Project Overview
The Legacy of Chester Fritz is a full length novel set in a small university town in North Dakota. It combines elements of Lovecraftian horror, murder mystery, and historical fiction.
The Legacy of Chester Fritz will be released at some future date. In the mean time, I wanted share one scene that is important background for the first season of the Podcast.
The excerpt below is part of Chapter 25. In this scene Chief of University Police Norm Rollins recounts for Detective Andrea Martin the first battle of the Chester Fritz Library.
Dust Jacket Summary
After discovering the grisly death of a colleague, Professor Jake Verlorin finds himself assisting Detective Andrea Martin in a murder investigation. As unseen forces close ranks to stop the investigation of the bizarre death, Jake finds himself peeling back layers of a mystery more than 100 years in the making.
Digging deeper uncovers the story of an ill fated adventure through war torn China by a prominent university alum, Chester Fritz. Fritz’s journey set in motion the creation of an occult fortress, disguised as a campus library.
But, that fortress has been breached by agents of a dark god and must be re-claimed at any cost.
Excerpt
The Battle of the Chester Fritz
Five minutes later, Andrea was in the passenger seat of a University Police SUV, heading toward the commercial district. Norm had the local public radio station turned down low and was making small talk, asking about her background. After they had covered her military service and the curling league, he asked if she was from the area. She informed him she was from Wisconsin originally. Norm nodded.
“I’m from Minnesota myself, but I was here for the flood, so I guess I count as a local.”
Andrea smiled. The flood was more than 20 years ago, but Norm was right. It was the dividing line between locals and outsiders. “Did your house get a lot of damage?” Andrea asked, keeping with the general flow of the conversation. The stop light turned green and Norm navigated an unprotected left-hand turn.
“I was living along the North Shore of Minnesota at the time,” Norm replied. “When I say I was here for the flood, I mean that I arrived the day the levies broke. I was running the Department of Conservation’s enforcement unit, and we were sent in to help.”
Andrea furrowed her brow, “Minnesota sent conservation officers?”
Norm nodded. “We were the ones who knew how to operate boats. But even so, it was really dangerous work.” Norm turned to make sure Andrea was following the story “I’ll give you an example, one of my officers, a real nice guy, was evacuating an assisted living unit. He was shuttling people out when all of a sudden his boat just stopped. The guy looked down and saw the top edge of a stop sign that had sliced through the hull of his boat. He wasn’t actually sinking because the boat was impaled on the sign, but he was wasn’t going anywhere. You could say he had come to a full stop!” Norm began chuckling at the story and Andrea found herself warming to the man.
“So, about the Zylka case.” she began, but Norm cut her off.
“I’m getting to that. But I think you need some of the back story.” Norm shrugged apologetically. “So, one of the first things I did when I arrived was launched my boat from the east side of the river and made my way to the police station downtown. That was April 18th. The water was only supposed to hit 49 feet, but the river crested at 54, and it had started topping the sandbag levies on the 17th. That night the levies failed, breaching in multiple places. The evacuation was underway when I arrived, but the heart of the city was already under water. It was the eeriest thing. The streets felt like river canyons, and the currents were completely unpredictable.”
“When I finally reached the police headquarters, it was all but abandoned. The sewer had backed up, and the police had fallen back to a new command post at the university. The police station reeked of sewer gas. I was there for maybe 20 minutes, and I felt sick. Like really sick. I threw up going through the door. There was one person in the whole building. The 911 dispatcher had refused to leave her post until the emergency phone-lines were up and running at the new command center. It broke my heart when I found her. She was all alone in a toxic fog, trying to keep ahead of the dozens of calls for help coming in each minute. I forget what her name was, but I remember she was crying. It was the strangest thing to see tears streaming down her face but hear her voice—controlled, professional. You wouldn’t know it. You just wouldn’t have any idea that she was breaking because she just kept doing her job.”
Andrea felt a stirring of professional pride as Norm’s recounted the darkest days of her department. As a rule, people just didn’t talk about the flood. When she had taken the job, she had expected the flood to be part of the organizational mythology of the police department, but for whatever reason it just wasn’t.
“I gave her the information on my officers so she could put them to work, and then I headed to the university to connect up with the new command post. It took me a good hour, but I was able to work my way down University Drive. Parts of the university were walled off by six-foot-high sandbag walls, but other parts had been left unprotected. I ended up working with a Captain from the airbase to monitor the university’s flood wall network.” Norm paused for a second, his lips pressing tightly together.
“Tyrice Clark.”
Andrea recognized the second pause and press of lips as a sign of distress. She was about to ask a gentle follow up, when Norm pushed ahead with his story.
“He was from small town Alabama and joined the air force to play football at the academy and to pay for a degree in civil engineering. I think the idea is that I was supposed to chauffeur him around, and if we ran into a problem, he could credibly call in for more manpower. The air force base had sent in about 100 personnel, but that was a drop in the bucket when you are trying to evacuate 40,000 people.”
Norm turned into a parking lot and then swung toward the drive through for the Starbucks. “Do you mind if we get coffee to go?” He asked. “I think its easier to talk and drive.” Andrea assented and passed her order to Norm who relayed it to the barista at the drive through window. They waited. Norm took a deep breath, his shoulders slumping. “So that is how I met Frank Zylka.”
Andrea nodded. She had been wondering at the trajectory of Norm’s story. It had the feel of something more than just reminiscence, but she was uncertain what Norm saw as pertinent.
The drive through window opened and Norm rolled his window down the entire way to accept the two Venti coffees. The thirty seconds of open window needed for coffee transfer was enough to vent the heat from the car into the frigid January air. Norm raised the window and adjusted the heating system to compensate for the sudden and bitter collapse in temperature.
“So Frank was at the library. He was there with two other professors—this young guy, Jim Galgadet, and an older woman Elizabeth Dunley. I think she started out as a home economics teacher and ended up as dean of the Education college. I remember being dumbfounded when I saw them. She looked so frail and Frank always had a pretty serious weight problem, and he was in his sixties at the time. And yet, the three of them were building an inner wall of sandbags near the door to the library.” Norm took a sip of his coffee. “We stopped and advised them to evacuate with the rest of the town. The university was closed. There was nothing to be done. Frank said they were staying. He said that he believed the flood wall would fail around the library and they were going to make sure it held. Tyrice and I inspected the library wall. The sandbags were about three times thicker and half again higher than anywhere else in that part of the city. We tried to convince them the wall would hold but Frank was adamant. I wasn’t going to fight him. So, I opened up one of the hatches in my boat and found a flare gun. I told Frank if he needed help, just send up a flare and we would be along as soon as we could.”
Andrea listened, sipping at her coffee. She could tell that Norm had gone on auto pilot. He was making a patrol loop while talking.
“The thing you’ve got to understand about the flood, is that it wasn’t supposed to happen.” Norm said. The National Weather Service had a solid forecast that the water would crest at 49 feet. The national guard had been dumping sand onto the ice for weeks trying to speed up the melt and several hundred pounds of dynamite had been deployed to bust up ice jams. It all should have worked. To this day, no one really knows why the water surged those extra five feet or why the ice jams locked together in a way that stopped the waters from receding. It was a full thirty days before the evacuation was lifted. Those were the longest, hardest days of my life.”
Norm’s voice cracked and Andrea glanced over to see that his arms were shaking save where he had anchored himself to the steering wheel.
“Chief Rollins” she began.
“Let me get through this.” He said, cutting her off not unkindly. “Let me talk. I’ve never really talked before. And, I know it’s going to start sounding strange, but let me tell it.” She nodded uncertain but willing to listen. She considered flipping her phone on and recording as she would when taking a statement, but Norm was on edge and she wanted to hear where he was going.
“Tyrice saw the flare go up about five minutes after midnight. I had been bedded down at the command post on the far south end of campus, trying to get a couple hours of sleep between shifts. He got me up out of bed, and we grabbed two other airmen and jumped in my boat to check on the library. It was slow going as we crossed the quad. The water was only a couple feet deep and even with the waxing half-moon, there was not much for light. We were on generators in that part of the city, so there were no street lights, but there was a pair of search lights positioned on the top of the library. The lights were sweeping the water, and I remember thinking how odd it was that they were scanning the water and not the flood wall. It was strange. As we pulled up along the rear of the library flood wall, the light swept down on us for a long moment and then moved away. I heard Jim Galgadet call to us as I tossed the boat’s anchor over the sandbag wall. Others were already scrambling over the barricade. I had expected the inner part of the wall to be filling with water, but it wasn’t. The ground was saturated and soupy, but the inner ring was not flooding. We were just starting to walk counter clockwise around the library when we heard the first gunshot. A second followed moments later, and we were all off and running. Rounding the back side of the building, I slipped in the mud. I went down and slammed my face against the semi-frozen ground. I remember the mud was only about two inches deep. It was cold, and it stunk like sewage.
“I pushed myself up and followed Tyrice and the two other airmen toward the front of the library. The sound of gunfire was regular now. I didn’t know what I would find but as we approached the northeast corner of the library one of the floodlights lit the scene up in a sharp white light. There was a something writhing on the ground three or four feet inside the sandbag wall. Cresting the wall was a second figure. It was.” Norm’s voice cracked. He glanced over at Andrea clearly calculating. “I’ve only talked about this once before with someone who wasn’t there. I know how it sounds, but I’m a level-headed guy. I don’t read much fiction, and I don’t have much for an imagination, but…” Norm stopped.
They drove for a time in silence. Andrea sensed that Norm was losing his momentum and so she pushed him gently.
“Norm, did Frank kill someone that night?” she asked, tentatively. To her surprise, Norm chuckled.
“I doubt we killed any of them,” he said with bitterness.
Andrea raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Them?” she asked, unsure.
“Some of them were a bit bigger than us, and some were massive. They kind of walked upright, but they kind of hopped. They were dark green or black or gray, except for their chests, which were white. Their skin, well, it wasn’t scaled like a fish; it was more like a frog’s skin, but they had gills, and their heads were…” Norm shuddered “You know how a fish has eyes on either side? They were like that—big, bulging, unblinking fish eyes. I honestly don’t know how to describe them. There were spines—ridges on their backs and arms. The ridges were sharp, like a serrated knife. I can tell you that much. The one on the top of the sandbag wall was croaking or barking, and then it took a shotgun blast full in the chest. It was knocked down before we heard the report of the gun, but a second later it was back on its feet and charging into the inner ring. The figure on the ground that had been writhing and thrashing was back up on its feet too.”
“That was the last clear memory I have of that night.” Norm said. “After that it’s just a jumble of things. I can’t be sure of the order or of what happened when. There was firing from behind us. A pair of the fish-faced, frog creatures was storming the eastern side of the barricade where our group was positioned. They were among us. One of the airmen was picked up and hurled against the library wall. I remember how after striking the wall his body went limp, and he didn’t even attempt to control his collision with ground. He was dead the moment his skull struck the wall. I remember being confused that I had used up all three of the magazines I had for my M9. I don’t remember where I shot or if I hit any of them.” Norm turned to look at Andrea. She had been unwilling to believe his story until she met his eyes. She knew that look of haunted pain, and it scared her that he had it more than twenty years later.
“That has always bothered me. I’m a professional. Every time I pull the trigger, I should know where a bullet is going to go. That is the point of regular, realistic, and relevant fire arms training. I am accountable for every pull of the trigger. But that night. I… I wasn’t.”
“I think what you are describing is pretty normal.” Andrea took a deep breath trying to slow the racing of her heart. It wasn’t normal. It was insane. It was comically insane, and yet she couldn’t write off what Norm was saying. She felt twitchy. She felt exposed. She should be lower to the ground. She should be under cover. She took a deep breath.
“The Taliban tried to overrun our base.” Andrea squeezed her eyes shut and pushed out the story. “It started with a suicide bomb—a green on blue attack—and, then a second bomb breached the wall. I have lots of very vivid memories but also lots of gaps.” Andrea focused on her breathing. Sixty hours after the attack had started, she had finally been able to take a shower. She had been shocked to find her right shoulder was a black bulbous mass, the muscle pounded to a pulp by the recoil of her M16.
She tried not to think about that detail. Andrea had learned to manage the memories, the flashbacks, and the nightmares. Rather than trying to hide from it all, she embraced the rush of memories, consciously cycling through the faces of people she had served with. She always made sure that she retrieved a memory of each person smiling or laughing.
But it was strange what other memories she held onto. There had been days—even months—where the dust and the haze blanketed the whole world in that same washed out brown of desert camo or the dingy white of tents. And then on other days the sky would be such a rich blue that it felt like her eyes were burning from the sudden fire of cut sapphire skies. Andrea shook off the memory.
“Your training carries you,” she said in an empty reassurance.
Norm nodded. He seemed to have found his control again. “I remember Tyrice charging one of the creatures. Maybe it was the one that had thrown the airman. He slammed into the thing and carried it back toward the sandbag wall. The creature’s bony spines were cutting at his arms and his chest, but he kept it pinned there. Jim came charging across the top of the sandbag wall, swinging a narrow-bladed shovel. He bludgeoned the creature from above while Tyrice held the monster pinned against the barricade until the thing stopped struggling. Tyrice’s coat was sliced in a dozen places and was soaked with blood. I remember screaming for help and holding him as his legs gave out. Elizabeth Dunley who had been at the library earlier in the day was next to me with a first aid kit. She was cutting the coat from him with medical shears. When his coat was off, I noticed the Captain’s pistol. I checked it. He had half of a magazine left. I took it and spent the rest of the night patrolling the perimeter of the wall with maybe seven bullets and a shovel for defense, watching for the next wave of fish faced monsters to come crawling out of the water.”
“It was from the sandbag wall that I saw the fire. People talk about electrical shorts and natural gas lines as the cause, but I have no doubt it was a sabotage action by the fish monsters. The entire rescue effort shifted from evacuation to trying to save the city from fire. Everywhere, there was the rainbow slick of gasoline on the surface of the water, and the fire was spreading fast. The water towers were empty, so the fire hydrants couldn’t deliver more than a trickle of water. And the depth of the water meant that the firetrucks couldn’t get through. It was such a hopeless feeling. We were going to lose the whole city to fire because of a flood.” Norm chuckled. “So we got creative. We hoisted the fire engines onto flatbed trailers and rolled them down flooded streets with tractors. We called in helicopters to bomb the city with flame retardant. It was a state-wide rescue operation with every chopper in range flying round the clock. You should have seen it.”
“But in the middle of all of that, the only thing I could think about was what was going to come at us in the night. I checked in on Tyrice at lunch. He was on the main floor of the library with the other wounded. Frank was with him, and they were talking through what had happened. As Frank told it, we had faced down the advance wave, but more were coming. An army was advancing inland from the Hudson Bay. They were traveling down the Nelson River and to Lake Winnipeg. The creatures were pushing against the current the whole way. From Lake Winnipeg they had connected up with the Red River and were moving south toward us. Tyrice and I listened as Frank explained the situation. I remember feeling sick to my stomach and dead tired. I didn’t have anything left. I caught Tyrice’s look and saw him working at things. He had this deep furrow in his brow for a long time, and then the tension shifted to creases around his eyes. I remember thinking ‘now there is a man who has made up his mind.’ I could tell it hurt him just to breath, but he forced himself to stand. He said, ‘you got my word, professor, we’re gonna’ hold.’”
“He asked me to ferry him to the edge of the flood plane, where he stumbled to a Humvee and left. He came back three hours later with eight military cargo trucks from the air base and nearly one hundred airmen. They set up a front and rear ammo dump, corner machine gun nests, the sandbag wall was lined with razor wire. The Captain coordinated mortar support from the upper levels of the library. There were tractors loaded with sandbags that could rapidly repair a breach in the flood wall, and the inner area bristled with airmen carrying M16 rifles. As the sun fell, I surveyed the fortifications and realized we were really and truly ready for a war, and yet I wondered if we were actually up to it.”
“That night, and the thirteen nights that followed were a literal hell. The night skies blazed with tracer bullets and screamed with mortar fire. The waters about the library popped and sprayed with ordnance. Yet the constant roar of munitions could not drown out the croaks and barks of dozens of creatures—sounds blurring together into a sakata-esque buzz. The waters about the barricade would roil with their movements. The smaller creatures would charge the barricade in pairs. The first would throw itself on the razor wire while the second would charge over the top of its partner. Usually we could neutralize the first by the time the second tore itself free from the razor wire and joined the melee. The larger of the creatures would rocket from the water, clearing the wall and landing among us. When we were lucky, we would catch one of the big ones in the air with a mortar. If they landed, you had to get low and get back. The spines on their arms would slice a man in half. Kevlar could stop the cut, but the blow would collapse a human ribcage. By the third night those of us in the inner ring had abandoned rifles in favor of long pikes tipped with iron and side arms. On the eighth night they tore open a section of the sandbag wall. The tractors closed the gap within a minute, but we were fighting in ten inches of water. The strategy of get low and get back when a huge fish frog man landed was suddenly very dangerous. The water made us slow and it was easy to get pushed under and disoriented.”
“On the tenth day, the waters began to pull back from the library. You may have heard people talk about the rainbow. That was the day, we were able to set up four additional machine gun nests out further from the library, which created a massive kill zone. They only tried three more times after that. When it was clear we had the upper hand, the waters began to recede more quickly. We lost 37 airmen, one professor, and two of my police officers. I honestly don’t know if we managed to kill any of them. We never recovered a body. Either they retrieved their dead or their dead revived enough to slither back to the water. My one regret is that we never staked one of those fish-faced fuckers to the earth as evidence of what we were facing. When it was all done, the only thing we were left with was a library full of dead and dying men and about 10 million worth of military equipment—used up or broken.”
“On May 3rd a Department of Defense investigator arrived. He took testimony from the survivors. I gave my testimony on May 10th and recommended that Captain Tyrice Clark receive a silver star for heroism. I told the investigator how he had single handedly tackled a fish creature that first night and suffered horrible wounds, and that he had made good on his promise to hold. On May 11th Captain Clark was arrested by military police. They allowed him to plead insanity. He was facing 30 years in a military prison, but he opted for a lifetime in an asylum somewhere. I expected an inquiry regarding my involvement in the battle of the Chester Fritz, but it never came. The whole thing sort of disappeared. The national story was the flood, and if a handful of people died fighting fires and flood and rescuing little old ladies from nursing homes, well, that was enough.
Andrea realized her jaw had fallen open at the unjust turn of events. “So that is it?” she asked in disbelief. “The air force shuffled Tyrice off to an insane asylum and everything went back to normal?”
Norm nodded. “That is about it.” A few seconds passed before he added “well, I had a beer a couple years ago with one of the airmen who fought with us. He told me that his wife works on nuclear security for the Department of Energy. Apparently, there was a panic in late May 1997 because the Navy unexpectedly detonated a high yield nuclear bomb off the coast of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. He thought it might be related. The time-line works, but its hard to see how an underwater detonation near Massachusetts would connect to what we saw here.”
Andrea frowned, “I honestly don’t know what to say. I was expecting some insight into the Zylka case, but this is…I don’t know.”
Norm broke from his patrol loop and began heading south on Washington Ave. “I honestly don’t know what happened to Frank.” Norm said. “He was a friend, and it tears me up that he died that way.
Something was very, very wrong. The police officer in me wants to set things right, but that isn’t exactly my job. We leave justice up to you folks with the city. Our job is to keep the peace, but we do that a bit differently than you all. Some things need to look normal even when it’s all gone completely insane. It’s a different take on keeping the peace—helping people to just live their lives without worrying about all the crazy stuff going on.”