Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  Unexpectedly, the inside of the shed was lit, and brightly. All the walls were covered with black drapery, it was even nailed to the ceiling. But from that ceiling hung a very bright bulb, and a reflecting skirt drove all the light on to the car below it.

  Nuri stood there blinking for several moments while he tried to make sense of what he saw.

  A Lincoln V-12 was here, in the last stages of some major modifications. Both hoods were open and the doors had been taken off the hinges. The glass on the windshield, the rear window, and on the doors he could see leaning against the wall, were all painted black. Every seat but the driver’s had been torn out, and in their place stood stacks of wooden boxes piled to waist height, surrounding a metal barrel that reeked of gasoline. In the trunk was the same thing, a drum—this one sidewise—surrounded by wooden boxes. Thick wire coiled from one box to the next, throughout the whole car.

  Nuri walked up to the side of the car and gently lifted the lid of one of the boxes. He wasn’t surprised by what he saw. In the box, connected by wires to each other, were at least a dozen sticks of dynamite.

  The Lincoln was a rolling munitions dump. He felt the same sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that he’d felt when he heard his sergeant step on a land mine.

  The room was no longer silent. Something moved behind him. Nuri turned, raising his cane to defend himself. He was too late. Something slammed into his head and he fell into the blackness of the draperies.

  Nuri came awake in a familiar room. A single light burned above him, dangling from a wire in the ceiling. He lay on a dirty cot, still in his uniform. At the moment he wished he’d been wearing his service pistol.

  He sat up and looked at the stone walls surrounding him and called out, “Stefan!”

  From the other side of the door Nuri heard Stefan’s voice say calmly, “There’s no need to shout.”

  Nuri sprang up and stumbled on his bad foot. He limped up to the door and tried to force it open, even though he knew it was hopeless. The door had held Stefan, and Stefan had been stronger than him even before he was claimed by the supernatural.

  “What are you doing?” Nuri yelled at him. “Let me out of here!”

  “I can’t, Nuri.” Stefan’s voice sounded heavy beyond the thick door. Nuri wished he could see him. “I wish it was possible—”

  “Just open the door.”

  “You saw what I was doing. I could stare into your eyes and tell you to forget, but that wouldn’t be enough. You would do something—inadvertently I’m sure—that would alert him. I can’t let you, not when it’s almost over.”

  Nuri looked at the door and shrank back, thinking of the modified Lincoln. “You’re going after him? Good Lord, you can trust me. I’m not going to warn the bastard after all this—”

  “It’s not about trust,” Stefan said. “I’ve spent years making sure that I was the one person who knows what is about to happen. You found me here. I don’t know what you asked, or who, but it might be already too much. Melchior has ears everywhere. I’m also not sure you wouldn’t try and stop me.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “If you knew what it was going to cost.”

  There was a long silence, and Nuri thought Stefan had left him. He pounded on the door. “Are you still out there?”

  “Yes. It’s probably a good thing that there’ll be someone left to remember what happened and why.”

  The way Stefan said it made Nuri freeze. He began to realize that there had to be someone driving the Lincoln when it went up.

  “Sit down,” Stefan said. “I’m afraid that you’ll be here a while. But I might as well tell you, so someone knows.”

  Nuri tried the door a few more times, then gave up in frustration. He backed away and sat down. He stared at the wooden door, and shivered as the cold began to sink in. He wrapped a blanket around his shoulders as Stefan spoke.

  During the whole monologue, something in the tone of Stefan’s voice kept Nuri from interrupting.

  “You saved me, Nuri. If not for your intervention, I would still be one of his thralls, probably used up and truly dead by now. He could see in me, and through me, but you found his blind spot. My presence here, on blessed ground, blinded him—or gave me the power to blind him. Father Gerwazek gave me the faith to push him from me. I died to him, and I gained my soul back.

  “But I knew, even as I walked from this place, my redemption wasn’t free. I was saved for a reason. What afflicts me might not be evil in itself, the thirst given me doesn’t have to kill—but Melchior is an abomination. He feeds on his own kind. In the end, he wants all the world’s flesh bound to his own.

  “The war we’re fighting in Europe is a result of his desire to rule an empire of men, an empire ruled by those of the blood. If he lives when this war is over, he will gain that empire. He has become part of the industrial sinew of this war. He builds munitions, transports them, feeds our effort in Europe and Asia. He is so tied into the powers of the allies that he will rule what is left of the axis when the war is over. That cannot happen. Compared to Melchior; Hitler, Mussolini, Tito, Franco, they are all angry children.

  “I’ve seen the carnage that supports him and his followers. I’ve been a part of it. The bodies he left for us, the ones he wanted to be found, those weren’t a hundredth part of the blood left in his wake. And what he wallows in now is not a thousandth part of what would happen if he is granted what he seeks.

  “My redemption won’t be complete until that is prevented. I want you to realize what I am stopping. The cost may be appalling, but what would happen without it is unspeakable. I only pray to God that the sacrifice will succeed.”

  Nuri grew colder and colder as Stefan spoke. He had been in Europe, and had seen the Nazis’ handiwork for himself. He knew what the SS was capable of, and he knew stories of things much darker. Imagining something that might be worse gave him a sick feeling in his gut.

  It was a while before Nuri realized that Stefan had stopped talking.

  “You can’t do this by yourself,” Nuri said. “There’s no other way I can do this,” Stefan said. “I’ve left you food. You won’t see me again.”

  Nuri sprang up and pounded on the door. “You can’t just leave me here!”

  “Father Gerwazek will be here to let you out on Friday.” Stefan’s tone became frighteningly cold. “When he does, leave here as fast as you can.”

  “What are you going to do?” Nuri said, “What happens on Friday?”

  “Melchior dies,” Stefan said flatly. “Remember, leave here quickly. Good-bye, Nuri.”

  “Stefan?” Nuri called.

  There wasn’t an answer.

  “Stefan!” Nuri yelled out, to no response. “What happens on Friday?” Nuri called repeatedly, into the night.

  That was the last time he ever heard Stefan Ryzard’s voice.

  5

  Friday, October 20

  2:10 PM

  After four days Nuri was stir-crazy. He had broken his cane attempting to open the door, his throat was raw after hours of screaming for help, and his head ached from the cold and damp. But the room had held Stefan, and it held Nuri. On the fourth day he looked at the last dregs of the food and water Stefan had left for him and wondered if he would ever get out of this small stone room.

  But, just as Stefan had promised, on Friday afternoon, Nuri heard Father Gerwazek’s voice calling out, “Hello?”

  “In here,” Nuri yelled, and then erupted in a fit of coughing. The shout tore at his abraded throat.

  “I’m coming,” Gerwazek said. In a few moments the door pushed open.

  Gerwazek entered, looking older and more worn than Nuri remembered. The priest stared at him for a moment before saying, “Detective Lapidos?” There was the sound of surprise in Gerwazek’s voice.

  Nuri grabbed his shoulder, “Where is he? What’s he doing?”

  “What?” Gerwazek said.

  “He sent you here. You have to know what’s going on.”

/>   Gerwazek looked at him blankly. “All I know is I got a phone call saying that someone was trapped in the basement of old St. John’s, and I needed to come here before two. I didn’t know it was you.”

  Nuri shook his head, and pushed past Gerwazek. He hobbled toward the exit. “He’s planned something for him. It’s about to happen.”

  Gerwazek followed. “Who? Who’s been using this building? Who locked you in there?”

  “Stefan, Father,” Nuri said as he pulled himself up through the trapdoor. “I’ve got to find out what’s happening.”

  Nuri stumbled out into a brisk, cloudless, sunlit afternoon. He stood in front of the church, staring at the sky.

  Gerwazek came out after him. “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “I wish I knew,” Nuri said. “He’s planning something for today. The way he said it, saying I had to leave here quickly when you showed up, it has to be happening now—but it can’t be.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You know what he is. He can’t be running around in daylight. I’ve seen what sun does to them.” He’d have to be as powerful as Melchior to walk in the daylight....

  Nuri looked up at the afternoon sun and whispered, “Or be shaded from it.”

  “What?”

  Nuri ran unsteadily around the church to the shed in the back. It took a few moments for Gerwazek to follow him. When he caught up, Nuri was standing in front of the open shed, looking at where the Lincoln used to be. He remembered all the windows painted black.

  “It is today,” he said, staring into the empty shed. “He blacked out the windows so he could go out in daylight.”

  “Stefan?” Gerwazek said.

  “Yes, Stefan. Father, I need to get to a phone. Stefan’s riding a bomb somewhere, and I want to find out where.”

  2:20 PM

  Stefan Ryzard checked his watch and then started the engine of the Lincoln. The powerful V-12 roared into life, vibrating the chassis around him. It was time.

  He had parked way back from the site of Eric Dietrich’s visit. He hadn’t wanted anyone in any security capacity, either Dietrich‘s, or the plant’s, to take notice of the car. The black windows were enough to draw attention.

  Even with the windows blacked out, even with only a sliver of window open for him to see the road, Stefan sensed the pressure of the mid-afternoon sun. The light outside was a numbing presence that he could feel even inside his pitch-black car. Wherever the light from his sliver portal touched the skin, it would go numb and dead. Stefan knew that if such light hit him directly, he would become a pile of dead meat. His recuperative powers would save him from a gunshot, or a broken bone, but they were taxed to the limit by just a thin beam of sun.

  It was a measure of just how old and powerful Melchior was that he could walk abroad in the sun, apparently unharmed.

  The sun also brought a crushing fatigue that Stefan had spent years learning how to fight. The natural order of things was for his body to shut down while the sun was in the sky. Every motion, every thought, required an inhuman effort to maintain.

  Fortunately, while the planning and the secrecy was delicate, the execution was not. All Stefan had to do now was aim the car down two miles of road, and accelerate. When the Lincoln came into Melchior’s view, Stefan expected that he would sense one of the blood inside, even though Stefan had purged himself of Melchior’s blood long ago. It was the nature of the blood that its people sensed one another. Stefan just hoped that by the time Melchior knew what was racing toward him, it would be too late.

  Stefan pulled out into the road, and began flooring the accelerator. He dodged slower-moving traffic as the speedometer crept toward ninety.

  On the gearshift, Stefan found a button strapped there with cloth electrical tape. He pressed it down and held it.

  There was no turning back now.

  2:22 PM

  “Look, I know I’m not on the force anymore, I’m asking a favor as a friend.” Nuri stared at the phone in front of him. He wanted to beg, to plead—mostly he wanted to tell the officer on the other end what kind of stakes they were dealing with.

  “Look,” said the man on the other end of the line, “As a friend I’m telling you, we’re not supposed to be giving out that kind of information. There’s a war on, you know.”

  Nuri shook his head in exasperation and looked out of the phone booth. Gerwazek was still there, watching him with a bit of concern, but calmly enough that Nuri realized that none of the unease that flooded him had really touched the priest.

  The closest phone they’d found was in a little drugstore on the same block as the old St. John’s. The white-jacketed pharmacist was busy talking to some old Slovenian lady.

  Nuri took a few breaths to calm himself and said, “Are you suggesting I’m a Nazi spy?”

  “I’m saying that—”

  “I had my foot blown off for schmucks like you!”

  The pharmacist and the old lady both turned to look in his direction.

  “What do you want from me?” asked the man at the other end of the line.

  “I want to know where Eric Dietrich is, right now. He’s a VIP, he gets police protection when he’s in public, you have his itinerary somewhere.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, and hurry.”

  “It’ll take a minute.” Nuri heard the officer set down the phone.

  Nuri felt time slide by, oily and slow. The Slovenian lady got what she’d wanted, walked over to Father Gerwazek and started talking in hushed tones, occasionally looking in Nuri’s direction. Nuri suddenly realized how he must look. He had slept in his uniform for four days without a shower or a shave. Dirt was smeared all over him, and he must have smelled like the mildewed basement where he’d been kept.

  Every minute was marked by an axlike thunk from a large clock above the pharmacist’s counter. Nuri stared at the clock, wondering how much time he had before whatever happened, happened. It might be happening now, might have already happened....

  The officer came back on the line. “Okay, I’ve got what you wanted.”

  Nuri listened with slowly growing horror as the officer told him where the Hungarian industrialist Eric Dietrich was at that moment.

  Nuri stumbled out of the phone booth without hanging up the phone. The old lady stumbled backward like a frightened bird as Nuri grabbed Gerwazek’s shoulders.

  “What is it?” Gerwazek asked. Some of the fear from Nuri seemed to finally erupt in the priest’s face. It was as if everyone could see it, smell it on Nuri. Even the pharmacist stepped out from behind his counter, as if he suddenly felt the sense of menace that had a stranglehold on Nuri.

  “He’s at the East Ohio Gas Company,” Nuri whispered.

  “What?” Gerwazek asked.

  “Some industrial tour, him, some Congressmen—” Nuri shook his head. “Don’t you get it? The natural gas tanks.”

  Gerwazek stared at him.

  Nuri looked at him and said, “Millions of cubic feet of liquefied natural gas, and Stefan’s riding a bomb in there!”

  The minute hand thunked home. It was 2:28.

  2:29 PM

  A man in a hard hat led Eric Dietrich and a small horde of followers across the grounds of the new East Ohio Gas liquefication-regasification facility. The tanks towered around them, reaching toward the cloudless sky.

  “The first part of the facility,” their guide was saying, “was completed in January of 1941. Tanks number one through three.” He motioned to a column of spherical structures nested in girders and scaffolding towering nearly sixty feet into the sky.

  He motioned around to a different tank, this one cylindrical and somewhat shorter than the others. “Tank number four,” he continued, “was built later on, to help deal with the wartime shortages. Despite the fact that it holds a hundred million cubic feet, double any of the others, the design actually uses less material, saving about a hundred tons of steel for the war effort.” He looked at Dietrich as he said it.


  Dietrich was here in his capacity as a wartime industrialist. In that capacity he had visited innumerable factories and power plants. This was just the latest in a long line. His party consisted of bodyguards and two congressmen who were bound to him by more than party affiliation.

  “I am interested in the transportation of natural gas,” Dietrich asked. “The feasibility of rail transports is my current concern.”

  Their tour guide nodded and started to say something when he was interrupted.

  The party stood outside and towards the front of one of the buildings of the Number Two Gas Works. From there they could see the three spherical tanks and the cylindrical tank number four. Also, through the fence around the gas works, they could see the street that went by the grounds.

  One of Dietrich’s bodyguards, and one of the cops with them, both shouted that something was coming.

  On the road, shooting toward the Number Two Works, was a long black car. It was topping a hundred miles an hour as it barreled down the street, weaving in and out of traffic. Sunlight gleamed off of its ebony windshield.

  Dietrich stared at the vehicle, as if he saw more than a black shell hurtling down the street. Across his face ran an expression of first puzzlement, then recognition.

  The car swerved so it was no longer pointed down the street, but angled toward the gas works, toward the group gathered around Dietrich.

  Calmly and without passion Dietrich said, “Stop that car.”

  The cops were still assessing the situation when the triad of Dietrich’s bodyguards responded to his command. All three drew their weapons, braced, and began firing. Sparks boomed across the long hood of the sedan. The ebony windshield sprouted spidery cracks. One of the rear tires exploded, throwing its hubcap across the sidewalk and jerking the car off its course as it burst through the fence surrounding the works.