Industrious: Engineering Marvels - Chapter 18 (Patreon)

“-A-M-P-I-R... E... S.” Nick stated, trailing off in disbelief at the end, staring through his lens at the highest tower of the castle.

“Fuck,” Victor growled, the noise rumbling through Steve and Bucky's guts even at a few feet of distance. The blonde man took a deep breath through the cigar clenched between his teeth that caused the small ember at the tip to momentarily flare. “I hate vampires.”

Steve felt that vague floating sensation of disbelief overcome him momentarily as he traded a weighted look with his oldest friend, recognizing in an instant the same emotion that was flowing through him. Sparing a glance at the still-flickering light in the window of the castle and then at Fletcher, who was scribbling as he mouthed the words under his breath, he turned back to Victor.

“You've... met vampires?” Steve heard his own voice ask, then reached up to rub tiredly at his face.

What was it Ray sometimes said? FML? Yeah, sounds about right. Fuck my life right now.

“Bro!” Victor barked, his voice carrying through the dark despite the low volume in a way that made the hairs on the back of Steve's neck rise up. Yet another reminder of the fact that he, Bucky, and Ray weren't the only 'special case' members of the group. Almost against his will, his mind snapped back to the too-small child Ray and Bucky had carried out of the camp.

He also remembered the swordsman's words.

“It's not that they're afraid of newtypes, Steve. It's that they're afraid of things they don't understand. That doesn't change, no matter when or where you're from.”

With a time-traveler for one of his closest friends, the future was never far from his mind. It worried him that he could see the logic in Ray's assertion, even as someone who was now as strong and durable as he was. Although... Dr. Erskine's words were also heavy on his mind. 'A weak man knows the value of strength, and knows compassion.'

Steve was honest enough with himself to admit that weak people also knew fear.

In his case, intimately.

He'd tried to never keep it from letting him do the right thing. He’d stood up for other people who needed it as a matter of course. A lot of people from Brooklyn thought he had a chip on his shoulder about his size. He'd heard the adage about little dogs barking the loudest more often than he'd cared to admit. In fact, that insistence on their part had been part of what motivated him to overcome his fear; to overcome his inaction.

Part of that was believing the best in others, though. Steve knew he'd been called naive as well, but people like Logan and Victor gave him hope. They were rough, hard men, and more than occasionally strange enough to send a trickle of fear down his spine, but they were also good men here, fighting for their country against some of the worst evil mankind had ever seen.

Which was why he tamped down on the reflex to reach for his gun when he just barely caught sight of Logan stepping out of the forest with a barely-audible set of footsteps even on the crisp, cold vegetation of the forest. With a passing glance, Logan snorted and reached into his pocket before extracting a cigar. “What's up?”

“Remember Montreal?” Victor asked.

Logan visibly paused, hesitating for a long second as the lit match between his fingers reached the cigar. Taking a long drag to get it started, he sighed out a stream of smoke while crushing the match in his palm to extinguish it.

“Fuck. Bloodsuckers?” Logan asked.

Several of the men in the small encampment were now staring, blinking in the dim light of a shrouded lantern. One voice speaking up from the gathered men in the wake of the sudden silence.

“Oh, blast it all. Not again.”

On cue, everyone turned to look at the bespectacled British man wearing a red beret with a yellow tassel and a white ascot around his neck between open lapels. Cursing under his breath, the man went digging through his pack for something very obviously larger than a sidearm. And a few grenades.

 “I'm sorry,” Bucky called out, looking around. “Are Steve and I the only ones here who had no idea vampires were real?”

There was, for a moment, a yawning void of silence as multiple members of the team looked vacantly at him. Then Dino raised a hand tentatively. “Ah, I was about to play one in a movie before the war broke out. Does that count? If it doesn't, though, I had no idea.”

Thankfully, that seemed to break the ice and Bucky let out an only-somewhat manic rip of laughter before abruptly quieting himself. Shaking his head and looking back at Steve, he shrugged. His blonde friend, seeming to have found a slightly steadier mental footing, stepped up and clapped his hands. “Okay, anyone with experience or knowledge fighting... vampires, please come up. Unlike the giant demon spider from the last mission, I don't think it'll be as easy to hit one with a tank shell this time. So, thoughts?”

In the end, there were apparently four members of the squad who knew something about fighting vampires which, in Steve's concern for his own sanity, was probably too many. Logan and Victor had apparently ended up targeted by a group of bloodsuckers a decade or so previously in Montreal, Canada. After a few run-ins, they'd gotten tired of chasing the monsters off with excessive amounts of bullets and tracked them to a disused barn they were squatting in.

Before setting it alight an hour after the sun had risen.

“So, fire kills 'em,” Logan shrugged, taking one last pull from his cigar before crushing the remainder against the back of his arm. “Kills most freaky shit, really.”

“Crushin' their heads work, too,” Victor chimed in. “One of the fuckers turned to dust after I slammed a sledgehammer down on their skull five 'er six times.”

“But bullets basically just slow the blighters down,” Pinky added unhappily. “They'll do damage, sure, and judging by how upset they seemed after being hosed down with a machine gun, it does cause them physical pain, but it doesn't seem to really 'hurt' them in the same way it would you or I.”

“H-Holy water works, u-usually,” Nick added, making eyes shift his way in what was still mild surprise. The younger man busied himself with cleaning his camera. “I-it depends on the type.”

“Type?” Logan asked, crossing his arms over his chest as he looked down at the much skinnier man. “What do you mean, type, kid?”

“Th-the guy who saved me, when I ran into a pair of them... he, um... I helped him out with some stuff to pay him back and he told me some stuff.” Nick cleared his throat and looked around, then ducked his head again. “There's a bunch of different types, ah-bloodlines, he called them. The master vampire gives any vampires he sires a piece of his power and, as they drink blood and grow older, they get stronger.”

“You mean they can't all turn into dogs and fog?” Pinky asked, surprised, the high-born aristocrat blinking. “Good lord, that takes a weight off my chest.”

“Ones we fought never pulled anything that fancy,” Victor stated, spitting off to the side in distaste. “They liked to disappear, though. Think they could fuck with peoples' heads.”

“Do any of you have any idea what kind we might be facing here?” Steve asked, his leg bouncing with poorly-restrained energy as he looked over his shoulder to the castle. The idea that his men were running into a situation they'd underestimated this badly...

They'd need to do better.

“Pretty much all vampires are stronger, faster, and more durable than humans, they can't take the sun, die to a stake through the heart, and are weak against fire. Holy water is kind of hit or miss,” Nick stated, frowning. “Crosses tend to work, though.”

Steve's hand swept up to clutch at the rosary in his pocket. “Do they need to be blessed?”

“Or can we just slap two pieces of wood together?” Gabe Jones asked, leaning forward.

Nick bit the inside of his cheek, obviously thinking through the question before nodding. “Ah, they don't need to be blessed, but whoever's holding it needs to believe. Like, actually believe. Otherwise it's just a pair of sticks.”

Bucky rubbed at his eyes. “Fer fuck's sake, ugh.” He looked around. “Okay, I know there aren't supposed to be any atheists in foxholes, but who wants to be on cross-duty? True believers only.”

Logan and Victor exchanged a look and a shrug, but neither stepped up. The other men did much the same before Dino Manelli raised his hand. “I was an altar boy back in the day.”

Steve smiled and shook Dino's hand as he approached. “You're in good company, Dino. I was in the school's choir for five years myself. Let's get some pieces of wood for a good cross or two. Anyone else?”

Frenchie confessed to be enough of a lapsed Catholic that he didn't believe his faith would hold up, though he could be heard muttering about attending mass when he got back. Monty Falsworth, though not Catholic, was enough of a practicing Anglican that he agreed to be one of their cross-bearers as well as Gabe Jones, who was a Baptist from the Mississippi Reformed Congregation.

Then Steve turned back to the message Jim Morita had flashed to them via morse code. There weren't as many details as he liked, but with the revelations about what they were fighting the plan had changed. Honestly, it would have been better to hit the castle in broad daylight with what they now knew. It was too late for that, though. Ray, Jim, and Dum Dum had already killed the base's leader and Nick wasn't sure if the 'head vampire' would know about it or not.

Which moved their timeline up instead of letting them wait until the dawn came.

As bad as this could turn out, they at least had some warning. Issuing a rapid series of orders, his men swapped their normal loadouts for something a bit more suited to fighting the undead. Not all of them would do so, of course, there would doubtless be some normal soldiers guarding various parts of the castle, but knowing was half the battle.

Have to remember to thank Ray for that. 'Knowing is half the battle,' is a good slogan. Wonder why he grins every time he says it.

Then the highest tower of the castle blew up, and Steve knew they'd run out of time.

…

Dum Dum fired a shotgun into a Hydra-uniformed body flying straight at us. The blast had enough force to blow the vampire off-course and, as he crashed into a wall, I swung my blade through its neck. The head went flying and, after another bisecting cut to the body, the undead creature began to disintegrate.

“I think I'm starting to hate vampires,” Jim stated, carefully kicking a collection of ash in the shape of a body, only relaxing marginally as it collapsed instead of reanimating itself.

“Join the fucking club,” Dougan growled, reloading as I kept an eye out.

“How many more bombs do we have?” I asked, declining to comment on the vampires.

The fighting we'd already faced hadn't exactly been easy. My running theory was that someone had noticed the flashlight we'd been using to signal the team and decided to find out what was going on. By that time we'd, luckily, managed to root through all of the documents in the now-dead leader's desk and steal whatever we wanted.

I patted my backpack absently. The other guys had made off with a bunch of gold coins he'd had in a safe, but me? I'd claimed the silver-plated dagger for myself. Maybe I'd keep it as a prize of war or perhaps I'd melt it down into a letter opener, but...

Well, I liked swords.

And, considering the photo I'd happened upon, this pointy piece of metal was worth some serious bragging rights. I could just skip melting it down and use it to open my mail anyway. That was a tempting thought.

“Twelve,” Morita stated, looking back to where the smoldering ruin of the castle's tower had collapsed onto the main body of the structure.

“Have to give the krauts credit, I thought the entire thing was going to come down,” Dum Dum muttered, finishing his reloading and pulling out another bomb to toss to the other man.

The slightest sound caught my attention and, spinning, I slashed my sword through a leaping shadow and took off another creature's head.

“Jesus-Fuck!” Dum Dum cried, swinging to aim at the vampire I'd decapitated even as I gave it another main-body cut for good measure. “Goddamn-fucking-shit!”

“Now you know why I was so pissed off,” I stated, keeping careful attention on our surroundings. “Vampires are like cockroaches. They're irritating, cause panic, and are damn hard to exterminate.”

“Roach never came at my face trying to tear it off,” Morita stated, winding the clock on the bomb and setting it. “We're good, let's move.”

“I'm on point. Try not to shoot me with that thing, Dougan,” I reminded him, moving forward with my guard up.

The entire thing was a clusterfuck, honestly. We'd had to bail on the tower when a group of guards had begun trying to break into the room. I'd managed to pin a zip-line style rope across the inner courtyard, allowing the three of us to escape the bombs we'd set up. The chaos of the falling tower had also allowed us to keep relatively unnoticed as we ducked and weaved into the shadows and set bombs as we went. It was nowhere near as clean and smooth as our last mission, but none of my plucky little crew was dead yet.

Maybe next time I'd let someone else be volun-told into whatever crazy infiltration mission was decided upon.

“Giant monster spider that shot acid first, nazi-vampires second,” I muttered, easing my breathing into a flowing pattern as-

A shadow surged out of another darkened corner and-

My blade sheared off the tips of the claws coming towards me, but nothing more. The instant the metal made contact, the form reversed course on a dime, leaving the vampire hovering in the air near the stone ceiling of the hallway we were in. To the left were a series of doors we had designs on planting more bombs within. To the right was a large overlook into the inner courtyard.

The light from the burning fires was flickering back and forth, casting the entire area in a moving gloom against the otherwise dark night around us. Still, I was able to see the figure clearly. He wore a black and purple costume with a cape that was fixed to his arms and legs, making him look almost like a bat. A cowl covered the top part of his face, only allowing his glowing yellow-red eyes to peer out from his skull, an inner flame seeming to make them more noticeable.

“I am Baron Blood,” the vampire stated, hovering in mid-air. “And you mortals have given me quite a bit of trouble.”

It was the kind of thing that should have been too corny and over the top to be threatening. His entire appearance was comical, bordering on a complete farce. Still, the weight of the moment, his own supernatural prowess, and the sounds of others of his kind moving closer made it hard to be irreverent.

I took a breath and slid one foot forward, repositioning my sword so that I held it next to my right ear, the curve of the blade on top as it glinted in the light like a giant fang. “I am Ray Winston, and I kill monsters.”

The vampire master chuckled.

Then, in a burst of speed, the fight was on.

~~~

As promised, an update for Industrious. Decided to pay some attention to the Marvel timeline first this month. Ray's in for some interesting times in this latest life or death battle while Steve is hurrying the men along to come to the rescue.

But will they make it in time?!

Anyway, I'll be working on something else for another upload either Friday or Saturday. It will likely either be Nexus Event or Where Your God Is. The week's been a little stressful and I need one of my other projects to break things up. More Winning Peace coming up after that.