by Al Ewing
"And that reminds me; in a few minutes I'll be marrying the lovely Carina, who I believe you've met. This sword is going to be my wedding gift to her. Don't get me wrong, it's of no particular sentimental value, in fact-" He lunged, slashing at El Sombra's belly while the other man clumsily attempted to parry. "- in fact, when I sliced its original owner apart like so much wurst, I felt... well, I felt less than nothing, really." Another lunge. This time the blade gashed the masked man's cheek, and Alexis grinned with petty vengeance. "I mean, for me, this is just a souvenir of a particularly dull invasion. I fought a halfwit and subjugated a city of mindless sheep. Hardly one for the history books."
El Sombra snarled, and there was blood in his eyes. Alexis smiled. Almost there...
"Still, I'm sure my lovely wife will appreciate it. By the time it severs her neck, I'd imagine it'll come as something of a relie-"
El Sombra charged.
He was angrier than he'd been in a long time. There was rage in him, hot and righteous and blazing, and he was ready to carve his brother's killer into bloody chunks with the heavy blade of the katana and then go on and cut every member of the Reich to pieces, to keep cutting and chopping and hacking until every last one of the bastards was dead at his feet. He wanted to soak the streets of his childhood in their blood, to cleanse the rotten sewer that his town had become.
Alexis flicked Heraclio's sword forward with machine precision, the point slashing through the skin and muscle of El Sombra's forearm. The masked man's fingers flared involuntarily and the katana clattered to the ground at his feet. Alexis kicked the sword away with the point of his immaculate shoe.
He smiled, eyes narrowing, savouring the moment. "Look at you! You've met the woman once and suddenly you fly into a rage over an idle threat. This is exactly like you, Djego. Didn't you try to ruin your brother's marriage the same way?"
He levelled the point of the sword at his enemy's throat.
"Take off the mask, Djego. It's time to grow up a little."
Djego looked up at him, swallowing hard, clutching his injured arm. Suddenly he felt very small and weak and foolish. Alexis' smile widened.
"El Sombra is dead."
Master Plus was dead. He knew this to be a certainty as he stood in his place by the altar, dressed in a spotless new white suit, tugging at the tight collar and feeling, not for the first time, as though he would suffocate. He shuddered inside as the first few bars of the Wedding March played on the creaking organ and he saw his daughter, dressed in a beautiful white gown and veil, led down the aisle by Oberleutnant Strauss. He had been judged too much of a risk to play that particular role in this farce, and he found himself glad.
A disinterested observer might have thought that Carina was looking around at the new decor of the Old Church. Actually, she was checking possible escape routes and examining the congregation. A crowd of sixty men were stood to attention in the pews, all of them wearing gleaming wing-packs and armed with some form of automatic weapon. She wasn't sure which possibility was more frightening - that this was a trap, or that such an armament was part of their uniform. Actually, the latter was the case. This was the officer class of Aldea. The highest echelon. For the most part, they were pen-pushers and desk-warmers, long absent from any form of real combat. The wings on their backs were dress models, plated with gold and silver to catch the eye, rather than the more powerful combat models. And the machine guns were purely for the occasion. A show of strength that seemed almost comical coming from this crowd of armchair warriors.
Failing to find any immediate way out of the situation, she turned her eyes to her father, and felt a pang of sympathy for him. It confused her.
Master Plus saw the look of compassion in his daughter's eyes and looked away. Anger or bitterness he could have dealt with, but the look of pity on her face was far too much to bear.
Oberleutnant Strauss led her to the altar and then stood stiffly as the Wedding March played on. And on. It was five minutes to noon, and the groom was still nowhere to be seen. The congregation continued to stand stiffly to attention, looking straight ahead. General Eisenberg, in full dress uniform and his own pair of dress wings, stood at the pulpit, looking out on the scene as it descended further and further into a parody of itself. He hissed through his teeth like a teakettle and muttered the same words over and over again.
"Where is that boy? Where is that boy?"
Djego reached behind his head and untied the knot that had bound the red wedding sash to his face for nine long years. It took several tries to pick apart the blood encrusted knot, and when he lifted the mask from his face he was left with a strip of paler brown across his eyes, where the sun had not baked his flesh. Alexis could not help snorting with laughter at the sight.
"You look like a raccoon. Was it worth it, Djego? All you've really done is make things worse for the people you allegedly care about. We might have shipped them back to the Fatherland for cheap labour if you hadn't stepped in, but now - well, we'll be killing them and bulldozing their bodies into pits. Entirely because of you." He smiled genially. Djego had already sunk down onto his knees, and was looking at the ground like a contrite schoolboy, the long wedding sash cradled in his hands. It was too perfect. Alexis slowly drew back Heraclio's sword. He was satisfied. It was time for the coup de grace.
"Goodbye, Djego. I'll put your brother's sword to better use." He smiled, slashing Heraclio's sword forward, aiming to bury it in Djego's worthless throat.
The blade passed through empty space.
Djego was already moving, springing up and spinning out of the way of the blade - performing a backward flip and sailing over the head of his enemy. He came down like a cat behind Alexis, wrapping the wedding sash around his throat and pulling tight. Heraclio's sword clattered into the dirt as Alexis desperately reached up, scrabbling helplessly at the tightening material. Djego leaned in and whispered into the other man's ear as he tugged the sash tighter still, and there was something in his voice as cold and unyielding as a gravestone.
"Amigo... that's my sword."
Alexis could only gurgle and gasp, mouth flapping like a fish, eyes bulging and rolling into the back of his head as the man behind him pulled with a devil's strength, the red cloth burying into the flesh of his neck, cutting off both his air and the blood flow to the brain.
His hands continued to scrabble at the cloth cutting into his throat for a few more seconds before they fell limply down to hang at his sides. The strength left his legs and he slumped, held up only by the sash that was strangling him. His feet began to twitch and writhe and in a final indignity, his bowels and bladder let go, drenching the inside of his expensive, immaculate suit with filth.
It was ten minutes before Djego let go of the wedding-sash and let the body crash to the ground.
The organist dutifully went into the Wedding March for another time. It was almost twenty minutes past noon. The congregation were still standing to attention, albeit with visible effort. Master Plus was still looking at the ground. Carina, in her wedding gown, continued to look carefully around at the windows and the double doors. And General Eisenberg paced back and forth in front of the altar, lips pulled back from gritted teeth, staring furiously at nothing at all.
"Where... is... Alexis?" He barked the words like a snarling dog.
His son would pay for this humiliation. The El Sombra business may have called unwelcome attention to Aldea at a crucial moment, but it was Alexis who was the loose cannon now. All eyes were on the project, and while this wedding was, at best, a minor experiment, it had become symbolic of a return to business as usual, a sign that the Generaloberst's grip on matters was still as firm as it had ever been. Alexis would not sully that. He would not be allowed to drag his father down though his own flippant attitudes. Alexis would be brought down to the level of Obergefreiter. He would be forced to clean the latrines in the town for seven months. He would be disowned.
There was a knock at the door. Or rather, the hilt of a sword poundi
ng against the wood, three times.
The Wedding March stopped. General Eisenberg cursed, and stepped quickly back to his place behind the podium, thankful that his wretched son had at least thought to give the assembly some warning before he sauntered in from whatever jaunt he'd been on for the past hour. Perhaps it would not be necessary to reduce his rank to Private after all. First Lieutenant would be quite sufficient.
"Come in and take your place, Alexis. We need to get this wedding back on schedule."
There was silence. Eisenberg smashed his fist down hard against the pulpit and screamed.
"Alexis! Get in here now!"
Slowly, the wooden double doors creaked open, to reveal a dead man. Wilhelm Brandt had been happy to be picked to stand guard on the Old Church and ensure none of the curious workers stepped near it until the wedding was finished with. He had felt it an honour, after years of being passed over for such duties, to finally be picked to add his strength to an important venture for the Ultimate Reich. He saw guarding the Church almost as a sacred trust.
So the last emotion that passed though him after the hilt of the sword seemed to come out of nowhere to smash hard into the back of his head was a feeling of crippling shame. The knowledge that his unconscious body was to be stripped before his throat was slit, in order that his killer might get a clean pair of trousers, would have been unlikely to alleviate that.
El Sombra stepped into the Church, his mask firmly in place, Alexis' wing-pack strapped tightly to his back. In his right hand, he held his brother's sword. In his left, he held a human heart, freshly hacked from its owner's chest. He smiled.
"Your son couldn't make it, Herr Generaloberst. But he asked me to convey his apologies and to assure his bride that his heart, at least, will always be with her."
He tossed the bloody organ into the Church and it skidded along the stone floor, tumbling over and over to rest a couple of inches from Carina's white dress.
"How thoughtful of him," she said softly.
After that, there was silence for a while.
And then the congregation turned, levelled their automatic weapons, and opened fire.
CHAPTER NINE
Gotterdammerung
The noise hit like a bomb.
Sixty heavy-calibre machine-guns opening up as one, spraying a torrent of lead at the entrance of the Church. Stray bullets impacted against the heavy oaken doors, splintering them, tearing them off their hinges so that they collapsed to either side of the yawning entrance. There was the tinkling sound - like a thousand tiny bells - of cartridges bouncing off the stone tiles. The overall noise was deafening - a hundred storms rolled into one, a barrage of thunder and final judgement, a hymn of murder and destruction that echoed around the stone arches above.
The barrage lasted a total of eight seconds, and in that time two thousand three hundred and eighty-seven bullets were blasted towards the figure standing in the doorway.
None of them connected.
El Sombra was no longer there.
Carina took her hands from her ears and looked through the crowd of soldiers and the thick, pungent fog of cordite. She took a sharp breath at the sight of a riddled, punctured corpse laying in the dirt - and then remembered Wilhelm Brandt, the hapless guard who'd died a few moments before the tide of bullets had torn his body into shreds. Of El Sombra, there was no sign. Slowly, the soldiers crept forward, inching towards the doors, ready for the masked man to appear from whatever point of ambush he had chosen.
In the expectant silence, she heard a slight creaking sound, far above her head.
The soldiers heard it too. One by one, they cast their eyes upwards, towards the ceiling.
Silence.
And then the stained glass window exploded once again, the swastika shattering into a thousand shards as El Sombra flew through it on the wings he'd taken from Alexis' corpse. He'd stolen more than a pair of trousers from the luckless Wilhelm Brandt. He'd also stolen the guard's M30 machine-gun, secreting it on top of the church roof in case the numbers inside were too much to handle. Now he made use of it, squeezing the trigger to let off long bursts of fire, sending streams of ammunition into the crowd below him. While the masked man had had problems with guns in the past, the congregation in the church was so densely packed together that he couldn't help but hit one of them no matter where he fired.
Oberleutnant Strauss reacted instantly to the carnage unfolding in front of him. He was confident that his position next to Carina would shield him from the attack, and so, ignoring the tiny slivers of glass that cascaded over his head, he pulled his Luger from its holster and aimed carefully. Odell Strauss might have been a dab hand at interior design, but as a marksman he was even better. He was confident that, from this position, he could hit the masked man's femoral artery, causing him to bleed out over the assembled company within the space of a few brief seconds. He smiled softly. It would certainly be a wedding to remember.
That was the moment when the jailer, Rafael Contreras - who had spent the last nine years as Master Plus, manservant and dogsbody to a regime that considered him less than human - finally found his courage. Seeing the Oberleutnant levelling his pistol, he took two quick steps forward and drove his elbow hard into the man's teeth, a move he had first learned to use against the drunks and hopheads in his father's jail when he was sixteen. Now the jail that his father had built was the Palace Of Beautiful Thoughts, and somehow he had been so concerned with keeping his daughter 'safe' - fattening her for the slaughter - that he had never made anyone pay for that. And so it was a blow with the pent-up rage and humiliation of nine years behind it, and it sent Strauss flying backwards, broken teeth tumbling from between split, bloody lips, the pistol skittering across towards the empty pulpit. Rafael felt the impact run up his elbow, his ulna nerve stinging and pricking with pain. It felt liberating.
Carina looked at her father in shock, and then reached out to take his hand, shouting to be heard over the gunfire:
"Papa! We'd better get behind the altar. I don't want you killed."
Rafael smiled, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, running the words through his mind again and again. I don't want you killed.
Those might have been the sweetest words he had ever heard his daughter say.
Having spent the bulk of their ammunition firing wildly through the double doors at the unfortunate corpse of Wilhelm Brandt, the amassed officer class of the Ultimate Reich found themselves unable to effectively return fire as El Sombra emptied almost the entirety of his ammunition into them. As was often the case with the military, the men further up the chain of command had little understanding of the realities on the ground and, as was also common, they had wasted their resources without thought for the long term. As was somewhat less common, they paid the price for their mistake - despite their heavy wing-packs, the bullets from the M30 were more than powerful enough to punch through one human body and into another and thus El Sombra was able to reduce the congregation by half before they even began to fire back.
Once the assembled Oberstleutnants and Majors began to return fire, the masked man dropped down into the very midst of the crowd, hovering in place to lash out with both his feet, spinning and kicking in a quick circle and using the butt of his gun as a club to smash the skulls of those closest. The congregation were unable to return fire for fear of hitting one of their own - the punishments for gunning down a fellow officer were severe - and so El Sombra found it easy to reduce the congregation to a mere handful of men, standing dazed and bathed in the blood of their colleagues.
Noting that there was now more than enough room in the crowd to fire on the masked man without risking hitting each other, the remaining officers raised their guns - but it was already too late. With a cheery wink and a wave, El Sombra flew out of the double doors and into the cloudless sky above, leaving the officers left standing after his bloody assault no choice but to follow him out and into the heavens.
The entire bloody battle had taken, in tot
al, perhaps ten seconds. Sheltering behind the stone altar, Carina and her father were left to gaze out onto the bloody remains of dozens of men littering the floor. The cream of the Ultimate Reich, leaders of men hand-chosen to make the mission in Mexico a success, now stacked atop one another like cordwood. The lucky ones were still alive, bleeding out from ragged holes ploughed through their flesh and organs, and their groans and pleas for aid echoed through the empty space, along with the remnants of the gunfire. She exhaled hard, the adrenaline still raging through her system. "We should... we should get away from here."
Rafael nodded. He was sickened at the sight of the carnage, and at his own part in it. "You're right. I think this might be how it ends."
And then General Eisenberg stepped out from his hiding place behind the wooden pulpit, Oberleutnant Strauss' pistol in his hand, and shot Rafael squarely in the back.
He looked down at the writhing man, and hissed curtly between his teeth. "Master Plus, you are dismissed from your duties." Then he shot him again. Carina lunged forward, smashing a fist hard into the bridge of the Generaloberst's nose, breaking it a third time, a cry of hatred torn from her throat.
The Iron Mountain was unmoved by the gesture. He barely noted the blood that trickled over his lip as he gripped her wrist, pointing his gun at her belly. "I was stabbed in the chest with a hunting knife on the Russian Front, Carina, and I didn't even notice the wound until a minute after I finished killing my opponent with my bare hands. A punch in the face is hardly going to slow me down. Think yourself lucky I still have need of you." His teeth were still clenched, and his eyes glittered like chips of cold, grey ice. He had walked into this church secure in the knowledge of an almost spotless victory over the last enemy of the Reich in this misbegotten country, and in just a few minutes, he had lost everything he possessed. His only son had been murdered, and now the same man had, in the space of ten seconds, torn apart the vision he had spent nine years building. And somewhere inside him, like a goad spurring him to greater violence, was the nagging thought that it was his own overconfidence that was to blame.
