Maxim Darko: The Greatest Gift of Evil. A Vampire Chronicle

EPILOGUE THE REEPERBAHN LAIR

Whoomph! Sounds of sea waves splashing on a harbor wall began to bring Maxim out of his coma. He foggily thought. Was I dreaming of a harbor? He focused his mind and started the process to bring his body out of the coma. As his scales slowly retreated, his senses recovered. When the final scales slid away from his nose, he smelled salt air. The sounds of ships and cargo being moved, entered his ears. I wasn't dreaming. With a sense of urgency, his mind raced through his options. Which ocean did the truck drive to? Oceans are good. The whole world is open...but a ship is also a jail. An easy place to get cornered and captured. With an abrupt thump, the truck came to a stop.

Maxim decided to keep the translucent darker scales deployed over his body. A dark-skinned man would easily blend in at any major port city. Craning his neck, he scanned the area underneath the truck for feet. Not seeing any sign of humans, he released himself from the under-carriage of the truck, and rolled out from beneath it. In one smooth motion, that only a very observant person would have noticed, Maxim rolled to a standing position. And immediately picked up the brisk pace of a dock worker. He pulled his collar up against the cold of the sea mist, and for the first few minutes, kept his head down.

When he felt sure he had not attracted any unwanted attention, he raised his head to survey his surroundings. Large cargo ships were lined up along a quay. Five-story tall cranes, magnetically lifted, large metal sea-land cargo containers from trucks onto the ships. Like a finely choreographed ballet, dock workers swarmed around the trucks, and ships.

To the south, he saw a farm of numerous cylindrical white oil storage tanks. The writing on a ship next to him read: Hyundai. I'm definitely not in Korea. He shifted his gaze to some brick buildings on the landward side of the harbor. A large sign read:

PORT OF HAMBURG, GERMANY

Immediately he knew where to hide. The Reeperbahn District of Hamburg. A red-light, organized-crime infested, section of the city, used for centuries by men trying to hide from the law. Modernization had only glossed over the filth that lay beneath the street. It was the perfect hideout for him to re-gain his strength, and to organize a concerted hunt for Mustafa and his clan.