by Paul Taylor
“What are the prospects of our defeating the Mohawk lycanthropes?”
“Silver weaponry is our only hope,” I said. “Judging by the size of the Mohawk Nation, we would need thousands of pounds of silver, melted down from our reserves.”
Hamilton shook his head.
“We could not so deplete our supplies without destroying our international financial reputation,” he warned. “With our currency now linked to precious metals, our silver reserves remain an essential part of our creditworthiness as a nation. Without it, no country would dare trade with us.”
Jefferson turned to Burr.
“Then the zonbi army is our only hope,” he said. “Is it yet operational?”
Burr clasped his hands and leaned back in his chair.
“It is, Mr. President,” said Burr with a self-assured grin. “Bokor Samedi has produced thousands of them, all awaiting their first command.”
“Then Dr. Franklin shall immediately have them assembled at the frontier border,” said Jefferson.
Burr shook his head slowly.
“He shall do no such thing, Mr. President.”
Burr’s defiant tone rang through our ears like an alarm.
“Mr. President,” said Burr, “I have arranged for the zonbi army to be turned over to British command.”
Hamilton bolted from his chair.
“Traitor!” he cried. “Burr engineered the bankrupting of the nation with his zonbi scheme, which required a gold and silver currency standard to keep our national debt in check. And now that our fiscal need for silver has left us defenseless against the Mohawks werewolves, Burr threatens to turn control of the zonbi hordes to the British!”
Burr rose.
“Jefferson has had his turn to lead!” he cried. “But under his administration, we have gone to war against the Pasha of Tripoli and the House of Habsburg, and now we are on the verge of war with the Mohawk Nation. It is time America was governed by an enlightened ruler presiding over a peaceful regime. And so I have promised the British the United States will no longer engage in foreign entanglements under my administration.”
“Your administration?” asked Jefferson. “You should first attend to the administration of your will, you treasonous cur!”
“There will be no proceedings for treason!” shouted Burr. “Jefferson will resign the Presidency, I will assume it, and you shall all support me in that regard! For if you do not, I shall deliver the zonbis to the British, who with their Mohawk allies will raze this country from north to south!”
A silence fell upon the East Room. Jefferson gazed around the cabinet table, seeking expressions of hope. He was met only with hopeless stares.
“Have you no means of foiling my plans this time, Dr. Franklin?” needled Burr.
Jefferson heaved a heavy sigh.
“I should never have succumbed to my hubris and believed any good could come of an army of entranced supplicants, undead or otherwise,” he said.
Jefferson turned to me.
“Secretary Franklin, I authorize you to deliver our response to all Mohawk demands to Chief Thayendanegea. If those terms are accepted, I will resign the presidency, and Burr shall assume it.”
Burr folded his hands, and the meeting was adjourned.
As I left the East Room, I heard the faintest sobs coming from a nearby antechamber. It was Dolley.
“I overheard!” she said. “Should Burr become President, he would dismantle the political structure my husband risked his life to build! Burr would reduce the Constitution’s separation of powers to a struggle between the competing goals of his own ambition!”
I held Dolley’s hand.
“The President has authorized me to craft the terms of our response to the Mohawks,” I said, “and I shall do so in a way that does justice to the foundation your husband so carefully laid.”
After some consideration regarding the nature of our terms of surrender, I went with Ichabod Crane to deliver them.
We rode by carriage to the edge of Chief Thayendanegea’s lair. It was just before dusk. The chief was waiting for me, already in wolfen state. As expected, he was joined by his leading lycanthrope officers, who were literally salivating at the prospect of abject American surrender. Behind them, hundreds of Mohawk warrior wolves had begun the celebrations by quaffing mead by the jug, drinking themselves into a euphoric berserker state.
I stepped down from the carriage. In my hand was the rolled parchment listing each American concession. The sight of its bulk and size caused the lycanthropes to jump almost playfully onto their hind legs, and yip.
“I have the terms of surrender,” I announced to the barking assemblage.
I loosened the ribbon that bound the parchment and unfurled it with a flourish. Line after line of surrender terms rolled across the dirt until the end of the scroll opened gently at the tip of the chief’s misshapen claws.
The chief lifted the paper. His wolf pack gathered along the length of the document, grabbing its edges with anticipation. They howled with delight and ran their paws ecstatically over each term.
“I trust you are satisfied?” I asked the chief, struggling to be heard over the animal din.
“Your concessions are accepted, Secretary Franklin!”
I gestured to Crane, who emerged from inside the carriage holding the ornate cherry wood trunk we were authorized to deliver. The chief looked upon it longingly.
“What added gifts have you for us?” he growled.
Crane opened the lid of the trunk, revealing a large battery. Copper wires dangled from its sides. Crane adjusted the battery’s knobs and pulled a lever on the trunk. The battery hummed. Too late, the chief discovered its wires were attached to the parchment, and that the terms of the concession were written in a continuous circuit of silver ink.
The charge surged through the document, holding the wolves’ paws fast to the scorching electric current, which carried more efficiently through silver than any other metal. The chief and his top commanders dropped to their knees. Their howls turned to whimpers and their hulking frames crumpled to the ground. Their paws, fused with silver, boiled to a pulp.
Crane and I jumped into the carriage and headed south. Only the Mohawk leadership had fallen, while packs of infuriated Mohawk warriors remained. It was only a matter time before they attacked in revenge.
We rode through the night and arrived at the edge of Washington City just after dawn, where we met several militia regiments.
“To the Capitol!” I ordered. “The Mohawk soldiers will not be far behind!”
The newly-constructed Capitol was the closest thing to a fortress in our new nation. Its marble steps rose steeply to meet a series of columns that would serve as barricades, separating and slowing the wolves when they arrived.
I had arranged for defensive positions to be established in the well of the House and behind the House rostrum. Other militiamen were scattered round the Capitol. I confirmed our strategy with the assembled men.
Then, from the Grand Balcony, came a lookout’s cry.
“Here they come!”
The wolves swarmed up the Capitol steps, fanning through the East Portico. They picked up speed in the Main Vestibule before crashing through the heavy oak doors leading to the Hall of Representatives. The wolves, now leaderless, seemed physically rudderless, driven by a raw rage untethered to any semblance of strategy.
As the wolves approached, the militiamen raised modified muskets with spring-loaded bellows affixed to their muzzles. On my command they struck the spring triggers and the bellows slammed closed, propelling a hot steamy mist laced with liquefied silver.
The wolves’ eyes swelled shut as they doubled over in pain. The blinded beasts scattered, stumbling aimlessly throughout the House chamber.
“Fire the chimneys!” I cried from my command perch at the base of the Rotunda’s vast dome.
Militiamen stationed on the roof adjusted boilers fixed atop the Capitol’s many chimneys. With a collective hiss, th
e boilers pumped more steam infused with liquid silver throughout the House chamber, permeating the air with tiny droplets of the aerosolized metal.
Wolves grabbed their throats and struggled to plug their ears as the silver filled every wolfen orifice. The chamber echoed with the whimpers of a thousand hounds.
The silver mist was working. And all it took was the smallest fraction of our silver reserves.
I gathered with the militiamen atop the Rotunda and watched the wolves pour out of the Capitol, tumbling down the huge marble staircase to escape the tainted air. They gathered in a monstrous heap at its base.
But then my eyes wandered to the horizon, where I spied another dark, undulating mass. It approached at a quick walking pace, led by a festooned General. I recognized the ostentatious bicorn hat and the wide red cuirass as that of Robert Ross, head of the British North American divisions. And his stumbling infantry was the zonbi horde, which Burr had turned over to British command.
General Ross called out to the wolves.
“Mohawks, recover your strength in the open air! The zonbi army will flush out the Americans!”
Ross halted his steed and ordered the zonbis forward. They staggered with increasing speed as their olfactory nerves smelled stationary prey.
“Separate and fill each entryway!” ordered General Ross. “Feast on the American swine!”
The zonbis lurched ahead.
Several militiamen panicked and jumped from the roof.
“Hold!” I cried. “Stand fast on the Dome!”
The advancing rows of zonbis split when they reached the writhing wolfen mass at the stairs. The militiamen watched in horror as though a legion of their own pallbearers approached.
But the zonbis did not continue forward.
Instead, they circled the wolves and inched inward.
“Zonbis, move forward!” yelled General Ross.
The zonbis ignored their master’s command and instead curled into the wolves like a black boa constrictor. They hugged the beasts close and pulled the fur from their heads like feathers from a goose, sinking rotted teeth into lycanthrope skulls.
I could hardly contain my delight.
“As I thought,” I said, patting Crane on the shoulder, “having feasted on the drunk workers at Bokor Samedi’s factory, the zonbis developed a taste for alcohol-addled brains! And no brains are as pickled as those of hard-drinking berserkers!”
The Mohawks swung their claws wildly, still unable to open their eyes through the sting of the misted silver. They soon fell like exhausted dogs to the relentless toothy pecks of the zonbi horde, and within minutes, the proud Mohawk tribe had been reduced to a pile of stump-necked carcasses.
The militiamen broke out in “Huzzah’s!”
General Ross reared his horse.
“Celebrate while you can, Dr. Franklin!” he yelled. “There remain a thousand zonbis who will stop at nothing for a taste of your superextended cerebrum! Zonbis, carry on to the Capitol!”
The mass of tattered cloth and flesh, having sucked Mohawk skulls dry, sauntered ahead with noticeably greater rigor. The militiamen looked to me for words of comfort. Instead, I put my fingers to my lips and blew a high-pitched whistle.
Almost immediately, the dull moans of the zonbis were overtaken by a crescendo of galloping hooves. From around each side of the Capitol came a cavalry of gray-suited gentlemen sporting topcoats and tails and a most confident riding stance.
The horsemen drove a line between the zonbis and the Capitol steps and turned their horses to face the horde.
Except they themselves had no faces. Their starched white collars circled empty voids.
“Headless horsemen!” shouted a New Englander from the Dome.
I leaned over to Crane, and confided to him in a whisper.
I told him that in 1776 I came upon the bodies of some hundred headless Hessian werewolves. I kept them in an underground icehouse for years, always interested in the prospect of reanimating the dead. But Burr’s plan of taxing productive businesses to provide federal subsidies to the incompetent Bokor Samedi left no private capital available for me in America to pursue my work. So I partnered with the Temple Trust of Scotland. My research on electricity allowed us to bypass the brain and reanimate headless bodies fueled only by circuit-charged werewolf adrenaline.
“And you sent prototypes to the western frontier?” asked Crane knowingly.
“Indeed.”
I leaned over the railing and addressed the headless Hessians.
“Horsemen, loose your lanterns!” I cried.
The horsemen produced pumpkins from their saddlebags. But where their stems would have been, each had a flintlock screwed to the top.
“Cock!” I ordered.
The horsemen pulled back the flintlocks in unison, then sprang the triggers to the frizzen. Pieces of hot metal dropped into a pan near the stores of gunpowder in the pumpkins’ hollows.
“And throw!” I yelled.
The horsemen hurled the pumpkins at the zonbi mass, where they exploded, setting their tattered clothes aflame. The zonbis stumbled forward, a determined army of matchstick men.
“There are too many zonbis!” said Crane. “The horsemen will be overwhelmed!”
“You forget the zonbis kill to consume brains,” I said. “And the horsemen have none.”
Sure enough, the zonbis seemed to become increasingly disinterested in their headless tormenters. The horsemen ran circles around them, herding them together like listless sheep and hurling repeated volleys of incendiary pumpkins.
Within minutes, the entire zonbi mass was a charred inferno with a molten flesh core into which the entire horde collapsed.
When I emerged from the Capitol with the militiamen, General Ross had long since fled, and Vice President Burr was nowhere to be found.
Part 4: Benjamin Franklin and the Electrostatic Pirates
(The Terror Conspiracy)
I returned to my residence and found Dolley waiting for me at my doorstep. She appeared as an angel following the apocalypse, and she was sounding an alarm.
“Dr. Franklin!” she cried as she ran to me. “President Jefferson has appointed James Monroe the new Secretary of State. They all presume my husband has become another victim of the dreaded Habsburgs!”
I clutched her shoulders gently and held her back so I could see her eyes. They belied distress, but also a sense of closure. As I took Dolley to my breast once again, I could only wonder whether we would grow closer still someday.
But for the moment I satisfied myself with caressing Dolley’s gentle curls. They moved like springs in a watch, which I wound slowly tighter in my fingers in the hopes of speeding time. But all that came was sundown, and the realization that I, too, was fading with the twilight.
The next morning, President Jefferson introduced James Monroe as his new Secretary of State. Monroe then provided the assembled cabinet with an assessment of current threats to the nation.
“With the Barbary pirates’ cutting off commerce overseas,” he said, “and British impressments cutting off commerce with England, we must look to our own Hemisphere for needed trade.”
“I have determined to make Monroe’s doctrine official policy,” said Jefferson. “Henceforth, efforts by foreign powers to colonize land in the Americas will be viewed as acts of aggression requiring intervention by the United States.”
Monroe looked to me.
“There is civil unrest in Mexico,” he said. “President Miguel Hidalgo now leads that country following his successful revolution. But word has come to us that the country is now subject to destabilizing forces directed from overseas.”
“Dr. Franklin,” said Jefferson, “you will go to Mexico and determine the nature of those forces, and Hamilton will go with you to help negotiate a trade agreement with a free Mexico.”
Within days, Hamilton and I were riding by carriage across the Lerma River, not far from our destination of Mexico City.
The bridge was thick with t
raffic. Donkeys carrying jugs jostled with fruit cart pushers and other pedestrians for any inch of a right of way. Our carriage was buffeted mightily until a bottleneck brought us to a halt. While traffic was stopped, the din continued, and, oddly, grew even louder.
Through the cacophony, we heard timbers crack and, peering from the carriage window, saw the bridge supports split open like ears of corn. The timbers began to heave and separate, and a black ooze swelled up between the cracks. It spread in all directions, but was not liquid in form.
“Army ants!” I cried.
Pedestrians found their legs covered to the knees as lines of killer ants stitched their mandibles into human flesh. Carts overturned. Donkeys kicked in every direction. The traffic suddenly lurched forward as panicked travelers crushed those who hesitated under foot and wagon wheel.
The bridge seemed to breathe, groaning above the shifting weight of the marching ants. As the ants moved, the supports underneath the bridge sank and rose until it became clear the ants themselves had provided the bulk of the bridge’s foundation.
Our carriage bucked as if it were feeling a thousand stings itself, sending our driver tumbling into the swarm below. Hamilton climbed through the carriage window and took the reins, snapping them violently to both rid them of ants and focus the horses on the path ahead. The horses strained, using their legs like a vice to pry the carriage through whatever space would allow us until we were largely clear of the chokepoint and all that composed it, which was left to sink into the mass of ants in our wake.
“Dr. Franklin,” cried Hamilton, “the ants are upon us!”
Indeed they were. I could discern nothing but soldier ants in the mass, each nearly a half-inch long, their jaws tiny machetes extending fully one-third the length of their bodies. The species notoriously dismembered any living thing in its path, size notwithstanding. The ants were also known for their ability to latch onto each other, foot to foot, and mold themselves into whatever living architecture might be necessary to preserve the colony, including, as we apparently just witnessed, the formation of bridges over water.