by Smith, Bryan
Jessica cut down the man in the business suit as he reached the helicopter. The pilot danced out of the way and was able to get the drop on her. He fired and missed. If he’d been a better shot, Jessica’s flight from Prison 13 would have ended right there. Making the most of this second chance, she swept the MG 42 toward the pilot and a line of bullets punched across his midsection. As this was happening, Spider’s gun took out the woman in the dress and the other two SS men.
A few of the wounded were still alive, albeit incapacitated. Jessica finished them off, shooting all of them in the back multiple times. Once the dust had settled and she could hear herself think again, she called out to the two people still inside the helicopter.
“I need you motherfuckers still in there to toss out any weapons you’ve got if you want to fucking live!”
A few moments elapsed. There was nothing but silence from the helicopter. Jessica moved closer to the craft and put her back against the cockpit area. She raised her voice and called out the same demand again. This time there was an extra edge in her voice. She was aware of too much time slipping by. They had a window here, a real chance to get away, but it would close soon. They needed to get in this goddamn thing within the next few minutes. If that didn’t happen, reinforcements would arrive and then they’d be totally fucked.
Another moment passed. Making matters worse, a wave of crushing cold air had swept into the transport center, making Jessica shiver in her bare feet and stockings. Her cohorts were similarly uncomfortable. The retractable roof wasn’t meant to be open this long. Just one more reason to get in the copter and get airborne as soon as possible.
Someone inside the helicopter yelled out something defiant in German and unloaded a handgun through the open side door. When the gun’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber, Jessica pounced. She propelled herself toward the door, spun about, and shot an attractive young blonde woman in the gut multiple times. The woman’s body jittered as it absorbed the shots, then fell backward into the helicopter. Jessica reached in and dragged the body out, heaving it to the floor.
That left just one person at the rear of the craft’s passenger compartment. He was partly cloaked in shadow back there, but from what Jessica could see he was no real threat. He was a frail-looking man of extremely advanced age. The man was confined to something that looked like a cross between a wheelchair and a large black metal box. Across the front of the box was a row of blinking, multi-colored lights. Tubes from the side of the box were plugged into small metal sockets embedded in the sides of his neck. Only part of the man’s torso was visible. His arms—if he had any—and the rest of his body were hidden inside the metal box. He had no legs, apparently. Whoever he was, he wasn’t about to shoot anybody.
Jessica glanced backward. “Everybody get the fuck on board. It’s time to leave.”
She moved aside and kept an eye on the distant transport center entrance as the nurse wheeled the gurney over to the helicopter. The nurse pulled on a latch that lowered the gurney’s legs. Together she and Ms. Wickman worked to load Spider into the helicopter while Jessica kept watch. The moment this was accomplished, the other women piled inside.
Jessica was right behind them. She was headed for the cockpit when Spider let out a startled yelp. “Holy shit!”
Jessica stopped and turned around. “What is it?” She saw that Spider’s gaze was riveted to the man in the strange sci-fi-looking contraption. “You don’t have to worry about that guy. He’s harmless.”
Spider shook her head. “I don’t think so. Look closer.”
Ms. Wickman and the nurse were taking a closer look already.
The nurse gasped and slapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, my God!”
Ms. Wickman stared intently at the man a moment longer, confusion writ large in her features. Then her mouth slowly came open and she shook her head in disbelief. “Incredible,” she said, laughing softly in amazement. “This place. The whole Nazi thing. It wasn’t a big lie, after all. How did I not know this?”
This was a rhetorical question. No one had an answer for her.
Despite the urgent need to get away, Jessica’s curiosity got the better of her. She crept toward the back of the passenger compartment and took a long look at the mystery man. He was trembling and rotating his head slowly side to side. At first, Jessica couldn’t accept what she was seeing. It was too absurd. Too far-fetched. But though the features were aged, she couldn’t deny the striking similarity this man bore to the younger version she’d seen in so many old photos and newsreels since she was a child.
And he still had that stupid little mustache.
Without even thinking about it, Jessica brought the MG 42 to bear again, aiming it at the center of the terrible man’s wrinkled visage. The sheer magnitude of what she was about to do nearly overwhelmed Jessica. This was one of history’s greatest monsters. Still alive. Somehow. And she was going to be the one to take him out once and for all.
He looked her right in the eye and, in a voice so weak it was almost inaudible, said, “Nein. Nein.”
Jessica sneered. “Jawohl, motherfucker.”
She squeezed the MG 42’s trigger and blew off Hitler’s head.
Spider shook her head in stunned amazement. “Yuck. Also, holy shit.”
There was general agreement on this sentiment. Once the shock of the moment passed, they hauled out what was left of the dead former dictator, dumping the withered body and its weird metal home out on the transport center’s blood-spattered floor.
Jessica was behind the controls of the helicopter a few seconds later. The craft was a model she’d never flown before. There were some inconsequential differences, but the key things about the craft’s operation were the same as they were in any other craft of its type. Jessica got the rotors going, strapped herself in, and began to take the copter upward. Fortunately, anyone who could close the retractable roof and prevent escape was dead.
Some pops from down below were just barely audible as the helicopter began to rise through the hole in the roof. Small arms fire. Some manner of reinforcements had finally arrived, but they weren’t heavily armed. Jessica didn’t bother taking a look, choosing to focus her efforts on piloting the craft. Either they would make it out of here or they wouldn’t. There was nothing she could do about the people on the ground at this point.
She nonetheless breathed a sigh of relief once they were clear of the transport center and able to start flying away from the prison. Taking them up high to avoid any possible additional damage from small arms, Jessica stared out at the sprawling prison complex below. The layout was as Ms. Wickman had described, but from up here it didn’t look like much in the midst of the surrounding vast frozen wasteland. She spared one last thought for all the doomed women still trapped in there before working the throttle and taking the helicopter off toward the gray horizon.
They had gone several miles by the time Jessica perceived the rising buzz of a powerful engine. The others heard it, too, and moved to the doors for a look at what was behind them. Except for Spider, of course, who was demanding information.
The nurse groaned. “Oh, fuck.”
Ms. Wickman said nothing, but her expression was grim.
Jessica couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “You’ve got to be shitting me. Is that a fucking Stuka? What’s the deal with these motherfuckers? There’s such a thing as taking a dedication to historical accuracy too fucking far.”
The WW2-era Nazi fighter plane quickly closed the gap between the two crafts. By then they were another few miles from the prison, but civilization and safety remained hundreds of miles distant. Jessica would try what evasive action she could, but they were doomed. There was no getting around it. She was in the last seconds of her life. Then she laughed. Fuck it. At least she hadn’t died in that fucking prison.
At least she’d gone down swinging.
The plane trailed behind them for still a few more miles, zigzagging to follow Jessica’s d
esperate evasive maneuvers. Jessica held her breath, waiting for the inevitable. She cursed the pilot in that plane, knowing the fucker was just toying with them as a kind of payback for what they had done.
She didn’t care. She’d killed the ultimate embodiment of human evil and she just didn’t give a fuck. No one who mattered would ever know about it, but she didn’t care about that, either. She was smiling as the Stuka’s guns finally opened up on the helicopter. Another last-ditch evasive maneuver happened on instinct. It wasn’t enough to entirely avoid the hail of bullets. Some missed. Some clipped the rotors and damaged them, sending the helicopter whirling across the bruised sky. Another bullet punched through the body of the craft and passed through the skull of the nurse, blasting her brains all over the helicopter’s interior. The Stuka flew above the faltering craft and passed it, disappearing in the distance.
It would be back, Jessica knew, for a finishing fusillade.
The helicopter continued to spin and drift toward the blanket of white below, trailing a thickening plume of black smoke above.
Jessica was still desperately working the throttle and watching the horizon for the inevitable return of the Stuka when she happened to glance down and saw the wide black hole in the surface of the ice crust.
She frowned.
What the fuck?
The helicopter’s rotors sputtered one last time and quit working as the craft dropped through the hole and disappeared from sight.
Out there on the endless frozen landscape, everything looked the same as it had for so many countless thousands of years. Of Jessica Sloan, there was no trace.
THE END
Coming one of these days…maybe…
DEPRAVED 4: AT THE CORE OF THE EARTH
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Before anyone rushes to point this out, let me be clear in saying I’m perfectly aware that the prison in the novel you just read in no way resembles any real prison anywhere. I know, okay? Hell, I just had Jessica Sloan ice Adolf Hitler. Ultra-realism was never the goal here.
My last novel, ALL HALLOW’S DEAD, was a tribute/homage to the slasher movies that were so popular at the box office and video stores in the 1980s. DEPRAVED 3 is a homage to another subgenre of exploitation cinema. Specifically, women-in-prison (WIP) movies. Like the slasher movies, I watched many of these during my misspent youth. CHAINTED HEAT, CHAINED HEAT 2, CAGED HEAT, HELLHOLE, ILSA: SHE-WOLF OF THE SS, BARBED WIRE DOLLS, etc.
The WIP genre, you should not be surprised to learn, was all about titillation. Sex, nudity, and violence. Girls, girls, girls. As you might imagine, I found all this quite captivating as a teenager. I don’t watch WIP movies much these days, but the fond memories have lingered. At some point, I decided I would write my own tribute to the genre, one in which I would go much farther in terms of explicit content than most of those movies ever could. Because, hey, that’s just what I do.
Originally, I thought I’d do a stand-alone story unconnected to my other works. I planned to call it IN CHAINS. I put this notion on the back-burner while I worked on other things and eventually took a hiatus from writing. When I was ready to start working again, I had a backlog of ideas. I wanted to do IN CHAINS and a bunch of other things, including another DEPRAVED sequel. It was then that I hit on the idea of morphing the planned WIP novel into DEPRAVED 3.
One thing I really didn’t want to do with DEPRAVED 3 was write another backwoods rednecks story. I’d done all I felt like doing with that concept, at least for a while. But I could take the main character, Jessica, and put her in an all new, even more “depraved” setting. So this is a whole killing two birds with one stone kind of deal. I threw in a couple of secondary characters from the first DEPRAVED (Helga and Megan) to further connect it to the first book in the series.
As for whether there really will be a DEPRAVED 4: AT THE CORE OF THE EARTH…well, who knows? It might be fun. Maybe I’ll do it one day. But probably not for a while. I need to get to work on the rest of that backlog, including, eventually, some other sequels a lot of you are wanting. The next one, though, will probably be something totally new. Stay tuned.
Bryan Smith
October 2016
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Unofficial DEPRAVED 3 soundtrack/playlist on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/user/bryandsmith/playlist/7Em1lmCfl2x0QUKwPUbKmn
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bryan Smith is the author of numerous previous novels and novellas, including Slowly We Rot, All Hallow’s Dead, 68 Kill, The Reborn, Depraved, The Killing Kind, Strange Ways, House of Blood, and The Freakshow. Bestselling horror author Brian Keene described Slowly We Rot as, “The best zombie novel I’ve ever read.” A film version of 68 KILL, starring Matthew Gray Gubler from CRIMINAL MINDS, is set for release in 2017. Bryan lives in Tennessee with his wife Jennifer and their many pets. Visit his home on the web at www.thehorrorofbryansmith.blogspot.com
