Bald Tom fell to his knees, dropped forward. He tumbled off the dock and down to the frozen water below. He hit it hard, dropping through the ice with a sizzle and fountain of steam before he sank away out of sight, silent, like a stone.
Jim Crawford shouted in triumph, but the Mate hushed him sternly.
“I just killed a good man,” he said grimly. “Tis no cause for celebration.”
“He were dead already,” Crawford said.
“That don’t make me feel any better about it,” the Mate said grimly.
He stuck his hand in the pitch again, and came up with a second ball.
“You were lucky with the first,” I said. “Mayhap it is best not to chance it again?”
“We both know we have no other choice, Cap’n. Light it up.”
For a second time his arm seemed to grow a flame. The powder in the pitch spluttered before it left his hand. He threw it towards the dock, but it exploded and fizzled out well short, dropping away out of sight to the ice below.
“I can do better than that,” Crawford said.
Before either of us could stop him he plunged his whole arm into the pitch, coming up with a far bigger ball than the Mate. He leaned forward and touched the flame to the oily mixture.
His arm immediately burst aflame, fire roaring up the side of his head, flesh crisping and melting. He screamed, just once, and fell away from us. The powder went up and the whole right-hand side of Crawford’s body burst, like a ripe fruit, a dead, smoking, ruin before he hit the deck.
The Mate looked down at what was left of the man.
“Be careful,” I said.
The Mate bent to get himself another handful, when Eye-Tie Frank stepped in front of him.
“Mayhap I have a better method,” he said. He removed his cap, then his belt. He filled his cap with the pitch, and then tied it up with his belt. He was left with a two foot length of belt with a ball of pitch on the end.
“Shame on you,” he said to the Mate and me, his slight accent showing through. “Do you not do this yourselves at home to bring in the New Year?”
He lit the pitch, swung it around his head and sent in winging over the dock.
“That we do,” the Mate said, unbuckling his own belt. “Although I am usually too far gone in my cups to remember it.”
The fireball exploded just above the heads of the throng of the dead, sending burning flame over five of them.
The Mate sent one of his own after it. The air filled with black acrid smoke as flesh burned. The ranks of the dead did not move, even as their neighbors burned.
“All very well,” the Mate said. “But we have a limited supply of belts and caps. And I’d rather my breeches didn’t fall down…not in this weather.”
Dave the Bosun’s Mate arrived on deck. We set him to finding twine and cloth, the better to make more fireballs.
For a while the air was full of flame and fury.
The snow got heavier still. Sometimes we could not even see the dock, but the smell of burning meat told us we still hit our targets.
We lost ourselves in a world of burning pitch and whirling snow, the only sound being the coughing, spluttering rattle of powder starting to fizzle, and the whoosh of flame as we hit our targets. The night went on without end.
I know not when the snow finally stopped, only that I looked up to see stars and a full moon overhead.
“My eyes deceive me, Cap’n,” the Mate said beside me. “For surely the moon was on the wane when we hove-to here.”
“There is deception here, right enough,” I replied, “But it is not your eyes. It comes from that one.”
Out over the dockside, the white native with the feather headdress still stood tall and un-burnt. Around him the ranks of the dead lay, finally at rest, a smoking chaos of limbs and torsos piled higgledy-piggledy in a hellish landscape strewn across the dock.
The native thumped at his chest. He made an expansive circle with his arms before thumping his chest again.
He did this twice before I realized his meaning.
This land is mine.
He pointed at Dave the Bosun’s Mate. The man jerked, as if jolted by lightning.
To our astonishment he threw himself off the boat, towards the pier.
It was a prodigious leap. I would not have placed a bet on him achieving it, but he seemed to have been given wings. He landed, a few feet in front of the white native.
The native thumped his chest again. He stroked Dave’s face, gently, as if romancing a woman. Once more we had to watch a colleague freeze. His body went stiff, and a last plume of breath left him, floating high in the air. I could only hope it was his soul, fleeing to its place in Paradise, for the thought of a man being frozen but yet imprisoned, mute, in his own body, was almost too much to bear.
Finally Dave turned back towards us, blind, white eyes staring out of a blue face. The native once more made the circle with his arms.
“He’s showing us,” the Mate said. “He’s showing us that all this is his…including us.”
“It does not include me,” Eye-Tie Frank said. He leapt off the ship, screaming his defiance. Whether he intended to reach the pier itself we shall never know. His leap was well short and he fell away below our sight, never to be heard of again.
The native stared at the two of us, his black-lipped mouth raised in a smile. He thumped his chest again. Somewhere, out in the wild reaches of the night, a wolf howled at the moon. It was answered much closer, by a pack, a wild, ululating wail that seemed to pierce my very skull.
The First Mate looked at me, and I at him.
“We have served together over twenty years, Cap’n. I have been proud to call you my friend.”
“And I you,” I replied. We both had a tear in our eye, there at the end.
“Goodbye, Cap’n,” he said, as the native on the dock pointed a long white finger, straight at him.
* * *
Mina sat at her desk, staring at the computer screen. She could scarcely believe what she saw.
“It’s a webcam,” Jon said. “Fixed on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s usually only used to check for traffic, but the networks switched over to it when their own cameramen went AWOL. This is a recording from half an hour ago.”
The bridge was empty save for a lone figure, a thin man, ivory white, gaunt faced with a small goatee beard. He wore a high headdress of eagle feathers.
“Get the face-recognition program fired up,” Mina said.
“Way ahead of you boss,” Jon replied. “Just watch. I’ll fill you in later.”
The white figure turned his back to the camera and made a wide sweep of his arms, encompassing the snowstorm that hid Manhattan Island from view. He turned back, and slapped his chest, twice.
“He’s claiming territory,” Mina whispered.
“Not just territory,” Jon said, his voice shaking. “Watch.”
The white figure pointed a hand out towards the camera. People began to walk into view, stumbling, as if dazed, across the bridge. The frozen ones came out of the storm to meet them.
Mina had to look away as the first victim, an old man, was torn apart before her eyes and a red pool spread in the snow.
Jon leaned over and closed down the window.
“You can guess the rest.”
“They were all killed?”
“Not all. Some were frozen, like the others.”
“And the white figure? You know who it is?”
Cole Barter spoke from the doorway at the same time as Jon.
“Dick North. It’s Dick North.”
* * *
Mike Kaminski stood in the delivery bay listening to the thudding beats as the things outside tried to force their way in. For maybe the fifth time he checked that the shotgun was loaded.
The only time he’d ever felt like this before was at a drug bust.
And that time I was the one breaking in.
He remembered the same fluttering in his stomach; the same buzzing, like angry b
ees, in his head. When he heard footsteps in the corridor behind him he almost fired.
“Hey, relax, big boy,” Mina said. “Your caffeine fix is here.”
He took the coffee, swallowing a too hot gulp, thankful for the warmth.
“How’s our archaeologist?”
Mina brought him up to speed.
“Dick North? The Professor?”
Mina nodded. “Barter says there’s all sorts of stuff in North’s journal.”
“And how did he get hold of that?”
“He’s not saying. There’s something going on there. He knows Jackie as well.”
“I don’t like it.”
“What’s not to like? The world has gone to shit, we’re under siege from frozen zombies…and our generator won’t last forever.”
Mike sighed.
“How long?”
“Six, maybe seven hours.”
“No extra fuel?”
“Not inside. There’s a small depot maybe twenty yards out, but neither Jon nor I have a key for it.”
“Any chance of the cavalry coming to our rescue?”
“I doubt it. Whatever North has become, he’s holding all the cards.”
Mike nodded grimly.
“Then we have two choices. Sit tight and wait for the power to give out…Or find some way to fight back.”
The thudding at the door suddenly stopped. A deep quiet fell on the delivery bay.
“I vote for fighting back,” Mina said.
“Me too. Let’s go and find out exactly what our friend Mr. Barter does and doesn’t know.”
* * *
Cole was sitting in Mina’s office reading the last of the journal when the detective walked in. Cole knew immediately he was in trouble; he’d seen that expression on cops’ faces before.
“I’ll tell you everything,” Cole said, even before Mike said a word. “But I want you to remember. I saved your life out there. I didn’t have to do that.”
“I’ll take it into consideration,” Mike said. “Now talk. I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“It started when I pretended to be a cop,” Cole began.
“What!” Mike shouted.
“If you’re going to interrupt every time I speak, this might take a while.”
“I should kick your ass around this room,” Mike said.
“Save it till the end,” Cole said. “That way you’ll know how many kicks I deserve.”
Cole was initially just going to give the cop the abridged version, but in the end he told the whole story. He had Mike, Mina and Jon’s undivided attention, and he actually enjoyed the story telling.
“The journal,” Mina said when he finished. “That’s what you were reading earlier?”
Cole nodded.
“I haven’t quite finished yet,” he said. “But I’ve read enough. Dick North ate the heart of the native, and turned into…something. Probably a Wendigo.”
Mina shook her head.
“I don’t believe that.”
The big cop was more pragmatic.
“How do we kill it?” Mike asked.
“I think I was just getting to that.”
Cole opened the journal and read aloud.
* * *
Taken from the personal journal of John Fraser, Captain of the Havenhome, a cargo vessel. Transcribed and annotated by Dick North, 19th March.
NB This fragment continues straight on from the Journal Entry date 17th October, 1605.
What happened next will stay with me for the remainder of what is left of my life.
The First Mate shook and juddered, in the same manner as Dave the Bosun’s Mate had done a few moments before. He gritted his teeth. He stuck both arms into the pitch, all the way up to his shoulders. Before I could move, he took the torch from me. He leapt from the boat, straight at the native.
“Havenhome!” he called, his voice ringing out loud and clear in the night. He landed just in front of the tall, white figure, stepped forward, and grabbed it in a tight embrace. I have seen men’s backs broken by that grip, but the native ne’er flinched. The Mate put all his strength into it, but the white figure was unbowed.
Then, at the last, as the skin in the Mate’s face went blue, he yelled out once more, a formless word. He brought down the torch, and set light to his pitch covered arms.
I stood and watched, with tears running through a grim smile, as the pair of them burned. The feather crown went first, blazing all as one and sending flames all up the creature’s back. Where the First Mate’s pitch covered arms touched its body they stuck, searing huge patches of flesh at a time.
Together the bodies fell on the dock. The Mate was surely dead by now, but the creature could not escape from his embrace.
Even then I thought the creature might break free, for the flames had begun to die down, yet clearly, it still showed signs of what passed for life in that white frozen frame.
Finally, just as I was starting to despair, the powder in the pitch took.
A yellow flame shot ten yards into the sky. When it died down there was nothing left of either body that could be recognized…just one single, fused mass of blackened flesh.
* * *
Doug looked up. The other three stared at him, open mouthed.
“That’s how the bodies at the museum got fused together,” Mina said.
“Yep.” the big cop replied. “You starting to believe yet darling?”
“Maybe just a little,” Mina replied. “But it still doesn’t explain why all of this is happening.”
“I’ve got a theory,” Cole said. “If you’re interested?”
“Go on then,” Mike said. “Let’s hear it.”
“It’s to do with territory?”
“You mean he’s pissing in our pond?”
“No,” Cole replied. “We’re pissing in his. Or rather, the thing that Dick North has become believes he is an American Native, protecting his lands from invaders.”
“Bullshit,” Mina said. “Dick North was a white European.”
“Yes. But the heart he ate was Native American. You want a scientific rationale? How about donor memory translocation?”
“What’s that? More bullshit?” Jon asked.
“Something else I’m not sure I believe in,” Mina said. “There have been some recent papers that tend to suggest that people who get transplants can take on some characteristics of the donor.”
“Sure sounds like bullshit,” Jon said.
Mina shook her head.
“Some of the data is quite persuasive. People claim to take on some memories from the donor organs.”
“Like that vegetarian athlete,” Cole said. “She got the heart and lungs from a Hells Angel and now has a beer and fried chicken habit and rides a Harley chopper.”
“An extreme case,” Mina said. “She might just have wanted a change of lifestyle after a traumatic operation.”
Cole wasn’t going to be stopped so easily.
“But aren’t there also other studies that suggest that every cell in our body retains most, if not all, of our memories; down at some molecular level we don’t yet understand?”
Mina shook her head.
“You’re oversimplifying. Extrapolating a big picture from different small ones.”
“Yeah. But I could be right. North could have picked up the Native’s character from eating the heart? It’s within the bounds of scientific possibility?”
“Barely,” Mina said.
“And still a far cry from a weather manipulating leader of an army of zombies,” Jon said.
“It’s just too many impossible things to remember before breakfast,” Mina said.
“At least we know that someone beat it in the past,” Mike said. “That’s enough to give me hope, however small.”
“All well and good,” Mina said. “But how do we find it. It’s a big city.”
“I’ve got a theory about that as well,” Cole said. “In Wendigo myths, the creature always hangs around the same pla
ce where it was made. If I had to guess, I’d say the best place to find it is back where it started; back on Hunter’s Dock.”
“That figures,” Mike said. “That place always was bad news.”
Cole reckoned that now was maybe not the time for his abduction theories.
“So what’s the plan?” Mina said.
“You’re asking me?” Mike said, incredulously.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re doing okay so far.”
Mike smiled.
“Somebody call Guinness; I just got a chance at boss.”
“Make the most of it, Moose,” Mina said, turning his smile. “I might change my mind if you don’t shape up. What’s first?”
“First up is survival. And top of the list, assuming those things can’t get in here, is heat. The generator’s good for another six hours. Is there any other heat source we can use?”
“Short of burning the place down about our ears, no,” Mina said.
“Okay then. Weapons?”
“I’ve got three Molotov cocktails, and the pump-action shotgun from the bar. Fifteen shells left. Apart from that, you’re the one with all the armory.”
“And I left the cleaver outside,” Cole said.
“I remember. Thanks. Lastly, food and water.”
“We’ve got several water coolers, plenty of coffee, and a fridge full of chocolate snacks,” Jon said.
“Everything a growing man needs,” Mike replied.
“Any booze?” Cole asked.
“Just straight ethyl alcohol,” Mina replied. “You’d go blind.”
“It might be preferable, given some of the things I’ve seen tonight.”
“Talking of seeing,” Mike asked. “Do we have any eyes looking outside?”
Jon slapped his forehead.
“I forgot all about the external cameras. I can get them from here.”
He moved to the laptop. The rest of them crowded round. Cole had to lean sideways to see past the big cop.
The technician brought up a series of screens.
Night of the Wendigo Page 20
