Volk

by David Nickle

  The truck slowed as the road narrowed. Ruth looked warily out her window.

  “Did people ever drive along here?”

  “Horse and wagon was more common,” admitted Jason. “But sure they did. Don’t worry. It’s a clear run.” He grimaced as the truck hit a bump. “More or less.”

  “You having made it so many times,” said Ruth. “What are we in for, Jason?”

  Jason shut his eyes. “There’s a house. Big mansion. Bigger than your pa’s, back in Eliada, I’d say. There should be a pretty big crowd of folk.”

  “Andrew?” asked Annie, and Jason nodded.

  “Doc Waggoner and his Société friends too. You’ll be able to say hello to him before lunch.”

  The roadway widened and improved somewhat as they approached the pass. The rocks loomed above the trees, the opening in the mountains impossibly dark in the bright Bavarian morning, and Jason found himself grinding his foot against the floor of the cab—just to sharpen the pain. He shut his eyes again, for longer this time, and when they opened, they were in the depths of it . . . the bottom of a gorge, or so it felt, the warmth of the sunlight gone. Jason had to remind himself to breathe—he felt as though he were underwater. He looked to his right, and up. There, somewhere up there, was the old route he’d taken his first time into this place . . . following a pencil-line on a map, to take some photographs, and make some notes for fools who thought they might master a Juke.

  He had made this run many times since then. Not up there, in the trees, clambering up and down rock falls. But down here, in the little road that carried into the valley.

  It was a fine run, he thought, and gave his ankle an extra twist, hard enough to bring tears and even a sob.

  They were met by a procession, or rather joined, as they left the pass and drove along the edge of the valley, toward the great mountain chateau where Orlok had moved. Jason recognized them all, and called out by name, as they flocked around the car: Ari and Gertrude, Victor and Friedrich, and on and on, until he could no longer differentiate, and it was all pale flesh, flitting in and out of shadow from the trees into the sunlight . . . until finally—Catherine.

  She wore a gauzy throw—the one that she favoured—and a pair of oversized boots, pulled from one of the S.A. men, when the Volk first came from here to the farm. She climbed up on the running board next to Jason and leaned in the open window and squealed a curse in French when she saw Jason’s bandaged foot. The truck lurched forward, then stopped, and Catherine stumbled off, and Jason gasped.

  “I’m sorry,” Ruth said. As Catherine jogged along to catch up, Ruth asked Jason why they were all naked.

  “It seems very cold to go without skirt and trousers,” she said. “Is it because of the nudist colony?”

  “I reckon,” said Jason. “Bergstrom used to use that as part of the therapy here before they brought the Juke.”

  “That therapy for the naked folk, or for Bergstrom?” asked Annie.

  “Germans quite like nudism,” said Ruth. “It lets them see who’s fit and who’s not.”

  Annie shook her head, and Catherine finally caught up.

  “Who hurt your foot, ma chère? Nazi Germans?” she asked, in her improving English. “Did you kill them for it?”

  Jason shook his head.

  “I did not kill very many of them,” he said.

  “I shot him in the foot,” said Ruth, but Catherine didn’t hear her, or pretended not to.

  “Did you fight them off?”

  “I killed some of them. The Volk on guard at the farm may have killed others. But not many. We didn’t have enough there. And they had guns. They came sooner than we thought they might and there were more of them than Orlok figured. We’re going to have to face some of them.”

  Catherine nodded seriously, and as the car slowed for the bend before the main drive, she stepped off and stumbled only a moment before she bolted off to the side into the crowd, who was now drawing back from the road, the truck.

  “Charming girl,” said Ruth.

  “Sure,” said Jason, and then they said little else. For the road climbed past a stone wall, through a gate, and to the front of the chateau. Orlok was there on the steps, and it was Jason’s experience that he always did kill a conversation, walking into a room or out onto front steps.

  “Was ist mit deinem Fuß passiert?”

  “My foot got shot,” said Jason. He was standing on the steps to the chateau, his arm around Ruth’s shoulder as it was since she’d helped him out of the truck. Orlok nodded.

  “You did not drive them off,” he said, and Jason agreed that he hadn’t. “I would have fucked them, and driven them off,” Orlok said. “I would have broken their spines and stacked them in the corner like a woodpile. Am I not right, Markus?”

  Markus Gottlieb agreed that he was with his usual enthusiasm, then, also as usual, looked off shyly, hands stuffed in his trouser pockets, and withdrew a few steps, in this case toward the doors to the house.

  “Who are these?” asked Orlok, looking to Ruth, and then Annie, and Jason told him: “Annie Waggoner and Ruth Harper.”

  Orlok nodded as though he understood and Jason imagined what he might say: You were distracted by your weakness for your sweetheart. He didn’t say that, and Jason didn’t correct him with more details. Orlok summoned them all inside, and started to lead the way.

  “Hold up,” said Annie.

  Orlok stopped, and looked around, and Annie repeated it in German.

  “Where is my husband?” she demanded.

  Jason tried to step between them, Annie Waggoner and Orlok, but his shot foot made him slow. And he saw that she had brought the Luger from the truck. It dangled in her right side, half-hidden in her skirts. The way she was holding it, Jason wasn’t even sure if she knew she had a gun.

  “The Neger Waggoner,” said Orlok. “Not here.”

  “He was here though.”

  “He is not here.” Orlok’s eye fell on the gun, then went back to meet Annie’s. “He left before I even arrived. Before we arrived. His friends are here somewhere. Ask them.”

  Annie looked at the Luger—as though she had indeed first noticed she had it, and considered its implications. Having done so, she knelt down, set the gun on the steps in front of her.

  “There are a lot of men coming,” she said, “along that road. I need to find my husband before they get here.”

  Orlok laughed. “They will not get here. We will stop them as they enter the pass. They will all die.”

  “Are we ready?”

  “We are ready. You told the French girl of your failure. She has told the rest.” Orlok turned back to the house. “Come inside with your women, to tend your wounds, and let us finish matters.”

  Jason made it inside and to the door of an old library room before the pain got to be too much, so Ruth helped him to a chaise longue there, and to lift his feet. Annie set off to find Andrew’s “friends” and promised to be back. She wouldn’t hear of it when Ruth insisted that she stay. Jason worried about her too, but was happy to not have her in the room with him. He didn’t like the look in her eye.

  “I’m sorry,” Ruth finally said when she sat down herself, on a chair at the head of the longue. “That must hurt.”

  “It sure does,” said Jason. He craned his neck around—it was hard to see her. Most of the room he could see consisted of some bookshelves—a low table with an old Dictaphone recorder on it, next to a metronome whose unclipped arm listed to one side. Finally he rolled on his side, propped himself on an elbow and looked up.

  “You should lie still then,” said Ruth.

  “I will, from here on,” Jason promised.

  Ruth seemed to approve. She smoothed some hair that had fallen over her forehead, and half-smiled in a way that affected Jason unexpectedly. It might have been the light from the window. But whatever it was, he was put to mind of those early days, before he even knew her name, and he’d walked past her on a train trip, and . . . well, he was young, an
d so was she, and it’d affected him then too.

  “So that,” she said, “was your brother.”

  “My brother?”

  “Orlok, wasn’t he?”

  “Oh. That was him, yes.”

  “Interesting fellow,” she said. “Doesn’t speak English?”

  “Lots of people don’t,” said Jason and Ruth nodded agreement.

  “He’s impressive. Big. Imposing, one might say. Do you think he’s the Übermensch, really?”

  “He—” Jason was going to say that Orlok was exactly that: a superman, the top of the heap. Jason certainly did understand that to be true, on some level at least. Orlok was a kind of a God. Jason . . . well, Jason was too, or so said Orlok some days. But as he thought about it again, he wondered.

  “He’s a strong man,” said Jason. “Strong-willed. But he should have guessed that Goebbels would send men as soon as he did. I should have guessed.”

  Now Ruth did smile. “I’m not as sorry as that,” she said, and when Jason asked her what she meant, she indicated his foot, now stretched out over the edge of the couch.

  “You were a little out of your mind,” she said. “The pain’s done you good.”

  Jason thought about that. “How come you’re not?” he said.

  “I beg pardon?”

  “How come you’re not out of your mind? You’re thinking I smelled the Juke smell off him and started thinking crazy stories, and now this jam of pain’s pulled me out of it. You might be right. But what about you?”

  Ruth frowned and thought about that a moment.

  “I think that I am a bit mad, if you want the truth of it,” she said. “I can’t count the number of people outside . . . not the same, from one minute to the next. I suspect that if we tried to tell each other about the things that we saw during the drive from the farm to this place . . . well, I am going to guess that the Decameron system would tell us two different stories.”

  “Do you want to—?”

  Ruth shook her head. “I’ve had enough of the Decameron system,” she said. “And I daresay I’ve had enough pain to keep my head clear for a very long time. Clear enough to think things through.” She got up and went to the window. The view carried down to the old orchards, the depths of the valley . . . eventually, over to Austria. She put a finger on the metronome arm, pulled it down. It swung back with a pronounced tick.

  “Although I do wonder,” she said, “if my thinking has been at all clear since Eliada. Since the Thorns. Have you ever wondered about that?”

  Jason sighed. He rolled over onto his back, sending another wave of pain up his leg.

  “You’ve done all right for yourself, Ruth,” he said.

  “I have,” agreed Ruth. “But most of that has been a result of simply holding the reins. I was given great privilege, in my birth . . . my inheritance.” She flicked the metronome again. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “Have I wondered whether I’m that smart? Whether I make the best decisions?” Jason winced and propped his bad foot on the toe of his good one. “I don’t think I made a bright decision, ever.”

  “What about your brother Orlok, now,” said Ruth. “Do you think that Orlok has a better plan here than he did for you at the farm? I mean for defending us?”

  “He’s got folk watching the road,” said Jason, “through that pass. They’ll rain boulders down on anyone who tries to get through. And they got their own guns.”

  “Do they know how to use them?”

  “Some do.”

  “Reassuring,” said Ruth. “What if some get through?”

  “It’s been awhile,” said Jason. “They haven’t yet.”

  There came a knock at the door then, and Ruth got up to see.

  It was Annie, and two of the men who’d come with Andrew: the American, Lewis, and the Austrian fellow, Kurtzweiller. Doc Bergstrom was with them too.

  Bergstrom came in first, and immediately looked at Jason’s foot. He dug around under the table and took out a medical bag.

  “This used to be my consulting room, long ago,” he said. “It’s good to see that it has been kept relatively intact. May I examine your foot, Herr Thistledown?”

  Jason nodded sure, and sat up to help remove the bandages, but of course Bergstrom told him to hold still.

  “Andrew left two nights ago,” said Annie.

  “That’s correct,” said Lewis.

  “He left before supper, when we arrived,” said Kurtzweiller. “They both did. We thought they might have gone back to the farm.”

  “You didn’t think to look for them?” asked Ruth and Annie said: “Oh no. No they did not.”

  Ruth rose and took Annie by the arm, guided her to the chair—as though she might want to cry, or scream. He couldn’t see whether she was . . . and after a while, he wouldn’t be able to tell if she were either. He was doing enough of it himself, as Bergstrom dug into his foot with a pair of forceps, and pulled out the bullet that Ruth had put there. Jason wondered if he might lose the foot, and asked Bergstrom what he thought about it while he sewed up the hole and applied new bandages.

  “I do not think so,” said Bergstrom. “You have a strong constitution, Herr Thistledown, and infection . . . well.”

  “We’ll just wait and see then,” said Jason. He pulled himself onto the couch. He and Bergstrom were alone in the room at this point: during the shouting and cursing, Ruth had suggested the rest of them step out into the hallway. “How long’s it been?”

  “Since . . . ?”

  “Since you started this. Seems like hours.”

  Bergstrom looked at his pocket watch. “Just over an hour,” he said. “I am sorry. It can’t have been comfortable.”

  “I’m used to it,” said Jason. He sniffed the air. There was that scent . . . but there was something else. He sat up farther, to try and see out the window. There didn’t seem to be much movement. He sniffed again.

  “What is that smell?” he asked.

  “It is close in here. Would you like me to open the windows?” asked Bergstrom. He stood up and went to the windows, and Jason shouted at him not to.

  “Why?”

  “It’s fresh-cut hay,” said Jason.

  Bergstrom nodded. “Yes. I smell it too.”

  “Was taught to sniff that in the war,” said Jason sharply. “It’s phosgene.”

  “Phos—” Bergstrom’s eyes widened. “Oh!”

  “Poison gas,” said Jason. “The brownshirts didn’t come through the pass. They took that footpath that brought me here the first day. And they’re gassing us.”

  Although it hurt fiercely, Jason sat up the rest of the way and got to his feet . . . or one foot . . . and with Bergstrom’s help, hobbled to the door to the main hallway. Ruth and Annie were there, with Andrew’s friends. Jason motioned up the stairs, and together, they climbed. Then it was down a hall, through a room, and to another set of stairs—this one spiral—to a fourth floor, and then a fifth floor in a turret. Jason could barely move when he got to the top, last of all. The room was small, not more than nine feet across, and round. Windows on four sides.

  Annie spotted the first squad, positioned high on the ridge behind the chateau. There looked to be three of them. They were all wearing hooded gas masks with breathing boxes. They had set up what Jason recognized as a Livens launcher—a tiny portable mortar, that Great Britain had employed in the war. As they watched, there was a whump! and a flash, and then very shortly, another.

  It was phosgene. Jason had never experienced an attack, but he knew what to do: the smell of fresh-cut hay meant you slung your gas mask on as fast as possible, and if you could, got to high ground.

  Looking down at the grounds, Jason knew it would be impossible to see, but it was easy to see its effect. There were three people on the ground, holding their faces. One girl—it looked like she was convulsing, while another person hung close to her. She might well survive, thought Jason, if the gas shelling stopped.

  But as he considered
that, another whump! came from the hillside, and with this one, came the sound of shattering glass. They had sent it downward—likely pierced a window in one of the lower floors . . . filling the chateau with gas, sure as they were slowly filling the valley.

  It might not kill them, but when the rest of the brownshirts finally came through, none of Orlok’s Volk would be in any condition to resist.

  And in the best case, the five of them would be trapped here.

  “Oh Andrew,” said Annie, and Ruth held her close, and Jason thought: And then there’s Andrew.

  Eight

  He was nearly a boy—surely, not any older than Dominic. Dark blond hair, combed to one side, with a wave in it. A bit of fat in the cheeks, but otherwise youthfully lean. He introduced himself as Arnold Deutsch. Andrew met him, alone, the morning after he and Dominic were gathered from the valley and brought here. It was still in the valley—and from the number of gates that they passed through, Andrew guessed it was in the very middle of the valley. He and Dominic had been taken finally across close-cut meadow, to a door, sheeted with metal that entered into what seemed like a bunker. It was difficult to apprehend more. Their captors—two of them—kept their torchlights pointed to the ground, so that all Andrew and Dominic could see were the concrete blocks of the wall. Inside, the walls were also concrete, although painted a pale green. They were escorted along a hallway, lit dimly by kerosene, but not far, and finally Andrew was placed in a room with nothing but a cot, a chair, and a little table holding a washbasin, and a chamber pot by the bed.

  It was in this room that Deutsch visited him, in the morning after a silent attendant—a dark-haired man with a thin beard—cut away his bloody trouser leg, looked at the punctures in his thigh, cleaned them, and provided him with a bandage. Deutsch brought a folding wooden chair and a tray of breakfast: oatmeal, and a boiled egg. And a pot of coffee, with two mugs. He moved the basin aside and set the tray before Andrew.

  “You have been looked after, Doctor Waggoner?” asked Deutsch, once he had introduced himself.

  “Yes,” said Andrew. “How do you know my name?”