The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: The Butcher and the Black Tide, Part 9 of 13

Lucky Ford and Miller have survived a strange attack, and now the secret of Miller’s strange condition is finally revealed. But Lucky’s time in Spain has reached its end. If he does not rescue Grease and get out, he will be left there. Does he have what it takes to enter the realm of the dreaded Romanian?

The Butcher and the Black Tide is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

This is Part 9 of The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: The Butcher and the Black Tide. If you haven’t read Part 1. Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, or Part 8 yet, check them out before reading any further.

Content Warnings: Violence, Gun Violence, Animal Violence, Death, Gore, Mild Swearing

TUESDAY MORNING, JULY 13, 1943
LA TIERRA MUERTA
THE SIERRA ESPUÑA MOUNTAINS, SPAIN

“Mary Shelley?” Lucky repeated. He knew that name. “Hold on, you mean from Frankenstein?”

“The very one,” Miller answered.

“You are not telling me that you got stitched together out of corpses and struck by lightning, are you?” Lucky joked.

“Of course not,” Miller snapped. “The vast majority of her novel was fiction.”

“What about the rest?”

“Every good story contains a kernel of truth,” Miller replied.

“Which kernel?”

“Miss Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein utilized a method based on the incomplete research of her late uncle, the disgraced Doctor Herbert Wollstonecraft. Mister Edison further perfected Doctor Wollstonecraft's concept of the intrinsic sapient current which ultimately resulted in my revival,” Miller said, stating all this like it was common knowledge.

“Revival? From the dead?”

“In every philosophical sense, yes, the dead.”

“So Thomas Alva Edison ran an electric current through you and raised you from the dead?” Lucky asked. He had to say it out loud just to make sure he'd heard right.

“‘Alive’ and ‘dead’ are far more binary than I prefer,” Miller chuckled, still cranking away on his stainless steel alternator.

“So what were you?” Lucky asked, trying to get him to open up a little more. Miller had given him more new questions than answers. He tried to remember some of the other things he'd seen in his time with the masked man. “Didn't Woody call you his favorite Canadian?”

“Chief Woodruff is clever,” Miller laughed. “He was among the outfitters employed by the Halistones during the expedition in which I was found.”

“Found?” Lucky stammered.

He knew that the Halistones were world-famous explorers and adventurers: first starting with the Baron Halistone, then his son, and finally the Colonel, the Baron's grandson. Somehow it made perfect sense that these men would happen upon someone like Miller during their travels.

“They found me frozen in an iceberg, naked, just inside the Arctic Circle, north of Nunavit territory in Canada. Thus, to Chief Woodruff, I am Canadian,” Miller said. Lucky had already had to realign what he thought was normal just to survive in the Office, but this was almost too much for him.

“Frozen... but not quite dead?” Lucky repeated. No matter how readjusted his views would become, a dead man thawing out, getting up, and walking around would never be normal.

“Not measurably alive: no pulse, no breath, no body temperature, no cerebellic activity. But otherwise perfectly preserved, with neither cellular nor nervous system injuries. Simply dormant, needing a kick start, as it were.”

“And Edison used this intrinsic...” Lucky started, but couldn't quite fit his mouth around the whole phrase.

“The intrinsic sapient current reactivates cellular processes and autonomic functions through applied electric stimulation,” Miller recited, like he was reading it straight from a book. “It constantly and wholly rejuvenates all of my tissues and promotes cellular growth, from muscles to brain cells.”

“So you don't age?”

“Or eat, or sleep, or forget,” Miller said, then added: “Some call it eidetic memory.”

That was the fancy word for photographic memory, Lucky recalled from somewhere.

“That's why you're such a good researcher, you’re like a living encyclopedia.” Lucky concluded.

“Edison woke me in 1908, but it took the other technology twenty years to catch up,” Miller said. He gestured at his ingenious environment suit, from the vacuum-sealed seams to the hand-cranked alternator, as well as the minuscule but powerful cooling unit and battery.

“Whatever life I had before they woke me, the current wiped away, like an electric eraser across a gray matter slate. Once I had learned to read and speak, Colonel Halistone's father was generous enough to refrigerate their entire family library so that I might absorb as much knowledge of the world as I could.”

“If I'd been frozen solid, the last thing I’d ever want would be to be cold again,” Lucky pointed out.

“Would that it were my choice,” Miler sighed. “The current requires a constant tissue temperature of negative five degrees Celsius to maintain proper conductivity.”

Lucky shook his head in disbelief. Minus five is damn cold; Miller should have been frozen solid. The current had to keep him pliable along with everything else.

“Eduardo Rosales must have been a godsend,” Lucky said, considering the idea of being stuck in an icebox library for years on end.

“Until he perfected the environment suit, battery, and charging system, I'd only left the Halistone library two or three times per year in almost two decades, and only so far as the grounds of Calparock Manor in the dead of winter. Only once was I able to leave the property, and my activities were limited to the cabin of the HMZ Westphalia, and even then for only a short duration.”

“Eduardo gave you freedom.”

“I am eternally grateful to the Halistones. They were wonderful hosts, giving me everything they could, treating me as an honored guest and defending me against any who would think of me as less,” Miller said. “But the freedom to choose one's place in the world is something else altogether.”

“Who would want anything else from you?” Lucky asked.

“I was Mister Edison’s first successful application of the current, you see. In his later years, he grew obsessed with using me to further test its properties, and the Halistones would hear none of it,” Miller replied, sighing. “Unfortunately, I am the reason that relations between the Halistones, and the later the Office, soured with Mister Edison.”

He felt at fault for the Office's loss of resources and allies due to the rivalry between the ingenious inventor and the renowned explorers. His mere existence had saddled him with guilt. Lucky knew that feeling. Miller continued:

“Mister Edison's process required many failures before he could reach success. The Halistones were afraid for my well-being were I under his observation. He was already an old man, and reviving dead tissues would have been his greatest, most desperate discovery in a long line of great discoveries.”

Miller took a deep breath, then shook off that old weight.

“His work to replicate the intrinsic sapient current ceased only with his death,” he added. “Ultimately it was not the sapient current that perplexed him, but the means by which I was preserved. Every other subject frozen using every reproducible method suffered irreversible nervous system damage and could not be revived. Between Edison, the Halistones, Tesla, and Rosales, none could explain my perfect condition.”

“And you said you were frozen... naked?” Lucky asked. He was trying to fit the puzzle together like he’d have some insight some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century had missed.

“There were no clues on my body or in the ice as to who I was, or where I originated, or even when.”

“And the current heals you so fast that you haven't aged a day since they started running it through you,” Lucky considered out loud. “So you could be seventy years old.”

“Or seven hundred,” Miller replied.

“And if you cut off the current, took off the suit, what would… ?” Lucky wondered.

“If the current ceases or if my core temperature rises much higher than freezing, the results are... less than desirable.”

“Would you die?” Lucky asked.

“Not quickly,” Miller answered. “The only fortunate result of my tissues warming is that the first effect I experience is loss of consciousness. This is fortunate only in that I would not have to bear witness to the more graphic effects with full retention of my senses. My tissues then proceed to lose cohesion and begin breaking down.”

Lucky was quiet for a moment. There was dread in Miller's voice.

“You got me, and we got that hurricane tape, so as long as I have your back, you won't have to worry about any of that,” Lucky reassured him.

Here was a man who could be a hundred years old, and he'd only been able to live his life outside an icebox for the last sixteen. On top of that, he'd dedicated every one of those years to risking that reclaimed life by helping his adopted country and family. Being the trusted comrade of a man like that was an honor Lucky did not take lightly.

In exchange for that honor, Miller simply requested a piece of tape every time he willingly took a sword for his comrades. Lucky'd do it proudly and without hesitation. He put his hand on Miller's shoulder to show him that he was there for him.

Miller stopped cranking the alternator and looked up at Lucky. The crow's feet crinkles at the corners of his eyes told Lucky he was smiling. Lucky looked down at the alternator's silver cylindrical body. The glowing red light had faded out, and now a green bulb burned brightly. Miller unhooked the clips from his chest leads and buttoned the flap down over them. He slid the alternator back into its disguised sheath on his webbing, took the M3 from Lucky's hands, and rose to his feet.

He was ready to get moving, or at least ready to quit talking, only saying:

“Time to go.”

“Wait,” Lucky started, scrambling to his feet. “You don't know anything about before?”

“Before what?” Miller asked, starting the long walk south, toward the coast.

“Before you froze. You go by Miller, so they had to find your name somewhere.”

“Miller is the surname of an eighteenth century playwright. I happened to be reading his work when I came to a revelation: I had been obsessed with reclaiming the life I had lost. What I realized that day was that the person who had lost a life was not the person who had woken up. So, I took the name on the cover of the text and started anew.”

Miller kept walking, not looking back while he continued speaking:

“Private Ford, one's name is the most personal thing he owns. Revel in it, and respect it.”

That made sense to Lucky: Miller's strict adherence to rank and title wholly stemmed from the fact that he had none of his own.

“Just because you don't have a name doesn't mean you have nothing,” Lucky said. “You have a family, friends. Emilia, the Colonel, Woody, me.”

“Thank you, Private Ford,” Miller responded, almost too softly to hear.

They had reached the edge of the gremlins' lattice, and the ash whipped through the air in front of them like a furious gray blizzard.

“It doesn't matter what happened before, you're a good man and a good friend, and I'm honored to know you,” Lucky said, and he meant every word. Miller paused at the green-gray pale, contemplating walking into the volcanic storm.

“We have another hour's march to Miss Emilia's weapons cache, then a difficult afternoon ahead, Lucky,” Miller finally said, after a moment's consideration. He'd used Lucky's nickname, something he'd never done before. Lucky stood alongside him and stared into the swirling gray. Miller flipped the safety of his grease gun off and said:

“There is nowhere in this world I would choose to be other than fighting at your side, my friend.”

With that, the immortal man stepped into the driving gray haze, heading south. Lucky pulled the brim of his helmet as low over his eyes as he could to keep out the grit, then followed his friend into the ashfall, toward their fight.

TUESDAY MORNING, JULY 13, 1943
SOUTHBOUND ON THE ROAD TO THE COAST
THE SIERRA ESPUÑA MOUNTAINS, SPAIN

Lucky's eyes burned. A pair of white lines had been blanched from his eyes to his chin by twin streams of gritty tears, the only clean spots on his ash-stained face.

The volcanic storm had come bac in force throughout the day, with thicker flakes of incinerated rock relentlessly piling up to Lucky's calves. His fatigues were ruined. He didn't want to imagine how much of the Saint George's hot water it would take to dislodge the pervasive soot from where it had ground into his skin and hair. He could taste it between his teeth.

Miller led them between a fold in the landscape, a hairpin gully tucked between two canted poplars. They belly-crawled beneath a collapsed overhang and found themselves in a narrow but cozy natural culvert, lit by a familiar oil lamp glow. Lucky nearly stayed there, splayed out on the dirt floor. It wasn't just that he was exhausted, he was, bone-deep, but the sheer joy of seeing soil that wasn't covered in toxic gray fluff or chewed femurs made him want to kiss the ground.

Emilia and Bucket set down the guns Lucky hadn't noticed they'd drawn on him and settled back into their seats. Lucky realized that it might have been smarter to knock before they'd burst into a masked vigilante's secret armory.

“It's good to see you,” Lucky said, wiping the quarter-inch of grime from his cheeks and forehead with an even grimier sleeve.

“Nice face,” Bucket kidded. His soggy cigarette jumped around in his mouth as he spoke. He tossed Lucky a wet hand kerchief. “Try this out.”

The white silk was permanently stained the instant it touched Lucky's skin. It was completely soiled by the time he wiped the black stains off his palms.

Lucky took a seat next to Emilia, who hadn't yet acknowledged their arrival beyond holstering her revolver. She resumed obsessively cleaning a French rifle, the same model with the grenade cup attachment that she had used to blow out the back wall of her hideout. Lucky could only assume that the munitions crate she was sitting on was packed to the brim with rifle grenades. She was loaded for war and didn't look eager to talk about it.

Miller was the first to break the silence her demeanor inspired.

“Officials, Miss Emilia, we must move quickly. It is already...” he paused to check the watch sewn onto his sleeve. “It is already eleven-hundred hours. At fourteen-thirty, I am to activate the radio transponder in my suit to signal Flight Lieutenant Seacombe for pickup.”

“Good, we need some cavalry in here,” Bucket muttered.

“This mission is off the books in a neutral nation, Sergeant Hall,” Miller responded. “The Office is strictly providing extraction. There will be no tactical support.”

“Then we got a hell of a job ahead of us,” Bucket observed.

“What happens if we're not done in the next three-and-a-half hours?” Lucky asked.

“If we do not signal them by fourteen-thirty, they will assume we are either dead or staying, and they will move on,” Miller answered.

“To Germany,” Lucky muttered.

“Yes, Private Ford,” Miller confirmed. “So unless we conclude our business with the Romanian quickly...”

“We'd better get comfy in Spain,” Bucket finished for him.

“You three have made it loud enough here already,” Emilia said, finally looking up from working on her rifle. Her deathly glare broke, emerald eyes and sincere smile shining through. “I don't know how much more of you we can stand.”

With that, they all chuckled. Emilia hadn't so much as smirked since Espada had attacked her hideout the day before. Lucky was glad to see her smile again.

“What's our next move?” Lucky asked. As much as he wanted to keep Emilia smiling and relaxed, time was not on his side. He would need the other Emilia. He needed the Gallo Rojo.

Emilia seemed to read his mind. Her smile dissolved as she pulled a folded parchment from the inner pockets of her crimson coat. She spread the yellowed paper across the floor for the four of them to study. It was her hand-drawn map of the Romanian's coastal battery base.

The battery was built as a fortress, crenelations and towers packed with guns that stood atop a soaring rise that overlooked the ocean on a jutting peninsula. Years of disuse and neglect had reduced it to a ruin. The Romanian and his men had abandoned the collapsed walls and guns and burrowed into the bunker system beneath.

“They have one way in,” Emilia explained, tracing her finger down a thin line that ran down the center of her map.

The battery was accessible by a single-lane dirt road that emerged from the forest and split when it reached the battery. Rubble and land mines blocked its way up to the fallen fortress. Its other branch ran downward, cutting a grotto-sized gouge that terminated at the bunker’s reinforced doors. They were solid steel and so thick that only a blockbuster bomb could budge them.

All down this artificial box canyon, on either side of the road, the bolseteros had cobbled together a shanty town of garages, barracks, and store houses, sandbag and sheet metal structures that barely clung to the sloping ground. These structures had never been intended to last, but by then they’d been occupied for years.

The road was a killing field. It was easily defendable by any competent force. To even approach it would put one in the crossfire of bolsetero machine gun nests. With those active, anyone descending into the base could be mulched at a moment's notice.

The Romanian did not field a competent force.

Emilia's experience scouting the battery showed that the strongpoints were rarely occupied, and that their weapons were in poor repair. The bolseteros had little method to their madness. If caught unaware, they could be broken. However, if they were any kind of lucid when trouble started, they could hold out indefinitely.

Of course, Espada knew better than to trust addicts. The bolseteros were a powerful weapon, but not a dependable one. They could not be relied upon to actively repel infiltrators, so all flanking approaches along the peninsula had been fortified. Ever square foot between the trees and the cliffs was snarled with barbed wire and loaded with Bouncing Betty s-mines. One wrong step and anyone trying to flank the Romanian would be shredded from the ankles up.

It would be a tough assault for an infantry company with artillery support. It would be impossible for four people.

“That's a lot of shit to wade through,” Bucket observed, poetic as always.

“These last days have been the worst for la Medida's men,” Emilia stated, running the numbers in her head. “Since you came here, over one-hundred-forty of them have died, with even more wounded. Father Mandario killed many this morning.”

“The original company of viriatos, the Portuguese mercenaries that fought in the Civil War, listed three hundred and forty men as wounded deserters at the end of the war,” Miller pointed out, reciting the numbers from memory while he analyzed the map. Lucky could see he was coming up with a plan already, the gears in his mind working without rest.

“Us against the two hundred-twenty that are still standing?” Bucket asked with a start, his dirty glasses almost falling off his nose.

“Sixty had already been visited by el Gallo Rojo,” Emilia answered. Lucky didn't hear anger or remorse in her voice; she was just giving the numbers.

“Well, four against a buck-sixty doesn't sound half bad,” Bucket replied. He pushed his glasses back up his nose.

“Three against,” Miller said.

“Wait, where are you gonna be, Snowman?” Bucket demanded. Lucky smirked. He finally suddenly understood Bucket's nickname for Miller.

“I will be present” Miller answered, then pointed at Lucky, “Private Ford will not engage in the assault.”

“I'm not sitting this one out, this is my fight!” Lucky protested.

“No, you are by no means sitting this out, private,” Miller said, drawing an invisible line down the fortified road leading to the bunker with his finger.

“The very strength which Doctor Hellbörg and Captain Espada consider the backbone of this facility shall be what we use against them,” Miller said.

“What’s that?” Lucky asked.

“They are so confident that any threat will come from inland that they have focused their defenses on only this single avenue of attack,” Miller said.

“There is only a single avenue of attack,” Emilia objected.

“You are thinking like an army trying to destroy a bunker,” Miller told her. “Our mission is to rescue one man.”

His gloved finger slid away from the fortified road, up and around the minefields, and over to the ocean side of the base.

“So you want to climb a hundred feet of cliffs and come at them from the sea?” Bucket asked.

“Just Private Ford,” Miller answered. He took a pencil from his breast pocket and began scribbling on Emilia's map.

“Private Ford, you will take up position here, just beyond the patrol and fortification radius of the battery.” Miller drew an 'X' outside the perimeter of the base. Emilia must have spent weeks documenting the comings and goings of the Romanian's men. The position Miller indicated was within twenty yards of the cliffs, but still safely concealed in the thick treeline.

“How do we knew this map is up to date?” Bucket interrupted. Lucky shared his concern. There was no telling how Espada could have mixed things up once he knew that el Gallo Rojo had new allies.

“Espada draws in his forces when his men are out on a mission,” Emilia interjected. “With only a third of their number remaining, the patrol areas will be even smaller than I have drawn.”

“But that is not a risk we are willing to take,” Miller assured Lucky, then continued:

“At this time, Sergeant Hall and Miss Emilia will begin their assault on the camp. They are to make as much of a commotion as possible, to alert the entire facility.”

“That will not be a problem.” Emilia patted her seat, the munitions crate chock full of rifle grenades.

“Can't wait to put some real ordnance on these goons,” Bucket added, jamming his thumb at a pair of identical duffel bags, each large enough to hold some serious firepower.

“They know there are few of us, so they will attack without hesitation. You must engage their entire force, draw them out of the battery. Walk the fine line of holding them back while giving them the confidence to keep coming, not looking back,” Miller instructed. Bucket and Emilia understood.

“Private Ford, when you hear the bedlam, you are to make your way east, to the battery. As the top of the cliffs are wired and mined, you must scale their face. That area is undefended and it is where you will enter. The aiming slit on a coastal cannon' of this caliber will be large enough for you to crawl through,” Miller said.

Lucky's heart sank. He'd never been that sure-footed when climbing, and he knew the driving ash wouldn't help any. Still, he'd have to manage. Going around the back was the only way in.

“I will wait in strategic reserve, here,” Miller paused to scratch another 'X' into the treeline, close enough to Bucket and Emilia's position to provide fast support.

“I will either reinforce the two of you if the bolseteros are able to advance on your positions, or cover you with additional fire and smoke grenades when Private Ford extricates himself and Private Benolli.”

He was putting it was all on Lucky. Miller, Bucket, and Emilia were going to face down the combined might of Espada, O'Laughlin, the bolseteros, and the I-soldiers as a distraction to get Lucky into the battery. If he took too long, or even if he got Grease out in time, it could cost all of his friends their lives, or worse.

“Private Ford,” Miller said, “You must be prepared for what you may find in Doctor Hellbörg's laboratory. Your friend may not be alive, or who you remember,” Miller pointed out.

Lucky knew this, he was afraid he’d find the worst, but he had to know for sure. He’d want someone to do the same for him.

“You must act without hesitation. Take whatever you find there and leave, for every moment you linger could be disastrous.”

“I understand. Thank...” Lucky tried to say, but Bucket interrupted him:

“Not needed. We're doing what has to be done. You'd do the same for any of us.”

Lucky would.

“Take these,” Emilia said. She took Lucky’s gremlin-chewed rifle and replaced it with a factory-fresh M1897 shotgun and a gold pocket watch. He looked the gun over, from bayonet lug to heat shield to butt stock. A trench sweeper would be prefect for the cramped quarters inside the battery. He knew that this twelve gauge gift was as close to sentimental as Emilia Rosales would let herself be. The pocket watch was tarnished and well-used, but looked expensive and was still ticking. Still, he knew the gun meant more to her.

Lucky fed shells into the shotgun 'til it was full and stuffed his pockets until they were overflowing. His Colt 1911, with all its scars, scrapes, dings, and dents, was fully loaded and holstered on his hip, and his knife was secure in its shoulder sheath. Lucky double-checked its clasp: it wasn't going anywhere this time. He took three pineapple grenades from Emilia's stash and clipped them to his gear.

With all that, a chug of water, and a deep breath, Lucky was as ready as he was going to get.

“We have three hours and fifteen minutes to call for our extraction,” Miller said. He hefted his grease gun, racking the bolt back to show that he was ready for action.

“La batería is close, only forty-five minutes to walk,” Emilia said. She had packed over a dozen rifle grenades into the hidden pockets of her coat and slung the French rifle over her shoulder.

“In this weather, let's call it an even hour,” Bucket suggested. He'd clipped a dozen rifle grenades onto his own webbing, and claimed a rifle for himself. He looked hilariously over-loaded. His Tommy gun and grenade-launching rifle were huge relative to his small frame.

“Hour sounds right to me,” Lucky said. He slung the shotgun over his shoulder.

“Well then,” Bucket said. He checked the time on his new wrist watch, the only thing on him not stained with soot. “Sounds like we got our plan. Lucky, you get trucking. Emilia and me, we'll hump this hardware out to the battery, and Miller... you just stay frosty.”

Bucket pulled one leather duffel over his shoulder while Emilia hefted its twin. Both bags looked to weigh in at over sixty pounds. Gunmetal clanked inside them.

The four of squirmed out of the spider hole and out into the ashfall. Bucket pulled a stained handkerchief up and over his nose like some kind of cowboy. Emilia's helmet clanked shut. Miller checked the charge on his battery, then made sure all the flaps on his environment suit were buttoned down. It was time.

“Hope you're ready, Lucky,” Bucket said. “In an hour we're striking up the band.”

“Don't worry, I'll get to the party,” Lucky replied. He put out his hand. Bucket took it and clapped him on the shoulder. Lucky winced: he was still sore and cut up from getting tackled by gremlins.

“We will find Private Benolli,” Miller assured him. He took Lucky's hand in both of his gloves. His handshake was serious as a steel clamp, but all Lucky could see in his blue eyes was compassion.

“And we will find justice,” Emilia whispered. Her voice was metallic and monotonous through her helmet, but when she wrapped Lucky up in a surprising hug, he could feel a tremble run through her. Through her layers of weapons and armor, she felt small and scared.

“We'll find what we need,” Lucky whispered.

TUESDAY MORNING, JULY 13, 1943
WEST OF LA BATERIA DE LOS ACANTILLADOS
THE SOUTHERN COAST OF SPAIN

The Romanian’s headquarters sat embedded in the side of a singular rock that towered high above the sea, sheer and titanic. While wind and water had left the fortress atop ground down and gnarled like a mouthful of broken teeth, the stone beneath was riddled with tunnels and chambers like it was infested. Top to bottom, the whole place was run through with horror and corruption, down to the bedrock.

Endless coils of barbed wire rattled in the whipping wind. Gray flurries rolled over and through it, uncovering and burying Bouncing Betty land mines with each gust. The entire slope up to the former fortress was a kill zone. That left only the cliff, the vertical face that grimaced over the Mediterranean.

Lucky took a careful breath. The whipping air was hot with volcanic grit and sea salt. The soot-covered underbrush he was hiding in was only twenty bare yards from the cliff, but across the dead land, it seemed as far as the moon. It would be a long dash to the cliff, but it wasn't time yet.

Emilia predicted that Espada would withdraw his remaining troops into the battery, but Lucky wasn't going to chance even a single twitch: he'd seen how jumpy the bolseteros could be. There was no percentage in assuming everything would work like he thought it should.

Lucky could feel each second tick away in the pocket watch clutched in his palm, even through its gold shell. The sheriff's old watch had stopped after the plane crash in Sicily, so the one Emilia'd given from her father's collection would have to do. It was heavy, which they say makes it expensive, and it had somebody's name engraved on the back: 'Cartier', or something like that, etched into the gold in fancy script. Lucky didn't care whose it was, it told time.

It also told him that the hour Bucket had promised was just about up.

Lucky could hear the sea pounding the cliff from beyond that distant edge. It sounded heavier, cruder than the warm waters off the Louisiana coast. The first time he'd seen the sea was when he sailed out of New Orleans for Africa. He’d counted his seas as he traversed them: the Gulf of Mexico, across the Atlantic, and through the Mediterranean. Once he was done losing his lunch in the water, he’d been in awe of it, its rhythm and pulse.

These waves, lost out there in the gray, sounded like another beast altogether.

Lucky'd spent enough time staring at the watch; he closed his eyes and tried to imagine what those strange waters held.

His daydreams were interrupted when the wind carried the crack of a rifle, followed swiftly by a muffled blast. It was unmistakable: a rifle grenade. From this distance Lucky couldn't hear the cries of the bolseteros, but knew they'd be there: Emilia didn't make it a habit to miss her targets.

Lucky waited another second to make doubly sure no concealed guards were gearing up to react to the attack. It wouldn't do for him to rush out headlong into a patrol of panicked reinforcements. He heard the long chatter of a heavy machine gun opening up on the battery, and sporadic rifle shots barking over the sustained automatic fire. There was no skulking patrols, no hidden snipers. He was alone. It was time to move.

He shook the accumulated ash from his helmet and shoulders, tightened all the straps on his gear, and dashed to the cliff, trench gun in hand, silver-edged bayonet fixed and leading the charge. Lucky skidded to a halt just a foot from the precipice and steeled himself for the climb.

His first instinct was to look down, so he followed his gut. This was the wrong move.

The Mediterranean was dark as sin. It attacked the base of the cliff in waves, like column after column of black-shirted SS stormtroopers charging an enemy line. As far as the volcanic flurries would let Lucky see, the sea twisted like boiling tar. A lump swelled in his throat and his guts wound themselves into pretzels, but the chatter of machine gun fire that must have been raking over his friends urged him forward.

One boot went over the edge. Through the gray haze, past the rusting wire and buried mines, Lucky could see the silhouette of the coastal gun protruding from the cliff, about twenty feet down and few hundred yards east.

The steel toe of Lucky's jump boot fit right into a crack that ran down the cliff face. He took one last deep breath then reached for a lower foothold.

It felt like forever, inching down and across that sheer stone wall, hands and feet blindly searching and grasping so he could bring himself closer to the growling inky sea.

Stone rasped against Lucky's palms, scraping through the ground-in ash to reveal raw flesh beneath. The cliff was salt-corroded and crumbling, and the hot winds threw him against the stone, but he kept going, struggling like a fly trying to stick to the side of a freight train.

It felt like hours, with each second drawn out by the distant gunfire. The pops the shots made cut through the heavy air as easily as the supersonic bullets themselves. Emilia and Bucket couldn't hold out forever, and clambering along the cliffs felt like an eternity. He tried not to think about anything, not about his friends up top or the waters below, only allowing himself the mental freedom to find his next handhold. The hungry black tide below was abyssal, and Lucky knew that if he allowed any thoughts of its oily embrace to swallow his mind, his body would soon follow.

Lucky paused to gauge his progress. He had come down the cliff about four hundred yards west of the battery's big gun, a ten-inch ship-slayer that could hole a dreadnought before it peeked over the horizon. Somehow, he'd made it across the weathered stone, grip by grip, hand over hand, to within thirty yards of the rusting cannon. Just a few feet beyond its pitted barrel was the only opening in the rock-embedded cement bunker, its gunner's aiming slit.

Hot air rushed up from beneath him, billowing his shirt and forcing him to cling closer to the stone. The gray haze was being pushed up and away by the sea breeze, allowing Lucky to clearly see the waves below. They were as nebulous and hungry as he'd imagined, inky blacks and clogged with cindery, clotted bergs.

The dread of descending any closer to the roiling surface of the tainted Mediterranean tied his gut in knots. He coughed up a lungful of grit and started his descent. There was no access above the slit: it was a smooth concrete slab, with no handholds to be found. He'd have to slither his way in from below.

The poisoned sea growled as Lucky climbed down. He buried his fears as deep into the rock as they would go.

Lucky shimmied across the cliff face until he was directly below the gun. He let himself catch a breath before he reached for the next grip. When he did, his hand grasped at stone and but slipped away. He gasped and hauled himself closer to the stone. If he fell, he’d have been swallowed by the black sea and no one would’ve ever known what had become of him.

When he caught his breath, he found his hand stained red and brown. The stone was slick where he’d touched, stained an inch thick in oozing, crusted blood.

Inches above his head, a pipe jutted from the cliff like a poisonous thorn that had been stabbed into the stone. The pipe was twisted and chancred with rusting ulcers, and thick black viscera dripped from it in clumps that the wind splatted onto the rock.

Lucky carefully ducked below the pipe, straddling the oily red stain. He lurched to the side, and managed to get past without touching it again. Once safe on the other side, he risked another look down. The oozing gore cut through the black of accumulated ash, a brown and red stripe of crust and clots staining the stone all sixty feet down to the water. It was worse than anything he’d seen as a deputy, worse even than photos from Chicago. Icepicks, Thompsons, leaded baseball bats, and piano wire didn't have anything on this.

It might have been worse than Vesuvius.

The pipe was six inches across, wide enough to move gallons of remains every second. Lucky shuddered as he clung to the rock. Hundreds of people were missing. Whole families, an entire prison, travelers, enemy soldiers. They had been torn to pieces by the Romanian, then dumped into the sea. Emilia had mentioned smokestacks, too. This horror didn't even account for all of Hellbörg's victims.

Lucky wanted to vomit, and bile boiled up, but he forced it back down, though not before the acid taste fouled his mouth and stung his throat. He spit the yellow bitterness out and watched the amber bead fall away into the surf.

Its tiny splash whipped the black tide into a frenzy.

A dozen opportunistic sharks knew where the Romanian dumped his victims and, even after the eruption of Vesuvius, they remained for a handout. The animals tore through the water, launching their bodies clear of the surface in explosions of poisoned seawater. Their once-sleek forms had become misshapen, swollen and cracked by the volcanic toxins leeching through their gills and skin.

One shark, crazed from pain, leaped from the waves and into the base of the cliff, hard enough to knock it into a daze. Lucky had just a flash to study it. Its eyes were bleached blind by chemical cataracts. Its stomach, once white, was now distended and pink with infection. The shark's gills were shredded by igneous stone flakes that sliced through them with every breath. It twitched on the surface for only a second before the rest of the school latched onto it, dragging it into the black.

Lucky's attention snapped back to the cliff. No distractions. His knuckles were as white as that shark's blinded eyes.

He hauled himself the rest of the way up to the gunner's slit. His left hand found a gap underneath the steel shutter that he could use as an anchor. The bare concrete stripped his skin away, but Lucky ignored that and planted his toes in the space where smooth construction met natural stone. The shutter above was locked shut, a steel plate an inch-and-a-half thick that closed off the slit when there wasn't anything to shoot at. It was strong enough to stop a howitzer shell, so it didn’t budge when he pulled at it.

“Shit,” Lucky whispered. His friends were getting shot at, Grease was getting carved to pieces, and the sharks were circling below. He'd need some inside help to get the shutter open. He could only hope that Espada had left a few bolseteros in reserve.

Lucky wormed around to hold the shotgun in his right hand. He took just another second to make sure its strap was still around his neck. When things got hot, he wanted to be able to drop the shotgun without losing it to the sea. Lucky hooked a frag grenade on his collar, within easy reach.

The wind carried the sound of another salvo of shots to him. That meant, at the very least, that Emilia and Bucket were still in the fight. Lucky ducked down and made himself as small as he could below the gunner's slit, then lifted his shotgun and banged its barrel hard against the shutter three times.

His knock was met with muffled, confused shouts. After a moment, machinery groaned and old hinges squealed. The pitted shutter hadn't moved in years. Rust flaked off and fluttered away as it rattled open.

The shutter swung up and out, and a rifle barrel poked out, followed by the masked head of a curious bolsetero. He leaned out of the opening to his waist, curious to find the source of the disturbance. The mercenary had no idea Lucky was hidden below him, not 'til he got thumped behind the ear with Lucky's shotgun. The bolsetero went limp and started to slip over the ledge, right on top of Lucky.

“Damn,” he growled, catching the unconscious bolsetero on his shoulder. Lucky knew what circled below, what would happen if he let the man fall. He dropped his shotgun and let it dangle from his neck while he attempted to shove the stunned mercenary back inside. The man was light, all rags and bones, but he stank so badly that Lucky nearly gagged.

A tin cup clattered to floor inside and Lucky risked a peek around the K.O.’d man and over the ledge. Two more bolseteros were scrambling to their feet and grabbing for their weapons.

“Pegá-lo!” one of them yelled. They racked their rifle bolts forward, charging live rounds. Lucky tried to both prop up the unconscious man and free his shooting hand, but his comrades started firing. The bolsetero on Lucky's shoulder shuddered as his own comrades’ bullets slammed into him. He spasmed once, coughed blood inside his mask, and died.

“Damn, damn, damn,” Lucky muttered. He shrugged his shoulder low, letting the dead bolsetero slip past him.

Lucky pulled the frag from his collar with his newly freed hand and yanked its pin with his teeth. In the chaos of moving bodies and ringing gunshots, the panicked bolseteros didn't notice the small olive explosive land at their feet. Lucky ducked low and curled into a ball, hugging the stone as tight as he could.

The falling bolsetero hit the ravenous water feet from the frenzied sharks, and an instant before the pineapple grenade went off. The plume of burning shrapnel and dust surging out of the gunner's slit and over Lucky's head mirrored the red splashes boiling up from the hungry sea below. The concussion nearly shook Lucky off the cliff, but he kept his grip.

A heartbeat later Lucky had heaved himself over the concrete sill and through the slit. He was inside the Romanian's bunker, shotgun in hand, sweat-soaked, bloody, coughing up bile and gun smoke.

Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres. Spanish translations by Caitlin Gilmore.