Fortress of the Dead

by Chris Roberson

  Now it was Curtis’s turn to treat her to a blank stare.

  “It’s like my Chester always used to say,” she went on, “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”

  “Lady,” Curtis said with a snorting laugh, “what the heck are you babbling about?”

  Sibyl shook her head sadly, like a teacher disappointed with a student who had done poorly on an exam because he’d failed to study and prepare properly. “Simply that there is a threshold beyond which a congruence of unlikely connections cannot simply be dismissed as coincidence, and the only rational course is to consider whether there might be some greater meaning, or some larger force at work.”

  “What, like the devil made ’em do it?” Curtis chuckled. “Because if so, I’ve gotta say that I’m kind of flattered. I wouldn’t have bet that we’d be worth the attention.”

  “I’m not talking about any particular dogma or doctrine,” Sibyl shot back, “simply that there is meaning to existence that sometime reveals itself in unexpected ways and…”

  “Enough already, y’all,” the sergeant called back from the head of the line, sounding annoyed. “Less talking, and more walking.”

  “But sergeant,” Jun began to protest, not yet having found the opportunity to steer the conversation back to the more pressing questions surrounding the stories of the Alpine Redoubt. She did not dispute the fact that the idea of potential coordination or even direction amongst the movements of the Dead was worth discussing, but not when it so quickly devolved into one of Sibyl and Curtis’s customary debates about nihilism, meaning, and humanity’s place in an uncaring world—variations of which Jun had heard countless times in the months that she had been serving with the Englishman and the young American. “What about…?”

  “No buts, kid,” the sergeant shot back with note of finality to his voice. “Keep your eyes peeled for any Dead bastards, and keep chatter to a bare minimum.”

  And so Jun fell in line as the squad and the refugees under their protection continued to march south along the main road, as the sun rose slowly in the slate grey skies above.

  Chapter 6

  JUN AND THE rest of the squad were used to long marches through varying terrain and unreliable weather, but the refugees were civilians whose reserves had already doubtless been sorely tested by their long and stressful flight down out of the mountains. And while none of the refugees had complained about fatigue or hunger, clearly eager to put as much distance between themselves and any Dead who might still be pursuing them from the north, it was clear that the journey was beginning to take its toll.

  So in the early afternoon, not too long after the sun had crested its zenith and begun sinking once more towards the western horizon, the sergeant called the column to a halt and ordered a thirty-minute-long rest. They would not be stopping long enough to set up a defensive perimeter, but instead he had the squad positioned on a low rise above the defile where he had asked the refugees to shelter, from which vantage Jun and the others could see the approaches from all four sides.

  As the refugees passed around canteens and snacked on emergency supplies, the squad rested in the shade of a looming cypress tree, their weapons close at hand.

  “Now, Werner, about this Alpine Fortress?” the sergeant said, finally returning to the topic that had been biting at Jun’s curiosity since the night before. “You said that maybe the last war wasn’t as finished as we thought?

  Judging from the expressions on the faces of Sibyl and Curtis, it was clear that they shared Jun’s burning interest as the three of them turned their attention from the sergeant to the German soldier sitting across from him.

  “And that there was something in the refugees’ account of what they’d experienced that suggested a level of coordination among the Dead?” the sergeant added. “Care to explain what you meant by that?”

  Werner was eating potted meat from a tin, and finished chewing before answering, holding up one finger to signal for a moment’s pause. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, took a long swig from his canteen, and then turned to meet the collective gaze of his four squad mates.

  “Because that is what these poor unfortunates told me,” he said simply, nodding in the direction of the refugees sitting huddled in the low depression that stretched behind the rise where the squad was perched. “They come from all over the Alps, as you might well have guessed from the welter of languages and accents in which they speak. Many of them fled south into the mountains from the foothills in Switzerland and France in the weeks and months following the rise of the Dead, seeking to find some refuge in the higher elevations. But there they encountered families of survivors fleeing down from the mountains to the east.”

  He paused, and pointed out a small knot of refugees sitting slightly apart from the others, looking a little more haggard and world-weary than the rest.

  “These were residents in a remote Alpine village high in the Swiss Alps. They came with stories of seeing the German army moving large convoys into the mountains beginning in the winter of 1944. A small army of Waffen-SS officers and Hitler Youth led by an SS colonel, escorting dozens upon dozens of trucks. Engineers constructed what sounds like a sort of makeshift funicular railroad, with cables and tracks ferrying carts heavily laden with crates of ammunition, weapons and food up the side of the highest peaks themselves, to some kind of base that was kept carefully hidden from the view of anyone below. Then the funicular railroad was disassembled after it had carried the SS officers and Hitler Youth up to the peak, like a man pulling a rope ladder up after himself after reaching his destination, and the trucks were driven back down out of the mountains and never seen again. The villagers kept careful watch to see whether any of the officers or their young charges ever came back down the mountain again, but none of them were ever seen again.”

  Werner paused, his jaw tightening.

  “Until the day that Plan Z was enacted,” he added, “and the villagers saw the first of the Dead who came down off of the mountaintops and attacked the village.”

  Jun glanced around the circle at the other members of the squad, and saw that they were as intrigued and confused as she herself felt. A small army ascending a mountain to wait out the end of the fall of the military command? That was not too difficult to believe. And they all knew too well how it had gone the day that the enemy dead had risen from their graves, animated by some unholy rites carried out by Hitler and his lackeys in the Ahnenerbe, the Nazis’ occult society. But was there some connection between the two?

  “You said something about coordination or even control,” the sergeant responded.

  Werner nodded, taking another long swig of water from his canteen. If Jun didn’t know better, she would be tempted to think that the canteen actually held stronger spirits instead, schnapps or brandy, the way that the German soldier seemed eager to use it to settle his uneasy nerves.

  “The people of the village were convinced that the Nazis on the mountaintop were sending the Dead out into the world to do their bidding. Understand, they were more or less completely cut off from the lowlands by this point, and when the undead first approached them from the direction that they had seen the Waffen-SS officers and the Hitler Youth ascending, the connection seemed obvious to them. But even after they encountered refugees fleeing upland and away from the low country that the Dead were already overrunning, the villagers continued to insist that the undead who plagued them were being directed in some way by the Nazis from on high. And the lowland refugees who had joined them as they fled together south and west through the Alps? They came to share the villagers’ views.”

  Werner glanced again at the refugees seated below, and Jun could see a look of sympathy and perhaps even pity flickering across his face before he turned back to the squad to continue. And was that something like guilt that Jun could see twisting Werner’s mouth into a frown? Considering how even-handedly he’d talked about making widows of so many woman like Sibyl during the campaigns in North Afri
ca, evidencing no sign of guilt for the lives he’d taken on the battlefield, was it possible that he might be taking some personal responsibility for whatever hardships had befallen the refugees? Men, women, and children whom he’d never met before the day before, fleeing from undead horrors of precisely the sort that Werner had dedicated himself to eradicating as a member of a Resistance deadhunter squad. Jun wasn’t sure, but it certainly looked to her as if Werner seemed to be taking the refugees’ circumstances personally in a way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  Perhaps that was why Werner had not spoken again about the Alpine Fortress through the hours of the night and the first half of the day, until prompted to do so once more by the sergeant when they finally paused for a break? Was he somehow reluctant to explain what his earlier cryptic statements had meant?

  “The refugees were not simply fleeing from the Dead,” Werner continued after a long pause, “they were being pursued by the Dead. Do you see the difference? We have all of us encountered countless shambling obscenities in the course of our duties, and I am certain you would agree that they are little more than unholy appetite given form and movement. The Dead hunger after the flesh or souls, or whatever you will, of the living, and it is this that drives them, but there is no true agency in their actions. Put another living body in between yourself and a Dead who is advancing on you, and the Dead will go after the nearer and easier of the prey one hundred percent of the time. But the horde of Dead which came down off of that mountain and attacked the villagers? They continued to pursue the villagers who survived long enough to flee, up and over the mountain passes and down south through the foothills, long past the point where any other undead that we have encountered would have broken off in favor of easier prey.”

  “Maybe the pickings up there were just slim,” the sergeant put in, the first of the squad to interrupt Werner’s account in several long moments. Jun realized that it was the longest unbroken speech that she had heard from the German soldier since they had first started serving together, months before. “They kept on pursuing the refugees from the village because there wasn’t any other dining options on the go up there.”

  Werner shook his head.

  “The refugees say that at one point a large herd of Alpine ibex crossed their path—mountain goats, outnumbering the refugees by nearly two to one. The refugees were sure that this would prove to be their salvation, if they could keep the herd between themselves and the pursuing Dead. Surely the Dead would be drawn to the burning life force or the ibex, or their lifeblood, or heat and warmth or whatever else it is that they crave from the living. But no. The Dead scarcely noticed the mountain goats, but waded right through the herd, batting them aside as they continued in their pursuit of the refugees without deviation or pause.”

  “Do the Dead even eat goats?” Curtis saw the sharp look that Sibyl was shooting in his direction, and he added, “I mean, have you ever seen one of those walking maggot factories eating a goat, lady?”

  Sibyl crossed her arms over her chest, her nose in the air.

  “Maybe it’s a species thing,” Curtis went on. “If a goat were to come back as one of the undead, would it hunger after the flesh of living goats instead of humans?”

  “I’m fairly certain that ibexes are herbivores,” Sibyl said without making eye contact with him, as though reluctant to engage on the American’s level but unable to prevent herself correcting what she perceived as a flaw in his reasoning.

  “We all saw those undead bastards tear their way through a whole damn herd of cattle in an afternoon at that ranch in Lombardy last month,” the sergeant replied, “so I’m pretty sure a Dead bastard with an appetite ain’t about to draw the line at mountain goat.”

  “When have you ever seen one of the Dead without an appetite?” Jun chimed in, but quickly turned her attention back to Werner, who had remained silent through the exchange. “So the refugees believe that the Dead had been sent down out of the Nazis’ secret base in the mountain top to attack them personally?”

  Werner had a far off look in his eyes for a moment, then turned and met Jun’s gaze and nodded slowly.

  “Do they say why?” Jun asked. “Why is that they think that the Nazis wish to see them dead… these villagers in particular, I mean, as well as the other refugees who have fallen in with them?”

  “They believe that it is because they know the rough location of the Alpine Redoubt,” he explained in a low voice, as though worried that the refugees might overhear him. Or perhaps as if worried that someone else would, instead. “They believe that Nazis are conducting their war upon the living from their place of hiding high atop the Alps, and are using the Dead to eliminate anyone who might know the way to reach their secret fortress.”

  “That doesn’t make a lick of sense,” Curtis spat. “If they were covering their tracks why wouldn’t the goose-stepping bastards have murdered the villagers on their way up the mountain in the first place?”

  “The villagers say that while everyone in the region had observed the Nazis moving equipment up the mountain over the course of that winter, only a handful of people living the village had observed the bulk of the Nazi army ascending the mountain on that final day—a group of young villagers who had been out skiing, a hunter returning home, and a game warden on his rounds,” Werner replied. “They had seen the face of the Waffen-SS colonel who led the final complement of men and boys up the mountainside, but they had kept themselves hidden from the colonel’s view, worried to draw his attention lest they invite reprisals. But after the makeshift cable car had been dismantled and the trucks had returned to the lowlands, the villagers were much more open, sharing gossip in the village square about what they had seen, until it was not just the few young skiers, the hunter, and the game warden who knew the identity of the colonel who commanded the secret mountaintop army, but the entire village.”

  Werner took a deep breath and let out a ragged sigh.

  “The villagers believe that they cursed themselves when they first spoke the SS colonel’s name out loud,” he went on. “That they invited doom on themselves and their families in that moment, ensured that the unholy forces of the Nazis would pursue them tirelessly until the ends of the Earth until the last person who knew about the secret Nazi fortress was eliminated.”

  “Sounds like a bunch of hooey to me,” Curtis said with a sneer.

  “I must admit, it does sound unlikely,” Sibyl put in, making eye contact with Werner for the briefest of instants before averting her gaze once more.

  “Nothing I’ve seen since this whole damned mess started makes me think that anything like that could be going on,” the sergeant said, shaking his head slowly. “The Dead get up, they walk around eating whatever they get their hands on and making a powerful mess, and then we come along and put the bastards back in the ground. Ain’t no grand plans or hidden agendas to it, just the living versus the Dead, that’s all.”

  But Jun had spotted something in Werner’s explanation, and seen a pained expression flit across his face once or twice as he had been talking. There was something more that he wasn’t saying. Some vital bit of the story that connected to him personally, in ways that he found painful to consider.

  She thought that she might know what it was.

  “Who is he?” Jun asked, staring hard at Werner’s face. “The Nazi colonel who led the secret army up the mountain, the one whose name said aloud brought doom on the village?”

  Werner’s gaze was on the ground at his feet, and he did not move or speak for long moments after Jun had asked her question.

  Jun looked up and saw the sergeant and the others exchanging glances with raised eyebrows and shrugs. None of them saw quite where Jun was heading with this line of questioning, but she didn’t think this was the time to explain. Better to wait and see if her suspicions were borne out.

  Then Werner slowly lifted his head, and when his eyes met Jun’s she could see that the suspicions she had harbored had been correct.

>   “I was sent to a penal battalion after I shot and killed a member of the SS Ahnenerbe who was carrying out an unholy occult ritual in Carentan. I could not conscience that such a foul creature would be allowed to breath the same air as I, much less serve beneath my country’s flag at my side. I was arrested on the spot, under the orders of that occultist’s superior officer, who was the ranking member of the Waffen-SS on the site. Had I reacted more quickly, I could have put a bullet into his brain as well, and sent him to hell along with the occultist who I had just sent there. Had I been more strategic in my thinking, I would have shot the officer first, since the poor unfortunates who had died on that sacrificial altar were already dying by the time I killed the occultist, and so my bullet would not have brought them back from the brink. Had I shot the officer first, though, perhaps it might have forestalled future deaths. But no, I acted in the heat of the moment and shot the occultist, and the officer who had ordered the ritual in the first place lived to commit still further atrocities while I fought to survive in a penal battalion on the front lines.”

  Werner took a deep breath and blinked slowly.

  “That officer was Standartenführer Hermann Ziegler, a colonel in the Waffen-SS.” He paused, and glanced one last time at the refugees huddled down in the defile. “And it was the same Standartenführer Ziegler who the villagers saw leading the army up to the hidden fortress on the mountaintop.”

  Werner closed his eyes, seeming to retreat within himself for a moment before turning back to the squad and finishing his tale.