The Living Dead 2

by John Joseph Adams

  In May of 1944, Willem paid us another visit. This time, he took both Weber and myself aside and spoke to us privately.

  “It is clear the Allies are preparing a counter-invasion. The likely location is somewhere across from England on the coast of France.” He held the cigarette to his lips thoughtfully.

  “We’re ready,” I said boldly. “We’ve been ready for months. What do the Daimler-Benz engineers say?”

  Willem breathed out smoke. “They have made several methods available to us. Since this is to be the first deployment, we have chosen the retreat scenario. We will place the tote Männer in a bunker in the path of the Allies and detonate it when they come.”

  “Are we expecting to be overrun?”

  Willem shook his head. “Of course not. The tote Männer are a backup plan only. We will deploy them behind our own lines and only release them if we are forced past them. If the front line holds, we will not release them at all.”

  I nodded. “How many?”

  “We estimate six thousand.”

  I thought quickly. “It takes six days for each group. Six thousand will take us thirty-six days.”

  Willem smiled at me. “Did you know of the expansions of Birkenau commissioned early last year?”

  “Of course,” said Weber. “They were a dreadful nuisance.”

  “They are about to pay for themselves,” retorted Willem. “I developed Max’s original plans for Birkenau beyond his conception. The new facilities can serve as incubator.”

  “How many?”

  “At least forty thousand at once. Six thousand should not be a problem.” He pulled from his briefcase a set of plans.

  I looked them over. I was impressed with the innovations I saw. “This is better than I had hoped.”

  “I’m glad you are pleased. When can the first squad be ready?”

  I looked over the plans again and did some figuring on a piece of paper. “May 12, if Daimler-Benz can provide the bunkers and the transportation.”

  “I’ve been assured this will not be a problem.”

  “Then we will be ready to deploy.”

  Willem pulled a map from his briefcase. “Our sources say we will be struck here.” He pointed to the map. “Pas-de-Calais. That is where our defenses are located and just three kilometers behind them, our tote Männer. The Allies will not know what hit them.”

  This was by far the largest group of tote Männer we had ever attempted to create. Weber took a fatherly approach to them. When the hosts entered the euphoric stage and called to him with affection, he responded, calling them his “children” and other endearments. I found this unnerving. When the tote Männer were finally ready and installed into their transportation containers I was glad to see them go. Weber watched them leave with a tear in his eye. I went home to my wife and son.

  But, of course, the Allies did not strike at Pas-de-Calais but at Normandy, over three hundred kilometers to the southwest. The tote Männer were in their bunkers. The Daimler-Benz engineers had packed them like munitions. There was no way to extract them without releasing them.

  It was terrible timing. All of the available tote Männer were in Calais and the next squad would not be ready for deployment until June 9: three days!

  Willem conferred with his staff and said that if we could drop enough bunkers in the Cerisy Forest and fill them with tote Männer, we would let the Allies overrun the forest and open the bunker.

  At this point the new squad was just entering the coma stage. We’d found the tote Männer were vulnerable to jostling during this period and had always transported them towards the end of the coma. But desperate times require desperate measures. Willem and I led the crew that took the newly comatose tote Männer, eight thousand strong, and trucked them to the forest. Meanwhile, three large prefabricated bunkers were erected on the sites. I barely had time to phone Elsa to say I would not be home that night. Weber, affectionate to the tote Männer as before, elected to stay and incubate the next squad. I was just as glad not to have him along.

  The bunkers were not particularly explosive-proof but would stop bullets. They looked more like officers’ quarters than anything else. We locked them and moved away to nearby Trevieres. This was June 8th. By the afternoon of June 9th, the tote Männer would be alert. When fired, the bunker would first explode a smoke bomb containing the colloid and attractant we had devised to mask the area. A few minutes later, small explosives would release the tote Männer and break the outside walls. The tote Männer would have to do the rest. We hoped the smell of nearby prey would waken them to fury as we had observed in the lab.

  The time passed slowly, punctuated with small arms fire and a few large weapons. The wind moved back and forth, sometimes bringing us the firecracker smell of the battlefield and then replacing it with the pine smell of the forests.

  The afternoon came. An odd aircraft I’d never seen before, called a Storch, was made available to us. The pilot, Willem, and I boarded the airplane along with the radio equipment. The heavily laden craft took off in an impressively short distance and in a few moments we were high enough to see the bunkers and, worse, the advancing Allies. Willem pressed the button.

  Smoke poured out of the three buildings. I could not hear the reports as the internal explosives ignited but there was motion—furious motion—through the smoke. Seconds later the advancing Allies were running down the hill away from the smoke. Directly behind them were the tote Männer.

  The tote Männer were much faster than the humans they pursued and more clever than ever I would have guessed. One toter Mann leapt from human to human, biting and clawing, not even pausing to enjoy the “meal.” Eight thousand tote Männer poured over the Allies. Guns didn’t stop them. They were in and among the soldiers so quickly none of the supporting artillery or machine guns could fire. The smoke switched over them and we could no longer observe.

  “Fly over them,” Willem ordered, “so we can look down.”

  “Sir, we will be shot.”

  “Fly over them, I say,” Willem shouted and brought out his pistol. “Or I will shoot you myself.”

  We flew over the churning mass of tote Männer and humans. They took no notice of us. All of their attention was focused on the horrifying apparitions among them.

  “Good,” said Willem grimly. “Return.”

  It was a safe bet that each of the tote Männer had likely managed to bite at least three soldiers. Assuming an overlap of twenty percent, that meant better than thirteen thousand Allied tote Männer would be awakening in a week. This was a conservative estimate, assuming the infected soldiers would not infect others during the euphoric period.

  We landed, and General Marcks himself joined us. Willem told him of the adventure and the anti-tote Männer equipment—mostly flame throwers and protective jackets—waiting in trucks not ten kilometers distant. The Allied invasion would not succeed.

  And it did not.

  The Allies, so demoralized by the Reich’s new weapon, were unable to advance. German bombers were able to sink support craft in the channel. The war stalled in western France all that summer.

  When I returned to Krakow in July to see my wife I still smelled of burning diesel and gunpowder. She made me bathe before I could kiss her.

  The Daimler-Benz flying barges were deployed. These, I had not known about. They were gliders filled with forty or fifty tote Männer, towed overnight by bombers and released near the front to land where they would. The crashes released most of the tote Männer but mechanical relays released the remainder. Willem informed us that there were now highly localized tote Männer infections in Britain, where wounded men had been returned before they had turned completely and before the Allies had realized what they were dealing with.

  But the Russians continued to advance. They were no less ruthless than the tote Männer and had devised a simple but effective defense. Any group of tote Männer they found they slaughtered without regard to coincident casualties. We estimated they were killing as much as
10 percent of their own men with this technique. But it was effective. It was only a matter of time before they reached Germany.

  The Allied advance had not been routed as we’d hoped but only stalled as they tried to cope with their own problems. Had Germany remained the fighting force it had been at the beginning of the war, this would have been enough. However, now the Allies had a foothold in France and would not give it up. Antiaircraft batteries were brought over the channel and the bombers could no longer eliminate the shipping. Soon, the Allies would figure out a method of containing the infection just as the Russians had done. A stalemate in this war would inevitably lead to an Allied victory.

  Willem created the todeskommandos. These were the last paratroopers still left in the Luftwaffe. They were infected without their knowing and dropped far behind enemy lines. Their mission was to spy on the enemy and return in two weeks’ time. Of course, they transformed in less than half that time and infected the Russians.

  I refused to participate in this activity. I would not be a party to infecting unwitting German soldiers. Willem did not press me at that point though I knew a day of reckoning was coming. Knowing this, I persuaded Willem to loan me one of the Daimler-Benz engineers—preferably Joseph Bremer, a friend of Hans Braun and the engineer who had later proposed the trebuchet. I liked the way his mind worked. Willem sent him to me with the warning that something needed to be done about the Russians.

  Bremer, being a mechanical rather than a chemical engineer, immediately saw solutions to the issues we had not solved. We had to maintain the environment of the worm and virus for the duration of delivery and then spray it out into the surrounding area without shredding either. Weber and I had already determined that inhaling the inoculum would not infect the host unless some portion was swallowed. The worm needed to actually enter the digestive tract to enter the blood stream. The only result from a purely pulmonary inoculation would be a sterile partial infection.

  It was Bremer who devised an irritant to be added to the mixture. The irritant would not be poisonous in any way but would cause a mucous flow from the nose. The subjects would be forced to swallow. It worked in Birkenau experiments with great success.

  By this time, Hitler had been sending V1’s against Britain for a few weeks. My purpose was to be able to replace the explosive in the V1 with a Todesluft canister and infect the Allies in their home territories.

  Once we had the Todesluft device perfected, we approached Willem with it. Willem at once saw the possibilities but denied us the chance to try it out in a V1. Instead, he told us of a new rocket, vastly more powerful and accurate. It was to be called the V2.

  The bombers over Berlin never stopped during that summer. Up until we released the tote Männer, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and the other camps had been spared for some reason. By July, we had a version of the Todesluft device ready for the V2 and after the first few reached their targets, the Allies, realizing where our production facilities must be located, started bombing the camps. I had to drag Weber from our burning laboratories. He wanted to save his “children.” I triggered the containment-failure devices and incinerated the last remaining tote Männer squads but saved inoculum samples and the Todesluft devices to operate elsewhere. It was curious: the incubation pens and the holding areas were completely destroyed but the gas chambers survived the bombing.

  I had thought to travel immediately to Krakow to be with Elsa. But before I could, Elsa showed up at the camp. Weber, Elsa, Helmut, and I were able to find safety in the basement of the headquarters building. I managed to locate an intact phone and called Willem to tell him where we were.

  The bombing ceased in a day or so. The inmates were taken care of and we had food and water. Power was restored the following day.

  Weber liked to be near us. Something profound had come undone in him. He mourned the death of his squad over and over. On the third day he accosted me out in the street as I cleaned up the front of the building.

  “Could it have been the Jews?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The failure of our tote Männer.”

  I sighed. “The tote Männer did not fail.”

  “How can you say that? Germany is still losing the war!”

  I considered responding to this. How could any single weapon ever win a war on its own? It was our failure, not any failure of the tote Männer. But that would only have encouraged him. “We haven’t lost yet.”

  He ignored that. “We made tote Männer out of the Jews. Perhaps there was a judengeist that impaired them.”

  “What would you have done instead? Made them out of Germans as Willem did?”

  “I should not have been so reluctant to use Poles,” Weber said and sat on the bench, sunk in apathy.

  I continued shoveling broken concrete and shards of wood out of the street.

  Willem showed up that night. He was half-drunk and I was surprised he’d managed to drive all the way from Berlin. Morose and untalkative, he refused to speak until after dinner when Elsa had taken Helmut and herself to bed.

  “The Americans are smarter than we are.”

  “Beg pardon?” I said, ready to defend German intelligence.

  “It had to be the Americans. The British would not have considered it.”

  “Considered what?”

  Willem stared at me. “Of course. How could you know? They have been raining tote Männer on Berlin. All over Germany.”

  “That’s impossible. Did they drop them out of the bombers? Did they think we would be intimidated by smashed body parts?”

  Willem shook his head. “Nothing so complex. All they did was harness them to a big parachute and then tie them together with a bow knot so they would not escape during transport. Then they shoved them out the back of a bomber on a strip line. It undid the bow knot and released the parachute. Some of them were killed, of course. But so what? Between ours and the ones generated from their own ranks, they have enough.”

  “How were they released from the parachutes?”

  “We found a wind-up spring clip. When the spring wound down, the clip opened and they were released. Diabolical simplicity.”

  I drank some wine. “There are tote Männer in Berlin.” I tried to frame it as a logical proposition. I could imagine them lurching through the city.

  “There are tote Männer all over Germany. There are tote Männer in London from the V2 Todesluft attack. Von Braun even managed to extend the range of the V2 with a V1 attachment. There are tote Männer in Moscow. Tell me, Weber. How many tote Männer must there be to become self-sustaining?”

  Weber peered at him owlishly. “They cannot be self-sustaining. Eventually all of the raw material would be used up.”

  “You are so comforting,” Willem said dryly.

  I stared at the wine bottle. “When will they reach here?”

  “They were behind me when I crossed the border. One day? Two days? They move slowly but steadily and they will be brought here by our scent.”

  We had all underestimated them. They were in the camp by morning.

  They had broken through the barbed wire holding the inmates easily. The inmates were bitten and mauled by the hundreds. The guards died when they insisted on firing on the tote Männer and the tote Männer, of course, did not fall.

  The scent of the inmates was so strong that it overpowered our own smells. The tote Männer did not know we were there. We took care to remain hidden in the headquarters building. With so many possible hosts around, the tote Männer ignored the buildings. Each time a few seemed to take interest, there was another inmate to attack.

  Elsa refused to let Helmut near the windows. During a lull in the fighting she sat next to me as I watched through the window.

  “What are those things?” Elsa said quietly. Her face was milk white but her voice was calm. “Max? Uncle? What are those things?”

  “We call them tote Männer,” I said.

  “Is that what you were building in the camps? Is that your wea
pon?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head. “Did they escape from another camp?”

  “No.” Willem laughed dryly. “The Allies were kind enough to return these to us.”

  “Helmut must not see them.”

  “Yes,” I said. “More importantly, they must not see us.”

  She nodded.

  Eventually, the inmates were all infected. We had discovered in experiments that infected hosts were ignored by tote Männer. But there were still so many of them our own scent remained undiscovered. The tote Männer wandered off in small groups, heading east toward Krakow.

  The remaining freed inmates, now euphorically infected hosts, were not so ignorant as the tote Männer. They tried to enter the headquarters building. Willem and I defended the place as best we could. Hoess and Mengele tried to gain entrance by sweet reasonableness and grumbled when we shot at them. They wandered off arm in arm.

  By the end of the third day after the attack, we saw hosts finding small places to sleep. That evening the camp was entirely still.

  “We have to leave,” Willem insisted. This was Monday morning. By Wednesday night we would be fighting for our lives.

  “I’m ready,” Elsa said. “Those things will not hurt Helmut. I will kill him first.”

  I nodded. It pleased me that Elsa understood the situation. “Where shall we go? Our tote Männer are to the west and south. Their tote Männer are to the north and east. We have no petrol—the depot was blown up in the bombing.”

  “What shall we do, then?” demanded Willem.

  “They are not very intelligent—as I said a long time ago, think of them as crocodiles. They can use their eyes but largely they depend upon scent. Therefore, we can block ourselves up in one of the gas chambers. They are air tight.”