The great doors behind us began to open, signaling the arrival of reinforcements and now the pilot and copilot were coming, pistols drawn, attempting a flanking action. Will fired one last burst through the opening doors and then turned and ran. He dropped his gun as he reached the precipice, spread his arms, and launched himself into space like Peter Pan taking his leave from Wendy Darling’s bedroom window. He must have soared some fifteen feet before both darkness and gravity claimed him.
If he made any sound before hitting the rocks a thousand feet below, it was lost in the sudden roar of an express-train wind. Pushed back toward the entrance, the rest of us turned and fled before an invisible storm, retreating to the madness within the mountain.
* * *
The Mengele version who entered the detention facilities looked as though he were pushing fifty, a trim and vigorous fifty. And something else. Something vaguely reptilian lurked about his eyes and mouth. And something of the stalking panther resonated in his gait and movements.
I sat up a little straighter and, for the umpteenth time, tested the handcuffs that locked Hans’ left wrist to the chair arm.
Mengele II pulled a chair out, reversed it, and sat astraddle, leaning forward on its back some five feet away. He did not speak but continued to stare at me the way a kid would study a spider caught in a glass jar.
As he studied me, I studied him. If this was the dangerous one—the clone they had attempted to enhance through psychological conditioning—I had to wonder what had they actually done to him. How do you duplicate an intellect capable of murdering four hundred thousand men, women, and children? How could his childhood have been processed to produce a doppelganger of the monster that used hundreds of children like lab rats for sadistic experiments, atrocities that did nothing to further the cause of science or German superiority?
And then ratchet up those traits to higher levels of “efficiency?"
The fading, human scraps and snippets of my soul still shrank from the necessities of killing, even in a righteous cause. But this guy had the look of an infectious disease: he could probably make the Pope rethink his positions on abortion and gun control given a short audience in a soundproofed room. And now his cold, soulless stare was boring into my own eyes.
“Hey, Joey, take a picture; it lasts longer.” I didn’t have time to play “made you look away” with Death Angel, Jr.
“What happened out there?” he asked quietly.
“Hell, I don’t know. Ole Franz went Rambo. Ask anyone.” I raised a mental glass: Confusion to the enemy . . .
He shook his head. “I meant before. I did a quick review of the security videos. You were outside and were attacked by a wolf. Then you got up and it followed you inside like a faithful dog. Then Franz reports that the wolf attacks him before it is killed. Both of you have behaved strangely since then.”
“You get attacked by a wolf and see how strangely you act right afterward.” The answer was borderline rote and pro forma: there was no way I was talking my way out of the handcuffs with this guy.
“Who are you?” he asked. “Really?” He was no dummy.
“Mossad, you Kinderfucker! Israeli Intelligence knows where you are, now, and your hours are numbered!”
He didn’t blink. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a large, folding buck knife and unfolded it with careful deliberation.
“Did you hear me? I said ‘hours’, not ‘days!’”
He nodded and said, “Karl . . .”
The security goon who’d been standing behind me suddenly grabbed my free arm by the wrist. It was like being locked in an iron vise.
“I am going to ask you a series of questions,” he continued quietly, “and every time I don’t like your answer, I am going to shorten a finger by one joint. Understood?”
I had hoped to lure someone in close enough to bloody a nose. Now that was patently impossible. I hadn’t signed up for Advanced Pain and Mutilation, either, and I wasn’t about to stick around and audit the course. I banged around the interior of my borrowed skull a couple of times and shot back out into the ether. Perhaps, I thought as I exited through the wall, poor Hans would be well out of it, still crouching and whimpering down under the cellar stairs of his hindbrain.
But the screaming started before I was halfway down the hall. And the closed door did little to muffle Hans’ bewildered protestations and howls for mercy.
Object lesson for the squeamish and irresolute: mercy begets mercy. But when you swim with the sharks, payback’s a bitch.
Something I’d do well to remember if I ever made it back to New York.
* * *
It took me close to an hour to find my own body.
I had to search two levels and a half-dozen clinics and ORs before stumbling across the green-tiled theater where they’d stashed my mortal remains. It—I—lay on the stainless steel table, secured by two simple straps. The sheet was pulled back to the waist and I contemplated my waxy appearance like a talent scout for Madame Tussaud’s. I needed an astringent. A loofah wouldn’t hurt . . .
But I was really looking for two things.
First, a hint of the animus. Some sign of a Divine Spark to indicate premises weren’t totally vacated. But I looked dead. Not peaceful. Not sleeping nor in repose. Not even a hint of nobility or any other indication of character seemed stamped on my slackened visage.
I was gone.
The question was was I gone for good?
This brought me to the other thing. I looked for the heart’s fire and saw only ashes upon the hearth. Looked for spinning chakras and found only entropy.
That left only one, sure ingress: blood.
A wound, an injury, an entry point. An IV needle clumsily inserted might have done the trick. But no one had come along, yet, to hook me up. Hello? A little service here for Mengele’s Holy Grail, please!
Apparently they had something going on. Scanners passed back and forth over me like upended Xerox machines and sensors were affixed to my epidermis like computerized checkpoints for the bank of computers along the wall. A variety of monitors were displaying a variety of readouts and a cursory glance suggested some kind of biotech programming was in progress. I looked back at my body. Nanobots? The Wonder Twins had injected something into my heart and my brain back in the hospital room. Were they reprogramming thousands of microscopic machines now awash in my blood and tissues?
Maybe this wasn’t the time to zip up in my wetware suit and go lumbering around in a castle full of armed Nazis. But it did seem like a good idea to go find some kind of solidity and get back here before any more alterations were accomplished with my flesh! I considered the two tough-looking guards inside the room with me. Popped into the outer corridor and contemplated the second pair stationed right outside the door. Nope. Gotta thin the ranks a little. Even the odds. Balance the scales. In other words, FUBAR Brut Adler.
And, to do that, I needed blood.
Funny how some issues dog you well into the afterlife and I had a regular theme going on here. I hunted the hall, nearly making a complete circuit before opting up the next staircase and trying another level.
I hit pay dirt ten doors later in a sickbay area that was more clinic than surgical facility. Two members of the away-team were perched on the examining table being treated for superficial gunshot wounds, arm and leg respectively. Sizing both up, I opted for the one-armed guy—I needed to move about and too many areas of the complex weren’t wheelchair accessible.
A hop, a twist, and a little “Johnny, may I cross your red, red bloodstream” put me inside. No time for niceties: I elbowed the resident psyche out of the way and tried to hop off the table. The good news was they had already administered some kind of morphine so the arm wasn’t hurting as bad as it should. The bad news: they had already administered some kind of morphine so the rest of my new body wasn’t working as well as it should.
It all worked out for the best, though: the nurse who stepped in to catch me got my elbow in her face an
d staggered back with a bloody nose.
Sorry, hon, but I may need another getaway vehicle . . .
The weapons were stacked in the corner and, as I made my way toward them I noticed a couple of valves protruding from the wall. I opened the one marked “Sauerstoff” and, as pure oxygen began to hiss into the room, I heard the door open behind me. As I scooped up a handgun an all-too-familiar voice asked: “What are you doing?” I looked back over my shoulder. Sure enough, a blood-speckled Mengele II stood on the threshold, a security goon at his side. “Stop!” he commanded. “Drop your weapon!”
This wasn’t looking so good all of a sudden. My hastily conceived plan—short on detail, long on improvisation—depended on the elements of surprise and confusion. For them, not for me, unfortunately.
“Sergeant, shoot that man!” he ordered.
I dropped behind the exam table before he could get his rifle up but I was deep in trouble, already. Mengele Junior was no dummy and he was already watching the rest of his men for suspicious behavior. And while I lucked out this time and got a “right-handed” body to match my own orientation, it was the right arm that was all chewed up and practically useless. Furthermore, I was in a box—a box that everyone else was starting to exit—and the call had doubtlessly gone out for more reinforcements. I raised the pistol in my shaky left hand and considered my options. Stick my head up and probably get it blown off? Keep my head down and fire blindly over the tabletop?
I went with option three: I put three bullets into the wall before the fourth hit the opened oxygen nozzle and turned a four-room complex into a phoenix pyre that flipped its own fiery bird at Mengele Redux.
Fire alarms were blaring their klaxon distress calls throughout the complex as I exited the large, charcoal briquette I had spent all of ninety seconds possessing. I drifted through the flames and three more walls before reentering the corridor and resuming my search for another host body.
Brut Adler was looking less and less like an eagle’s nest and more and more like an anthill someone had kicked over. Personnel swarmed through the hallways, some fleeing the fire, others moving toward it with firefighting gear. Thirty seconds of mind-surfing the human currents and I retreated to another office and resumed my search away from the confusing kaleidoscope of mental chatter.
Office, office, closet, storeroom, lab, storeroom . . . Bingo: another OR! Or, rather, the viewing gallery for an operating theater one floor below.
Theresa Kellerman lay across the operating table, a cross-stitch pattern of bullet wounds marking her own, borrowed flesh from right armpit to left hip. And she was screaming.
Not in pain but in annoyance. “I don’t want an anesthetic! I don’t need an anesthetic! The last time you knocked me out for reattachment, you cross-wired two of my fingers!” Her voice had an unnatural, electronic sound and there appeared to be a modified vocoder taped across her throat. “I need to be awake this time to make sure all of the nerve endings are matched properly! When we’re done I’ll have a permanent body and no one’s going to screw it up on my watch!”
I leaned forward for a better look, pressing my palms to the slanted observation glass. No sign of Deirdre anywhere below. About the time I realized that my “palms” were insubstantial it was already too late to recover. I continued the “lean” into a horizontal skydiver’s pose, dropping forward and down into the operating room.
Onto the table.
Into Theresa Kellerman!
Her flesh was like a dry sponge, thirsty for spiritual essence: it sucked me in like that paper towel that bills itself as “the quicker picker-upper.” I had a new body if I wanted it.
Well, why not? She was doubtless part of the inner circle. Why not see what kind of havoc I could create wearing her identity? Plus, they couldn’t very well go ahead with the head swap while I was hijacking the donee. Or would Terry-call-me-T be considered the donor? Come on, Cséjthe; focus! Plenty of time to muse after the dust settles. I shook my head and was rewarded with a most peculiar sensation.
In fact there was a whole lotta peculiar sensations. Every new body was a different experience, though I was getting faster and more intuitive at mastering the process with each new “jump.” But this latest insertion felt—well—wrong in a way I couldn’t quite pinpoint.
Movement seemed difficult. I tried to sit up and convulsed more than actually moved. I wrenched myself up with a major effort on the second try and the doctor and two nurses standing across from the table staggered back. A nurse started to scream. The other nurse joined her—no, that was the doctor! He was a better screamer than she was.
Theresa Kellerman was screaming, too. Her high-pitched keening sounded especially eerie through the electronic filter of the vocoder. Time to send her to the mental cellar. I rummaged around in my skull but couldn’t find her. Not even down in the dark depths of the hindbrain.
I lowered my feet to the floor and carefully placed a little weight on my right foot. My legs felt sleepy and unresponsive and I had to lurch a little to make the position. Everyone else took a step back. One of the nurses grabbed a scalpel. The other snatched up a metal instrument tray, scattering dozens of implements, and then held it before her like a shield. The doctor threw up a gloved hand to his white-capped brow and shrieked: “It’s alive! Alive!”
I took a faltering step. This body had a lower center of gravity, being a woman with the typical hips configuration, and I was having a little more difficulty than usual in finding my balance.
The nurse with the scalpel threw it. Maybe she had “carney knife-thrower” listed somewhere on her resume. In any event, it landed blade-first in my left breast. There was some wetness and I was suddenly three cup sizes smaller on that side. I pulled the scalpel out as the nurse bugged for the door and the doctor fainted. Then I reached over and cupped my remaining breast. Implants. Based on the runoff I’d guess saline rather than silicone.
The other nurse was backing toward the door, still holding the stainless steel tray up like it would protect her.
Protect her from what? I mean, I might be worried if I saw Theresa Kellerman coming toward me—we had a “history,” after all. But all this abject terror? Maybe it was the expression on “our” face. Was I doing something to appear particularly ferocious? If so, I needed to practice more: I had a whole castle of Nazis to spook into submission.
I took another step. And then another.
The tray moved, trying to stay between me and the whimpering woman who kept shuffling backwards. As I came closer I could catch glimpses of my reflection, a little distorted and wavy, and very brief as the tray trembled and shook in her white-knuckled grasp.
Finally I was close enough to reach out and grab it, myself. At that point she relinquished her hold and ran screaming from the room. I let her go. I was more interested in my reflection. I turned the tray this way and that but the results were the same: no particular expression on my face.
No face.
No head.
I turned and looked back at the operating table I had just vacated. Theresa-call-me-Terry-call-me-T’s head was still there, still screaming through her vocoder. I dropped the tray and reached up to feel the space just above my shoulders: nothing was there.
I felt a ghostly smile where my head poked out of Kellerman’s corpse of crazy-quilt cadaver parts.
Cool.
Very cool!
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dead flesh isn’t easy to animate and it should have been downright impossible. But then I was getting to the point where words like “impossible” and “unlikely” and maybe even “coincidence” were being eradicated from my vocabulary. Ever since my sojourn among the Loa and subbing for Baron Samedi, the dead seemed to respond to my presence with a preternatural vigor. Maybe this was just more of the same.
Sort of.
Alas, this stitched-together semblance of a body wasn’t good for anything much beyond lumbering around and scaring the bejezus out of any rational beings it encountered. Which w
as plenty good for the next twenty minutes as I cleared the second-floor hallway from one end to the other. But sooner or later it was bound to come down to a fight and this putrefying mass of dissolving muscles, rotting sinews, and decaying bones wasn’t up to throwing a real punch, never mind a kung-fu kick or beating a hasty retreat. I needed firearms and opportunities for grander acts of destruction.
I also needed to get back to my own body and get it disconnected from those machines before Mengele completed his Bionic Manikin play.
I staggered on down the corridor, moving a small herd of fortress personnel before me like a cattle drive of the damned as I searched for the nearest staircase back up. Another pair of security goons appeared, pushing their way through the crowd to approach me.
Now I was in trouble.
The first burst of weapons fire went wide. These guys had cojones but you would need bowling balls to face what they were looking at and not have a little tremble in your trigger finger.
The second burst clipped me. The third sent several rounds right to my torso.
Having been in actual combat I’ve seen machine-gun fire pick a man up off his feet and throw him three or four feet back from the shooter. At the very least it will knock you down.
I kept to my feet. Kellerman’s liquefying flesh was an ineffective barrier to the bullets: they passed through me without meeting enough resistance to affect my frame as a whole.
The guards dropped their HKs and ran.
I picked them up, bracing the stock of each against the insides of my cadaverous elbows and forearms, and stalked on down the hall like Sigourney Weaver.
Sigourney Weaver on a coke-fueled Aliens pub crawl and missing her head, if you will.
I finally reached the stairs after Ramboing my way through about twenty more of Mengele’s staff. I was starting to think this might work and maybe I wouldn’t be needing backup after all.
But then I reached the stairs.
Habeas Corpses - The Halflife Trilogy Book III Page 40
