Hard Times (A Sam Harlan Novel Book 2)

Hard Times

Kevin Lee Swaim

Copyright © 2015 Kevin Lee Swaim All Rights Reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published by: Picadillo Publishing

Cover Design by: The Cover Collection

Editing by:Clio Editing

Proofreading by: Donna Rich

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my beta readers. Your feedback was invaluable.

Table of Contents

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

It’s amazing how
life goes back to normal, how the world keeps spinning, even after you do something so terrible that it can never be forgiven. You get up in the morning. You eat. You shower. Shave. Use the toilet.

I spoke to the woman across from me at the table and tried not to notice how much she looked like her twin sister. I tried to ignore the subject that lurked under every conversation, under every aspect of our relationship.

And the dream. Always the same dream. There was no escaping it. I closed my eyes, desperate for sleep, desperate to find a safe haven where I wasn’t haunted by my memories.

In my dream, I plunge the knife into a little girl’s chest.

It had been six weeks since I murdered my daughter—six weeks since I stabbed her in the heart with a silver knife, killing the bloodthirsty beast, the unholy and abhorrent dead thing that knew only want and need.

Everything felt wrong. I walked through the house that was not my house and pretended my family was right around the corner. I listened to the late October wind rumbling outside, shaking the house to its foundation. I slipped outside, looking for solitude, and a cold wind knifed through me. I worked on the truck that was not my truck, trying to bang out a dent in the side.

I was practicing with my handgun, trying to familiarize myself with my new tool, on top of the hill behind the house when I missed the phone call. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon when I returned to the house, mumbled some words to the woman at the table, and headed for my bedroom that I saw the blinking light on the answering machine. “Did you hear the phone ring?” I asked.

The woman shook her head. “I was reading in my room.”

Sister Callie was a nun and the book she read was the Holy Book, the only book she had brought with her from Peoria. She’d followed me home after I lost her twin sister, Katie, to the vampire, Silas. It was hard looking at Callie. She had emerald eyes and auburn hair, just like her sister. Her skin was a delicate cream, closer to parchment, lightly dusted with freckles. She looked so much like Katie that I found myself biting my tongue, trying not to say the wrong thing.

I was still trying to figure out if I had loved Katie Calahane.

I checked the phone, an old white Radio Shack brand with big push buttons. The ringer, controlled by a slider on the side, was turned off. I didn’t remember doing it, and I doubted Callie had touched the phone. I shrugged and pressed the button to listen to the message.

It wasn’t what I expected.

“Jack, it’s Mary Kate. I’ve got your newest order and … I need to talk.”

I listened to the message again. The woman’s voice had the hint of age, but wasn’t ancient. There was no discernible accent.

I turned to Sister Callie, who now stood behind me. “What do you think?”

She shrugged. “It’s not about Jack’s … work?”

Jack Harlan was a vampire killer, my great-great-great-grandfather, and his house was now mine. I was born Sam Fisher, but—as I found out—I had always been a Harlan. “I don’t
think
so,” I said.

“What kind of ‘order’?”

It was my turn to shrug. “Maybe it’s like the crops?”

Callie frowned, her forehead creasing. “I thought that was done?”

I nodded. I knew very little about farming. An old man with overalls had knocked on my door the week before. It seemed Jack had had an arrangement with the man, Albert Slinghuff. The old farmer paid the cash rent with actual cash, passed to me in a white envelope along with a cooler of freshly slaughtered beef. In exchange, Slinghuff farmed Jack’s three hundred acres of land.

The next afternoon he was out with his combine bringing in the crops, his wife hauling the grain in a semitrailer to the elevator eight miles away in Toledo, Iowa. The crops were soon harvested, the hills and valleys sheared bare, leaving short white stalks that covered the ground like angry needles.

A thought occurred to me. “Can we look up the number?”

Callie nodded and I followed her to the kitchen. Jack had left me everything, including his house. It was a simple affair, two bedrooms, a living room, and a large kitchen with pantry. The basement held a giant freezer full of beef, and stairs led to a steel door that connected to his underground bunker under the hilltop.

The bunker contained a dizzying array of guns and knives of all shapes and sizes, and a small fortune in cash and gold coins. All of it now belonged to me, to use as I saw fit.

I saw fit to kill vampires.

I was going to kill them for what they did to me, and for what they did to Katie, and what they made Jack become. For them, I saw fit to kill every damned vampire in the world, if I could.

I took a seat at the table in front of the new Dell laptop I’d purchased the week before. I winced as I typed the number into the Google search.

“Your wrist still hurts?” Callie asked.

I nodded. My wife, Stacie, broke my right wrist and two ribs in our final encounter. The damage was mostly healed, a byproduct of the change, the thing that had happened to my body after my first vampire kill. The change gave me strength and speed. I was quick to heal, and had a sudden appetite for vast quantities of rare beef.

A vampire could will itself into a human. They called it giving

‘the gift,’ but I’d found out that if I lived long enough and killed enough vampires, I would change into a vampire without being bitten or receiving ‘the gift.’

Like Jack.

I would become the very thing I hated.

I shuddered at the thought and saw Callie glance my way. She didn’t speak, but I knew she was sympathetic as well as concerned.

“Maybe we should have the doctor take another look,” she said.

“No point,” I said, shaking my head. “He said it was healed like it happened months ago, not six weeks.”

She hesitated. “If you think it best.”

“Sister, I have no idea if it’s best, but it’s what we’re going to do.” I finished the Google search and read the results. “Hawkeye Gun & Pawn. Marshalltown, Iowa.”

“Do you know it?”

“Never heard of it, but someone there knew Jack. Even had an order for him. Guess we need to make a trip to Marshalltown.”

* * *

Jack’s armory was a long room, the size of a small house, with concrete walls and a domed roof twenty feet tall. Racks of guns lined the walls. Rifles. Carbines. Shotguns. Handguns. It was almost too much to take in at once, and I mentally whistled for the thousandth time as I flicked on the light switch.

An overpowering odor of gun oil greeted me, but there was also a musty smell, even though the dehumidifier in the corner ran twenty-four hours a day. A rack of knives in various shapes and sizes sat above the dehumidifier, all razor sharp, all bearing silver content. There was a deadly looking device hanging from the wall in the back that Jack had identified as an RPG. I had no idea why he needed it, but I left it there, just in case. Under the RPG was a twenty-five-gallon Rubbermaid container full of wooden stakes, each about fourteen inches long.

Callie and I had ventured into town the week after I’d filed Jack’s will. We purchased the laptop and a wireless modem and spent the ensuing weeks researching guns and ammunition, trying to learn how to use my newly inherited stockpile of weapons.

We weren’t very good. We didn’t know the first thing about guns, or knives, or wooden stakes.

Sister Callie had finally settled on a twelve-gauge pump shotgun, a Remington 870, and had taken to practicing with it on the top of the hill, blasting at paper targets stapled to a sheet of plywood staked in the red clay soil.

I’d adopted Jack’s Colt 1911 handgun as my own, eschewing the rest of the handguns in the bunker. I had never shot a handgun before the attack in my diner, and I found the Colt had one hell of a kick. It was so brutal on my healing wrist that I practiced left-handed until the bones in my right were knitted enough to take the beating.

I’d found a spare leather holster, a Glaco made with thick leather straps that went around my neck and locked in place behind my back. It held the gun firmly in place under my arm. I thought it looked ridiculous, but I practiced drawing and firing until I finally felt I had gained some proficiency. After all that practice, I could routinely place bullets in the center of the target from twenty yards.

It was a good start, but I needed to do better.

If we hope to survive.

“We’re running out of bullets,” Callie said from behind me.

I turned to her. “What?”

She pointed to the heavy metal shelves stacked with boxes against the north wall. “I’ve looked through the ammunition. We don’t have much lead left. Only silver.”

“I didn’t notice.”

I searched through the shelves and found a few boxes of almost every caliber in silver but, as Callie said, very little lead ammunition.

How stupid of me. Just another thing I’m not keeping up on.

* * *

Callie headed back to the house and I exited the armory through the massive steel door to the south and made my way through the short tunnel to the machine shed. It was a big building with a concrete floor, a mechanic’s lift, and walls lined with rolling tool chests. Pegboard hanging everywhere contained every tool I knew how to use and quite a few whose purpose I couldn’t begin to guess.

The shed was packed with vehicles. A mid-seventies Camaro sat next to an older Ford Econoline van, which was parked in front of a late nineties Crown Victoria. There was a newish Ford F-150 pickup in the corner, along with a vintage motorcycle, but it was Jack’s Chevy truck with topper that occupied my time.

The passenger door to Jack’s truck looked reasonably well repaired. I had popped the dent out with a dent-puller and then filled it with Bondo. After hours of sanding, the door appeared somewhat normal, but the first coat of primer showed a rippling surface full of pinholes.

Apparently there is only so much I can learn from the Internet.

After filling the side with more Bondo and waiting for it to harden, I covered the door in a fine coat of glaze to fill the pinholes and waited for it to dry. Then, I spent the next hour working up a sweat in the crisp October afternoon, smoothing the side of the door with a long flexible sanding block until it looked even, then shot a few coats of rattle-can primer over the sanded surface.

I turned my head to catch the light playing across the surface. The pinholing was gone, and so were the ripples. My wife had slammed me into the truck so hard that the window would no longer roll down, but now the damage was finally gone.

I felt a presence behind me, a pressure against the back of my neck, and turned to find Callie watching.

“I thought we were going to Marshalltown?” she asked.

“Tomorrow morning.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Why not now?”

“It’s getting late and I need to finish fixing this door,” I said half-heartedly.

She glanced around the shed at the other vehicles, then her eyes returned to me. “
That’s
the reason?”

“You think there’s another?”

She spoke quickly. “I think you’re hurting, Sam, and I think going out in the world is the
last
thing you want to do.”

I felt a small surge of anger. I pointed to the truck door, lying across the two sawhorses and said, “I told you I was going to fix Jack’s truck and then I was going to hunt vampires. Whatever that phone call was, it
wasn’t
about vampires.”

I turned my back to her and grabbed the truck door. It was heavy, but my newfound strength allowed me to easily lift it from the sawhorses.

Callie sighed. “Do you need any help?”

“Grab those pins and springs. We’ll put it back on the same way it came off.”

For the next ten minutes Callie helped me replace the door on the truck. When it was finished, I opened it and closed it several times. It squealed more than I expected. I opened it again and used the hand crank to roll down the window, then rolled it back up. “Maybe not as good as new, but it’s functional.”