Necromanson (Beta) Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Henry Stein is a former combat engineer who washed out and became a plumber. Life was circling the drain when a once in a lifetime opportunity set him up for life...At least until everything turned spooky.

A group of armed terrorists preformed a strange ritual in his apartment complex, triggering the creation of an abomination. Now Henry is on the run, because he's got the last piece the creature needs to become immortal, and it's not something he can just give away...It's his soul.

Henry Stein paced back and forth in front of the floor to ceiling windows of his fourth story hotel room, anxiety chewing at his intestines as he nursed a bottle of Nyquil. Screeching tires and a particularly loud door slam had propelled him from the safety of the sheets to being sandwiched between the floor and the hard wood siding of his bed, panting in terror.

Henry had been a smart kid, but not quite smart enough to avoid getting shot at. When he was eighteen, being a combat engineer sounded like great fun. Those montages in movies where the heroes whip up some last ditch fortifications, or a batch of explosives from scrap that would save the day or kill the monster? That was going to be Henry.

Of course, the reality was nine parts sweaty boredom, and one part bowel-loosening terror. Henry had gone two years without ever seeing any of his work put to use. Set up defenses here, rig this or that bridge to blow, just to pack up and head back to base at the end of the day. By the time he was twenty, he felt like he had a serious case of battle blue balls.

One day he got what he thought he wanted, and he learned a little bit about himself and his job. First, he was not Rambo. He cowered and gave shrieks of terror as his teenage underlings looked on in amusement, blessedly ignorant of the amount of damage a single centimeter of shrapnel from the mortar fire could do to the human body, and blithely assured of their immortality.

Second, he learned that a combat engineer’s work was easily overcome by concentrated effort and ingenuity. The enemy had rigged a fucking plow to drive right through Henry’s barbed wire, and his minefield, while mortar and small arms fire had stopped them from doing anything about it.

Sure, Henry had lived through it, but he had a small scar along his scalp where a bullet had nearly blown his mind when he tried to assess the situation. The sudden brush with his own mortality and the sight of dozens of armed men rushing through the hole in His fence, His minefield, trying to kill HIM, brought him new insight into himself, and Henry didn’t raise his head above the concrete lip of his fortifications until the all clear had been sounded.

For their part, his teenage charges didn’t say anything to him, he was still their superior, but he saw something change in their eyes as they stepped away from wrapping the gauze around his head. Or maybe it was Henry that had changed, seeing the boys and the corpses they could become side by side.

Either way, Henry realized he wasn’t cut out for combat and had himself transferred. The officer in charge of his case tried everything he could to get Henry to stay before finally giving Henry the worst job he could think of as punishment for what he saw as abandoning his duty; Plumbing.

It wasn’t a bad job. Not particularly demanding, and only a handful of events required Henry to stand knee deep in human shit over the course of his early career. Eventually, as he gained seniority, he did more watching other people standing in shit as he sagely consulted blueprints.

By the time he was thirty, Henry was working with architects planning gas and water for large government buildings, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from the front lines, and earning a quarter more than the average grunt. Henry found himself bumping elbows with some damn good architects. Prima donna’s, all of em.

Henry had long since learned that job advancement was more about average performance and good networking than it was about being stellar at any given task. over the course of his mega plumbing career, Henry had networked, and as the demanding architects filed out of the military, he found himself getting calls from them, bouncing their ideas off him late nights, sometimes with job offers.

One particular Sunday night, Henry had been throwing darts at a picture of his commanding officer, balling his hand into a fist every time it unconsciously passed by his jury-rigged drink-mixer. He had just considered dialing the black knob a bit to the right, allowing vodka to spill into his sprite and orange juice mix.

Henry’s eyes passed over the three upturned bottles locked into place, ready to whip him up a screwdriver at a moment’s notice. It was a conversation piece, and amused the younger guys every time they came over, but Henry’s superiors had cast a mildly disapproving eye on the repurposed plumbing decorating the center of his house, perhaps seeing a darker side of his machine.

The phone rang, and Henry snapped away from contemplating a screwdriver to answer it. Zachary Landon, The most demanding, crazy old architect Henry had ever had the opportunity to work with was on the other line.

Henry liked Zack, or Mr. Landon as he was referred to by people who didn’t know him. The last job Henry had done with the old man had strained every fiber of his being, the stress nearly made him blow the place up.

He had never slept better. The constant, involved, demanding action required by the industrious old man had kept Henry’s doubts and nightmares at bay, and he found himself falling into bed aching, and waking up still aching, but rested.

Zack’s voice came over the line, brusque and to the point. “Henry, how would you like a job?” Zack said, his voice intruding into Henry’s ear like a crowbar.

“I have a job,” Henry responded, taking aim with his darts.

“How would you like five million dollars?” Henry’s dart went wide and produced a dent in the steel housing of his computer.

Henry took a long look at the hole riddled portrait of his boss, then the cluster of piping dominating the center of his table, a single tube extending to a nearby solo cup, waiting for a simple squeeze to begin pouring his screwdriver.

“Where?” henry asked, his eyes losing focus as he said goodbye to the military he had been growing ever distant from.

The deal had been solid, and Henry had found himself engaged for the first time in years, meeting the whims of the irritable architect. Henry had worked together with the man to get the water, gas and shit flowing in a way that met his demands… and they were demanding.

The pipes in the floors and walls, rather than being optimized for best performance, all had to conform to bizarre, cryptic rules set forward by the enigmatic old man. Henry was kept in the dark as to why, and it nearly drove him insane. He had to bust his ass to make an impossible water system merely an underperforming one.

One night he had confronted Zack about the nonsensical bullshit they were doing, forming artsy circles and loops out of piping that would never see the light of day. Henry stormed into Zack’s office, slammed down the blueprints in front of him and demanded to know why they had to devote fifteen times the energy to move the same amount of water.

Zack, a man who had never slowed down, showed the sheer exhaustion of his age for just a moment. With a sigh, Zack rubbed his temples before regarding Zack with a fiery gaze. “Because it’s what the people paying for the building want. It’s your job to make that happen, not come crying to me every evening. In case you couldn’t tell by now, price is not a concern.” Zack’s voice contained the steel that had supported him through his career. It was always below the man’s surface, waiting for a hard strike to expose it through his flesh, not unlike the terminator.

Henry regarded Zack’s fearsome gaze for a moment before cocking his head. “I’ve got a blank check?” Henry asked. Zack nodded his head slowly, his eyes still narrowed. Henry leaned away from the old man and let out a deep breath. “Alright. Whatever makes this Feng shui nutjob happy.”

In retrospect, it had been the best year of Henry’s life. Unconstrained by money, Henry had been able to experiment and learn, picking up a few tricks that weren’t in the books as he went. It wouldn’t have only been fun in retrospect if he had any time to stop and enjoy himself. As it was, Henry and the rest of Zack’s crew dragged themselves to their beds at the end of the night.

Bed was a trailer crammed with six bunk beds and lockers. There were dozens of identical trailers, packed to the gills with other guys getting paid to live on-site. Henry wasn’t bothered by the bunk beds, no one had the energy to do anything but sleep at the end of the night, but Henry still found himself troubled in the short seconds before he surrendered to exhaustion.

Why was every man working on the project being offered ownership of a room in the building? Ostensibly, it was to ensure that the men working on the building took it very seriously, having a vested interest in its quality. Henry himself had signed a contract giving him a generous family size portion of the fourth floor. He had looked over the contract and only signed when he was sure they couldn’t saddle him with the debt if the building went belly-up.

Still, as the days went by, Henry couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy about the project. Nothing jumped out at him in particular, but the men working on the building seemed a little gloomier than they should have been, the concrete and steel a little heavier.

Henry made a bug out-bag. It was an ancient, half-forgotten part of his training as a combat engineer. Henry didn’t want to call it embezzlement, but that’s what it was. As the lead water and gas engineer on a project as haphazard and chaotic as this with no price limits, it was easy to disappear a half-million dollars inside an airtight twelve inch PVC pipe seamlessly attached to the end of another. The money-packed appendix of the building rested just behind a fragile half inch of drywall in the men’s bathroom of the lobby, a handful of steps away from the front door.

Tension and guilt had eaten away at Henry the first week, adding to the general malaise surrounding them, but after a week, the guilt turned to worry, the worry faded to nervousness, and eventually, the dirty deed was all but forgotten as the fifteen story hotel was erected around his ill-gotten loot. He wouldn’t touch it, he rationalized. It was solely for the event that some rich scumbag decided to find a way not to pay Henry what he had been promised.

He needn’t have worried. The building was completed on time, and Henry found himself a millionaire overnight. Henry immediately sat down with a tax consultant and painfully carved away more than a third of his fortune to get the IRS off his back, and then put the rest in safe, dividend bearing stocks and bonds, realizing, at thirty two, that he never needed to work again.

And that’s where his life had lead, standing in his well-furnished living room, the T.V. quietly playing late-night cartoons behind him as he stared out the window, watching cars glide between the pools of light gathered around street lamps.

Henry flicked the cap off the Nyquil with his thumb, numbly listening to the cap clatter on the hardwood floor beneath him. Without taking his eyes off of the road, he took a gentle sip, long past shuddering at the taste. Nights like these, when he was startled awake, only drugs seemed to get Henry back in bed. Henry scratched the thin scar three inches above his left ear idly, listening to the whoosh of cars passing over the wet asphalt.

A white van caught his attention, in and of itself, not out of the ordinary. What caught his attention was the three identical vans behind it in what appeared to be lockstep. The four vans came to park in a perfectly synchronized motion in front of the hospital across the street.

“The fuck?” Henry muttered to himself, taking another sip of Nyquil straight from the bottle. The doors of the vans slid open, and six armed men from each van filed out, storming the hospital with predatory silence, causing Henry to cough his mouthful of Nyquil onto the floor to ceiling window of his condo.

A stretch of silence antagonized his racing heart as he stared at the scene in front of him. The squealing of tires as the four vans burst into movement spurred Henry into action. He dropped the Nyquil, sprinting to his phone as the blue liquid sluggishly pooled across the floor.

Henry snatched his cell phone from the kitchen counter and dialed 9-1-1, rushing back to the window as he held the phone to his ear. The phone rang, and rang, and continued to ring. Henry pulled the phone away from his ear, reading the tiny two words at the top of the screen: No Service.

“Goddamnit,” Henry cursed, tossing the phone aside, bouncing it off of his reclining love seat, onto the pristine tight hand side of the piece of furniture. A moment later, he lay in front of the window, peering over the edge of the floor out at the hospital as he held the land line to his face. After a breathless moment, he realized his landline was dead too.

As he stared at his phone, Henry had an icy realization that whatever crazy scheme was going down, it wasn’t limited to the hospital across the street. Henry shivered, sliding away from the window, his mind turning to finding a weapon and a way out.

A burst of gunfire made his calm slide backward turn into a mad scramble, only interrupted when his shoulder slammed into the kitchen counter. In a near blind panic, Henry dove toward his closet, dragging a misused bicycle aside, throwing it to the floor as he began to dig durther into the cluttered walk-in space.

After seconds of frantic tossing, Henry unearthed a black plastic box and two worn duffle bags. With Henry’s last name printed across them. Carrying them to the center of the room, henry opened the black box, revealing a black handgun and three loaded clips.

Long forgotten training slowly rekindled as Henry hefted the weapon in his hand, checking the metal for rust, working the slide and slamming the first clip home, the slide pulling forward with a satisfying clack. Retrieving the holster from behind the foam, Henry shrugged into the shoulder straps, sliding the Beretta into its familiar home.

The gun rested oppressively against his chest, it’s weight magnified by the dark situation he found himself in. Henry was a realist. All those movies where the good guys run away with bullets scattering around them were bullshit. It had taken one game of paintball for teen Henry to realize that.

These people were using real guns, which were a hell of a lot more accurate. Henry didn’t see himself as die-hard, the only way he’d pull the gun is if he caught one of them with his back turned. Henry had no intention of dying in a fair fight.

Inside the first duffle bag were rusting paraphinalia from before he had washed out. A short, rusted shovel was tossed to the side, followed by his old army duds. Henry snagged a rough canvas coat from the bag, throwing it on to conceal his gun. Henry grabbed a pair of thick leather gloves and shoved them in the coat pocket, working furiously.

Henry jumped over to the second bag, and cursed when a bit of steel poked the knee he rested against the bag. Opening the duffel revealed more clothes, a pair of wire cutters, and about a hundred feet of razor wire on a wooden handle.

Another burst of gunfire drew henry’s attention, and he peered back out his window, down to the parking lot. The two dozen armed men emerged from the hospital, pushing at least fifty people in front of them, doctors and patients. Henry could make out some daffy duck scrubs near the front of the pack.

Henry’s heart sank as he watched them herd the people toward the the lobby of Henry’s building. “Shit shit shit,” Henry chanted as he jumped back into the closet, pulling free a wireless nail gun. Henry checked that the tool was charged and loaded before he ran back to his living room and snagged the wire cutters and the razor wire.

With the thick gloves on, Henry spooled out eight feet of wire and tacked it up between two doorways just beyond the elevators. Henry lunged up and smashed the overhead light with his wire cutter, casting the blade-studded wire in shadow.

Henry turned and ran toward the fire escape, stopping as a voice whispered his name. “Henry,” came a voice from the door to his left. Henry paused for a moment and saw the face of Leanne, the cougar next door peering out into the hallway.

“What’s going on?” The older woman whispered, her eyes wide with fear.

“people with guns are coming into the building, and the phones aren’t working. Get something heavy and brace your door, find a weapon, and don’t let anyone into your room until you can get ahold of the cops.” Henry spoke the words faster than he could register them, turning back to the fire exit.

“Good luck,” she said, the words barely reaching Henry as he loped down the hall. Shortly after, Henry faintly heard the sound of Leanne bolting her door again.

Why am I doing this instead of following my own advice? Henry thought to himself as he glided down the stairs, his legs moving furiously. It was the best course of action. When he had been young and invincible, the army had expected him to tromp around day in and day out with fifty pounds of gear strapped to his body. Now older, and much more out of shape, Henry tasted blood as he arrived at the middle of the fire exit.

Could be spider-man syndrome, Henry thought to himself as he knelt to work, I wouldn’t expect a cougar to do anything about this, but I’m a (ex)combat engineer, maybe I feel some responsibility? Henry wondered to himself, watching his hands work as though he were watching someone else.

Henry dropped the wire to the ground, tacked one end to the wall, and unspooled the wire, cutting it off and tying the other side to the bannister, making sure it was low and taut. Coming to stand, Henry looked at his fifteen seconds of work, designed to cripple one of the baddies. Henry shook his head. He had a terrible feeling that sitting on his ass would get him killed.

Henry picked up his gear and hustled further down the stairs, feeling almost like a spider, expanding his territory one strand at a time. Henry made it to the bottom of the stairs, his heart pounding. He was only a few dozen feet away from the nearest bad guy at his closest guess. There was a door leading further into the building, and an exit that led straight to the street.

Henry took three quick, bracing breaths, and pushed the door to the street open, craning his neck to peek around the street. Henry saw the other guy first.

Walking down the street was a man wearing black combat gear, a helmet, balaclava, bullet proof vest, and a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. The man’s blue eyes, the only exposed part of his body, met Henry’s gaze.

“Fuck!” Henry screamed, flinging himself away from the door, taking the stairs three at a time. behind him, Henry heard the telltale tromp of boots approaching the door. Henry kept himself low and close to the outside wall, paranoid that the asshole would start taking potshots at him even with the bannister that would play havoc with ricochettes.

Henry’s breath hitched and he let out a grunt as he deliberately leapt over the razor wire, stopping a flight above the trap. Henry dropped to his stomach on the dirty stairs, freeing his pistol from the holster, sure that he looked like an idiot. Like an idiot serious about living, he thought to himself.

The tread of footfalls rose up to him, and Henry held his breath, listening. Cry of pain, jump out and shoot him, he finds the trap and says something stupid like “barbed wire?” jump out and shoot him, no sound at all, wait until visual, two voices, one in pain, jump out and shoot them, more than two voices, run like a bitch. Henry ran through his options in his head, flickering through all the situations that would get him killed.

Henry’s back itched madly as a sudden insane urge to look behind him for another gunman washed over him. Narrowing his eyes, Henry deliberately relaxed his hold on the pistol.

A man’s voice cried in startled pain, no words, just a short series of vowels. Henry, praying the other guy wasn’t smarter than him and waiting just behind the tripwire with his gun aimed at the stairs, jumped out, the berretta trained on the tripwire.

The guy was smarter than him.