All of this in barely the pop of a single flashbulb.
Henry lunged at the nearest guard and ripped the machine gun from his hands. The chants still there, muffled and distant:
“Heil! Heil!”
Henry fired into the ring of men before most could even find their triggers, cutting down the four SS guards closest to him, shocking the crowd into silence. The guards didn’t flail their arms or fly backward firing their guns the way men do in the movies. They simply fell where they stood, limply, unceremoniously erased. The remaining guards opened fire, dividing their muzzles between Abe—who had landed on the ground at Hitler’s feet—and Henry. The bullets tore into the vampires’ arms and legs. Splintered their ribs and spines. All of this in a single chant of “Heil!”
Hitler clutched at his throat as beads of red began to appear, clinging to a perfectly straight, invisible line. Rubies on a necklace with no chain. More droplets began to appear along the length of the paper-cut-thin wound, held shut only by the surface tension of his skin. The dam broke with sudden fury, and the blood poured forth in waves, over the top of Hitler’s hands, through the spaces between his fingers. He began to sputter and cough. He went ghostly white. His knees buckled. He fell, his blood mixing with that of his fallen guards. Mixing with the blood that trickled from the bullet-addled body of the tall vampire.
Henry fell, flailing his arms, firing his gun exactly the way men do in the movies. He writhed on the concrete, bullets lodged in every extremity. His gun barrel still smoking.
All of this in less than three seconds, from the first leap to the last shot.
And all of this, solely in Henry’s imagination.
The truth was, we just stood there and watched [Hitler] pass… watched his entourage lead him away as the crowd continued to chant. As much as Abe wanted to—as much as we both ached to—and as close as we were, we had our orders. No one could know who we were. No one could know that America had sent us. There was the country to consider.
The country… always the country…
In the years to come, I would think about that night over and over, turn it in my mind a thousand different ways, wondering how many millions of lives might have been saved had we succeeded in blowing him into a million pieces. Or if Abe really had said, “The hell with it.” How much suffering would have been spared, and how different today’s world would look… if not for a fucking glass of water.
Abe and Henry boarded a train out of Berlin that night, going to great lengths to make sure they weren’t followed.
But they were.
Back in their civilian clothes, fake passports in hand, Abe and Henry left Frankfurt by Zeppelin on the evening of May 3rd. They’d spent two days zigzagging through Germany by rail, as news of A FAILED PLOT ON THE FÜHRER’S LIFE! filled the front pages.
They’d discovered the bomb while taking the stage apart that night and started looking for the saboteurs right away. Everyone who’d had access to the stage was rounded up and questioned, except, of course, for the freakishly tall officer and his smaller friend, who couldn’t be found anywhere, and whom—come to think of it—no one had ever seen before. Within an hour of their finding the bomb, there were leaflets with our descriptions being passed out at beer halls and train stations and orders being radioed around the city to be on the lookout. You have to give it to the Germans… they’re nothing if not efficient.
Abe and Henry had cabled a prearranged coded message back to Washington on the morning of their departure:
BER 1102A 3MAY 1937
SEC H WOODRING 1650 Pennsylvania Ave N.W., Washington, D.C.
FORECAST CALLS FOR RAIN. DRESS APPROPRIATELY.
It was a three-day crossing to New Jersey by air, and though still stinging from their failure, Abe and Henry were relieved to be headed home.
Henry had crossed the Atlantic countless times by then and had marveled at the speed and luxury of modern ocean liners.
Now man had built ocean liners of the sky. Defying Newton’s laws in high style. Unlike twenty-first-century air travel, with cattle crammed into pressurized tubes, the fortunate few staring out of tiny windows at a strange collection of colors and patterns some five miles below, travel by airship was intimate. Slow and low. Gliding over the earth no faster than a car, a mere five hundred feet above the ground. Passing ships bobbing in the waves of the Atlantic. Over cities, low enough to make out people waving from their backyards.
This particular airship had two decks, the upper for staterooms, the lower for recreation and dining. There was a lounge on one side of the lower deck and a dining room on the other, both with large picture windows where passengers could idle and take in the view. There was also a small smoking lounge—the only place passengers and crew were permitted to light up, on account of their being seven million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen over their heads. There was even a crewmember whose sole responsibility was to make sure no one left the smoking lounge with a lit cigarette or pipe.
The dining room aboard Abe and Henry’s Zeppelin. Henry passed much of the three-day voyage looking out the windows on the left, while Abe preferred to stay in his stateroom—a decision that nearly cost him his life.
Abe passed the time in his stateroom, reading. I preferred the lounge, soaking in this flying wonder of the modern world, the constant drone of the propellers the only noise, save an occasional rattle of china.
As it happened, this particular crossing was only half-booked. There were thirty-six passengers aboard of a possible seventy, and more than sixty crew. Unusually strong headwinds slowed the voyage, and by the time the American coastline appeared three days later, they were hours behind schedule.
We passed over Boston, low enough to make out the clock on the steeple of the Old North Church. It was the first time I’d seen America from the air, and I was struck by how grand, how built up and packed in it all was. My first memories of Boston were of the ultramoral Puritan settlement I’d sought refuge in some three hundred years earlier, in the spring of 1660, when the colonial authorities hanged a woman named Mary Dyer for the crime of forsaking Puritanism. Not to become a Satanist, mind you, or even an atheist—but to become a Quaker and daring to suggest that men and women deserved equal standing in the eyes of God. Imagine what they’d have done if they’d known there was a vampire twenty feet from her gallows.
Further delaying the already late airship, there were thunderstorms over the landing site in New Jersey, forcing the captain, a forty-six-year-old veteran aviator named Max Pruss, to circle Manhattan and wait for the weather to clear. There was a minor stampede as New Yorkers scrambled out of their office towers to catch a sight of the glorious ship sailing overhead, seemingly just out of reach—lower even than the Empire State Building’s antenna. A biplane appeared and circled the Zeppelin, its newsreel cameraman taking footage of the spectacle.
I was in my stateroom, collecting my things in anticipation of landing. I could hear the engines idle, the hiss of gas being valved to reduce the ship’s buoyancy. I could feel the ship beginning to slow, and heard drops of rain begin to patter on the hull around me. Distant thunderclaps. I locked my trunk, grabbed my coat and hat, and decided to check in on Abe.
Abraham Lincoln, while brilliant and virtuous in many ways, had never been a punctual man. He was prone to getting lost in his own head, time slipping past him like a thief past a snoozing night watchman. Henry, to Abe’s constant annoyance, had taken on the role of valet over the years, eyes on his pocket watch, nudging Abe along whenever there were trains to catch or appointments to keep.
I knocked on his cabin door. No answer. I knocked again and called his name.
Henry turned the handle, expecting to find Abe asleep on the other side, a book on his chest. But when he opened the door, he nearly gasped. He dropped his coat and hat without thinking and extended his claws.
[The room] had been torn to pieces. There were craters and claw marks in the walls, tears in the mattress, feathers spilling out every w
hich way. Flecks of blood, too. But the thing that drew my eye was a hole in the cabin ceiling. A big, gaping hole that had been punched in from above. Someone had forced their way in through a crawlspace. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.
Henry stared up into the darkness of the gaping hole, which let cold air and engine noise in from the vast superstructure above. Abe is up there, he thought. Dead or alive, he’s up there, along with whoever made this hole. Henry reached up and grabbed the sides of the hole, pulling himself into the darkness.
Getting the drop on Abraham Lincoln wasn’t easy. Beating him up and dragging him away was nearly impossible. Whoever I was looking for was powerful and likely to do the same to me.
Contrary to the imaginations of most of those skyward-gazing New Yorkers, the “bubble” portion of the Zeppelin was not, in fact, one giant balloon. It was a rigid structure, and only part of it actually held the gas that kept the airship afloat. The rest was open space, connected by a series of catwalks and ladders that ran the length of the Zeppelin, giving the crew access to the gas cells, the engines, and the water tanks where ballast was stored to control pitch and buoyancy.
There were sixteen massive bags, or “cells” hidden inside the airship’s silver shroud. Like the watertight compartments on a seagoing ship, they were designed so that the Zeppelin could stay afloat if any one—or even several—of them were punctured. All of this was contained within an aluminum alloy skeleton, covered by thin silver fabric to keep the elements out. Being inside the bubble felt more like being in a vast, dark factory than in an oversize balloon. There were no lights inside the structure (they were too dangerous so close to the gas cells), but just enough daylight seeped through the silver skin to ward off total darkness.
Henry made his way aft along a catwalk, his vampire eyes making day out of the dark. His nose following the familiar scent of his friend. And all the while, ready for the monster to spring from hiding.
When you walk through a Halloween maze or watch a horror film, it’s not the scare that gets you; it’s the anticipation of the scare. I knew that I was walking into a trap, and I was eager to spring it. Eager to cut through that terrible anticipation and get to the screaming.
There was Abe. Alive, his hands bound behind him, his body tied to a vertical support beam with steel cable, likely ripped from one of the airship’s control mechanisms. Henry didn’t know it yet, but two fingers on Abe’s hand were missing—cut off during the struggle in his cabin. He’d been tied up at the very rear of the hull, where the exterior’s football shape narrowed to a point. On the other side of the fabric skin, four giant fins protruded from the airship’s tail.
“Abe…”
“Don’t,” Abe whispered, half conscious. “It’s a—”
“A trap. You don’t say.”
All the same, Henry began to yank at the cables, trying to loosen their grip on Abe’s body.
“It was her.”
I sensed her presence moments before I heard her. It had been centuries, but her voice was unchanged.
“Hello, Henry.”
Henry let go of the cables, leaving Abe still partially tied up, and turned.
She was exactly as she looked when I’d last seen her in James Fort, hundreds of years earlier. Still striking. Still young, outwardly, with the same wavy red hair and blue, blue eyes, the color of shallow waters. She wore black pants and a black leather waistcoat with a dozen or more heavy brass buckles and held a small sword—barely longer than a knife—in each hand. I felt everything: surprise, hatred, fear, love. When you’ve loved someone the way I’d loved her, you never stop. Not completely.
Henry couldn’t find the words. Couldn’t get his mind to pop into any particular gear. He was stuck, looking at her. She was flanked by two broad-shouldered brutes, their fangs glistening, claws scratching the metal hull of the ship in anticipation of conflict.
I’d known she was still alive, ever since Rockefeller had revealed the hidden name behind the mysterious “Grander.” But knowing something and seeing the proof standing in front of you are two very different things. The difference between believing in ghosts and waking up with one hovering at the foot of your bed. One is theoretical; the other is emotional.
“Virginia…,” Henry whispered.
I was, a long time ago, said a voice in Henry’s mind. Her voice. Henry was suddenly and completely aware that she’d been there, inside his head, since they’d arrived in Berlin. That indefinable dread he’d felt, that fogginess and forgetfulness… it had been her, all along. Henry felt like a gazelle at a watering hole, lapping up the cool droplets with his tongue, only to have his face snapped up in the jaws of the crocodile that had been waiting just under the surface the whole time. Waiting for the moment to reveal itself… until it was already too late. I was there before you even saw the watering hole. I was there when you drank. I was always there.
“You shouldn’t have come to Germany,” she said.
Abe pulled on the steel cables that affixed his wrists to the beam, trying to free himself. The cables cut into his skin, down to the bone—but they didn’t give.
There were a million things I wanted to say. A million questions. Here we were, reunited after what, three centuries? More? Face-to-face for the first time since I’d made her. My mind was frozen, its processors overloaded, and she took full advantage of it.
Virginia came, fiery and perfect, swords spinning. Up came her leather boot, the heel connecting with Henry’s chin faster than he could get his hands up to block it. Before his neck had time to snap back into position, Virginia plunged one of her blades into his chest, missing his heart by less than an inch. Henry instinctively grabbed the blade and held on as Virginia withdrew it—cutting deep gashes in both of his palms. She kicked him again, cracking his ribs and sending him stumbling backward on the catwalk.
She took a step back and let her brutes surge forward, a beneficent lioness, letting her cubs have their way with the scraps. The first leapt through the air, his jaws opening impossibly wide. Henry dropped onto his back and kicked upward with both of his legs, sending the vampire sailing off the catwalk. He fell fifteen feet to the canvas below, the force ripping a hole in the fabric directly above one of the airship’s four propellers. He fell through, the spinning blades severing his legs as he fell five hundred feet to the New Jersey countryside.
The second brute was more cautious, slashing halfheartedly at Henry’s throat as if afraid to commit himself. When Henry dodged, the vampire tried to kick his legs out from under him. Henry jumped forward instead, plunging all ten of his claws into the vampire’s throat. When he withdrew them, blood spurted from ten perfectly round wounds. The brute struggled to keep himself from bleeding out, but he was leaking like a sieve. Henry grabbed his head and twisted it violently. With a snap he broke the vampire’s neck and let him fall to the ground, his face now gawking at his own back.
Henry looked up at Virginia, who’d been watching with a wry smile. She was upon him in an instant, swords flashing through the air. Henry’s only chance was to get in so close that her blades couldn’t find momentum. He threw himself at her, embracing her as he had centuries before and trying to bite her face. Virginia slipped from his grasp and slashed at him again and again. Sparks flew as errant strikes connected with the metal frame of the airship.
She was the best fighter I’d ever faced. Ten times more powerful than Rasputin, despite being half his size. She was, to put it mildly, kicking my ass—cutting me to ribbons.
Virginia spun and kicked Henry a second time in the face, her red ringlets twirling outward like the streamers on a Maypole. He fell backward onto the metal catwalk, hitting the back of his head hard enough to rattle his brain in his skull, flicking his consciousness on and off, like a toddler who’s got ahold of a light switch. He could hear the four Daimler-Benz engines pick up again, this time in reverse, bringing all 803 feet of Zeppelin to a near halt, as Virginia raised one of her swords and plunged it into Henry’s midd
le. She twisted the blade and withdrew it. It made a sucking sound as it left Henry’s body. Blood trickled out around the red entrails that peeked through the wound.
Virginia turned her attention back to Abe, who’d cried out at seeing his friend disemboweled. He began to struggle against his bonds with renewed urgency. She was intent on finishing the old vampire hunter, now that his role as bait was fulfilled. The engines idled again, the airship slowing almost to a stop as the mooring lines were dropped beneath them. Virginia drew back her blade to cut off Abe’s head.
But something stopped her.
A sound.
The unmistakable sound of a Zippo lighter opening.
A silver Zippo, adorned with a gold swastika—a souvenir of a failed mission. Virginia turned and looked into Henry’s eyes, and for a moment, that’s all there was. Just the two of them… back in the days of understanding. In love forever. Somewhere in this moment, Henry struck the lighter’s flint and let it fly.
It flew as if in a dream, all slow motion and angels singing, gracefully arcing toward the nearest hydrogen cell. Its flame licked the side of the giant bag, the atoms of its fabric excited by the heat, their electrons moving to higher orbitals… the fire spreading on a quantum level, its time disassociated from that of the real world.
The Last American Vampire Page 31