The New Orleans Zombie Riot of 1866: And Other Jacob Smith Stories

by Craig Gabrysch

  Jacob ducked the clumsy swing, but the knight caught him in the face with a backhanded slap from his right gauntlet. Jacob flew through the air, over and into the wooden pews. He tried to tuck and roll with the impact, but his landing space was too confined. He landed hard on his left shoulder, his collarbone snapping with a profound crack.

  Fire shot up his arm as he slid three feet down the smooth seat, his legs splayed behind him. He gripped his sword tight and scrambled out of the pew.

  “Goddamn,” Jacob said, trying to move his left arm. All he got for his trouble was agony. The knight reached down and effortlessly cleared the pew with a brush of his right hand, throwing the wooden pew off and to the left.

  Jacob scooted backward towards the side aisle, his left arm hanging useless by his side. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he sheathed his sword and drew his revolver.

  “Face me,” the knight bellowed from the center aisle. Jacob stopped on the other side of the pews beneath a stained glass window emblazoned with a medieval depiction of two knights riding the same horse.

  “Think I’m stupid?” He drew his pistol, cocked it single-handed, and aimed at the knight’s head.

  The knight stopped.

  “What are you doing?” The knight looked both ways. “That is dishonorable.”

  “Dishonorable?” Jacob asked and fired a shot. The knight’s head snapped back, the metal of the visor dented. Jacob switched positions, moving to his left to flank the giant. “You must be three times my size.” He fired another shot, this time aimed at the side of the giant’s head. The giant stumbled sideways, losing his footing.

  “One punch and you broke my damn collarbone.” Jacob moved as quickly as he could through a pew towards the center aisle. He fired another round. The bullet hit the giant in the shoulder. The giant knight lost his footing and stepped forward to regain his balance. Jacob thumbed back the hammer. The gun boomed as he fired into the giant’s backside.

  The armored man fell forward, sounding like a pots and pans covered bull plowing through a barn wall. His great sword fell to the stone tile of the aisle. Jacob holstered his pistol and drew his sword. He rushed the giant with a roar.

  The giant rolled with surprising quickness, trying to bring an arm up in time to meet Jacob’s charge, but it wasn’t any use. Jacob already stood over him, broadsword clenched in his right hand and ready to drive it downward and through the giant’s neck.

  “Yield?”

  “No,” the giant said, a touch of surprise in his voice, “this is not the way it should happen.”

  “Wait. What do you mean?”

  “No one ever has won.”

  “I ain’t supposed to win? Really?” Jacob grunted his own surprise. “How does anyone ever join the Templars?”

  “It’s a sacrifice on your part, this duel. The initiate is to lay down his life for honor, and to leave behind their old life. Only after that can they be reborn into their new,” the knight said.

  Jacob grunted. “Well shit.”

  “May I remove my helmet? The dents make for an uncomfortable fit.”

  “Fine.” The knight reached up cautiously and undid the strap beneath his helmet. He removed the helmet, revealing a gentle, topaz-hued face surrounded in long, blonde locks of hair. His eyes were golden, but human in shape and appearance.

  “Thank you. I seldom have to wear the armor. One forgets how hot it can be. May I stand?”

  “Your word you ain’t gonna make a move?”

  “Yes, my word as an angel.” Jacob raised an eyebrow and stepped back. The angel rose to his feet.

  “Woah there. Angel? Got any proof?”

  The angel sighed. He puffed out his chest, his breastplate groaning with the strain, and stretched his arms to his side. As he leaned forward, a great wrenching of metal sounded. Feathered, white wings sprouted from the rends in the armor, stretching two dozen feet in each direction. Jacob stepped back as the angel twice beat his wings in the air.

  “Does my proof back my assertion?”

  “Yup,” Jacob said, sheathing his sword. Wincing, he cradled his useless arm to his chest.

  The angel sighed again and bent down to retrieve the helmet at his feet. He picked it up and inspected the depressions left by the bullet and looked at Jacob. “None of the others used pistols, you know.”

  “Why not?”

  The angel shrugged.

  “So, I was supposed to lose?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish someone would’ve mentioned that beforehand. Reckon this is all new.” He looked around the structure. “Nice chapel, by the way.”

  “Thank you, but it’s not mine. I’m merely it’s guardian appearing in a way you wish to see. This place belongs to the Knights Templar.” This close, Jacob realized just how tall the angel really was. Jacob only rose to his chest.

  “They own this place?”

  “In a manner of speaking. It’s difficult to explain, but this is the ideal Chapel of St. George. The perfect one, upon which all others depend. As long as the other chapels exist, this one will as well. All the others previously built across Europe and the Holy Land by the Knights Templar were just shadows. You should have seen this place three centuries ago. The daemons almost reclaimed into the ether.”

  “Demons?”

  “Allow me to clarify. Daemons. They are neutral, and have no bearing on the fight for creation. They come through like stable hands and wipe out old, unused ideas and constructs.”

  “Right.” Jacob pursed his lips. “How do you reckon we get this thing moving forward then?”

  “I could kill you.”

  “What’d that take?”

  The angel made a chopping motion with his hand.

  Jacob shook his head. “Not a chance.”

  “I am no Jack Ketch, sir. A well-placed, clean strike should do the trick neatly.”

  Jacob looked askance at the great sword laying a few feet away in the aisle. He looked back up at the giant through squinted eyes. “Your word as an angel?”

  “My word,” the angel said, holding up his right hand and beating his wings once for emphasis.

  “Alright, then. Guess we should keep tradition.” Jacob sighed. “How do you want to do this?”

  “You can just kneel right where you are.”

  “Alright,” Jacob said, getting down on one knee. He settled in with the other while the angel retrieved his sword. “One quick question.”

  “Yes?” The angel asked as he spun the sword with ease.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Michael.”

  “You’re Michael the Archangel?”

  “I am.”

  Jacob grunted and closed his eyes.

  “A request of my own, Jacob?”

  “What?” Jacob replied, eyes still closed.

  “Could you not tell the other Templars you won?”

  “Reckon I could keep it to myself.” Jacob sighed.

  “Thank you,” Michael the Archangel said just before beheading Jacob Smith, the newest Knight Templar.

  Images and experiences pressed together in Jacob’s mind, squeezing themselves into his awareness.

  “Papa, I wanna ride,” Jacob saying, holding his hands up to his father.

  “You sure, son?” his father asking as he reaches down to pick up Jacob before the boy can reconsider. Jacob sitting in front of his father on the horse, the saddle’s hard leather being uncomfortable, the smell of fresh grass and barnyard filling his nose. His father’s warm presence behind him as they both rode out from the Kansas homestead and into the prairie.

  Jacob’s first taste of coffee, his mother scowling when he spit it out, his brother laughing at him, his little sister screwing up her face in distaste and saying, “I’ll never try that.”

  Jacob decking his brother with a hard right hook, riding off the farm for the last time, going past the lonesome tree where they’d laid his mother, father, and sister to rest.

  Then the war, three hundred day
s of rain and cold nights, three hundred more of heat, all of them full of thirst and hunger, the soft crying of the new recruits, his own depression and lonesomeness in those early days, the ache in his gut because his parents would not ever come back no matter how many Rebels he killed.

  Jacob shooting the young girl in the face, the way the ball from his revolver entered below her left cheekbone and exited through the back of her skull in a bloody crater, his mustering out from the raiders afterward when the war ended.

  That same girl forgiving him a lifetime later while he sat breaking fast with the other monks. The abrasion of his vocal cords as he screamed, waking up from his first vision.

  Henry Bennett teaching him how to swing a sword properly. Jacob talking to Hatsuto about meditation, Bushido, and the Buddha. Talking to Christopher Freeman about the South. Hatsuto whooping him at practice, the feel of the Japanese man’s wooden kendo sword across his wrist. Jacob outshooting the Japanese man at the target range, and Jacob’s gloating afterward. Chanting in some foreign, cthonic tongue, tentacles, Jacob shooting DuBose in the back, the relief of safety, the pain of his leg.

  Then somewhere. Somewhere he had certainly never been, and had never dreamed before. He was floating above it all. A spangled mash of pinwheeled stars spun far below him in the echoless, silent vacuum. It spun so quickly, Jacob imagined he could scoop it into his hands. So he did. He reached down with his right hand and plucked it from the soft, velvet-like backing and held it up to his eye.

  The Templar blinked and saw he was now floating above the rambling sprawl of wooden structures that was Chicago. Jacob looked over the whole of the city. Judging by his position near the lake, the monastery would be due east. As Jacob realized this, he was already there, above the stone compound.

  He looked down upon it and felt a tug, a sort of wail which filled his senses. Jacob followed the pull through the ceiling of the monastery, down past the dining hall, beyond even the basement levels, far into the earth till he reached the catacombs below the structure.

  Jacob was in a giant room, far larger than the dining hall and bigger than any room Jacob had ever entered, filled with pillars and tombs. Scores of lamps and torches fought vainly against the shadows. Dozens of sarcophagi lined each side of the chamber, each carved with an individual likeness of a man laying in repose, eyes closed, hands at the hilt of a sword resting on his chest. Blurry figures swirled through the room so fast they seemed elongated and solid.

  The figures centered on a single sarcophagus in the corner. Jacob watched as one blur would come in and stop, become a human being, then would leave after another blur came and joined it. At times it was Hatsuto or Christopher, and at others it would be Col. Winnie. After some watching, all three blurs came to a halt together. They arrayed themselves around the sarcophagus. Jacob was dragged in closer.

  The three men reached down and, with effort, slid off the stone lid of the sarcophagus. Jacob, or his body at least, lay inside, naked and submerged in some sort of liquid with closed eyes and an empty expression. Only his face protruded into the air.

  “Think he survived?” Christopher asked.

  “He is strong,” Hatsuto replied.

  “Hatsuto’s right,” the colonel said. “Besides, if he doesn’t make it, he was never meant to join us.”

  Jacob floated in closer, looking down at his face. He looked so different from outside himself. Like a stranger he’d known his whole life. Jacob reached down to touch his own shoulder. The middle of his forehead opened and a great, sideways eye protruded, blinking rapidly and sucking in the light.

  The floating Jacob drew back, gasping. Then he was there, laying in the water and staring up at the faces of the three men who had imprisoned him.

  Jacob, eyes wide, sat upright in the sarcophagus. Salt water ran in rivulets from his naked chest and hair, cold air striking his skin with suddenness. He was alive, good God, he was alive!

  “Woah there, son,” Col. Winnie said, putting a towel over Jacob’s shoulders. Jacob, unblinking, looked at each of the three men. “Do you know who we are?”

  “Y-y-y-yes.” The three Templars looked at each other in expectation. Jacob screwed his face up, tried to remember the order of the words he needed to say. “You’re Christopher, the colonel, and . . . Hatsuto.”

  Col. Winnie clapped him on the back and the two other men exhaled in relief. “Damn good for a first try, son. Damn good. Do you know who you are?”

  “Jacob Smith.”

  “Even better. Let’s get him out of this thing.”

  The four men sat together in the burial chamber. The three senior Templars had brought down chairs when they came to retrieve him from his initiation. Jacob was naked beneath a blanket as he sipped from a cup of broth the colonel had given him.

  “Did you understand any of it?” Col. Winnie asked.

  “Not really.”

  “I didn’t neither,” Christopher said. “Still wonder about most of the bits.”

  “Feel same?” Hatsuto asked.

  “No.”

  “That is good,” the Nipponese man replied.

  “Sorry we had to do you like that,” Christopher said. “It’s the way it’s written is all. Supposed to show us our true selves and sever us from the past. Whatever that means.”

  The four men sat in the quiet.

  “I did have one question, though. Why wasn’t it more . . .”

  “ . . . religious?” Col. Winnie finished.

  “Yup.”

  “Because we only appear to be a religious order? Because God isn’t real? Because religion is about life, and life is about religion, and the two often look the same?”

  Jacob and the other two subordinate Templars just looked at Col. Winnie.

  “I don’t know, son.”

  Jacob looked from Col. Winnie down to his broth, then back to the colonel again. “God ain’t real?”

  “I have no idea,” Col. Winnie replied, shrugging. “We’re only backed by the Church. Hatsuto’s a Buddhist. Five Feathers still follows his tribe’s ways. Freeman here’s a Southern Methodist.”

  “But just the things I saw at Kadath, those creatures. They weren’t from here. And the tear DuBose made . . .”

  “The things I’ve seen, you wouldn’t believe neither,” Christopher said. “That don’t make the Catholic Church and the Papacy the final word on nothing. Just makes ‘em one interpretation.”

  “I wrastled with an angel, though. And demons, too? Sounds pretty much like the Church to me.”

  “I fought a kami in my vision,” Hatsuto said. “Guardian warrior spirit.”

  “I went against a loa named Ogun,” Christopher said. “They’re like angels and demons in voodoo. My aunt practiced.”

  All four men looked at each other.

  Col. Winnie sighed. “We don’t know what they are. We just know there are places . . . beyond. Some of these creatures, like the one you saw at Kadath, come from a different land. Others, like the ones you studied before, come from a place the Church already knew of. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ There are ancient things, son, things we haven’t seen in our life. Hopefully, we won’t have to, either.”

  “And we gotta stop ‘em? How? There’s only a handful of us.”

  “Just gotta believe,” Christopher said.

  “Believe? In what? Y’all just told me God ain’t real.”

  Christopher leaned forward, forearms on thighs, saying, “The colonel misspoke–”

  “He ain’t ‘misspoke,’ he just said there ain’t no God.”

  Christopher held up a hand. “He gave you his version.” He spread both hands as if his thoughts were an offering to Jacob. “Truth is, we just don’t know. We just gotta trust that whatever sent us to the order sent us for a reason, that’s all. Whether it’s God or an angel or just something else, that’s all open for debate. Hatsuto here thinks we are cursed for our sins.”

  “‘May you live in i
nteresting times,’” Hatsuto said. “Old Chinese curse.”

  Jacob grunted. He took another sip of his broth.

  “So what is this place?”

  “You won’t believe us,” said the colonel.

  “Try me, sir.”

  “The monks found a door from the cellar. This was here before any of the Templars came. It was here when the monastery was built by the French.” He paused for a moment. “The French didn’t build it, though.”

  “I’ll be damned if you weren’t right.”

  “But it’s real,” Christopher said, “as real as anything else we’ve told you.”

  “The dimensions match up perfectly with sites in Acre, in the Holy Land, and others across Europe,” said Col. Winnie. “And the architecture is similar to the chapel you probably saw in your vision.”

  “St. George’s?”

  “Of course. That is the thread for us. And those little creatures, of course.”

  Jacob looked around the circle at the other men. “Who built this place then?”

  Christopher and Hatsuto just shrugged.

  “No one,” the colonel said, leaning back in his chair, “has taken possession of that dubious honor.”

  “Alright, I’ve done heard enough,” Jacob said, rising to stand on quivering legs. “I’m gonna get some sleep. Some normal sleep.” Hatsuto stood and took Jacob’s cup of broth and Christopher offered him a shoulder. Jacob wrapped the blanket around himself, shivering against the damp. “Colonel, you can fill me in on all this stuff in the morning. For now, I’m dead tired and worthless as a Confederate dollar.”

  “Agreed,” Col. Winnie said, staying seated. “Get some rest, son.”

  With that, Christopher and Hatsuto led Jacob from the room.

  Back to Contents

  Grace

  Jacob Smith and Christopher Freeman rode through the starless night, their hats pulled down against the sheets of rain pouring down on them and rolling off their oiled greatcoats. The mud-covered morass of a road seemed to stretch on forever through the thicket of oak and hickory trees.