Fortress of the Dead

by Chris Roberson

  Now that she had a less restricted view, Jun was able to get a better sense of the layout of the hangar. The rolling doors were to her right, with the chain-and-pulley assembly that she had seen along one side. The floor of the hangar was concrete, and on the far side of the hangar were stacked metal drums of what looked to be gasoline, and a rack of automotive tools in the adjacent corner. Far to her left Jun could see a set of reinforced metal doors that appeared to lead to a corridor beyond, and it was through these that the amplified voice appeared to be issuing.

  To her immediate left was a small control room, with leaded windows reinforced with metal wires that looked out over the hangar floor. The door to this control room stood open, and inside Jun could see a bank of dials and switches and levers. Keeping her Webley at the ready and crouching low, Jun hurried to the open door to the control room. After making certain that it was empty, she slipped inside, and studied the controls. And while her German vocabulary was minimal, she was able to make out the words for “door” and “open” above one of the larger levers.

  Holding her breath, Jun took hold of the lever and eased it up. With an electronic hum and a clanking sound far overhead, the chain-and-pulley began to grind into motion, and the hangar doors slowly inched open.

  Sure that the sound would bring guards rushing at any moment, Jun held the lever in position for only a matter of seconds, just long enough for the bottom edge of the hangar door to lift about three feet up off of the concrete floor. Then she let go and the lever immediately slammed back into the off position.

  Then she slipped back out of the control room and crouched low in the corner, her Webley trained on the reinforced metal doors in the wall to her left. If guards came rushing in to investigate the sound of the opening door while Jun’s squad mates were still slipping inside, she would at least be in a position to cover them long enough for them to take up defensive positions and defend themselves.

  But by the time the sergeant and the others were through the three-foot gap beneath the bottom of the rolling door and at Jun’s side, the reinforced metal doors had remained closed, and the only sound she could hear was that of the amplified voice from the other side.

  “Good work, kid,” the sergeant said in a quiet voice as he handed Jun’s boots back to her. Jun holstered her revolver and then sat down, pulling on one boot and then the other, wincing as she tightened the laces over her injured ankle, trying to ignore the icy traceries of pain from the cut on her thigh. “Run into any trouble?”

  Jun shook her head as she climbed to her feet, and then accepted her coat and then her weapons and ammunition from Sibyl and Curtis, while the sergeant and Werner kept their guns trained on the metal doors to one side and the partially-open hangar door on the other.

  “Should we close that thing behind us?” Curtis said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the rolling door.

  “Looks like we got lucky and no one heard us coming in, but I don’t want to make any more noise we don’t have to,” the sergeant said, shaking his head. “And besides, could be that we’ll want to make a hasty exit, and it’d be nice not to have to slow down and open it up again, if we did decide to close it.”

  “There is the chance that a patrol outside might notice the light spilling out,” Werner said cautiously, “or that someone in one of the turrets might see it.”

  “That’s a risk we’ll have to take,” the sergeant replied. “’Cause boxing ourselves in here without an easy way back out is an even bigger risk.”

  Jun had finished strapping back on all of her equipment, and took a moment to tie a bandana around the cut on her thigh. It would serve well enough until she had time to dress the wound properly. She only hoped that it didn’t get infected before she had a chance to see to it. Then she hoped that she lived long enough even to need to worry about an infection in the first place. But they had more pressing concerns.

  “Everyone ready to move out,” the sergeant asked, speaking to all of the squad but clearly mostly interested in Jun’s response.

  Jun just nodded in reply, lips pressed tightly shut. She felt a little more secure with the weight of her submachine gun in her hands, to say nothing of the sense of strength in numbers that being back with the squad gave her.

  “Then what are we waiting for, y’all?” The sergeant treated her to a lopsided grin before motioning for the squad to advance. They were headed towards the reinforced metal doors, and whatever lay beyond. “Let’s see what we can see, shall we?”

  Chapter 19

  STEALTH WAS OF the essence at this stage of the operation. Their primary objectives were threefold: to infiltrate the Alpine Fortress; determine whether there was anyone at the site capable of directing the attacks of the Dead forces against the Resistance; and if so, to locate and eliminate that command structure. They had so far managed to accomplish the first objective without meeting active resistance, but as they made their way deeper into the fortress Jun had every expectation that they would encounter enemy elements at any turn. But after checking through the branching corridors on the top level of the structure and then continuing down the stairs to the next highest, they did not meet anyone at all. The upper levels of the fortress appeared to be deserted, though the lights shone in every room and down the full length of every corridor.

  They could hear someone, though. The amplified voice that Jun had heard coming from the other side of the reinforced doors when she first entered the hangar had continued to deliver a lengthy address unabated since they had entered the structure, broadcast through the fortress via a public address system, with speakers mounted high on the walls every dozen paces or so along the corridor. With her limited German she was only able to pick up the occasional word or phrase, but it was clearly an impassioned speech about the noble future of the Reich, with references to the “flower of German youth” and “purity” and “vitality.”

  They were close to finishing their check of the second floor down from the top, and the speech continued to blare from the buzzing speakers overhead.

  “Does that joker ever shut up?” Curtis sneered, jabbing the barrel of his M1 Carbine at the nearest of the loudspeakers.

  “He would have shut up for good,” Werner said in a low voice, a stern expression on his face, “if I’d taken the shot when I still had the chance.”

  Jun and the others stopped and looked back in the German soldier’s direction. He saw their perplexed expression and replied with a curt shrug.

  “This is the bloody-handed bastard,” Werner explained, stretching out his arm and pointing a finger angrily at the speaker, scowling deeply. “The man speaking now is the one I should have killed when I had the chance: Standartenführer Hermann Ziegler.”

  “Nice of you to share that little tidbit,” the sergeant drawled. “Better late than never, I suppose.”

  Werner lowered his hand and tightened his grip on the handle of his MP40, and it seemed to Jun that his expression was uncharacteristically sheepish.

  “Yes, you are right, Herr Sergeant,” he answered, lowering his eyes to the ground. “I should have indicated that our intel that Ziegler was in command of this installation was correct as soon as I recognized his voice when we entered the facility. But I…”

  Werner’s hands had tightened into a white-knuckled grip on his weapon, as though it was a wet cloth that he was attempting to wring the moisture from, eyes flashing darkly as his sheepish expression was replaced by a mask of tightly controlled rage. Jun found it a little unsettling, seeing the typically calm and possessed Werner, always the model of the professional, displaying such naked emotion.

  “At ease, soldier,” Josiah said. “I get it. You have history with the man, and I can respect that. Let’s just stay focused on the mission at hand.”

  Relaxing his grip on the MP40 fractionally, Werner nodded, but the angry expression that lined his face did not seem to soften much at all. Whatever unpleasant memories were currently circling behind those flashing eyes, whatever atrocities Werne
r had witnessed that had been brought back to mind by the sound of the Waffen-SS colonel’s voice over the loudspeaker… Jun could scarcely imagine what horrors they must have been, considering the things that she had seen the German soldier take in stride in their time serving together. And she recognized the unfamiliar glimmers that she saw now flashing across Werner’s face as an appetite for vengeance.

  At the end of the corridor they found another set of stairs leading down to the next floor below. They eased their way down the steps, careful not to make any unnecessary noise, but when they reached the door at the bottom of the stairs they found it locked. There was nothing to be gained by backtracking the way that they’d come, since the only other stairs that they’d passed were the short series of steps leading back up to the top level that they’d originally entered through the doors in the hangar. The locked door was their only means of accessing the rest of the fortress.

  Sergeant Josiah had his hand on his chin, looking thoughtful as he mulled over the possibilities of either shooting through the lock or blowing the door off of its hinges, neither of which seemed particularly likely outcomes to Jun. At best, such an approach would mean that they would alert everyone on the floor beyond of their arrival if they did manage to force the door down in the first place.

  “Here, Josiah dear, let me take a crack at it,” Sibyl said, tapping the sergeant on the shoulder and slipping past him. She bent down to get a better look at the lock in the door, than unbuttoned the flap on the breast pocket of her jacket, and pulled out a small canvas bundle about the size of her outstretched palm. She unrolled the bundle, and pulled out a pair of small metal picks.

  As Sibyl bent down and inserting the first of the picks into the keyhole on the door’s lock, Curtis shook his head, whistling low.

  “Why, Mrs. Beaton, I’m shocked,” the young American said. “A respectable lady like yourself, a garden-variety picklock?”

  “Pshaw, dear boy,” Sibyl said, holding the first pick in place with one hand and then using the other to maneuver the second pick, turning it in some increments as she sought out each of the tumblers in turn. “Nothing garden-variety about my lock-picking abilities. Our Chester learned the trick of it when he was still at Oxford, and needed to break into the locked desk of a teaching assistant to pull off a prank. But Chester always said I took to it much quicker than he ever did. Said it was all down to…”

  There was a final “click” as the last tumbler was twitched into position, and Sibyl smiled as she took hold of the door handle and quietly eased it open.

  “All it takes is a woman’s touch,” she said, smiling sweetly.

  “Good work,” the sergeant said with a nod in her direction, and then stepped past her to move through the now open door. “Look alive, people. We’re bound to run into hostiles sooner rather than later.”

  As Jun and the others followed the sergeant through the door and into the corridor beyond, she immediately sensed a difference from the two floors above. The top two floors of the structure had seemed deserted, had still seemed somehow relatively orderly, as if the people who normally lived or worked in those rooms had simply stepped out for a moment and could return at any time. This new floor, however, was something else entirely.

  There was a sense of wrongness here. The air on this floor had a musty smell to it, and dust motes danced thick as soup through the shafts of light shining down from the lights overhead. And the quality of the light itself was different, seeming to have an unhealthy, sickly quality to it, with a queasy yellowish-green tint. The voice of the Waffen-SS colonel still buzzed from the speakers overhead, but his words here sounded muffled and strained, as if they were being heard underwater or from some great distance.

  “What’s that?” Sibyl said, crouching low as she pointed towards the ceiling a short distance down the corridor.

  Jun spun around, raising the barrel of her submachine gun. But Werner, who had already aimed his Karabiner and taken aim, was relaxing visibly, lowering his rifle’s barrel.

  “It is not a weapon,” he said, indicating the metal cylinder mounted on a swivel where the wall met the ceiling. “It is a camera. Closed circuit, with the imagery feeding to a central control center somewhere in the facility, for security and surveillance. The German army began using them to monitor rocket test launches in Peenemunde during the war. I noticed a few of them placed high on the interior walls of the hangar as we entered, no doubt used to keep watch over the comings and goings of aircraft in the facility remotely.”

  Jun couldn’t tell if Werner intended the tone of superiority that crept into his voice as he explained what the camera was, or if she was hearing something that wasn’t there. As much as he despised what the so-called Führer and the SS cult that followed him had done to Werner’s beloved Fatherland, there were still occasions where one could clearly see the deep-seated pride that Werner still felt for his native country. Perhaps the tension between that deep-seated pride and the shame he felt was the engine that fueled that rage and hunger for vengeance that Jun had seen in his face.

  “Does that mean that someone’s watching us right now?” Curtis asked uncertainly, looking up at the camera with an uneasy expression.

  Werner shrugged. “It is certainly a strong possibility. I would suggest that we err on the side of caution and proceed with the assumption that our presence has been noted, yes.”

  The sergeant motioned for the squad to continue, and they carried on down the corridor. The next set of doors they came to were closed, but on inspection turned out not to be locked. Inside they found a large room filled with metal bunks bolted to the concrete floor, but that was otherwise empty.

  Sibyl had hung back, and was standing beneath the surveillance camera mounted high on the wall, looking up and examining it closely. When the sergeant glanced back and saw that she had stayed behind, he gestured to get her attention.

  “You spot something?” he asked.

  Sibyl pointed at the camera overhead, and then at a bunch of cables that ran from its swivel mount and along the top edge of the wall, continuing down the length of the corridor and then disappearing around a turn.

  “If these cameras do feed to a central control center as suggested,” the Englishwoman observed, taking pains not to mention Werner or even look in his direction, “then surely that’s where these cables lead to, no?”

  Curtis had moved further down the corridor, and stopped beneath another surveillance camera mounted on the wall near a junction with another hallway that branched off to one side. “Looks like the cables from this one are headed in the same direction, sarge.”

  “Good catch, y’all,” the sergeant answered, nodding first in Sibyl’s direction and then towards Curtis. “And it stands to reason that whoever is calling the shots here is either at that command center or can be reached from it. So let’s follow that trail of bread crumbs and see where it leads.”

  They continued down the corridor, following the path of the cables from the surveillance cameras.

  “Sarge,” Curtis said, sounding uneasy, “isn’t the idea to leave a trail of bread crumbs so you can find your way back out of the deep, dark, scary forest?”

  “Listen, kid,” Josiah answered with a sly smile, “you mix your metaphors how you like, and let me mix mine my own self.”

  “Okay,” the young American said with a dramatic sigh, “but don’t come crying to me if we get caught in some damned gingerbread house or some such nonsense.”

  Jun didn’t understand half of what either of them was saying, but didn’t much notice. She was too busy studying their surroundings as they advanced deeper into the structure. The sense of wrongness that had assailed her since they had first reached this floor was only intensifying the farther in they travelled, and the warbling voice of the Waffen-SS colonel droning on from the loudspeakers only served to increase that unease.

  Werner had taken point as they moved through the next juncture where hallways and corridors branched away from one another, and
was following the path of the cameras’ cables as they snaked from one corridor through the next. He pulled up short, motioning the squad to come to an immediate halt with a fist held over his shoulder.

  “I believe that we have found it,” he said simply, and with the barrel of his rifle gestured down one of the wider corridors leading away from the intersection.

  Jun looked, and could see wires snaking along the tops of multiple halls and corridors, all converging in a junction box directly above a heavy reinforced metal door.

  “Let’s open her up and take a look.” Sergeant Josiah motioned for the squad to spread out as they approached. Curtis and Werner took up positions on one side of the door, with the sergeant pressed against the wall on the other side. The sergeant reached over, took hold of the door handle, and gingerly tried to turn it, but while the handle turned freely the door refused to budge. “Locked,” he said in a whisper, and nodded towards Sibyl. “Do your thing.”

  Sibyl knelt down to examine the lock, while Jun hung back to guard their rear.

  “It’s a different sort of lock but I think I can manage it,” the Englishwoman said in a quiet voice, and went to reach for the canvas bundle in her pocket. But before she could pull it out they were interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps, echoing from down one of the branching hallways.

  “What do you see, kid?” the sergeant called over to Jun, who was still guarding the rear.

  No, not echoes, Jun realized. There were steps approaching from several of the hallways that met at the intersection of corridors. And all of them growing louder by the second, threatening to drown out the sound of the warbling voice buzzing from the loudspeakers overhead.

  “Trouble,” Jun answered simply, just as the first of the Dead came shambling around the corner, bony hands out and grasping, jaws working feverishly as it hungered for the flesh of the living.