the tunnel, and the thing shrieked in a deep, unnatural voice, like something played at the wrong speed on a turntable.

  The buckshot rattled off its hide and rolled away in the dark, pinging off the rails.

  Conquer backed away, and Rockwell cursed. He heard the rattle of Rockwell’s Krylon can bouncing off the ground, and then the rapid crunch of his sneakers on the gravel retreating full tilt from the yard.

  Conquer ran backwards, firing again, and the thing came stalking after him, angular shoulders brushing the ceiling, raining down dust and loose chips of concrete. He was sure it was going to rip him apart when it stopped suddenly, as though it had run into something, and looked with apparent confusion to its right at the sigil Rockwell had thankfully finished spraying on the wall.

  It grimaced, displaying sharp, stubby black teeth like a killer whale’s, then whirled at the sound of Presto calling from the other end of the tunnel;

  “Yo! Conquer!”

  The creature leapt back onto the roof of the subway train and slithered off, legs shimmying as though they were boneless.

  Conquer cursed and looked back.

  “Rockwell! Get your skinny ass back here with them paints!”

  He heard somebody scream then. Jesus, this fuckin’ thing moved fast. He ran towards the scream, blowing open the window of a subway car and smashing through so he could move quicker, not have to sidestep between the trains.

  He kicked his way through the cars, cursing himself for not having trusted the kid with a gun.

  Then he felt the whole train jolt. The cars banged together and squealed a bit on the rails. At first he thought there might be an operator on board, but no, the thing had hit the train for some reason. Rocked it hard.

  He neared the end, noticing that Presto and Snoopy’s ambition had dwindled the farther along he’d gone. The windows were only sprayed intermittently, then not at all. As he slid open the last door, he saw Snoopy slumped in a seat near the back of the last car, Presto face down in the aisle. He could see the fetus thing outside, a jumble of fast moving limbs, battering at the car, trying to get inside. Its long arm smashed through the rear window and strained to reach him.

  Conquer ran to him, and couldn’t quite stop the gasp from escaping his lips when he saw the red tangle of Snoopy’s intestines drooping between his own knees.

  “Hey,” Snoopy whispered, eyes glazed, his green apple lolly tumbling from his lips. “S’fuckin’ bad, right?”

  Conquer crouched and touched Presto. He was breathing, eyes fluttering, a bad gash ripped open across his forehead, spilling blood into his eyes.

  It was what saved him.

  The rear door groaned and buckled and the thing was shouldering its way into the car. The long arm lashed out again and Snoopy’s upper half was swept from the seat, the bottom jetting blood, splashing Conquer and Presto.

  Conquer hoisted Presto up and they ran back toward the front, the floor rocking and jolting under their feet as the thing rent steel and forced its way in, pulling itself forward by the support poles and commuter straps.

  When the got to the next car, Conquer spared a look back and saw it coming after them, scuttling, flowing, skeleton liquefying and solidifying as required to fit it down the aisle, batter through the crack in the door. Its deceptively tiny mouth opened wide as a boa constrictor’s, and Snoopy’s eyes stared out from his dark dead face between its blood splashed jaws for a second before it sucked him down. Presto furiously wiped at the blood spilling into his eyes.

  “Wha’s happening?” he murmured.

  “Keep going!” Conquer yelled.

  Two cars from the front and it was still coming. One and it was at their heels, scrabbling like an oversized rat in a drainpipe.

  Last car, and there was Rockwell holding open the driver’s door and waving frantically for them to come in.

  Conquer dove with Presto and the door slammed shut behind him. He expected it to bang against the door, force its way in, but it didn’t.

  Rockwell helped him up. It wasn’t built for three people and they crowded against each other.

  “Yo, I bombed the driver’s door, man. It ain’t gettin’ in here. Where’s Snoopy?”

  “Cover your ears,” Conquer said, and stood, aiming at the glass.

  “You fuckin’ crazy?” the kid said, jamming his fingers in his ears.

  He blew it open, the s
hotgun sound tremendous, ear-ringing.

  “Jesus Christ!” Presto moaned from the floor.

  Then he jerked Presto on his feet, gripped Rockwell by the strap of his satchel, and pitched him through the shattered glass.

  “Get in the car and hit the floor at the back. Don’t let it out!”

  He shoved Presto after him.

  He didn’t stop to see if they listened. The thing would be gone in a second. He slid open the driver’s door, the warding sigil disappearing into the door housing.

  It whirled on him.

  “Hey motherfucker! Right here!”

  He shot it uselessly. It charged, and he barely got the door closed. Again, no impact. He put his ear to the cool metal, listened to it moving. When it started to go off, he opened the door again and fired, baiting it back.

  It turned again, and he saw Rockwell and Presto slip through the window of the car towards the back and get down. Rockwell, on his knees, furiously sprayed the floor in front of him.

  Conquer shut the door once more, turned, and jumped down to the rails through the broken window. He ran around to the back of the car.

  He had a hell of a time climbing in the way the skinny kids had gone, but then he was standing next to them in the car, looking at the ugly goddamned thing stalking back and forth like a newly caged tiger, trapped between the sigil on the floor and the one on the driver’s door, penned in by the identical symbols on the rows of windows.

  “Yo, what the fuck is it?” Presto panted, wiping at his bloody eyes.

  Conquer didn’t answer, because he wasn’t exactly sure.

  “Now what, man?” Rockwell said, kneeling on the floor of the car.

  “Make another one. Closer.”

  Rockwell rattled the can and leaning over as much as he dared, reproduced the sigil next to the first one, further toward the front of the car.

  “Keep going.”

  “Yo, lemme help,” Presto said, pulling a can from his back and getting unsteadily to his feet.

  Rockwell emptied the Krylon can and Presto tapped another beside. After a painstaking ten minutes or so, they had the thing standing pinned between the driver’s compartment and a line of twelve sigils on the floor of the car, unable to leap through the windows Presto and Snoopy had previously covered.

  It was trapped.

  “Standing room only, motherfucker,” Conquer muttered, dipping his hand into his duffle bag and coming out with the two inch ceremonial Thai meed mor dagger in the ivory sheath he’d brought from his pad.

  He stared at the symbol carved on the creature’s smooth chest, at the ragged scar in the center. He reached over and jabbed the knife into it, working to saw open the weak spot.

  It twisted and shook like a thing restrained, but in a minute a beating human heart within tumbled out amidst a putrid surge of black meconium from the chest cavity.

  It dropped into Conquer’s hand and with a rush of psychometric vision, he got everything he needed to know about how the monstrosity had come about.

  Some precocious white boy, not content to dabble with ritual bells, drugs and innocuous sex magic like every other wealthy, stone cold waste, had dug into a lot of bad books belonging to his ambitious father and gotten some bad ideas from them. Inspired by a recipe for kuman thong, roasted human fetuses covered in gold flake fed a steady supply of blood to bind an infant spirit as a kind of familiar servant, this particular kid had gotten the bright idea to mix in an Abramelinic resurrection spell and some diabolist necromancy from a fucked up grimoire that called for the insemination of one of his own household.

  He had raped his sister, bullied her into months of silence, cut the resulting undeveloped child from her, and crammed this, her own still-beating heart, into its tiny chest, sealing it with a left handed mark of his own invention, then dumped her body in the basement of an empty tenement slum in the Bronx.

  The recipe for a monster, cooked up from scratch by a monster.

  Only his pops had begun to wise up to his kid raiding the locked book cabinet, and in a panic, the little creep had ditched his creation, using the same convenient method of disposal dope fiends had used in the event of an impending raid since time immemorial; he had flushed the partially formed thing down the toilet.

  The rubbery little creature had gone on an odyssey through the city pipes, and eventually been deposited in some runoff and made its way to the subway tunnels, retreating from the sun. It had satisfied its blood need in rats and the homeless for weeks, and finally surprised Mad Bomber and the NBA crew tagging trains in the Number One tunnel.

  The ghost of the girl’s heart had shown him all this. She was a pretty white girl, all of seventeen, blonde hair, and her brother was a creep with catfish eyes.

  The monster was gone, dwindled to a shriveled fetus again at his feet. But the bigger monster was still on the loose.

  Conquer stumbled out of the subway car.

  “Yo, I couldn’t watch that shit. Is it dead?” Presto asked.

  He nodded, and went without a word to the tunnel that led back to the ladder up to 145th street.

  “Where’s Snoopy?” Rockwell asked again as he mounted the rungs.

  “Snoopy dead,” Presto answered.

  It was getting light out, and the sun caught a tear on Rockwell’s face before his hand could.

  Conquer looked away and lit a cigarette as Presto threw his arms around his partner and they put their foreheads together.

  “You boys want a ride?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rockwell, straightening. He reached into his duffle bag and held out the money. “Take it, man. You earned it.”

  “For real,” said Presto.

  “Just gimme a dime,” said Conquer.

  Rockwell looked confused, but dug in his jeans till he had one.

  Conquer went to the payphone on the corner and dialed Lazzeroni.

  “Hello?” the cop said sleepily on the other end.

  “Councilman Jack Grierson’s All American son, Jack Junior,” said Conquer.

  “Huh?”

  “Who raped and killed his own sister, and dumped her body in the basement of the tenement at 170th and Charlotte?” Conquer said.

  “What? Who the fuck is this?” Lazzeroni growled. Conquer could hear those nose hairs bristling.

  “Carnac the Magnificent. Better get there and find her before somebody burns the building down.”

  “John?”

  Conquer hung up and went to the car, to find Rockwell spraying the protective sigil on the wall as next to it, Presto threw up Snoopy and R.I.P. with the date. Rockwell signed the mark in crazy ‘wild style’ letters, Conquer, with a little crown beside it.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m a king, man,” said Rockwell. “So by the power invested in me, we crownin’ you, yo. The boroughs ain’t gonna forget what you done today, Conquer. I won’t let ‘em. I’ma put word out to all the crews. We gonna make this sign all-city.”

  They posed beside the sigil, throwing up their hands in complex gestures that didn’t mean anything to him.

  “Whatever, man,” Conquer said, yawning. “Get in the car. Let’s get some breakfast. Y’all are buyin.’”

  Conquer Comes Correct

  Baba Fred Hamilton’s East Harlem Dojo, in the stripped bottom floor of a town house on 125th street, dispensed the wisdom of Daruma and Malcolm X in equal doses to any kid looking for something better than a bloody end in the glass-littered gutters of Harlem.

  For a time, it had been a haven for a punk orphan named John Conquer, until he’d made the decision to use a knife on a pimp in Marcus Garvey Park instead of his fists and then picked a tour of duty over a jail sentence.

  Baba Hamilton encouraged revolutionaries. Not the kind the kind the CIA sweated over, but the kind they really ought to fear, the kind in suits and ties. Between kumites he talked up college like it was the Marines.

  Had John Conquer taken more of that lesson to heart twelve years ago, he might’ve foregone
the actual Marines and didi’d down a different path than the one that had led him staggering through the slicing elephant grass and the gut-shuddering thunderstorm of blood and paddy water kicked into the sky by 50mm VC Sky Horse mortars, through the magic and ultimate loss of an adopted Montagnard family, and finally to a private investigator’s office on St. Marks Place.

  But he was back now where he’d left off, under Baba Hamilton’s wary eye, holding his end of a makeshift coat rack chin-up bar for a couple of shining, skinny, pre-teen yellow belts to pull themselves up off the floor. He snuck a fast wink at Vonetta, the dark skinned twenty something black belt with the sweet smile and fighter’s ass.

  It was always good to be back in the dojo, good to smell the sweat and the blood and hear the slap of the mats, to feel that visceral internal heat stoking, like a potter’s fire baking soft muscles and hearts into a hard glaze.

  Conquer saw the rawboned kid in the cut sleeves amble in and look around. So did Baba Hamilton. The dark, hulking kenkojuku master raised one massive hand. The sempai ceased his counting, the boys and girls dropped down from the knotted gi ropes hanging from the exposed pipework, and the blue belts stopped midway through their Ten Hands Kata in precise unison.

  The shaggy newcomer found himself in a dead silent room, faced with twenty four hard stares, the owners of which would all swarm him at a blink from Baba Hamilton.

  He was a young bopper, a dirty faced Puerto Rican kid with one of those upper lips that looked more like a chocolate milk stain than a mustache. His wild, black tangle of hair was squeezed by a red bandanna, like a potted bunch of geraniums sprouting from the top of his skull. His denim vest was adorned with patches, one of which bore the name Jeet Kune Joe. His eyes scanned the sea of stark white gis with affected nonchalance, but Baba Hamilton stepped forward, way too big to discount.

  “Hola young man,” he said, his voice a thunder rumble that could rattle the panes uptown. “How can we help you?”

  “Yo, y’all do kung fu up in here?”

  “This is a kenkojuku karate dojo,” said Baba Hamilton. “It’s a style of shotokan handed down by our founder, Sensei Okano Tomosaburo.”