By the Blood of Heroes

by Joseph Nassise

  “So what are you saying?”

  Burke hesitated for a moment, then threw caution to the wind and plowed ahead. “I think we’re looking at a new breed of soldier,” he told the colonel.

  Nichols nodded, but he didn’t say anything to support or deny Burke’s conclusion. Instead, he asked, “Do you remember anything else that might be significant about this particular encounter?”

  “Like what?”

  The colonel shrugged. “Did it look different? Smell different? Did it, God forbid, say anything?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Burke replied, as a chill ran up his spine. It was bad enough that the thing had acted intelligently. The idea that it might retain the mental faculties necessary to speak made him feel vaguely nauseated as he considered what that would mean for the man the creature had once been. Could it remember who it had been? Be aware of what it had become? He shuddered. “No reason to trust my observations, though. Professor Graves is carving the thing up like a Christmas turkey in his lab as we speak. He can give you more information than I.”

  The colonel opened his mouth to ask another question but was cut off when an orderly pulled the curtain aside and stepped into the “room.” He went straight to Nichols, cupped a hand around his ear, and whispered something excitedly. Burke caught the words Freeman and wreckage, but that was about all.

  Whatever was said galvanized Nichols into action. He turned to Burke, thanked him for his time, and hustled out of the room on the orderly’s heels.

  What have you done now, Jack? Burke wondered and then pushed the thought aside, irritated at himself for even being curious. That vainglorious SOB could get himself thrown out of the Air Corps for all he cared. Burke’s years of giving a damn were long since over. Mae’s death had seen to that.

  Exhausted from all the day’s activity, Burke settled back against his pillow and let his eyes slip closed. Several minutes later he drifted off into an uneasy sleep in which intelligent shamblers chased him through the trenches of his dreams.

  Chapter Ten

  STALAG 113

  Verschieben!”

  The command to move was punctuated with a rifle butt between the shoulder blades, causing Freeman to stumble forward and fall to his knees in the mud beside the truck from which he’d just emerged. It wasn’t the first time he’d been struck violently since being taken captive, and he knew better than to protest. He’d done that the first few times, and the bruises on his face and body were testimony to the fact that they didn’t care what he thought of their methods.

  As he climbed painfully to his feet, he braved a quick glance around. They had clearly arrived at some kind of POW camp. A double chain-link fence surrounded the area, and guard towers with visible searchlights were strategically placed to give good sight lines of the perimeter. A cluster of wooden buildings stood to his left, and a German staff car was parked in front of the largest of them, a two-story affair that would have still looked like the French manor house it had once been if it weren’t for the flag of the Imperial German Empire hanging in front of it. Freeman guessed that this was the commandant’s headquarters and personal residence. A set of six low-slung rectangular buildings that reminded him of the makeshift hangars at the airfield stood off to the right. They were in the corner of the camp and ramshackle enough to make it clear that these were the prisoners’ barracks. In between were the usual assortment of buildings you’d expect to see as part of any military encampment—a motor pool, mess hall, workroom, laundry, and workshop.

  Directly in front of him was a dirt field, and Freeman could see men working in it, using handheld hoes and shovels to move the soil around. The men were dressed in gray coveralls with the letter K stamped on the back. He knew the K was short for kriegsgefangener, which meant “prisoner of war” in German.

  Beyond the field, in their own double-fenced section of the camp, stood another set of wooden buildings too far away to get a good look at. Freeman did notice that armed guards were stationed in the no-man’s-land between the two fences, but they were facing outward toward the second set of buildings, rather than inward toward the rest of the camp.

  Curious, thought Freeman.

  An elbow struck his shoulder, rocking him forward a step, and he realized the time for sightseeing was over.

  “Verschieben!” his guard snarled, and this time Freeman stepped forward quickly to avoid the rifle strike he knew the other man was preparing. Three other guards walked along with the one who was so free with the butt of his gun, making it a quintet.

  The guards marched him over to the commandant’s headquarters, where they went up the steps, across the porch, and inside to the office just beyond. A clerk sat waiting behind the wooden desk, a bored expression on his face and a lit cigarette in his mouth. Over the clerk’s shoulder Freeman caught a glimpse of another office. That one was much larger and more comfortably furnished than the one he stood in. It was also currently unoccupied.

  “Name?” asked the clerk.

  Freeman hesitated. The articles of war required that the kaiser’s forces properly record the arrival of all prisoners of war and pass their names and current conditions on to the International Red Cross. That information would, in turn, be relayed to the Allied authorities. On the other hand, he wasn’t just another soldier. His record of eighty-two kills made him not only one of America’s top aces, but a public figure as well. There was a fair amount of propaganda value they could gain simply by announcing he was a prisoner.

  Then again, he thought darkly, they might just decide to keep quiet. It was much easier torturing information out of a man everyone thought was dead.

  Aware that the clerk was getting impatient, and wanting to avoid another rifle butt to the back, Freeman decided that his notoriety might be more of a protection than a hindrance and took a chance. “Julius Freeman, major, American Expeditionary Force” and rattled off his serial number.

  The clerk scratched something on the paper in front of him, consulted a notebook, and then said to his guard, “Put him in C Barracks and assign him to first shift. He can take the place of whoever is selected to meet the commandant tonight.”

  His guards led him across the camp to the six low-slung buildings that he’d correctly identified as barracks for the prisoners. There were several men lounging around outside the entrance to one of them, but the minute they saw the guards approaching they disappeared inside.

  Freeman’s escort marched him through the same doorway and into the building. While Freeman was still waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim interior light, the guard behind him slammed the stock of his rifle into Freeman’s kidney and the American flier went down like a rock.

  For a moment, all he could see were stars, so great was the pain, but when his vision cleared, he discovered that he was lying on the dirt floor of a large, warehouse-like room. Bunk beds had been erected in orderly rows throughout most of the space, but there must not have been enough for all the prisoners who were housed, for men were lying on the floor in the spaces between the beds, wrapped in thin blankets.

  As he struggled to pick himself up off the floor, the other prisoners watched dispassionately. No one volunteered to help him. In fact, there was a definite sense of hostility aimed in his direction.

  He was a prisoner, just like they were. What had he done to them?

  He found out a few seconds later. The lead guard called out something in his native tongue and pointed at one of the other prisoners. Before the man had a chance to protest, two of the guards stepped forward and grabbed his arms, dragging him toward the doorway.

  A collective grumble of protest arose from the other prisoners, and several of them stepped forward, reaching toward either their companion or the guards, perhaps both, an act that proved too much for the guard in charge of the detail.

  The sound of the shot was deafening in the confined space. The prisoner closest to the guards dropped to the ground, dead from the bullet that had struck him below the right eye and exited the b
ack of his skull in a showery spray of blood and brain matter.

  As his body hit the floor, the rest of the prisoners froze in place.

  Lying a few feet away, Freeman realized that the guards were at a supreme disadvantage. All the prisoners had to do was rush them and they’d be overpowered in seconds. Sure, a few of the POWs were likely to die in the process, but the group would then be armed and they could use those firearms to gain more in the next attack.

  But rather than seize the opportunity, the prisoners backed away from the confrontation, doing nothing more than muttering darkly and casting hate-filled glances at their captors.

  The prisoner the guards had seized began to wail in French, screaming for the others to help and begging the guards to choose someone else, anyone else, just not him. Or, at least, that’s what Freeman, with his rudimentary French, thought he was saying.

  As expected, the guards ignored the prisoner’s pleas and marched back out the door, taking the prisoner with them as they went.

  In the aftermath of their departure, you could have heard a pin drop. Several of the men started toward Freeman, and from the expressions on their faces it was clear that they weren’t coming to help him to his feet, but they were intercepted by a short, dark-haired man with a trim mustache.

  He didn’t say anything, just stepped out into the open space between Freeman and the oncoming prisoners, glaring in their direction. That was enough to bring the men up short.

  The ringleader, a tall solidly built Irishman, said something to the short man that was too low for Freeman to catch. The other man answered in similar fashion, and whatever was said was enough to defuse the situation. The Irishman looked at Freeman, spat on the floor in his direction, but turned away, content for the moment to let the matter rest. His companions followed in his wake.

  “Thanks,” Freeman said from his position on the floor.

  The mustached man turned to him and Freeman could see a blaze of anger in his eyes as he said, “Do not think for even a moment that I did that for you. Fighting is a punishable offense, and in this camp there are things far worse than death.”

  Mustache and the rest of the prisoners turned away, leaving Freeman lying on the floor wondering just how he was going to survive.

  Chapter Eleven

  STALAG 113

  After the shooting and his subsequent shunning by the rest of the prisoners, Freeman found space against one of the walls to curl up in and quickly fell into a restless sleep. It had been too long since he’d had anything to eat or drink and he was feeling weak and light-headed. His condition was worsened, no doubt, by the pain of his injury from the crash and the physical exertion he’d undergone while trying to escape. If the other prisoners had decided they wanted to take revenge for the loss of one of their own, it would have been easy to slit his throat in his sleep, but Freeman was beyond the point of caring.

  The guards came for him just before sundown.

  A hush fell over the barracks, and the stomp of booted feet dragged Freeman back to wakefulness. He was just rousing himself when the guards grabbed him by the arms and literally dragged him across the floor to where an officer in the uniform of an oberleutnant stood waiting.

  The man looked down at him and said something in German, but Freeman didn’t understand and simply shrugged his shoulders in response. The oberleutnant sneered at him in disgust and then gave a rapid-fire round of orders to the guards before turning on his heels and marching out of the barracks.

  The guards followed suit, dragging Freeman with them. They took him behind the workshop and pantomimed that he should strip off his dirty clothes, gesturing with their weapons when he hesitated. When he had complied with their order, they made him stand up against the rear wall of the workshop on a cement slab set into the ground and then retreated a dozen feet away.

  So this is how it ends, Freeman thought to himself. He’d survived both an aerial dogfight with the famed Richthofen and the crash that followed only to face summary execution in a dirty POW camp by a couple of German thugs.

  Freeman ignored the pain in his leg and did his best to stand tall, wanting to go out with some dignity.

  To his surprise, one of the guards disappeared around the side of the workshop and came back a moment later carrying a fireman’s hose. The guard threw the lever attached to the side of the nozzle, and a jet of icy cold water struck Freeman like a freight train, slamming him against the wall behind him and holding him there with the strength of ten men. The guard directed the spray up and down Freeman’s body, using the water like an industrial-sized scrubbing pad, leaving the American gasping for breath as the force of the flow hammered him without mercy.

  Just when he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, the guard switched the hose off and Freeman collapsed to the ground, gasping for air. Now he understood the purpose of the slab he was lying on; it wouldn’t do to have freshly scrubbed prisoners fall into the mud that was the dominant feature of the camp. While the first guard returned the hose, another approached and threw a gray coverall to Freeman, indicating he should get dressed.

  When Freeman didn’t move quickly enough for the guards’ liking, they moved in and helped him get dressed, not caring how often they yanked or bumped his injured leg. By the time they were finished, he was gasping from the pain, but at least he was no longer naked. The prisoner’s uniform he now wore also gave him the sense that he might be here awhile.

  They gave him a moment to get himself together and then marched him across the camp to the commandant’s residence. Rather than going into the clerk’s office, as he had earlier in the day, the guards led him in through a different door on the side of the house facing away from the camp and Freeman found himself standing in a well-appointed foyer. A butler was waiting for them, and after exchanging a few words with the guards, he turned to Freeman and said, “This way, Major.”

  Their destination turned out to be the dining room, where several German officers were seated around the table. Conversation ceased when he entered the room.

  “Ah, Major Freeman, how good of you to join us!”

  The speaker was a blond-haired, jowl-cheeked man in the uniform of an oberst, which made him the equivalent of an American colonel, one rank above Freeman. He wore a pair of pince-nez spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose and black leather gloves on his hands, though whether the latter was to hide an injury or as a personal affectation, Freeman didn’t know.

  “I am Oberst Schulheim, commandant of Stalag 113,” his host said with a smile, revealing teeth that had been sharpened to points, “and I would be pleased if you would join us for dinner.”

  The thought of having real food made his stomach growl. He had no desire to eat with these men, but the chance to learn something more about the camp and his current situation was too valuable an intelligence asset to pass up. There was a chair at the end of the table directly opposite Schulheim, the only empty seat available, and Freeman made his way over to it. One of the other officers snickered at his limp, but Freeman ignored him.

  Let them laugh, he thought. Laughter never killed anyone. As long as they’re laughing, they’re unlikely to drag me out back to be executed.

  Though, with men like these, that might not be true.

  “Gentlemen,” said Schulheim, “this is Major Freeman, of the American Expeditionary Force. Major Freeman, my general staff.”

  No one introduced themselves, which was just fine. He didn’t care who any of these officers were, and he’d happily shoot them in the head without hesitation if given the chance. All he cared about was getting something worthwhile out of Schulheim that he could use to bust out of this place.

  He carefully lowered himself into his seat, wincing as his leg flared with pain. The wet stickiness he felt inside the leg of his coverall let him know his leg was bleeding again. The “shower” he’d received had no doubt opened the wound.

  “Are you injured, Major?”

  Freeman looked down the length of the table to fin
d Schulheim watching him closely. For just a moment he thought he saw the man’s nostrils flare, as if he could smell the blood from half the room away.

  “A minor wound,” he said. “It’s nothing, really.”

  Schulheim seemed unconvinced. “If it pains you, please let me know; I’m sure something can be arranged to take care of it for you.”

  Freeman nodded, but didn’t reply.

  Schulheim watched him for a moment, then said, “You know, Major, there really is no need for a man of your rank and stature to spend the rest of the war huddled in a freezing shack like Barracks C. A little cooperation would go a long way to making life much easier for you here.”

  Freeman had no intention of cooperating, even in the slightest bit, but he thought it might prove interesting to see what the oberst had in mind. At the very least, it might tell him something about what he could expect from his captors.

  “What did you have in mind?” he asked, a carefully neutral expression on his face.

  Schulheim smiled. “What did I have in mind? Well, I’m sure that isn’t too difficult for an intelligent man like you to determine. We could start with the disposition of your troops along the front near Provins and move on from there.”

  Freeman nodded. “Of course. And in return?”

  “In return,” Schulheim said, “I’m sure we can arrange private quarters, hot water, and even regular meals. You would be treated more like an honored guest than a common POW. Come now, you must admit that’s a tempting proposition, is it not?”

  Only for scum like you, Freeman thought.

  Carefully controlling his feelings, Freeman said, “You’ve given me a lot to think about. May I sleep on it?”