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Chapter Twenty-Two

"Now hold on there, She-go!" Will went stomping up to stand toe-to-toe with the ghastly Wendigo. Unfortunately she had attained a size that only permitted him to intimidate her knees. "You're talking about destroying the helicopter carrying my father's body—a body that he's going to want to return to when this is all over!"

As he spoke those words I suddenly found myself wondering if that was actually true. I hadn't had much of a chance to consider my new repository but the flesh and bone seemed reasonably fit, not too old, and—most importantly—free of the necrotic virus that was transforming my old digs into something monstrous and inhuman. Did I want to return to that once this was all over? Of course there was always the question as to whether it would ever be over.

And the question of the original occupant, Hans—or Franz—or who or whatever he was . . . what about his rights to his own flesh and bone? Had he abrogated those rights when he chose to join a different demesne of monsters? And even if I could take unto myself the right and role of judge and jury, how could I cast him out of his own body? It was not something easily undertaken by the willing. Was the alternative, keeping him locked down in the cellar of his own mind, even a viable one?

Maybe the damage was already done, the erosion of the soul sufficiently progressed, that I could even consider taking another man's flesh from him.

"And not just his life," my unborn son was saying, "but the life of the woman he loves!"

Huh?

"Um, wait a minute . . ." I said.

"Do you have a better plan?" the twenty-foot-tall Ghast of the Wild challenged back.

"I think you may be confusing love and lust," I said.

"Well," said Will, "you're really wanting inside the fortress, right?"

"And while I do love her," I said, "it's more of a platonic love—a friendship thing. Not that there aren't overtones of attraction . . ."

"Of course! But, as I have said, every door, every window, every point of egress is marked, at some point, by the sigil of the Whirling Logs, turning in reverse, turning us back. The Ttsilolni is a mark of darkest sorceries in the hands of the Ochkih-Haddä!"

" . . . but it's really your mother that I love. Oh, I know that we haven't been getting along, lately . . ."

"So, if we can find a way to get you and the rest of the AIM Irregulars into the Hitler Hilton, here, you would agree to leave the helicopter alone?" Will pressed.

" . . . but relationships are like that. They're like the tides, they ebb and flow. Sometimes they go out and leave you stranded on the beach . . ."

"And how do you propose to do that?" Wendigo asked.

" . . . but if you're patient . . . and don't panic . . . the tide always comes back in."

"I'm working on a plan."

"At least it almost always comes back in . . ."

"Will this plan take long?" Wendigo asked, shrinking back down to tête-à-tête size. "I am no general and The People are no coherent army. If they are not given purpose or opportunity soon, they will either depart or wreak havoc on whatever targets are most convenient!"

"Dad!" Will called over his shoulder. "We need to talk!"

"No kidding," I said as we walked toward each other to meet in the middle of a semicircle of Native American Guardian Spirits. "About your mother and me—"

"I know there's a lot that you don't understand, Dad," he said, steering me away from the helipad and over toward the edge of the plateau. "And after this is all over we can sit down and I can try to help you understand some things. But for right now we gotta focus on the task at hand. How do we pull a This Old House and do a Bob Vila on all the swastikas inside Nazis-R-Us?"

Right.

I wasn't going to save Deirdre—or Lupé, for that matter—standing around and dithering over where my emotional loyalties lay. I turned my mind over and gave it a little shake and, like a mental Etch A Sketch, it was cleared and ready for action. Even in a new body, freed from the progress of the virus, my emotions were becoming easier to discard.

"We need a way to remove the swastikas from some of the entry points to the fortress," I repeated.

Will nodded. "But not just some entry points. Once inside, there are so many places our, um . . ." he looked back at the profusion of grotesque shapes and forms, " . . . troops would not be able to go without a complete scouring of the fortress' interior."

I nodded. "There could be hundreds."

"Thousands . . ."

I shook my head. "I don't think so. Mengele was—is—a narcissist. I don't think he's all about bringing Hitler back or rebuilding the former glory of the Third Reich. I think it's all about Mengele Without End, Amen. Any trappings of the Nazi Party are about structure and control for the loyalties of his minions." I rolled my eyes. "Jesus! First I'm talking about Nazis and now I'm using the word 'minions.' I've really got to get myself a secret decoder ring sometime soon!"

"Still, hundreds of Nazi stop signs are still a lot of scutwork before General Wendy can give the order to attack."

I stuck my hands in my pockets and stomped my feet. I had forgotten the frailties of untransformed flesh and the numbing cold was taking its toll. "If we start now, we could run a sweeping action ahead of the troops, clearing the obstacles as the fighting moves from room to room."

"Except these bodies are likely to be the first casualties in any confrontations," Will countered.

"What about noncorporeal mine-sweeping?"

"Ala a little poltergeist activity?" He considered. "Unless you're a young, adolescent spirit, in the throes of an emotional rage, you're not going to be able to sustain the ectoplasmic cohesion to deface or ruin enough swastikas to clear a couple of rooms, much less three or more levels."

"So, we'd need an army."

Will nodded. "Preferably an army of adolescent spirits who could muster the psychic rage to tear through this abomination and break the power of every single symbol of Nazi hatred and darkness they could find."

I tried to smile: there was still hope for us here in the cold, howling darkness where one man's evil had outlived generations of mankind's justice. But there was a catch in my throat and my eyes rimmed with frost as I turned to my unborn son and said: "Time to take out the Eurotrash. I know where you can find such an army . . ."

* * *

The helicopter was coming in low so there wasn't enough time to diagram a detailed plan. We trotted back to the helipad with more of a sketchy theory and tried to present it to Wendigo as if we totally knew what we were doing.

She glared at us with black-rimmed, fire pit eyes. "You are mad, of course! But then the Human tribes of The People have always recognized that the mad are often god-touched and sacred." She turned to Will. "Where is this place you must go to?"

"Brzezinka."

"Is it far?"

"Halfway around the world," I answered. "So he'd better get going."

"Oh, I thought I'd stick around for a few more minutes and see if I can cut the odds a little. After all, I've got the easy job: single-handedly raising an army." He pulled back the slide on his H&K. "You have to single-handedly hold one off until I get back."

"More like keep 'em confused."

Wendigo snorted. "At last a use for your natural talents."

Despite the downward wash of the descending copter's rotor blades, a wind sprang up, swirling around us and rising upwards. Wendigo shredded into a thousand dark ribbons and disappeared into the night air.

"I think she likes you," he said, punching my shoulder.

"What? No!"

"Aw, c'mon, Dad. The old Cséjthe charm—maybe I'll inherit it someday. Get me some girlie monsters to make goo-goo eyes at me . . ."

"Just remember that after you're born you'll be completely helpless and at my mercy for a number of years to come."

He grinned. "Jeez, you're contemplating child abuse and I'm not even born, yet."

"Think I can be abusive? Maybe I'll get you a baby sister to really make your formative years a living hell!"

His eyes turned sad and deep. "Maybe a baby step-sister . . ."

And the helicopter was drowning out any further conversation as it settled down just forty feet away. The cargo door slid open even before the engines were cut.

It was absolutely the wrong move to make under the circumstances but I instinctively reached for my son to give him a farewell hug. Fortunately he was already moving, ducking his head, and headed toward the chopper to assist with the unloading. I followed, a cold pit of dread starting to open in my borrowed stomach as I anticipated what would come next.

There were two stretchers. Deirdre and I were both securely strapped and buckled down. Although they had discarded their hospital garb it wasn't difficult to pick out the pair of docs since they were sticking close to their patient/cargoes and flanked by Theresa "Scraps" Kellerman and Ilse "The Red Bitch of Buchenwald" Koch wearing Gretchen's cloned flesh.

Some of the other commandos and flight crew might have been clones, as well, but it was hard to tell in this light. I wasn't sure if Mengele would use replicants for grunt work but, if he was willing to make Ilse Koch into multiple Brides of Frankenstein, there might well be other matched sets of Godonlyknewwhat. The best I could do for now was count heads and note positions. My main attention was drawn to their hostages and what Will was about to do next.

He had planned to wait until everyone was off the copter. If it turned out to be part of a getaway plan, we didn't want to do anything that would damage the equipment. The pilot and copilot, however, remained on board to go over their post-flight checklists as the rest of the away-team disembarked and began heading for the main entrance.

I led the way, walking as slowly as I dared to delay the procession, while Will positioned himself to the rear. These guys were probably good but they were tired after a long flight and not expecting an ambush on their home doorstep. Three bursts of automatic weapons fire took down four of them before I could turn around and the rest could react.

Two more fell as the stretchers were dropped and offensive measures were taken by the survivors.

Will was at a devastating disadvantage, now. He couldn't move to the helicopter for cover—we might need it later. He had to choose his targets carefully lest he hit Deirdre or myself—or Hans/me, for that matter. And there was no place to run to with a thousand-foot drop-off just thirty yards behind him.

He fired another burst and caught one of the two Mengele brothers, spinning him around to fall on top of me. The strapped-down-on-the-stretcher me, that is.

"What are you doing, fool?" Ilse screeched at me. "Choot him! Choot him!"

I brought my Heckler & Koch up and fired a burst over Will's head while stepping to the side to give him a clear return shot. He took it and the Red Bitch turned the color of her nickname as she flew backwards and went down.

The great doors behind us began to open, signaling the arrival of reinforcements and now the pilot and copilot were coming, pistols drawn, attempting a flanking action. Will fired one last burst through the opening doors and then turned and ran. He dropped his gun as he reached the precipice, spread his arms, and launched himself into space like Peter Pan taking his leave from Wendy Darling's bedroom window. He must have soared some fifteen feet before both darkness and gravity claimed him.

If he made any sound before hitting the rocks a thousand feet below, it was lost in the sudden roar of an express-train wind. Pushed back toward the entrance, the rest of us turned and fled before an invisible storm, retreating to the madness within the mountain.

* * *

The Mengele version who entered the detention facilities looked as though he were pushing fifty, a trim and vigorous fifty. And something else. Something vaguely reptilian lurked about his eyes and mouth. And something of the stalking panther resonated in his gait and movements.

I sat up a little straighter and, for the umpteenth time, tested the handcuffs that locked Hans' left wrist to the chair arm.

Mengele II pulled a chair out, reversed it, and sat astraddle, leaning forward on its back some five feet away. He did not speak but continued to stare at me the way a kid would study a spider caught in a glass jar.

As he studied me, I studied him. If this was the dangerous one—the clone they had attempted to enhance through psychological conditioning—I had to wonder what had they actually done to him. How do you duplicate an intellect capable of murdering four hundred thousand men, women, and children? How could his childhood have been processed to produce a doppelganger of the monster that used hundreds of children like lab rats for sadistic experiments, atrocities that did nothing to further the cause of science or German superiority?

And then ratchet up those traits to higher levels of "efficiency?"  

The fading, human scraps and snippets of my soul still shrank from the necessities of killing, even in a righteous cause. But this guy had the look of an infectious disease: he could probably make the Pope rethink his positions on abortion and gun control given a short audience in a soundproofed room. And now his cold, soulless stare was boring into my own eyes.

"Hey, Joey, take a picture; it lasts longer." I didn't have time to play "made you look away" with Death Angel, Jr.

"What happened out there?" he asked quietly.

"Hell, I don't know. Ole Franz went Rambo. Ask anyone." I raised a mental glass: Confusion to the enemy . . .

He shook his head. "I meant before. I did a quick review of the security videos. You were outside and were attacked by a wolf. Then you got up and it followed you inside like a faithful dog. Then Franz reports that the wolf attacks him before it is killed. Both of you have behaved strangely since then."

"You get attacked by a wolf and see how strangely you act right afterward." The answer was borderline rote and pro forma: there was no way I was talking my way out of the handcuffs with this guy.

"Who are you?" he asked. "Really?" He was no dummy.

"Mossad, you Kinderfucker! Israeli Intelligence knows where you are, now, and your hours are numbered!"

He didn't blink. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a large, folding buck knife and unfolded it with careful deliberation.

"Did you hear me? I said 'hours', not 'days!'"

He nodded and said, "Karl . . ."

The security goon who'd been standing behind me suddenly grabbed my free arm by the wrist. It was like being locked in an iron vise.

"I am going to ask you a series of questions," he continued quietly, "and every time I don't like your answer, I am going to shorten a finger by one joint. Understood?"

I had hoped to lure someone in close enough to bloody a nose. Now that was patently impossible. I hadn't signed up for Advanced Pain and Mutilation, either, and I wasn't about to stick around and audit the course. I banged around the interior of my borrowed skull a couple of times and shot back out into the ether. Perhaps, I thought as I exited through the wall, poor Hans would be well out of it, still crouching and whimpering down under the cellar stairs of his hindbrain.

But the screaming started before I was halfway down the hall. And the closed door did little to muffle Hans' bewildered protestations and howls for mercy.

Object lesson for the squeamish and irresolute: mercy begets mercy. But when you swim with the sharks, payback's a bitch.

Something I'd do well to remember if I ever made it back to New York.  

* * *

It took me close to an hour to find my own body.

I had to search two levels and a half-dozen clinics and ORs before stumbling across the green-tiled theater where they'd stashed my mortal remains. It—I—lay on the stainless steel table, secured by two simple straps. The sheet was pulled back to the waist and I contemplated my waxy appearance like a talent scout for Madame Tussaud's. I needed an astringent. A loofah wouldn't hurt . . .

But I was really looking for two things.

First, a hint of the animus. Some sign of a Divine Spark to indicate premises weren't totally vacated. But I looked dead. Not peaceful. Not sleeping nor in repose. Not even a hint of nobility or any other indication of character seemed stamped on my slackened visage.

I was gone.

The question was was I gone for good?

This brought me to the other thing. I looked for the heart's fire and saw only ashes upon the hearth. Looked for spinning chakras and found only entropy.

That left only one, sure ingress: blood.

A wound, an injury, an entry point. An IV needle clumsily inserted might have done the trick. But no one had come along, yet, to hook me up. Hello? A little service here for Mengele's Holy Grail, please! 

Apparently they had something going on. Scanners passed back and forth over me like upended Xerox machines and sensors were affixed to my epidermis like computerized checkpoints for the bank of computers along the wall. A variety of monitors were displaying a variety of readouts and a cursory glance suggested some kind of biotech programming was in progress. I looked back at my body. Nanobots? The Wonder Twins had injected something into my heart and my brain back in the hospital room. Were they reprogramming thousands of microscopic machines now awash in my blood and tissues?

Maybe this wasn't the time to zip up in my wetware suit and go lumbering around in a castle full of armed Nazis. But it did seem like a good idea to go find some kind of solidity and get back here before any more alterations were accomplished with my flesh! I considered the two tough-looking guards inside the room with me. Popped into the outer corridor and contemplated the second pair stationed right outside the door. Nope. Gotta thin the ranks a little. Even the odds. Balance the scales. In other words, FUBAR Brut Adler.

And, to do that, I needed blood.

Funny how some issues dog you well into the afterlife and I had a regular theme going on here. I hunted the hall, nearly making a complete circuit before opting up the next staircase and trying another level.

I hit pay dirt ten doors later in a sickbay area that was more clinic than surgical facility. Two members of the away-team were perched on the examining table being treated for superficial gunshot wounds, arm and leg respectively. Sizing both up, I opted for the one-armed guy—I needed to move about and too many areas of the complex weren't wheelchair accessible.

A hop, a twist, and a little "Johnny, may I cross your red, red bloodstream" put me inside. No time for niceties: I elbowed the resident psyche out of the way and tried to hop off the table. The good news was they had already administered some kind of morphine so the arm wasn't hurting as bad as it should. The bad news: they had already administered some kind of morphine so the rest of my new body wasn't working as well as it should.

It all worked out for the best, though: the nurse who stepped in to catch me got my elbow in her face and staggered back with a bloody nose.

Sorry, hon, but I may need another getaway vehicle . . .

The weapons were stacked in the corner and, as I made my way toward them I noticed a couple of valves protruding from the wall. I opened the one marked "Sauerstoff" and, as pure oxygen began to hiss into the room, I heard the door open behind me. As I scooped up a handgun an all-too-familiar voice asked: "What are you doing?" I looked back over my shoulder. Sure enough, a blood-speckled Mengele II stood on the threshold, a security goon at his side. "Stop!" he commanded. "Drop your weapon!"

This wasn't looking so good all of a sudden. My hastily conceived plan—short on detail, long on improvisation—depended on the elements of surprise and confusion. For them, not for me, unfortunately.

"Sergeant, shoot that man!" he ordered.

I dropped behind the exam table before he could get his rifle up but I was deep in trouble, already. Mengele Junior was no dummy and he was already watching the rest of his men for suspicious behavior. And while I lucked out this time and got a "right-handed" body to match my own orientation, it was the right arm that was all chewed up and practically useless. Furthermore, I was in a box—a box that everyone else was starting to exit—and the call had doubtlessly gone out for more reinforcements. I raised the pistol in my shaky left hand and considered my options. Stick my head up and probably get it blown off? Keep my head down and fire blindly over the tabletop?

I went with option three: I put three bullets into the wall before the fourth hit the opened oxygen nozzle and turned a four-room complex into a phoenix pyre that flipped its own fiery bird at Mengele Redux.

Fire alarms were blaring their klaxon distress calls throughout the complex as I exited the large, charcoal briquette I had spent all of ninety seconds possessing. I drifted through the flames and three more walls before reentering the corridor and resuming my search for another host body.

Brut Adler was looking less and less like an eagle's nest and more and more like an anthill someone had kicked over. Personnel swarmed through the hallways, some fleeing the fire, others moving toward it with firefighting gear. Thirty seconds of mind-surfing the human currents and I retreated to another office and resumed my search away from the confusing kaleidoscope of mental chatter.

Office, office, closet, storeroom, lab, storeroom . . . Bingo: another OR! Or, rather, the viewing gallery for an operating theater one floor below.

Theresa Kellerman lay across the operating table, a cross-stitch pattern of bullet wounds marking her own, borrowed flesh from right armpit to left hip. And she was screaming.

Not in pain but in annoyance. "I don't want an anesthetic! I don't need an anesthetic! The last time you knocked me out for reattachment, you cross-wired two of my fingers!" Her voice had an unnatural, electronic sound and there appeared to be a modified vocoder taped across her throat. "I need to be awake this time to make sure all of the nerve endings are matched properly! When we're done I'll have a permanent body and no one's going to screw it up on my watch!"

I leaned forward for a better look, pressing my palms to the slanted observation glass. No sign of Deirdre anywhere below. About the time I realized that my "palms" were insubstantial it was already too late to recover. I continued the "lean" into a horizontal skydiver's pose, dropping forward and down into the operating room.

Onto the table.

Into Theresa Kellerman!

Her flesh was like a dry sponge, thirsty for spiritual essence: it sucked me in like that paper towel that bills itself as "the quicker picker-upper." I had a new body if I wanted it.

Well, why not? She was doubtless part of the inner circle. Why not see what kind of havoc I could create wearing her identity? Plus, they couldn't very well go ahead with the head swap while I was hijacking the donee. Or would Terry-call-me-T be considered the donor? Come on, Cséjthe; focus! Plenty of time to muse after the dust settles. I shook my head and was rewarded with a most peculiar sensation.

In fact there was a whole lotta peculiar sensations. Every new body was a different experience, though I was getting faster and more intuitive at mastering the process with each new "jump." But this latest insertion felt—well—wrong in a way I couldn't quite pinpoint.

Movement seemed difficult. I tried to sit up and convulsed more than actually moved. I wrenched myself up with a major effort on the second try and the doctor and two nurses standing across from the table staggered back. A nurse started to scream. The other nurse joined her—no, that was the doctor! He was a better screamer than she was.

Theresa Kellerman was screaming, too. Her high-pitched keening sounded especially eerie through the electronic filter of the vocoder. Time to send her to the mental cellar. I rummaged around in my skull but couldn't find her. Not even down in the dark depths of the hindbrain.

I lowered my feet to the floor and carefully placed a little weight on my right foot. My legs felt sleepy and unresponsive and I had to lurch a little to make the position. Everyone else took a step back. One of the nurses grabbed a scalpel. The other snatched up a metal instrument tray, scattering dozens of implements, and then held it before her like a shield. The doctor threw up a gloved hand to his white-capped brow and shrieked: "It's alive! Alive!"

I took a faltering step. This body had a lower center of gravity, being a woman with the typical hips configuration, and I was having a little more difficulty than usual in finding my balance.

The nurse with the scalpel threw it. Maybe she had "carney knife-thrower" listed somewhere on her resume. In any event, it landed blade-first in my left breast. There was some wetness and I was suddenly three cup sizes smaller on that side. I pulled the scalpel out as the nurse bugged for the door and the doctor fainted. Then I reached over and cupped my remaining breast. Implants. Based on the runoff I'd guess saline rather than silicone.

The other nurse was backing toward the door, still holding the stainless steel tray up like it would protect her.

Protect her from what? I mean, I might be worried if I saw Theresa Kellerman coming toward me—we had a "history," after all. But all this abject terror? Maybe it was the expression on "our" face. Was I doing something to appear particularly ferocious? If so, I needed to practice more: I had a whole castle of Nazis to spook into submission.

I took another step. And then another.

The tray moved, trying to stay between me and the whimpering woman who kept shuffling backwards. As I came closer I could catch glimpses of my reflection, a little distorted and wavy, and very brief as the tray trembled and shook in her white-knuckled grasp.

Finally I was close enough to reach out and grab it, myself. At that point she relinquished her hold and ran screaming from the room. I let her go. I was more interested in my reflection. I turned the tray this way and that but the results were the same: no particular expression on my face.

No face.

No head.

I turned and looked back at the operating table I had just vacated. Theresa-call-me-Terry-call-me-T's head was still there, still screaming through her vocoder. I dropped the tray and reached up to feel the space just above my shoulders: nothing was there.

I felt a ghostly smile where my head poked out of Kellerman's corpse of crazy-quilt cadaver parts.

Cool.

Very cool!

 

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