Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  Beppo? Were the ghosts of the Marx Brothers waiting in the wings? What was next? Smurf Nazis Must Die? I was definitely past tired and edging over into hallucinatory. “Robert Walton,” I said, trying to keep my guard up and simultaneously letting myself go with the flow.

  “That name sounds very familiar. Should I know you?”

  That depended upon the reading proclivities of twelve-year-old boys. “I shouldn’t think so.” And dead ones at that.

  Of course, given that context perhaps I should have selected a nom de plume from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

  “Did you have an accident or are you a part of one of Grandpère’s experiments?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Where’s your body, Herr Walton? Is it in one of the labs? Down in the morgue? Or did you find your way here on your own from outside?”

  “Uh, I don’t know,” I lied. “I’m kind of confused.” That, at least, was pretty truthful. “Where am I?”

  “Brut Adler. The Eagle’s Aerie. Or, perhaps more accurately, the Eagle’s Rookery. Grandpère hatches many fledglings here in this granite nest. Someday soon he will hatch himself and be reborn. Perhaps then he will rename it der Phönix Scheiterhaufen—the Pyre of the Phoenix.” He said this with a curious mix of pride and wistfulness.

  “Really?” I said. “And how is he going to do that? Some kind of breakthrough in blood chemistry?”

  “If only it were that simple,” answered a new voice. The other nurse from my hospital room back in New York had just entered the lab and she did not seem happy. “He prepares to be reborn by killing the unborn! He butchers babies so that he may live a second life! And a third! And Gott knows how many more!”

  The boy howled back at her, rage suffusing his features, contorting his face into a nightmare mask of hate and fear and even sorrow. He ran at her, his arms straight out from his sides, his hands balled into impotent fists. “Shut up, Gretchen! Shut up! Shut up! Shut! Up!”

  He ran into her without slowing—passed completely through her—and continued on, passing through the wall. His wail was audible for a few moments more, fading down the outside corridor.

  She sighed as she stared at the wall where he had phased through. “I really shouldn’t have been so blunt in front of Beppo.”

  “Any boy’s liable to take it personally when you dis his grandfather.”

  “Any boy, perhaps,” she said absently, “but for Beppo any attack upon his grandpère is the same as an attack upon himself . . .”

  The tumblers in my brain spun and finally clicked into place: the twins, the spitting image of their old man, the reproductions of my unborn wife and daughter . . .

  I turned toward the new apparition. Yep. Semitransparent and wearing a white gown instead of a nurse’s uniform, now. But no question about it: she was the spitting image of the nurse who had assisted the Pipt twins and Terry-call-me-T in my hospital room a few hours earlier this evening. Entirely too much spitting in the imagery department.

  “Gretchen?”

  She had turned to consider the boy’s exit but now turned back toward me. “Yes?”

  “Your name isn’t Ilse?”

  Definite frown: “No.”

  She had the look of one who had grown accustomed to her noncorporeal state. Which meant she hadn’t kicked the bucket in the last several hours. “And you don’t have a twin sister, do you.” I don’t think it was really a question at this point.

  Her frown became a harsh line slashing across the bottom of her otherwise pretty face. “I have no sisters.”

  “A daughter, then? More than one daughter?”

  “I said that he butchered babies,” she finally answered in a tremulous voice. “I didn’t say that they all died!”

  * * *

  Gretchen followed me as I stalked out of the lab and began trotting down the corridor in a half march. I set a deliberate pace that enabled me to poke my head through a door and check a new room every forty-five seconds.

  “Isn’t it rich?” I muttered harshly. “Aren’t we a pair?”

  “What?” she asked, hurrying after as I checked another lab with refrigerated storage space.

  “But where are the clones?” I grumbled, “Quick, send in the clones . . .”

  “Then you know.”

  “Know? No. Not everything. But I should have guessed sooner. The Pipt-Nikidik connection for example.”

  “The what?”

  “If laughing boy was going to be consistent with his little Oz code names then I should have connected Dr. Dick to Dr. Pipt right away. In The Marvelous Land of Oz Dr. Nikidik was the original inventor of the Powder of Life and lived in the mountains of the Gillikin Country. Later, in The Road to Oz, Dyna reported his fall from a great precipice and he was presumed dead. Interestingly enough, when Dr. Pipt turns up later in The Patchwork Girl of Oz AND also has the recipe for the Powder of Life, one has to wonder if maybe Nikidik faked his death and changed his name to avoid persecution for the illegal practice of magic.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Serendipity. Synchronicity.” I stuck my head into another room. “How many of him are there?”

  “How many?”

  “Yeah. I make two from the pair of docs—” Oh. Paradox. That was the stupid pun that kept rattling around in my subconscious. I grimaced. “—the twins—except they aren’t really twins. Any more than Ilse is your sister or your daughter.” I moved on to the next door. Surprise: a private gym. “So, how many?”

  Her alabaster and transparent flesh was a wash when it came to displaying contrasts; I almost missed the furrowing of her brow.

  “What? Can’t count that high?”

  She shook her head. “It is just that I don’t know how to count them. Do you ask how many there have been? Or how many are currently viable?”

  “What? ‘Viable’? You mean unlike our boy Beppo?”

  “The boy’s death was an accident. He, at least, survived for more than a decade. Some died while still in the womb. Others . . .”

  “Others what?”

  “The handivork of Gott is not mocked, Mr. . . .”

  What name had I just given Beppo? “Um, Krempe.”

  “Mr. Krempe. The same samples, the same treatments, the same procedures—the same flesh—and the outcomes vary. Some don’t survive. Some shouldn’t survive. Herr Doktor has become very particular as the time for his consummation draws near. He tolerates little short of perfection.”

  I stopped sticking my head through doors and walls and brought my face close to hers. “You’re telling me Pipt had other versions of himself destroyed?”

  “In some cases it was the humane thing to do. In others . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet. I’ve seen Herr Doktor’s handiwork.”

  “That is not to say he destroyed them all. He keeps several alive downstairs to better understand what can go wrong with the processes.”

  I turned away and began checking doors again, wondering what fresh horrors I might find if I looked in enough of the rooms. “So tell me, Gretchen—alive and viable—how many Pipts has this guy pooped?” The next room contained a small indoor swimming pool.

  “There are seventeen living children between six months and twelve years of age. Nine adolescents. Seven adults in their twenties and thirties. Three in their forties. One in his fifties. He is the most dangerous. . . .”

  “Oh? And why is that?” A private bathroom and sauna lay behind the next door: I was getting closer to Pipt Prime.

  “Herr Doktor did not perfect the biochemical transmission of memory engrams until a month or so ago. He experimented with controlled environments, hypnosis, and duplicating key events and experiences during his doppelgangers’ development.”

  “Sort of a Boys From Brazil scenario, huh?”

  “I do not understand.”

  The next room was a private office. The furniture and décor more appropriate to a CEO than a midlevel manager. “Read Ira Levin. Most pe
ople prefer Rosemary’s Baby. But I’m more interested in his ‘monsters are made, not born’ thesis.”

  “Well, his oldest doppelganger received conditioning that was designed to enhance certain aspects of Herr Doktor’s personality beyond the original parameters and this turned out to be a mistake that even he admits to. The man must be watched carefully and constantly.

  “In the decades that have passed since his first attempts, he has worked toward perfecting a chemical means of memory transfer. It has taken decades of bloody sacrifice and horrific failure but he now believes he has made a critical breakthrough. Very soon now he will attempt to place his actual memories within an infant version of himself!”

  I thought about the lab with the multitude of flatworm species creeping about the aquariums adorning the walls and benches and tables and remembered the Thompson and McConnell “worm-running” experiments from the previous century. “Don’t tell me the doc plans on grinding up his brain and feeding it to his clones?” It was something that the Nazis might have experimented with in the death camps of World War Two but no one in their right mind would seriously attempt with another human being—much less themselves. Of course the evidence that Pipt was in his right mind was seriously AWOL at this point. A Platyhelminthes with flatworm instincts and impulses was a far cry from the complex organism with higher brain functions that calls itself human.

  She shook her head. “Not grind up, no. He extracts fluid from the brain tissue—I do not understand the full process. It is most effective when reinjected into an embryonic host and allowed to wash over fetal brain cells.”

  “And the doctor, himself, would survive this process?”

  “No. Not the original brain tissue, anyway. That is why he has waited to perfect the process with many test subjects . . .”

  That was creepy. Even more so if he was using cloned versions of himself as guinea pigs.

  The physical clones of Pipt wouldn’t possess identical psyches: he couldn’t mimeograph the original mind and memories without destroying it. The question was how many versions of himself had he lobotomized trying to develop the means to perpetuate his own consciousness in successive copies? They might not possess the same thoughts and memories as his own but he would have a means of discovering how effective the actual transfer of memory and personality might be if he was willing to sacrifice enough human replicants over an extended number of years. I shivered. It was a monstrous concept to undertake with any group of test subjects . . .

  To engage in a premeditated pogrom of atrocities upon the mirror versions of your very own flesh and blood? My mind just couldn’t get a foothold there. Instead it turned its attention to whether or not Pipt might have finally discovered how much of the human personality template was “nature versus nurture”—any distraction as a port in the emotional storm.

  But I couldn’t afford any distractions now. “Gretchen? You said that the doctor has finally achieved the breakthrough he’s been searching for all these long years?”

  She nodded. “Well, actually, he finalized the process several years ago.”

  “Then what’s he waiting for?” I asked. But I already had a pretty good idea as to the answer.

  “He is afraid. What if something goes wrong? What if the transference is more like a copy and the destruction of the original is still death and final oblivion?”

  I nodded. “So what’s finally changed all that—besides his time running out?”

  “He speaks of another breakthrough these days,” she said. “A new kind of blood infusion that has recently come to his attention.”

  “A blood infusion that might enable him to survive the process,” I guessed, “and even permit a different approach to longevity if not immortality.”

  “Yes. It is to be delivered tonight.”

  “And Hitler?”

  “I’m sorry, I do not understand.”

  “You’re sure there’s no Fourth Reich, spooky resurrection, rule-the-world plot afoot?”

  She looked at me like I was speaking gibberish.

  “Yeah, well, hidden castle in the mountains, Nazis working on secret experiments, the laws of God and Man being broken—or at least severely dented—I can’t believe that Hitler’s brain or clone or cryogenic carcass isn’t behind one of these doors. Or the box that Jay is bringing down the aisle.”

  She looked around in confusion.

  “Never mind.” I stuck my head through the next door and found myself looking at Adolph Hitler in full dress uniform, very much in the prime of his life.

  I jumped a little: the painting was that realistic.

  I pushed on through the door and found myself in a spacious library. Not a lot of books but a whole lotta fireplace off to my left. The fireplace I had last seen in Pipt’s psychotropic email. The fire was damped for the night and the main lights were off except for a single beam from a track light in the ceiling.

  Der Führer was attired in an army greatcoat while the painting’s other occupant wore the full-dress uniform of the Waffen SS. He was a captain and the breast of his tunic bore several medals. The so-called mastermind of the so-called master race clasped his hand in a congratulatory manner. There was a brass inscription plate affixed to the bottom part of the frame but, as the subjects were rendered in life size the frame stretched from just inches off the floor to nearly a foot above my head. As I moved closer, I could see that the painting was very detailed, adding to the initial impression of realism. What most drew my eyes, however, was the face of the other man in the portrait. The rounded head, the dark hair and eyes, were becoming more and more familiar with each passing day: a younger version of the mysterious Dr. Pipt, an older version of Beppo, an exact match for the pair of docs who had shanghaied me from the hospital. As I got right up to the canvas my eyes moved to the inscription near the floor and I knelt to make out the finely etched script:

  1942—The Iron Cross—First Class,

  The Black Badge for the Wounded,

  The Medal for the Care of the German People—

  Awarded to Captain Josef Mengele, M.D.

  The room lurched around me and I fell through the floor.

  * * *

  Mengele!

  No one person better embodied the horrors of the Nazi death camps than Dr. Josef Mengele.

  The idea of six million human beings rounded up and systematically sent to their deaths is horror enough but the genocide of the Jews is only part of the story.

  The forced relocations, separation of family members, cattlelike internments, death by gassing or bullet, mass immolation of human corpses—all seem almost humane and even prosaic by comparison when the stone of history is turned over and the hidden, squirmy atrocities are brought forth from the dark, secret places.

  The concentration camps were more than just holding pens for Germany’s undesirables. More than just waiting rooms until the showers and the furnaces were able to play catch-up. Some were special windows into Hell where portions were set aside to serve as horrific research facilities. And staffed by scientists who carried clipboards instead of pitchforks and whose heads sported surgical caps in place of horns.

  Here were opportunities to research the effects of extreme cold on the human body. For every hundred Jews or Poles or Gypsies forced to endure frigid temperatures and then treated to painful, often fatal, rewarming experiments—perhaps a German soldier serving on the Russian front might someday benefit.

  Perhaps.

  Battlefield medicine could be advanced without risking the Fatherland’s troops. Prisoners could be shot, burned, have ground glass, sawdust, caustic agents rubbed into their wounds—and then be restrained while gangrene and sepsis taught the doctors what they wanted to know about pain thresholds, morbidity, shock, and the human will to live.

  Biological warfare was birthed in the camp clinics as children were injected with infectious agents and progress of each disease was painstakingly documented and mapped.

  Gruesome accounts were legion. But Mengele�
�s reputation overshadowed all the others, rendering them into nothing more than mere sideshow thrills outside the dark castle of horrors that was Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  He was Hitler’s point man on eugenics research.

  That was the given excuse.

  It was one thing to cleanse the earth of the subhuman races. The Aryans believed they were destined to be the master race, the über ideal. But as superior as the German peoples were supposed to be to the flotsam and jetsam that had infiltrated Europe, they knew that they still fell short, as a whole, to the fuller potential that lay dormant within their own genes. While they were supposedly further up the evolutionary ladder than the rest of mankind, there were rungs yet to climb. There was still a gulf between “man” and “superman” that the Nazis’ selective breeding programs had failed to close.

  Enter Captain Josef Mengele, M.D. War hero, medical doctor with a background in eugenics, party loyalist, and cold-blooded sociopath. The death camp at Auschwitz, Poland, was the perfect laboratory to explore the full spectrum of cruelties conceivable by the human mind and their effects upon the human body.

  He was movie-star handsome, well groomed, and always impeccably attired—dark green tunic neatly pressed, medals prominently on display, death’s-head SS cap jauntily tilted to the side revealing a precision part in his dark, wavy hair. Even amidst the dust or the mud of the unloading docks, his black boots were always polished to a mirror shine, his white gloves immaculate—except for those occasions when his temper would flare and he would lay hands on a prisoner in a bloody-minded rage.

  He would meet the trains bringing new consignments of human misery to the camp every day. Other doctors involved in the selection process required drugs or alcohol to help them face this repugnant task. Only Mengele seemed to enjoy the process, showing up even on his days off to select his human guinea pigs and consign the rest to the work details, gas chambers and the furnaces.

  For the most part he stood apart and above, flicking his riding crop to the left or the right, as he divided the prisoners onto separate paths. To the right, life. The showers that were not showers waited on the path to the left. It was calculated that, one by one, he sent four hundred thousand souls to the gas chambers. Infants, children, parents, grandparents—generations selected for extermination one soul at a time