“I’m not lying! I’m being moderately evasive!”
“Nevertheless, mister, consider yourself grounded.”
“Look, I know a lot of things that I’m not allowed to talk about. I’m breaking all kinds of rules just by being here in the first place.”
“Which brings me to my next question—”
The wolf put a paw on my chest. “No questions. Think of it like I’m Captain Picard and you’re asking me to violate the Prime Directive.”
“Well, I take more of a Captain Kirk approach to rules, myself.”
“No kiddin’.”
I struggled up to my knees. The flesh I wore felt heavy after the incredible lightness of being without. Somewhere down deep in the cellar, beneath my consciousness, the body’s original occupant crouched in the darkness and shuddered with his hands over his face. With any luck he’d stay down there until it was time for me to leave. “So this place you came from before you came here, they get all the Trek editions first run? Or just in syndication?”
“Dad . . .”
* * *
I was lucky that Whozits was too stunned by the turn of events to resist my taking over his body. It was hard enough just learning how to walk all over again. All aboard the Disorient Express. By the time I got the outer door open I was able to stagger about after a fashion but I had zombies in my backyard that shuffled with more grace and speed on less flesh and bone.
Will—I couldn’t keep calling him “wolf”—looked up at me as I pulled the door closed behind us. “What’s the plan?”
“What do you mean, what’s the plan? You’re the one who’s omniscient!”
“I never said I was omniscient, I only said that I know some things that I can’t get all loose-lipped about. This is your gig; I’m only trying to lend a helping hand.”
We both stared down at his paws.
“You’d think I’d get some credit for crossing all sorts of metaphysical barriers, chasing after you all the way to New York, watching out for your innards after you lost your outtards, hitching a ride with Witch Hazel out there all the way to the Rockies, and then pushing this poor old wolf carcass up the mountainside to help you again. Omniscient? If I’d known you were going to give me this much grief I would’ve stayed home and hung around haunting Mom.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m having a bad day. You’ve got to admit these aren’t the ideal circumstances for meeting your future offspring.”
“Not if they’re human, anyway,” he agreed, scratching at something behind his ear.
“It’s not that. It’s all this!” I swept the hall with my arm. “Nazis. Secret mountain fortress. Laboratories equipped with advanced genetics technology. They’ve cloned my dead wife and daughter and are using their fetuses as hostages! Who knows? Maybe they’ve cloned Adolf Hitler.”
Will shook his head. “It’s been done.”
I stared at him, aghast. “It has?”
“Another story, not here, not your karma.” He hesitated. “I don’t think . . .” He shook his muzzle. “Not now, not tonight. Try to stay focused, Dad. Plenty of fascist fish to fry later if all goes well tonight.”
“Swell. Even if you do learn from history, you’re doomed to repeat it.” I turned and staggered up the hallway toward the inner door.
“So what is the plan?” he called after me.
“I’m working on it.”
I opened the inner door. Another guard met me on his way out. Cigarette-break man.
“Hans? What happened?”
“What?” I hoped my voice didn’t sound strange.
He was too busy peering at my face to pay attention to the vocal inflections of a single syllable response. He wasn’t one of Mengele’s clones. That shouldn’t be too surprising as Gretchen had counted eleven surviving adult replicants and I’d already noted at least four times that many in the barracks, alone.
“You look terrible!” the guard exclaimed. “Did you have an accident?”
“Uh,” I half-coughed, half-grunted, “yeah. Fell down.”
“The transport will be here soon but I think I have enough time to help you down to the infirmary if you need assistance.”
Decisions, decisions . . .
“Don’t move!” he whispered. His hand went down to his holster and unsnapped the cover.
Uh-oh.
“There’s a wolf behind you.”
Oh. Oh!
I clenched my right hand into a fist. Then I stepped in as he drew his pistol and punched his jaw with a swift uppercut.
He stepped back and looked at me in disbelief as I shook my stinging knuckles. “What did you do that for?”
Apparently Hans was a “lefty.” And I had grown overly dependant on the preternatural strength of my former body.
“Uh, Greenpeace?” I said. As Will leapt past me and knocked the man to the ground.
I pointed the Heckler & Koch at man and beast as they rolled over and over but there was no way to get a clear shot. And putting a fortress full of Nazis on red-alert was not part of any potential plan that I was still working on.
Suddenly it was over. The guard got a firm grip on the wolf’s head and gave it a wrenching twist. There was an audible cracking sound and the beast went limp.
“Son of a bitch!” I hissed as I swung the automatic weapon up and at the man’s head.
He threw up his hands. “Whoa, Dad; best not to invoke family lineage in the house of one’s enemies.”
“Will?”
The guard wiped some blood from his hand onto the fur of the dead wolf and climbed back to his feet. “In the flesh.” He staggered a little. “Bipedal. Going to have to work on this balance thing a little.” He felt his face. “And what happened to all of those wonderful smells?”
He staggered toward me a little and I felt tears gather at the edge of my eyes.
“Dad? What’s wrong?”
I shook my head and sniffed. “I just saw my baby boy take his first steps.”
* * *
We killed another ten minutes in the temperature lock before returning to the main “lobby” of Brut Adler. It took that long for Will to get his “land legs” and me to get the pass code to the inner blast doors from the gibbering consciousness that cringed in my current body’s hindbrain.
“And you say it takes babies like forever to learn how to do this?” he asked as I placed “my” palm on the scanner beside the double doors and keyed in what I hoped was the correct sequence of numbers. “Man, I’m going to be a prodigy when I’m finally born.”
“I wouldn’t get too cocky, boy. You’ll be working with a carcass that’s still evolving from a quadruped to a biped with no muscle tone.” There was a click and I pushed the door on the right open. “Besides, I’m betting the rules will still apply to you, as well.”
“Rules?”
“Don’t be surprised if you come into this world with a hefty case of amnesia, just like the rest of us.” I poked my head through the opening and looked around. The lobby was still deserted. “Of course, if your memory is as wiped as the rest of ours is, there will be nothing to be surprised about.”
“Seems like poor planning on God’s part,” Will mused as we moved across the mezzanine.
“Don’t get me started on God’s grand design,” I griped as we paused at the foot of the staircase. “My first question, if we ever meet in the hereafter, is why do two-year-olds have so much energy with nothing to do while grownups—particularly parents—have so much to do and so little energy. Seems like an inequitable distribution of resources to me.”
“If you like, I’ll ask for you when I go back.”
I turned and looked at him. “You’ve met God?”
“Not exactly, no. But I’ve met some who say they’re on a first-name basis with Him.”
“Oh. Well. It’s pretty much the same here.” I raised a foot to the first step and stopped. As difficult as climbing the stairs was in a noncorporeal body, I had the distinct feeling it was going to be harder
wearing flesh other than my own. And Will?
“Can we take the elevator?”
“Okay,” I said, turning back to the glassed-in cage at the big room’s center, “but just this once for you.”
“And lets make a pit stop at the nearest restroom.”
“Why? You gotta go already?”
“No.” He reached out and touched my bleeding cheek. “You need to wash your Hans.”
“I’m beginning to understand why some animals eat their young.”
“Plenty of time to give me pre-childhood complexes later, Pop. We still don’t have a plan,” he pointed out as we waited for the lift to descend. “Are we going to raid the weapons lockers and go all berzerko, running around like the Dirty Dozen?”
“If you’re going to use movie analogies you’d more likely end up with Butch and Sundance, mise-en-scène freeze-frame and fade to black. And what kind of movie subscriptions are you getting on the Other Side? You’re a bloodthirsty little tyke for a heavenly personage.”
“Who said I was heavenly? There are more places between Heaven and Earth, Horatio, and you can’t make assumptions about everyone’s zip code.”
“Boy,” I sighed, “when this is all over we gotta have ourselves a long talk.” The elevator arrived and we got on board. “In the meantime, we’ve got two bodies to liberate and a mad doctor—or doctors—to put out of business. I figure if we can find some kind of communications center, we can call for help.”
“Who you gonna call?”
I gave him The Look. “I was thinking,” I said slowly, “of calling for backup from my own demesne. Or from Seattle. And that the Simon Wiesenthal foundation might be interested in learning that the Death Angel of Auschwitz didn’t actually die in 1979 after all.”
“That might work,” he agreed. “If you can convince them that you don’t sleep with tin foil over your noggin and you’re willing to wait a few days. Your people are hours away. How long would it take them to prepare a strike team? Assuming that they were willing to go to the extra effort and risk instead of cutting their losses and electing a new, purer-blooded Doman? And assuming they were able to find this place once they got here? I mean, it’s not exactly on the maps and you’re only going to be able to land one helicopter at a time if they do find the needle in a mountain range of haystacks. Face it, Dad, we’re it as far as you and your girlfriend’s bodies are concerned.”
“Deirdre is not my girlfriend.”
“That’s not the way Mom sees it.”
“Your mother is going through some difficulties right now and has made some mistaken assumptions.”
“And I should butt out of the grownups’ business, right?”
I leaned in as the elevator slowed to a stop. “We will discuss all of this later, at a more appropriate time. Right now we have a job to do.”
“You got it, Pops,” he said as the doors slid open. “Just tell me what I’m supposed to do.”
“You are supposed to meet the copter and assist them in transporting the cargo to the operating theater,” Gretchen answered, standing just beyond the doorway. “Fools! What are you doing back here?” Her tone was as cold, now, as it had been warm in the lab scarcely an hour earlier.
Will held up his hand where, as a wolf, he had nipped “himself” before swapping bodies through the blood bridge. “We were attacked by a rabid wolf!”
“Mein Gott!” she exclaimed.
“What is it, Ilsa?” Another Mengele-the-Next-Generation appeared behind her.
I suddenly realized that this “Gretchen” was very solid and no ghost at all.
“These idiots are not at their posts und now Franz, here, says something about a rabid wolf!”
Mengele Junior frowned. “Perhaps I should roust an additional security team from their bunks. We can’t risk the cargo—”
“The wolf is dead,” I said. “We killed it.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” Her face contorted into something ancient and feral. “Get back out there and pray that nothing goes wrong with the cargo or hydrophobia will be the least of your worries!”
I nodded hurriedly and stabbed at the button that would take us back down to the main level. The doors started to close but she caught the edge of one with her hand and leaned in. Hissing just inches from my face she said: “Do you know why they called me the Red Bitch of Buchenwald?”
I swallowed convulsively but my mouth was suddenly dry. “Yes.”
“I am remodeling my apartment very soon, now, und I am thinking of replacing my lampshades . . .” She gave us both long, searching looks and then released the door.
As the elevator finally began to descend, Will turned to me. “What was that all about?”
I shivered. I didn’t feel so invulnerable ensconced, once again, in the frail nest of flesh and sinew and blood. “Ilse Koch,” I said. “She was the wife of Karl Koch, the original commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp during the early years of World War Two. I don’t know if they had children but the Antichrist couldn’t ask for a better pedigree.”
“War criminals?”
“Oh yes! What makes them somewhat unique is that Ilse and Karl were tried by the SS back in 1943 on a whole list of charges ranging from embezzlement to incitement to murder. Seems Karl got a little too wanton on his own human game reserve, even for the Nazis. The judge found him guilty and ordered his execution. Mrs. Koch, however, was acquitted.” The doors opened and we exited. I resisted the impulse to look back up over my shoulder to see if she was watching us from an upper-level balcony.
“Pretty serious, though, if the Nazis were trying their own for war crimes,” Will said out of the corner of his mouth.
I nodded. “There was a lot of stuff going on at Buchenwald at the time. Medical staff gave friends and relatives souvenirs . . .”
“Souvenirs?”
“Human remains. Shrunken heads. The story was Ilse made lampshades by tanning the skin of some of the inmates. Supposedly she favored the epidermal areas that sported tattoos.”
“I can see that might add a festive touch.”
I looked at him. “You really aren’t a higher being, are you?”
He shrugged. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“The problem is, Ilse Koch was tried twice after the war and eventually sentenced to life in prison.”
“Looks like she got out.”
“Yeah, the hard way. She committed suicide in 1967.”
“This is very disturbing.”
“What? That a woman who is supposed to be dead is still alive? Or that she’s too young to have merely faked her death? Or that she doesn’t look anything like the surviving photos of the Red Bitch?”
“That my father knows enough about the Nazis to put out his own special edition of Trivial Pursuit.”
I didn’t have a comeback. I was working out the logistics of blonde, blue-eyed “Gretchen” being the DNA donor for the Ilse Koch revival. It made a certain kind of sense as the photos I’d seen of the original “Red Bitch” were nothing to cross the street for. Perhaps Mengele had petri-dished Gretchen for her physical attributes while utilizing Koch’s memory engrams for a more compatible soul mate.
And since this Koch was addressed as Ilsa while the one in my hospital room was called Ilse, there was apparently more than one.
Another thought suddenly occurred. If Mengele had perfected memory transfer across differing genetic hosts, then he could reincarnate himself in a different body with a different identity in the future. He could effectively disappear into humanity’s gene pool with scarcely a ripple! The clock was ticking and it was more and more apparent that time was running out on a number of fronts.
We came to the double doors leading to the temperature lock and the outside entrance. “Well, so much for Plan A,” I muttered as I opened the door to my left and stepped through.
Will followed and started to giggle as the door closed behind us.
“What?”
“I
just realized something.”
“What’s that?”
“Our names.”
“What about our names?” I zipped up my parka as I approached the outer doors.
“She called me ‘Franz’.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re Hans!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hans and Franz!”
“So?”
“So, like,” his voice took on a heavy and not too convincing Austrian accent, “ve are Hans und Franz, and ve are here to blow—” He clapped his hands together once and pointed. “—you up!” He began cackling like a demented magpie.
Kids.
I pushed the outer door open and went back outside to wait for my body to be delivered.
* * *
The wind was bitter and we both had to stomp our feet to keep some semblance of feeling inside of our boots.
“Okay, one more time, let’s go over our options.”
“Or lack thereof.”
“That’s my boy. Never too early to learn that pessimism runs in our family.”
“Runs? It practically gallops!”
“Two of us, lots of them. Quasi-military structure. Stone fortress, resistant to fire . . .”
“I don’t suppose they have a nuclear reactor we could SCRAM to go critical?”
I shook my head. “The only evidence my pipe crawling yielded in the basement was an older, steam-heat system, supplemented by a more modern, forced air flow furnace and duct system. Probably upgraded the facilities a couple of decades back.”
“Fuel?”
“I don’t know. Probably oil, originally. Maybe natural gas, now. Or even electricity. But if you’re thinking about setting charges and using the reserves to multiply the force of the blast, we’d have to find the explosives, find the fuel storage area, bring the two together, and I get the feeling that Madam Lampshade is going to have us on a very short leash as soon as we set foot back inside.”
He nodded. “I could still try to go for reinforcements but physical troops—assuming your people would come—would take too long to physically get here.”
Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III Page 38
