Letters to Abigail Read online

behind it. If all went well, then the corporal would leap off the back of the beast before the dynamite exploded.

  Simple enough to plan.

  Until the Confederate sniper shot the corporal in the back.

  Jonathan swung his spyglass around in time to see a puff of smoke drifting away from a clutch of trees about fifty feet behind the Behemoth. He couldn’t see the sniper hiding in the trees, but he thought he caught a glimpse of a rifle barrel being pulled back beneath the cover of the foliage.

  Another shot rang out loud and clear against the whirring of the Behemoth’s gears and motors as it stomped down the road. A man cried out and then tumbled from the tree line, rolling down a short hill and onto the road. The Confederate sharpshooter lay dead in the tracks of the Behemoth with a bloody hole in his chest. Jonathan’s own sniper had done his job well.

  Jonathan watched as the third man to attack the Behemoth—Private Cross—bolted from his hiding spot, running as hard as he could toward the legs of the giant. The green satchel holding the dynamite bounced against Cross’s right hip. Through the spyglass, Jonathan could see sweat rolling down the man’s determined face. He just hoped that the Behemoth hadn’t been followed by any other Southern snipers or scouts. Cross reached the back of the swinging right foot of the Behemoth and recklessly jumped onto it. Jonathan held his breath as the private hung on for dear life.

  The iron foot came down hard, and Cross almost lost his grasp. Scrambling, he somehow managed to keep ahold of the foot and started to pull himself up the leg of the mechanical marvel. Cross climbed quickly, reminding Jonathan of his own youth spent climbing trees in the backyard of his home in Wichita. He watched as the private went hand over hand up the long leg.

  Suddenly the Behemoth’s right leg came down hard, crushing a fallen tree lying in the road. A shudder ran up the metal leg, jostling the climbing soldier.

  Jonathan watched in horror as Cross misjudged a handhold. The teeth of a large set of gears chewed up the sleeve of his left arm. The gears didn’t satisfy their hunger on cloth alone. Jonathan could hear panicked and painful screams as Cross’s flesh and bone were torn apart. The soldier tried desperately to free himself, but while struggling he also managed to get his right leg caught in a thick vine of hoses and wires attached to the Behemoth’s ambulatory appendage.

  When Cross’s arm tore loose from his body in a bloody geyser, he fell backwards with his leg still caught up. The private swung limply back and forth with every step the beast took. Jonathan knew Cross had already died, but he winced at the beating the man’s body took as it careened off of the hard iron of the Behemoth when the leg swung back and forth.

  But the sight of the dead Union soldier didn’t shock Jonathan as much as what he saw on top of the Behemoth’s square head. Staring down at the carnage left in its wake stood a tall, thin figure cloaked in black robes. Jonathan couldn’t see the figure’s face in the shadow of the cloak’s cowl, but he swore he could see glowing red embers where eyes should be.

  He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. Jonathan knew they had to be playing tricks on him.

  Opening his sharp blue eyes again, he watched the robed figure looking down at the wake of corpses being left behind the Behemoth. Jonathan hadn’t seen the pilots or gunners climb out of the access hatch on top of the command turret. Where had this man come from? What was he doing?

  “Sir?” Sergeant Blake asked, standing at Jonathan’s elbow. “What should we do? We’re out of dynamite. Should I call for the rest of the squad to retreat, or do you have another plan to bring down the Behemoth?”

  “I’m wondering about that man on top of the Behemoth,” Jonathan answered, looking into Blake’s grim, bearded face. “I’m considering whether he might be a friend or a foe. Whether to fire on him or not.”

  Blake looked at Jonathan quizzically. “Sir, what man?”

  “That ma—”

  Jonathan’s pointing finger trailed off with his words as he realized the figure on top of the Behemoth had disappeared. He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs of confusion. Jonathan wondered if the many sleepless nights, hard miles of marching and the stresses of war were beginning to take a toll on his mind. Obviously, he had imagined the man on the turret. It was the only explanation.

  “Sir?”

  “Sound a retreat and regroup,” Jonathan commanded Blake, trying his best to sound more resolute than he actually felt. “Send a man back to camp to alert Major General Blunt that we weren’t able to stop the Behemoth. That means more Confederate troops are on their way. We’ve been so badly outnumbered we can’t take the risk of fighting them head on. We’ll rendezvous as planned near that town we procured from the rebels along the Little Blue River.”

  “Sir!” Blake bellowed and ran off to carry out Jonathan’s orders.

  Jonathan drew back slowly, deeper into the woods, his eyes still on the Behemoth as it moved on, his mind still obsessed with the cloaked figure he thought he’d seen.

  Below the ridge, on the road, he saw the figure again, standing over one of Second Squad’s dead volunteers.

  Jonathan froze. Seeing the black-robed apparition next to the body of the first soldier to die, he realized how impossibly large anyone wearing the cloak had to be. The man was at least seven or eight feet tall, but improbably thin—just a whisper of a figure—like a lean maple sapling. He watched as the cloaked mystery figure kneeled down slowly over the dead soldier. Jonathan broke out of his paralysis long enough to bring the spyglass up quickly to his right eye, zooming in on the strange sight.

  The left sleeve of the robe drew back slightly as the robed figure reached out toward the dead man, revealing a skeletal hand and forearm. Rotting grey flesh hung off of yellowed bones. Sharp black fingernails grew from the end of gnarled fleshless fingers that opened and closed above the soldier’s still chest. The fingers suddenly closed in a fist, and the dead body beneath that fist shuddered and shook. The dead man’s back arched up toward the fist. A clap of thunder echoed somewhere in the distance, but in his ears the sound of Jonathan’s furiously beating heart threatened to drown all other sounds out. A bright blue wisp of smoke emerged from the dead man’s chest like a slithering snake. The smoke climbed into the closed hand of the robed figure.

  Jonathan’s head spun, but he kept the spyglass on the supernatural spectacle. He knew Blake and the rest of his men were hightailing it toward the rendezvous point and that he needed to get moving. The man of science and reason in his head told him there was no way he was witnessing what his eyes showed him. But the man of war he had become—the man of primal passions, instinctual survival and animalistic behavior—knew too well the realities of the unseen world. Death and darkness were all around him. Death had come to claim his men, as death would claim everybody’s soul in the end.

  The cloaked figure stood, throwing back its hood. Jonathan gazed through the spyglass into the fiery red eyes of the Angel of Death. Grey-green flesh hung from Death’s sharp cheekbones. Long needle-like teeth smiled malevolently beneath the two black pits where a nose should be. Death moved away from the first soldier’s corpse toward the next.

  Jonathan wanted to scream at the merciless beast to leave his men alone. He wanted to scream out in horror and despair. He needed to let out the terror and insanity clawing at the inside of his skull—the madness that had slowly been building up since the war had begun—but found his voice suddenly drowned out by the screams of his own men. He came out of his horror-stricken shock to realize that the woods around him were exploding, sending flames, splinters and debris flying in all directions.

  As his normal senses came back to him all at once, Jonathan heard the booming echoes of the Gatling guns and cannon fire of a Behemoth. He moved the spyglass to the machine they had failed to destroy. The Behemoth had turned back toward them and was ripping up the woods where Second Squad had been hiding. Somehow the crew of the Behemoth had been alerted to their presence. Now the machine stomped its way toward the retreating men, all weapo
ns blazing.

  Taking his eye away from the spyglass, Jonathan spun on his heel to run after his men. Before he took his first step, a bellowing explosion slammed him to the ground face first. His ears rung and his vision blurred. He couldn’t catch his breath, but he tried to pull himself forward with hands and arms that felt numbed by the concussive blast that had knocked him down. As he dragged himself forward, pain exploded in his left shoulder. He realized that a sharp splintered limb jutted from the front of his shoulder. The bloody spike had gone through his back and come out the other side. Jonathan moaned loudly, rolling onto the opposite shoulder.

  The woods around him exploded into a chaos of fire, smoke, screams and thunderous gunfire. Then a shadow fell across Jonathan.

  Grasping the bloody branch protruding from his body, the lieutenant looked up into the once again hooded face of Death. The red eyes bore into his soul like Judgment Day. Jonathan thought of Abigail as he prepared to meet his maker. He wished he could see her one more time. Tell her how much he loved her and how foolish he was to go to war. He should’ve died in her arms an old man. Instead, he would die far away from home in a war that history was sure to forget, just like so many wars before.

  Another shadow fell across Jonathan, and then