“Very well,” Bruning said quietly.
“All right. I am sorry. You need not participate in the ritual if you wish. Just do not interfere with my operation and all shall be well.” Weber’s face softened a bit as he picked up the plans from his desk and slipped his gloves on.”You will have to excuse me. I have much to do. Good evening.” Weber said and gestured for the door.
Bruning left, walking slowly back to the officers’ barracks as the men on the beach continued to pull their dead into rough piles in front of the Deep Ones’ stones, lit bright white by the kliegs from the towers.
He heard the drone before he saw the contour of the plane as it streaked across the cold, starlit sky. Riding low above the channel it barreled over the camp in seconds, its engines building to a huge roar as it passed overhead, drawing the lights up from the camp after it, but they managed only to light an empty sky. Bruning caught the sight of a white American star on the tip of one slender wing as it blurred through his field of vision. It passed within feet of the cliffs of the Nez-de-Jobourg above the camp and disappeared on the far side of the promontory instantly, taking all sound and motion with it, like it was never there at all.
The only noise it left behind were the incredulous voices of the guards who muttered confused questions, the shouts of the men in the towers seeking orders, and then, building, the elated hoarse cries of half dead men, who had nothing left to live for but the hope of freedom.
CHAPTER 6:
A home in dark grass
December 8, 1942: Cap de la Hague, France
The screams of the men chained to the stones on the Cap de la Hague beach brought Bruning out of his reverie. The time of the Deep Ones had finally come. With the elastic quality of a nightmare the time had raced away, while still somehow beguiling him into believing that this moment would never come. His mind turned in on itself to search for some inkling of hope, but nothing came of this banal, pointless self-reflection. All his plans had degenerated into useless clusters of clichéd ideas and all his thoughts circled and crashed into the present without bringing forward one practical conclusion. Every morning he would think: Today I shall plan my escape. And he would wake with the same thought in his mind the next day, inwardly cursing his procrastination.
And now it was too late.
There was no way out of the camp for him. Even now, outside his cabin two SS guards stood watch, as much to keep him in as to keep others out. Weber’s paranoia was seen around the camp in other, less subtle ways. The drills, the endless morale-building chatter over the camp speakers, the anti-aircraft guns rolled out onto the beach, each indicated that Weber had severed all ties to the outside world until the morning of the ninth of December. Then he would be vindicated as the ultimate hero of the Reich. Insanity traveled down the chain of command like poison through the bloodstream. The SS men who manned the camp were blank-faced automatons, sure that their post was the most important one in all the Reich, assured that a death defending that post would be glorious and just. There was no way to bluff past Weber’s robots, no way to scale the walls which surrounded the camp without being seen and ripped to pieces by machine guns. There were no boats to get out to sea; they had been deemed too great a risk after the Mors incident, and those that had been sunk were never replaced.
The madman Weber would wait for his death with hope in his eyes.
The Deep Ones and their leader would rise and overrun the camp. There was no way an alliance could be formed between the Karotechia and the things from beneath the sea. It was as obvious to Bruning as the impossibility of his escape. The Reich existed like a cancer, subsisting within the morass of humanity, and the Deep Ones preyed upon it like a parasite. There was no question who would emerge victorious from such an arrangement.
As if to punctuate the unreasoning terror of his thoughts, another scream, more terrible than the first, tore through the night. The voice was that of a sickly, wheezing man, shrieking as if he hoped to free his soul from his body through the act of screaming itself—as if he could end his life through the release of his emotions alone, to escape whatever awful thing was shambling up the beach to meet him from the water. Bruning could not resist. He sat up in the dark and slunk to the window.
Outside the north window, the beach was obscure, sheathed in the night of the new moon. No light shone there, but Bruning’s sharp eyes could pick out the stones on the beach, and a few men pacing on the bastions. The star-lit sky hung like a painted backdrop, and as his eyes adjusted he could make out several dozen hunched figures moving in the rolling, glowing waves. He pushed open the windows facing the sea and a cold December wind wafted in, rank with the smell of rotting bodies, the salty surf, and the fetid reek of the Deep Ones and their brood.
A chorus of screams rose up from the dark now, drowning out the soothing pound of the surf. The figures continued to creep in on the waves, although nothing on the beach could be seen by Bruning. His vantage point was poor, and the bastions and stones blocked his field of vision. As he strained to see, a ragged scream suddenly climbed above the others, cutting through the air so sharply he winced at it. He listened with morbid fascination as it came to a final, liquid silence. A volley of foreign words filled the air as if in reply, pleading and screaming and crying in languages Bruning could not understand, Russian and Polish and more obscure tongues. Babbling and incoherent, their begging shifted slowly, changing from maddened imploring to shrieks of agony by degrees. One by one, the voices winked out, like street lights being extinguished, disappearing forever into the night.
Bruning found himself flinching before he realized what was happening.
Suddenly the sky was split by a blue-white light. The piercing star hung above the waves, sinking slowly, playing on the wind like a wisp, slipping sluggishly down towards the ocean. In the sea the Deep Ones swarmed, moving through the waves by the dozens, their hands flung above their heads to cover their huge eyes from the rogue star, their forward advance changing suddenly to a stumbling retreat back into the night surf. Shouts arose from the bastions. Men on the beach screamed. A woman cried out and was silenced by the chatter of a submachine gun. The clatter of footsteps running up cement walkways, the shouts for order and covering fire, the sounds of mad laughter, these intermingled and filled the air with a hundred other noises, each more hurried, confusing and terrifying than the last. Backlit by the blue-white light, the bastions showed numerous confounded shadows, frozen in confusion, or running in fear.
And then the first explosion. A rippling fireball erupted to the northwest of Bruning’s shack, slicing the legs off a guard tower and flinging wood pylons the size of railroad ties through the air like matches. The tower collapsed to the ground in a heap, kicking up an amazing cloud of dust which rushed through the open window in one great wave, coating Bruning in cordite and bits of smoldering wood. Two other explosions rapidly followed, ripping into the beach and throwing silhouetted pieces of bodies high into the night air.
Above the body-shaking tremors of the explosions that wracked the camp, the chatter of small arms fire crackled on endlessly, bullets tearing up all in their path. The MG42s opened up from the guard towers, tracking darkened forms as they rushed through the camp. Screams, shouts, and commands were all lost in the cacophony of explosions, and a second blue-white flare filled the night with the brilliance of a tiny drifting north star as the first flare hit the waves and was extinguished.
We are under attack! Bruning’s sluggish mind snapped to attention. This was his chance. Instantly he snatched up his valise and spilled out the open window in a heap, landing badly on his right leg. The sound of gunfire on the beach brought his head up and he saw the carnage on the bastions.
Shadows were there, locked in combat, human and inhuman, backlit dramatically by the flarelight. Squatting toad-like forms closed distances with submachine gun-wielding humans, ripping them to shreds even as the rounds tore through their alien bodies. Bruning watched fascinated as one Deep One lifted what must have b
een an eighty-kilogram man in one bulky arm and flung him more than four meters. It shrieked. Then the thing disintegrated into a dozen slimy bits, gore and ichor spraying in a million different directions as the MG42s tracked it, leaving huge pockmarks in the cement.
A man as thin as a scarecrow, with mad eyes, rushed past Bruning in a practiced combat trot, carrying a bloodied MP40. It was only when he passed that Bruning realized he was a prisoner, wearing ratty bloodstained grey rags. The stick man breezed by Bruning without even noticing him and continued around the shacks, disappearing into the shadows. Bruning stood, wincing at the pain in his leg, and made his way east, limping at a crazed pace for cover, any cover, as the shells continued to fall.
A submachine gun erupted behind him and he didn’t even spare a backwards glance as he slunk up next to a storage shack, slipping into the shadows. An SS man rushed past within four feet of him, unarmed, his face fixed in a mask of terror.
Then heat. Amazing heat, and the sensation of flying.
Bruning landed roughly on a singed portion of wood, his head pounding in time with his heart, realizing lethargically that a shell had just missed him. Next to his head a black-clad leg severed neatly at the knee lay amidst the smoking flaming ruins of the shack, and Bruning frantically grasped at both his own before realizing it was the unfortunate remains of the SS man he had seen moments before the explosion.
He pulled himself upright, the pain in his leg forgotten, the nails which had sunk deeply into his back ignored, the second-degree burns on his face seeming distant and unimportant. He picked up his valise and shifted into a crouching, shuffling run towards the east fence.
More shells fell, ripping into the childrens’ section, but they sounded distant and far away. He ran past the flaming wreck of the building, ignoring the childrens’ screams, searching frantically for escape. Then Bruning saw it, a gap in the fence, blown open by the shelling.
He fell the last few feet towards the fence, stumbling to a halt next to an upended railroad tie. Ahead of him the foot path to the top of the Nez-de-Jobourg cliffs lead up into the darkness. The rail-road tie jumped in his hand and smoke kicked up from it in a small cloud. It took him a moment to realize someone had just shot at him. He spun frantically, dropping his valise in the dirt, and saw an SS man rushing towards him from the officers’ cabins with his arm raised in a martial stance. A tiny flash of light appeared in the SS man’s shadow-clad hand and something whistled by Bruning’s head, followed swiftly by the crack of the report. It was one of Weber’s guards.
Bruning dove onto his valise, turned, and ran as fast as he could for the path up the cliffs. Stumbling up into the dark, following the sandy, ghost-white trail which zigzagged ahead of him, Bruning searched the hills frantically for the tell-tale flashes of mortar fire. Although his breath came in short gasps, it seemed to Bruning he could continue this way forever. His body felt like a machine, something he simply operated and had no connection to, which would run eternally upwards, following the path automatically.
Ahead of him up on the rocky promontory a single flash of light changed Bruning’s direction instantly. He zigged into a clutch of sickly trees, following a overgrown path which was only visible as a thin line in the dark of the night. The slope increased, and his body compensated, high on adrenaline. As he reached the rise before the promontory Bruning threw his pistol away into the dark and heard it dimly as it skidded down the cliff face. He shrieked in English and French:
“I am an Intelligence Officer! I wish to surrender!” He raised his burned hands in the air, waving his valise at the hunched figures he could make out on the rocky cliff, crouched around the tubes of their mortars.
Then he was hit from behind. Something in his back gave way and he heard a snapping sound when he tumbled to the ground with his assailant piled on top of him. My collarbone just broke, he thought calmly.
His hand desperately clutched the valise, the other fruitlessly searched for his gun on his belt, although he knew it was not there. Bruning spun face-up and was greeted by the grim visage of one of his guards, a chisel-faced blond with death in his eyes. His SS collar gleamed in the night air, and his breath came in great white plumes as he raised his fist to pound Bruning into submission. The punch struck Bruning in the neck, sending a shuddering impact through his entire body, and suddenly his throat felt completely blocked. His breath stuttered in his lungs, and he unconsciously put both hands up to cover his face.
Bruning desperately lashed out with his numb legs and connected with the guards inner thigh, causing their positions to abruptly reverse. Wheezing, Bruning now squatted over the guard, whose hand flashed to his belt in an instant, no doubt to find his dagger. Bruning, taking what little advantage he had, backed away and snatched up his valise from the ground. Behind the guard on the promontory a dozen shadows were now rushing towards their position, drawn by the noise and movement.
Bruning smiled at the guard as his breath returned in painful gasps.
The guard looked once over his shoulder, then back at Bruning and matched his smile. “We die together, traitor.”
In the guard’s hand, instead of a dagger, a potato masher grenade spit a coil of smoke from its handle. There was too much smoke and not enough time.
Bruning looked past the guard and saw the haggard face of a man, eyes wide with fear and cunning, his jaw overrun by a red scrub beard, carrying an British submachine gun, rushing towards them. His savior.
“Grenade!” Bruning shouted in English and all the shadows on the peak flattened themselves to the ground like a magic trick, leaving behind only the small shadows of the mortars. The man with the red beard threw himself off the path under cover. As the SS guard tackled Bruning, holding the grenade high in his hand, Bruning swung his arm in a wide arc, sending the valise sailing almost thirty feet through the air towards the promontory. It landed with a solid thud next to the red-bearded man. Then he and the guard collapsed on to the ground in a horrible crash.
Then, the explosion.
He was thrown some distance, or it seemed that way, and he could see the night sky lit by yellow-orange tinges of flame, tendrils of fire licking at the deep blue sky like tentacles engulfing prey. When he landed, the information came to him from far away, from the wreck that his body had become, from the place where he once had lived, but which was no longer necessary. In front of his blurred vision, the roots of a tree intertwined with the sandy dirt, overgrown by a vibrant green grass which hung heavy with frost and water.
Someone was rushing through the grass to get to him, but it all seemed so unimportant now. What was he supposed to do? Why? The questions sounded, hanging and dropping off into the ever growing silence which filled him. Bruning found he could not move, and he also found he was not surprised or scared. When he was a boy at Harburg, they would play hide and seek on the Elbe. In the forest there he would find the witch grass and curl up in it and sit still for hours while his friends searched fruitlessly for him. Like the man was searching for him now. Somehow his life had wrapped in upon itself neatly, like a loop, and he was there again. He was here again. It all made sense.
I have found a home in dark grass, Karl Bruning thought, and then died.
INTERLUDE 1:
Everything is in motion, even what is still
November 10, 1942: New York, U.S.A.
For the fifth time that week, interrupting his favorite show as it played on the tinny Philco radio, the power cut out in Tony Lanois’ apartment. These days blackouts were not uncommon in New York City. “When you hear the sirens, don’t give the Krauts something to shoot at! Lights out!” the posters warned, but outside the window, the lights across Fourteenth Street glared a dim and constant yellow. Beyond them the Empire State Building stood glowing like some geometric Christmas Tree and not a single warning siren had sounded. New York continued apace, unmindful of such an insignificant and personal inconvenience.
Lanois sighed deeply and stood up from his rapidly-cooling soup in the dark. A
million things could have caused the blackout in the Hale Building—his building—but Lanois knew better. He goddamn knew.
“Fuckin’ foreigners!” Lanois shouted. He hoped the bastards upstairs in Four-B could hear him, but the humming had started again. Soon the tenants would come down with their standard complaints in their standard order, about the lights, about their rats and bugs and all that other applesauce. Mostly war brides, they loved using the power outages as an excuse to complain about his shortcomings as the building super. During these bitch sessions he would feign polite interest, go to check on the power (stumbling down to the basement with a shitty old flickering flashlight), and then the lights would come back on of their accord seconds before he was ready to replace the cocksucking fuse.
Not again.
Like Sherlock Holmes or one of those hard nosed P.I.s on the silver screen, Tony had used his head. By paying attention to all the little details and carefully assembling the clues of the case, he had pretty much worked out the who and where, but not the what. As for the why, he was dying to find out, but that was phase two.
On the case of the mysterious power outages for some time now (in his official capacity as super, of course) Tony had long since noticed the oddities of the foreign goons in Four-B; the flickering of the hall light outside their door followed by the subtle whiffs of ozone from their apartment; the shouts and clangs and the low-pitched hum which seemed to thrum throughout the whole building, but only when they were at home; all the visitors and weird contraptions they were dragging up the stairs at all hours. Something screwy was going on up there, that much was sure.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 8
