The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman- Freedonia Page 12

  Caleb took another sip of absinthe. “Bully for you, Hamilton. I’m gonna go inside and address my Council.”

  “After I escort my wife to the Command Bridge, I will join you,” Hamilton said.

  Caleb entered the house and walked to the parlor, where his Council of Colin, Connor and Colonel Kim awaited him. The Council snapped to attention. Caleb waved his hands in a downward motion.

  “Sit; sit,” he said. “I want you to relax. There will be plenty to do once we arrive in Freedonia.”

  The men sat down on the couch. Caleb sat in a chair, facing them. He leaned forward in his seat before he spoke again.

  “Once we take Freedonia, I’m gonna kill that uppity smoke,” he whispered. “Then, I’m gonna turn his wife and her crew and this house will be my palace.”

  “Do me and me brother still get to rule England?” Connor asked.

  “Serve me well and you get to rule all of Europe,” Caleb replied. “Kang-min, I’ll still need you by my side as my interpreter, but you can have all of Asia…except India. India is white man’s country.”

  “Yes, Majesty,” Kim said, with a slight bow.

  “In just a few days, the age of man comes to an end,” Caleb said. “No more playin’ around.”

  “We’re gonna be gods,” Colin chuckled. “And I’m gonna be naughty! I’m gonna be a naughty Ghul God!”

  The parlor erupted into laughter as the Ann Eliza Jane rolled onward toward Freedonia.

  CHAPTER twenty-ONE

  September 27, 1870

  Jeremiah Hamilton rode next to Eliza in the Command Bridge, perusing the landscape of Maryland. The Appalachian Mountains rose out of the mist to the West. A movement caught his eye. He held a hand high and the Ann Eliza Jane ground to a halt.

  A moment later, the din of running feet came from the hallway outside of the Command Bridge.

  Caleb burst into the room. “What’s the skinny, Hamilton?”

  Hamilton pointed to the east. They were in the vicinity of where the Potomac River flowed into the Atlantic Ocean.

  “We are at the boundary between Maryland and Virginia,” Hamilton said. The border between the United States and Freedonia.”

  “Good!” Caleb said, clapping his hands.

  Hamilton pointed toward the observation window in the ceiling.

  Caleb stared up into the sky in the direction Hamilton pointed and his face went wan.

  “What is it?” Caleb said, squinting at an object in the distance that zoomed toward the house.

  “Aircraft,” Hamilton growled.

  “Ain’t like no airship I ever seen,” Caleb said.

  “The Freedonians call it a Dragonfly,” Hamilton said. “Those infernal contraptions are what gave Freedonia the advantage in the Reunion War. Those goddamned things cost me a lot of money in property damage!”

  “You better get on over beneath that outcropping of rock,” Caleb said, nodding toward the mountains. “Me and my army will handle this.”

  Hamilton stared at him.

  “What?” Caleb said.

  Hamilton said, flatly, “If you attack that Dragonfly, the Freedonia Border Guards will see it and call it in. More Dragonflies will come and we will all die.”

  Caleb opened his mouth to protest and then closed it. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll keep it cool and quiet for now. So, what’s the plan?”

  “We can’t even hope he hasn’t seen the pillars of dust this house throws up. He has spotted us all right.

  “He’ll make three passes,” Eliza chimed in. “The first one high, as an initial check. The second time, he will come in low just to make sure. The third pass, he will call in a company of Light Infantry to check us out and demand our explanation for being here.”

  The Dragonfly continued its approach, high but nearer now.

  “So,” Caleb began, “we either get him the second pass he makes, or we’re caught anyway.”

  “Not if we’re smart,” Hamilton said. “And that, I am. I also possess the gift of gab. I will talk our way into Freedonia. They will insist on inspecting the house, however.”

  “So, what do we do, then?” Caleb asked.

  “We do nothing,” Hamilton replied. “You and your army are going to sneak out through the trap door in the basement and then you are on your own.”

  “Hold up a minute, Hamilton,” Caleb protested.

  “I haven’t got time to argue with you,” Hamilton said. “Go now, before it is too late.”

  “Damn it!” Caleb spat. “Okay.”

  Caleb headed for the door.

  “Good luck,” Hamilton said. “Oh, and sorry you didn’t get the opportunity to kill me and my wife and take the Ann Eliza Jane as your palace.”

  Caleb looked as if he had been struck by lightning.

  Hamilton laughed. “Oh, the walls have ears.”

  “Oh, we’ll meet again soon, boy,” Caleb said with a smile. “That, I guarantee.”

  Caleb left the room, slamming the door behind him.

  The Dragonfly roared in on its first pass. The cyclogyro stopped in mid air a few yards past the house, hovered, turned and then came back.

  “Here he comes,” Eliza said.

  Something crashed into the underside of the Dragonfly. A moment later, a loud boom, accompanied by a flash of fire, erupted from the aircraft.

  The Dragonfly wobbled and shuddered and then it burst into a black and orange cloud of fire and smoke.

  “Caleb!” Hamilton roared. “God damn that monster!”

  Hamilton watched in horror as scores of Freedonian soldiers sprinted toward the house. They would call for Hamilton’s surrender and if he did not do so immediately, they would call in a fleet of Dragonflies and not even the Ann Eliza Jane could withstand that.”

  Caleb and his army came out of hiding from behind rocks and high grass and then plowed toward the Freedonian soldiers.

  Hamilton placed a firm hand on Eliza’s shoulder. “Take us out of here while both sides are distracted. Hopefully, they will all kill each other.”

  “Back to New York?” Eliza inquired.

  “No,” Hamilton said. “We park the Ann Eliza Jane in Richmond.”

  “And then?” Eliza said.

  Hamilton pointed straight ahead out of the observation window.“And then, onward, to Atlanta.”

  CHAPTER twenty-two

  September 28, 1870

  The Grasshopper landed on West Paces Road, about a mile from the National House.

  Harriet and Mary waited for the blades of the immense cyclogyro to stop spinning and then they hopped out onto the road.

  Harriet walked toward Peachtree Road. Mary continued up West Paces.

  “The National House is this way,” Harriet said.

  “I know,” Mary said. “I can smell Douglass’ cologne. Know what I smell this way, though?”

  Harriet raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “Beer and whiskey and cigars and pine oil,” Mary replied. “The scents of paradise!”

  “Hell is comin’ and you goin’ to a saloon?” Harriet said, pursing her lips.

  Mary shrugged. “What better place to be when Hell comes?”

  “Whatever,” Harriet said. “Meet me at the National House in an hour. We gotta strategize on how to stop Caleb. I’m surprised he ain’t made it here yet.”

  “I ain’t picked up no scent of ghuls yet,” Mary said. “I’ll see you soon, though.”

  Harriet threw up her hand and jogged off.

  ****

  Harriet entered President Douglass’ office. The President sat at his desk, sipping tea. Sitting across from him was a man Harriet didn’t recognize. The man’s smile was warm enough, but his eyes were as cold as the grave.

  “Madame Vice President! Welcome,” President Douglass said, rising from his chair.

  “Mr. President,” Harriet replied.

  The man with the warm smile and cold eyes extended his hand toward Harriet. “Madame Vice President, so nice to meet you. My name is Jeremia
h G. Hamilton and I have come to help make Freedonia the wealthiest nation in the world.”

  Harriet shook Hamilton’s hand. The world tilted and a blanket of hot, moist darkness engulfed her.

  ****

  Mary sat at the bar of the Gaston Saloon taking gulps of whiskey from a half full decanter between puffs from her cigar.

  The owner and bartender, Keith Gaston, exchanged limericks to the amusement of the five other patrons.

  “There was a young belle of old Natchez,” Mary crooned. “Whose garments were always in patchez.When comments arose on the state of her clothes, she replied, ‘When Ah itchez, Ah scratchez.’”

  “Bully!” the bartender said. “Here’s one for ya’: A wonderful bird is the pelican; his beak can hold more than his belican.He can hold in his beak enough food for a week, though I’m damned if I know how the helican!”

  Mary laughed. She took a sip of whiskey and then slapped the bar top with her palm. The bar shook. “Damn good one, Keith! I can top that, though: A flea and a fly in a flue were imprisoned, so what could they do? Said the fly, ‘let us flee!’ ‘Let us fly!’ said the flea. So they flew through a flaw in the flue.”

  The bar erupted in laughter and applause.

  “Ah, we’re being clever, are we?” Gaston said. “Ok, well, here is one I picked up from none other than Dr. George Washington Carver himself: There was a young lady named Bright, who traveled much faster than light.She set out one dayin a relative way,and came back the previous night.”

  The patrons in the bar paused, letting the word play sink in. All at once, it seemed, they got it and they laughed.

  Mary stared at the bartender for a long while. Then she spoke: “There was an old man with a beard; a funny old man with a beard. He had a big beard; a great big old beard; that amusing old man with a beard.”

  The patrons laughed.

  Keith Gaston bowed. With that, I concede. You are truly the Goddess of wordplay!”

  Mary curtsied. “You just tellin’ me what I been known, Keith. ‘Bout time somebody recognized, though. To celebrate this victory…the next round is on me!”

  A cheer rose from the bar.

  ****

  Harriet crept up Broadway in Manhattan, straining to see through the thick cloud of brown smoke. The cloud reeked of burnt sugar, kudzu and feces.

  The ground shook violently, rending a massive, jagged wound in the earth. A great dragon burst forth out of the chasm, rising skyward. The dragon descended, breathing fire that scorched the tall buildings and the ground.

  Harriet saw its face. It was Hamilton’s face and Caleb’s face all at once – a twisted visage of darkness, betrayal and death. The dragon’s crimson and azure body was composed of ghuls that writhed and roared in a discordant mess.

  Harriet fired the Carver Mule, striking the dragon in its left eye.

  The dragon roared with a thousand agonized voices. It opened its mouth wide and sped toward Harriet.

  The world tilted again.

  ****

  It was Rosetta Douglass who first saw the specks in the sky. She had been out on the lawn of the National House, pretending to tend to the beautiful white roses she planted there over a year ago. In actuality, she was visiting with Lieutenant Clarence Smith, a Freedonian officer and Honor Guard with who she was madly in love. She had looked up into Lieutenant Smith’s eyes when she saw them high in the sky, over his head – specks with tails of fire.

  Her outcry brought her mother, Anna and President Douglass after her onto the lawn, where they became stone effigies with pounding hearts, screening their eyes with their hands as they stared skyward. The specks appeared in view of a landscape that centuries of civilization had fertilized and cultivated and formed.

  Beyond the National House loomed Friendship A.M.E. Church. Rosetta always referred to Friendship A.M.E. as ‘Friend’. She had a habit of personifying all inanimate things; a habit that began in childhood and continued beyond her recent 30th birthday. If the Friendship A.M.E. walls were covered with hoarfrost, she said that her friend was shivering; if the wind tore around the church’s tower, she said that her friend had gas from overindulging in her mother’s corned beef hash.

  A century older than the specks in the sky was Rosetta’s friend; but the pass road was many more, countless more, centuries older than any friend of Rosetta’s. It had been a trail for Native American tribes long before any white man claimed to have discovered it and then claimed it as his own. Rosetta saw how the legions of fawn, light yellow-brown, sinewy men, covered in crimson, looked in their close ranks as they soared across the noonday sky.

  Many wars had passed the church and many more had passed the land upon which the church sat. Stone axe, spear and bow, javelin and broadsword, blunderbuss and steam-powered cannon – all the weapons, of all stages in the art of war – had gone trooping past. Now had come the specks in the sky, like a swarm of alien wasps pouring out of a tear in the Lumineferous Aether.

  ****

  Mary sniffed the air.

  “Excuse me,” Keith Gaston said. “My wife made me two fried eggs this morning with a side of pinto beans.”

  “That smells pretty bad,” Mary said. “But what I’m smellin’ is a lot worse. You should go home to your wife, now.”

  “What?” The bartender said. “We don’t close until around ten o’clock; sometimes a little later. We have another ten or eleven hours to go.”

  “Naw,” Mary said. “You about to close – or be closed – right now!”

  “Now, wait just a minute,” Gaston snapped. “I…”

  Mary dove behind the bar’s counter, pulling the bartender down with her, just before a squad of ghuls burst into the bar and opened fire. Bullets flew over their heads. Bottles shattered, raining rum, gin and whiskey on them.

  “Waste not; want not,” Mary said, grabbing a glass and then using it to catch samples of the different spirits. She emptied the glass in one gulp.

  When the volley of bullets stopped, Mary focused her hearing. The men were reloading. She peeked out from under the counter. There were a dozen gunmen; well, not really men anymore; there were a dozen gunghuls.

  Mary drew both Dragoon revolvers and fired a volley of her own. The ghuls dove for cover.

  She wounded several and delivered fatal hits to three of them – one in the chest; one in the upper spine and one right between the eyes.

  Mary barely had enough time to duck again before more bullets flew past her.

  She raised her carbine over the counter and, using the ghuls’ heartbeats as guides, fired off several rounds at an overturned table she had seen a few of the ghuls take cover behind. The bullets pierced the tables, finding their marks on the other side.

  Three ghuls fell from behind the table, collapsing in bloody heaps on the hardwood floor.

  Another hail of lead crashed into the reinforced bar. One of them grazed Mary’s leg, another hit her arm.

  The bullets ricocheted off of Mary’s stone-hard flesh. One lodged in the wall beside Mary. The other bullet tore a hole in the bartender’s head.

  Mary slid over the alcohol-wet floor to the leftmost edge of the bar, away from the gunfire, reloading as she glided along.

  She popped up onto one knee and then returned fire.

  More ghuls fell.

  She rose, unloading her rifle and twin pistols.

  Ghuls fell like a torrential rain of fetid flesh and greenish-black blood.

  ****

  Harriet’s eyes flew open. Wide-eyed, she examined her surroundings. She was still in President Douglass’ office, alone. Someone – probably Douglass – had laid her on the President’s couch.

  She had to warn him. That man, Hamilton, was responsible for the Great Fire in Manhattan – probably in her world and in this one – and was in cahoots with Caleb Butler.

  She stood and then walked to the arched French windows at the back of the office. She looked out onto the lawn. Scattered about were the corpses of Freedonian soldiers and Hwarang gh
uls.

  “Lawd, have mercy!” Harriet said. “Lawd, why you send me that message with Caleb and his army so close? I hope Mary is out there handling this.”

  Harriet whirled on her heels and dashed out of the office.

  ****

  Mary tiptoed out of the saloon. She focused her vision. About a mile away, nearly a hundred ghuls charged up West Paces Road, murdering all within their view.

  She focused her hearing. Screams of fear and agony assaulted her ears.

  “Damn!” She sighed.

  Mary drew a brass Very pistol from a pocket inside of her waistcoat. She pointed the gun toward the sky and pulled the trigger. A glowing, bright red flare rocketed high into the air. She then ran to a parked steam car, dropped into a prone position and then shimmied under the vehicle.

  A few minutes later, a Grasshopper cyclogyro, piloted by Major Clark, landed a few yards away from where Mary fired the flare.

  Mary crawled from under the car and sprang to her feet. She focused her vision again. The ghuls were a quarter of a mile away, now. She sprinted toward the Grasshopper and leapt into it.

  “I hope you summoned me for a lift to the National House” Major Clark said. “Those monsters are killing us out there.”

  “Naw,” Mary said. “But I think I got somethin’ for those damned ghuls.”

  “Ghuls…so that’s what you call them,” Colonel Clark said.

  “Yep,” Mary replied.

  “Where to, then?” Major Clark asked.

  Mary pointed toward the North. “The Tuskegee Institute.”

  ****

  Sounds of war filled the air. Metal rang against metal, and the unearthly cries of the inhuman ghuls unnerved the normally steely Freedonian soldiers.

  Into the fray Harriet went, releasing the power of her spirit, and crushing as many of the Hwarang that swarmed the National House as she could.

  She struck at the ghuls with frightening speed, ferocity and violence, forcing them back, casting them high into the air, driving them into the hard soil until their bones cracked and their flesh was torn asunder.

  She cut a path of blood and broken bodies through the battle.

  Harriet pushed through another dense line of Freedonian soldiers who were trading blows with Hwarang and other ghuls. She climbed a low hill where the Ghul King and his Council stood looking north and west. She was exhausted, yet she summoned strength from a reserve and pushed through the waves of ghul sailors and Hwarang who protected their king.