Primus Unleashed Read online

  Primus Unleashed

  Amber Wyatt

  Medjay Publishing

  Copyright © 2018 Amber Wyatt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, stored or distributed in any form by any means, printed, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without permission, with the exception of brief and reasonable quotes for use by a reviewer in their reviews or testimonials. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ISBN: 978-981-14-3968-1 paperback original version

  ISBN: 978-981-14-3969-8 paperback collectors’ cover 1

  ISBN: 978-981-14-3970-4 paperback collectors’ cover 2

  ISBN: 978-981-14-3971-1 paperback 2020 commemorative cover

  ISBN: 978-981-14-3972-8 ePub

  ISBN: 978-981-14-3973-5 Kindle MOBI

  Published by Medjay 2018

  Reprinted collectors’ editions 2019, and commemorative cover 2020

  This book is a work of fiction. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Medjay Publishing is committed to a policy of using papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, and made from wood grown in sustainable forests.

  With thanks to Jason, Tina, Leroy, Thomas and Frog.

  For James

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  24th March 1871, in the open sea off Axehead island, 36 leagues north of Puerto de la Santa Cruz, 14 leagues north by northwest of Isla Margarita and Las Tetas de Maria Guevara

  In all his born days Paul Cope had never felt so exhausted and ready to collapse. Yet still the old woman shrieked at him to row faster.

  “Mas rapido Pablo!” she cackled away, “Vamonos. La luna viene!” The old hag stretched her withered claw of a hand towards the sky behind her, before breaking down into a fit of coughing.

  Sure enough, Cope could clearly see the ghostly yet clear outline of the moon in the late afternoon sky. Dusk would be not long in coming and then, as was common in these waters, twilight grey would be replaced with surprising quickness by a night as black as coal. Too quick by far for him to finish his desperate mission. Nevertheless, he rowed on with his heart hammering against his ribcage as if it would leap out of his chest, and the salty sea spray stinging his raw, heaving lungs.

  Cope had spent twelve of his twenty-six years at sea, climbing aloft in the rigging and pulling oars on whaling boats, and his wiry body was corded with muscle. Despite leaden arms and exhausted sinews screaming for mercy, his strokes were strong and fast with no wasted movement. Each limb was hardwired with the memory and endurance of a thousand days pulling oars, and this day Cope rowed as if his life depended on it. Or in fact his soul. He bent his back into his stroke and the small skiff with its two lonely occupants flew across the waves, directly into the wind and the merciless current that tried to wash them away from the small, rocky island that was their destination.

  He had been third mate on the Ken Bartlett, a two-masted, 220-ton whaler with a crew of thirty-two souls on board. They were bound out of New Bedford for the two-year round trip past the nightmare storms off Cape Horn, and onward to the Pacific whaling grounds far out into the deep ocean west of Chile.

  It was a harsh and demanding journey even for the most experienced sailors, but Cope loved the open sea with a passion. Hardly a day went past that he did not praise God that his father had brought him along, when he had made the decision to emigrate to the Americas. For Cope, who had spent his youth toiling deep underground, choking on the arsenic-laden dust in the dark, cramped confines of Cornwall’s tin mines, the fresh storms and vast horizons of the endless ocean were like a glimpse of heaven.

  But that had been a lifetime ago, a dream it seemed now. Barely a score of days into their voyage the ship’s master, Captain Stuart Scott, had issued new orders. They were to make harbor at La Isla Margarita off the northern coast of Venezuela to take on board fresh supplies. Since they were still well provisioned and had only recently taken on fresh water and vittles from New Providence, and then again in the Antilles, this was a surprise to the crew, yet not an unwelcome one. Both seamen and officers were always happy to indulge in shore leave with its attendant rum and exotic whores, and no complaints were heard below decks until, two days out from port, a grim faced Captain Scott and first mate emerged from the captain’s cabin and announced instead that they would be docking on the Venezuelan mainland at a religious community called Puerta de la Santa Cruz. The crew glumly suspected, quite correctly as it turned out, that rum and whores would be in short supply at this new destination.

  That was when the nightmare had started, although Cope had not realized it at the time. They had indeed docked and taken on water, chickens, pigs and limes from the small community of monks and farmers. But while the crew and petty officers had spent the day loading stores, Captain Scott and the first mate had conferred with an old priest and then set off with him, mounted on mules and headed further inland on some mysterious errand. Then as the ship lay at harbor under the humid stars, on the stroke of the bell at midnight, the away boat had come creaking back across the gentle swells from shore with the captain, and he had not returned alone. Cope had had the first watch and even as he handed over to the second mate, he saw the foreigner board the Ken Bartlett just behind Captain Scott. Swarthy and mustachioed he was, looking to be a Spaniard if Cope were asked to judge, although it was difficult to see the man clearly under the glare of the boarding lanterns and the pitch black of the clouded night. Cope surmised that the newcomer was the man the captain had gone to meet earlier in the day. The Spaniard came on board, clearly an officer of some type, with four of his own men following behind, all of a similar ilk, clad in black and heavily armed with rifle, pistol and sword. Two of them carried a chest between them. Are they passengers or just loading cargo? Cope wondered, eyeing the heavy, dark wood of the chest and its cast iron bindings. He had heard the rumors, oft circulated by the crew, about the captain’s financial worries and the sometimes unscrupulous trades he engaged in, in order to pay off his debts.

  The newcomers lurched clumsily, awkward even for landsmen, across the slowly rocking deck, and the entire group had disappeared into the captain’s cabin in a mu
ffled clumping of boots and clatter of weapons. Then Captain Scott had emerged alone not two minutes later and ordered the second mate to rouse the crew for immediate departure. The latter had opened and closed his mouth like a fish before stuttering some few words about waiting for the tide. His seemingly reasonable objection had provoked an explosion of uncharacteristic rage and profanity from the captain that had lasted throughout the rousing of the crew, the fumbling in the dark with rope and canvas, and the fighting the incoming tides and landward winds to get the ship sailing out full and by into the open sea.

  In all the confusion it was only as the captain confirmed their course to the helmsman, that Cope realized the first mate was missing. As he looked over at the empty spot on the bridge where the sturdy Yankee normally stood, the second mate, Coleman, caught his eye, and with a look at the dark anger on the captain’s face, both junior officers wisely chose to make no mention of his absence. Cope then also realized that making sail had been that much more difficult because, along with the first mate, all of the seamen who had rowed the captain from ashore had also followed the newcomers into the captain’s cabin and had not come out since to help their crewmates.

  Including their mysterious additional passengers, there were ten men in there, in a cabin that would have been crowded with half that number. In all the hubbub of raising anchor Cope fancied he had heard some muffled shouts from within the captain’s cabin, yet later as they sailed due north, hour after hour through that long night, not a whisper from within escaped past the door of solid, New England oak. The only sounds were the wind in the rigging, the creaking of wood and the rushing waves as the Ken Bartlett cleaved through the dark and foamy sea.

  Coleman and Cope had stood watch until the sun had risen painfully bright off their starboard bow. Captain Scott had neither moved nor spoken the entire night, but had just stood behind the helmsman with a face of stone. A few hours after an unceremonious breakfast of eggs and soft tack Cope had been asleep along with the crew from his whaling boat when it had happened.

  Bestial screams.

  Gunfire.

  Pounding feet on deck.

  Men shouting hoarse oaths and crying out in pain.

  He emerged on deck, blinking in the bright sunlight, to witness a scene from hell unfold, which he struggled to comprehend. Every man on board was fighting each other without rhyme or reason. Men tore at each other with knives, whaling lances, belaying pins and anything else that lay to hand. The Spanish officer from the night before grinned fiercely as he sawed through the throat of the screaming cabin boy. Coleman had a spencer rifle and fired four shots rapidly into the chest of the Spaniard, blasting chunks of flesh out of his back, but the grinning maniac just laughed as he walked obliviously through the fusillade and stabbed poor Warren through the eye with his dagger. Obadiah, the huge negro from Cope’s own boat crew virtually decapitated one of his fellow crewmates with a fluke spade, but almost immediately another sailor jumped him from behind, sank his teeth into Obadiah’s cheek and ripped half his shrieking face off. Everywhere he looked sailors slipped in blood and howled their rage as they hurled lances and harpoons into each other’s bodies.

  The ship lurched suddenly to starboard and Cope gasped in horror seeing that the helmsman was down in a puddle of his own blood, in the terrible embrace of Captain Scott who had torn out the poor wretch’s throat with his teeth. The captain was howling like an animal and still nuzzling the dead man’s neck with his bloody face when the first mate shot him in the back of the head, roaring about betrayal.

  That was when Cope had noticed something unnatural about the battle. Half the fighters were his shipmates, using weapons, shouting to each other or screaming in fear and pain. The other half comprised the Spaniard’s men and the boat crew that had been locked in the cabin with them overnight. His former crewmates fought silently, with hands and teeth, and they ignored devastating, mortal wounds and even missing limbs, to claw and bite at their opponents with animal ferocity.

  “Make for shore, Paul!” the first mate had shouted at him, and suddenly he realized that there was an island not one hundred rods away. With no hand at the helm, the ship was heeling over with the wind, pulling away from the beach. In the water ahead was one of the whaling boats, which had gone to sound out the shallows ahead. The crew-members in the boat gaped back in horrified disbelief at the carnage on board their mother vessel.

  “Make for shore!” Cope had echoed the order at the men nearest him who were still on their feet. Old Garvey was next to him and plunged his harpoon into the stomach of one of the Spanish soldiers. With the vicious, barbed head sticking out of his gory back, the expressionless man had simply started to impale himself further, pulling himself up the hard steel shaft to stretch his crimson dripping teeth towards his prey. Garvey blanched ashen under his sun-blackened Kanaka skin, and suddenly Cope’s hands were full of his father’s Colt 1860, and he blasted three deafening .44 slugs into the Spaniard’s face at point blank range, taking off most of the man’s head. As the body flopped ungracefully to the deck, Cope stuffed the pistol into his waistband and without any more discussion both he and Garvey turned as one, and dove over the railings into the azure clear waters below.

  Salt water stung his eyes as the two men thrashed in blind fear, sharks be damned, towards the strip of beach and the tiny palm trees in the distance. Then familiar faces blocked out the blinding sun and strong hands pulled them into the whaling boat and Cope was bombarded with a cacophony of deafening questions suddenly cut short with a sob and a heartfelt, “Jesus Christ”.

  The men in the boat turned to look back at the ship. There were no friendly survivors left on board. And the expressionless, gore spattered enemy, murderous eyes fixed on the small whaling boat, were dropping off the side of the ship in twos and threes and swimming towards them. The last man off was the Spanish captain, who had thrown his mysterious chest over the railing and jumped in after it. By then the crystal waters were full of dark heads, like seals, moving inexorably towards them.

  There was a flurry of panic, shouting and fumbled oars, and then with terror powering the rowers’ muscles, the old whaling boat surged through the waves, twice as fast as it had ever chased any whale. They beached the boat in short order, and then the surviving crew had argued whether to run and hide in the hills, or to turn and face the enemy as they came out of the water.

  None of them had been keen on the idea of scattering across the desolate island, playing hide and seek with demon-possessed ghouls. They had stood and fought.

  And now Paul Cope, third mate, whale boat commander and harpooner, was the sole survivor. As he stood alone in the blood and sand amongst the bodies, the mad, old woman had suddenly appeared from the trees behind him. Maria Guevara was her name, she had introduced herself in her croaking, raspy voice and helped bind his wounds, and they had both stood watching the Ken Bartlett’s tiny white sails disappear over the horizon towards the mid-Atlantic.

  Maria was the oldest woman he had ever seen, wrinkled and gnarled with a face like a walnut. And to his astonishment she already knew what was in the Spaniard’s mysterious, locked chest. Of course, she could not tell him what the dread contents were in any detail. His rudimentary Spanish was not up to the task of translating her ancient rambling. Yet he had enough words to understand that death itself lay within the chest, and that they needed to sink it deep under the rolling blue waves.

  She had touched his torn skin, the bleeding bite-marks on his arms and face, and told him that death was in him also. That it would come for him soon with the moon and the night. And he understood. He could feel the unnatural fever burning through his blood already, even though his wounds were mere minutes old. That cursed Spaniard had brought the devil’s work aboard the Ken Bartlett in the black, teak chest, and damned Cope and his shipmates to hell with whatever ungodly evil was locked within.

  And now he rowed towards the west, for his eternal soul. And Maria giggled and exhorted him ever onward. On the beach s
he had cursed him furiously in Spanish, as he paused and wasted precious moments to write his last letters on scraps of paper, but now, close to their destination, she was in a fine old mood. His ship had disappeared into an unforgiving ocean, whose terrible hurricanes would not be survived by a vessel with only a ghost’s hand on its rudderless helm, and he wanted at least some small record to survive of what had befallen him and his shipmates. The letters went back into the oilskin packet in the whaleboat’s small locker and he had indicated by motion and words that Maria was to take the letters back to the Church mission at Puerta de la Santa Cruz.

  But now it was time. How had it become so dark already? Only moments ago, the sun had been burning down on the two of them. Now all was gray and fogged like a Nantucket winter morning. Except Maria. She glowed. She was beautiful. Cope wanted to touch her, feel every wrinkle on her lined face. He could almost taste her.

  He could feel his lips thinning as he bared his teeth and felt the surge of hunger for her skin. And blood. And flesh. And Maria was lifting up her pistol. His pistol. His father’s pistol that he had carried against the Confederates in that terrible war down south, and had brought back and never touched again.

  And for one last moment Cope remembered who he was and commended his soul to his Lord and Savior, as the heavy steel muzzle of the Colt pushed into his mouth.

  “Demonio necrofago,” whispered Maria, and her knuckle whitened, pulling back on the trigger.

  Chapter One

  Be Prepared

  Fort Lauderdale, Lyssavirus Quarantine Zone.

  The door opened and the little bell rang announcing another customer walking into the shop. It sounded like a real bell, a small one, but it was just an electronic recording, triggered by the magnetic switch at the top of the door. Hana did not look up from the cup of hot chocolate she was enjoying in her usual seat, off to the side of the counter. She was not exactly behind the cash desk, but sat closely enough to it that it was obvious she worked there.