El Sombra

by Al Ewing

  It was all over.

  Aldea was gone, and in a few years Pasito would again be a good place to live, with only the Red Dome and a statue of a ragged man in bloodstained wedding trousers and a mask to mark the darkest period in its history. All the bastards were gone.

  He frowned at that. Something about the notion didn't seem to fit, but Djego couldn't put his finger on it.

  He began to scratch at the back of his skull.

  "... so Octavio says that if they're going to be locking up drunks, they need uniforms, which we have, but obviously the uniforms can't be grey and we should change the cut of them as well... are you listening?" Rafael looked at his daughter quizzically. They were both sat in the small room that had become their kitchen since they had moved into the Red Dome.

  Carina nodded. "Just thinking about Djego. He's going to have a lot of adjusting to do. More than we do. It's like we've been waiting all this time for our lives to have purpose again, and now they do... and he is gone. There's nothing left for him."

  Rafael nodded. "Is that what you meant when you talked about saving him?"

  She sighed and nodded slowly. "The first time we met, he just seemed so... so sad. He was in pain and lashing out against it like a rat in a cage. I want him to be a man. I want him to be happy, but he's never going to be happy so long as he's got that mask on... he needs to learn how to live again now it's all over, anyway. He's been out in the desert for god knows how long, thinking about nothing but fighting Nazis. What's he going to do now?"

  Rafael shrugged. "Go to Germany and kill Hitler?"

  "Don't even joke about it, father." Carina smiled softly, shaking her head. Then she looked up with a start. "What was that noise?"

  Rafael looked up at the ceiling. "It sounded like breaking wood."

  Carina was up and out of her chair in an instant. Heart pounding, she ran up the stairs and grabbed the handle of the door to the guest room.

  "Damn it, he's locked the door!" She hammered on the wood with her fists, and Rafael came running close behind her, his breath ragged and short.

  "I could... break down the door..." The last word was barely audible over his coughing fit. Carina looked at him in exasperation and ran back down the stairs, heading towards the store cupboard in the basement where the master keys for all the rooms in the Red Dome were kept. She moved quickly, but she already knew she would be far too late.

  Sure enough, when they finally managed to open the door, all that they found was an empty cupboard with the door torn off. The window was wide open.

  Djego was long gone.

  The man walked through the desert.

  And the desert brought strength to the man.

  El Sombra was at home here. It was his element, his place of power. He relished the heat of the sun on his back, and the way the sand warmed the soles of his feet as he trod. The familiar weight of the sword was in his hand, and he clutched it so tightly, so gratefully, that his knuckles were white with the strain, and that felt so good to him that he laughed, the sound of joy carrying over the sands. The mask was back where it belonged, covering his eyes, the knot of the cloth riding against the back of his skull in the way it used to.

  He felt bad about leaving Carina so suddenly, and without saying goodbye. He'd hurt her, he knew, and he'd hurt himself at well. Djego had had a chance for something good in his wretched life. A chance to help his hometown heal from the horrors that had been inflicted on it. But El Sombra could not let him rest just yet.

  As far as Carina and Rafael and all of Pasito cared, the bastards were gone, but they weren't gone. They'd only left his town. His country.

  They hadn't left his planet.

  They had gone west, across the sea, to use the lessons they'd learned on Pasito on their own people. But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that the man in the statue was still alive. He'd destroyed El Sombra's home from the comfort of a government office somewhere, sitting in a comfortable leather chair as he signed forms to authorise the death and degradation of everything the masked man loved, without ever meeting the people he was condemning, without looking into their eyes. The man in the statue was the orchestrator of every sorrow and shame he and the people of Pasito had ever suffered - and he had never paid the price for it. At best, all Pasito was to him was a cross on a balance sheet, a failed experiment. And that wasn't good enough.

  El Sombra wanted the name of Pasito to wake him up in the night, sweating and shaking. He wanted the thought of what he'd done to burn in the coward's heart until the day came when he thrust his brother's sword through it. He wanted the man in the statue to suffer until he ended his wretched life.

  It was too bad about Djego. El Sombra regretted little, but he regretted denying Djego that one small chance at happiness. But it couldn't be helped.

  Until Adolf Hitler was dead, El Sombra could never rest.

  The man walked west, towards the sinking sun.

  EPILOGUE

  The Man In The High Castle

  Walter Hopfenkecker was neither a strong nor a brave man. Built like a strand of straw on a riverbank, he had often been picked on as a child, his face pushed in the mud by older, stronger children as they screamed into his ear "Walter Haufen Kacke! Walter Haufen Kacke!" He remembered vividly how they took his brand new mathematics book that his father had slaved eight hours overtime to buy him, and threw it in a river. He remembered sitting on the riverbank, sobbing into his hands and thinking that he had never felt so helpless. He wanted control over his life. He wanted the power to stop them hurting him. He wanted them to fear him, wanted them to be punished.

  It is from such tiny acorns that great oaks grow. Now Walter Hopfenkecker was the Chief Administrative Assistant to Adolf Hitler, and his power was vast indeed. And men feared him.

  Or he punished them.

  There was only one man who did not fear Walter Hopfenkecker, and only one man who Walter Hopfenkecker truly feared. And he could not truly be called a man at all.

  Walter paused at the great oaken door that let to the Führer's study, trying hard not to allow his hands to shake as he reached to turn the iron key that would allow him access. He bit his lip, almost drawing blood, and then uttered a soft and silent prayer as the key turned and the door slowly swung open.

  Then he stepped into Hell.

  Steam and smoke filled the massive chamber, scalding the skin and choking the lungs. The art treasures adorning the walls had to be protected by boxes of glass, the temperatures carefully regulated to prevent the toxic atmosphere from destroying what lay within. Human beings who entered the office of the Führer were afforded no such protection.

  In the centre of this hideous miasma there was a machine.

  It was more than three storeys tall, a terrifying construction of iron, copper and glass. A noxious green liquid coursed through tubes running up and down the structure, exiting a grille in the top as vapour, a grotesque mist that would burn at the eyes and lungs and kill any man who breathed it in. Vast pistons pumped and shifted, creating a constant, eternal shriek of metal scraping against metal. It was horrific to look upon - a vast industrial nightmare that seemed designed for no purpose beyond torture and death.

  It was formed roughly into the shape of a man, and at the top, there was a great bronze head, motionless, with eyes that burned a terrible green. In the centre of the chest, there was a tank of reinforced glass, filled with the bubbling green poison, and hanging in the very centre of this, in a web of copper wire, was a human brain.

  It was a brain that had once attempted to excise an entire people from the face of the planet. It was a brain that possessed an uncanny ability to incite hatred, fear and violence, to turn a crowd of ordinary people into a mob, to create an entire country dedicated to the deaths of the innocent in the name of their own twisted notions of purity.

  It was the brain of Adolf Hitler.

  Slowly, the Führer reared up to his full height, leaning over to gaze down at the tiny little man who'd dared
to intrude upon him. The eyes in the great bronze mask - the mask of Hitler, an idealised Hitler, more like an Apollo than the shabby, ugly man with the awful hair who had once stalked these halls - stared down at Walter, merciless and cold. From Walter's perspective, he seemed like some terrifying iron god, ready to pronounce judgement on all those whose names were not written in his Book. When he spoke, the voice that projected from speakers located in the brass head's throat was a screaming symphony of needles scraping slowly across sheet glass.

  "Greetings, Herr Hopfenkecker. You have the final report on Projekt Uhrwerk?"

  Walter nodded, stifling his coughing. "J-Jawohl, Mein Führer. I am pleased to report an eighty-three per cent success -"

  "Eighty-three per cent. Does that sound acceptable to you, Herr Hopfenkecker?"

  A chill crept up Walter's spine, and he gave a tiny shudder. No, it did not sound acceptable to him. "Unfortunately, the... the actions of the terrorist network forced us to bring the Project to a premature end..."

  "One man is not a network, Herr Hopfenkecker. Do not try to diminish your own execrable performance by conferring special powers upon your enemies. I will not tolerate it." The terrifying, screaming machine leant close and Walter took a half-step back, his gut lurching. "One man, who single-handedly destroyed our work in Mexico, in the process destroying hundreds of thousands of Marks' worth of property and ending the lives of several dozen of our finest troops. What do you think my reaction would be, Herr Hopfenkecker, if a similar man were to arise here in Berlin?"

  "Mein Führer, with the greatest respect, those were special circumstances, we were an invading force and we had barely occupied the town for nine years. Under the circumstances, we did brilliantly. If Project Uhrwerk Phase Two were to begin operating in Berlin - where we control both the government and the media, and there are no outside influences to interfere with the programme - my people calculate a one-hundred per cent chance of total success."

  There was a pause. Slowly the head of the immense machine tilted, as though studying Walter for some small sign that would indicate whether or not one of the huge machine-fists should close about him and burst him like a poisoned boil.

  Then, the structure shifted back in a storm of shrieking metal and glass. Walter breathed a sigh of relief. "Danke, Mein Führer. Danke."

  "We have better things to worry about than a tiny town in a backwater region. When the glorious Reich sweeps through Mexico again - as it will cover the entire world - I will take great pleasure in crushing the town of Pasito and leaving the population's heads on poles to serve as a lesson in obedience. In the meantime, we shall continue with the programme as it stands."

  Walter nodded. "I will attend to it directly, Mein Führer. The terrorist will be destroyed with the rest of his town when the great day of our conquest comes."

  There was something not unlike a dry chuckle from the machine. It sounded like a handful of broken glass being slowly crushed by the turning of a thumbscrew.

  "Oh no, Herr Hopfenkecker, you misunderstand me. We won't be leaving El Sombra to live out his pitiful existence without retribution. Nor will we have to. Anyone who can destroy a man like Eisenberg and everything that he loves will not be content living out his days in some cow town in the desert. Not when there are people like you and I still waiting to be murdered. He will come to me, Herr Hopfenkecker. He will walk into my waiting arms.

  "Have our people in the Tsar's Empire watch out for him. If he shows his face, report back to me. I want him alive, if at all possible. I want the pleasure of snuffing his miserable animal existence out like a candle. I want to see this miserable urchin who did us so much damage suffer as nobody has suffered before."

  The chuckle slowly built into a laugh, and the horrific echo the machine produced to attempt it was the sound of a blitzkrieg of shrapnel tearing through an orphanage of screaming glass children.

  "I promise you, Mein Herr... El Sombra has not heard the last of Adolf Hitler!"

  THE END

  Al Ewing was born in 1977, three days before Elvis died on the toilet. Indoctrinated into the loathsome practice of comics at an early age by his disreputable brother, the child progressed from his innocent beginnings to the loathsome depths of sin represented by the British comic 2000 AD, long known as a haunt of depravity. He remains ensconced there to this day as a writer of the bizarre and fantastic, when not involved in even more sordid past-times. El Sombra is his first penny dreadful.

  Now read the exciting new short story from the creator of Pax Britannia, Jonathan Green...

  Fruiting Bodies

  Jonathan Green

  SEPTEMBER 1997

  I - Have His Carcass

  The Thames. Thick and sluggish as treacle. The foul waters of the ancient waterway oozed between the detritus-strewn mud banks bordering the river at Southwark. The river that had spawned the sprawling metropolis was now being smothered by its obese offspring. Londinium Maximum drained the eternal Thames of all it had and then regurgitated it again, a diseased open sewer, polluted by rapacious industry and the waste of the teeming millions that called the urban sprawl home.

  Scummy waves lapped at the tarry shoreline, regimented lines of flotsam and jetsam - flood-borne sticks, unidentifiable twists of rust-red metal and all manner of broken Bakelite or ceramic waste - showed where the still tidal river had marked its own rise and fall. Its own unique aroma of oil and excrement rose from its sludgy surface, carried along with whatever detritus had found its way into the surging effluent current of Old Father Thames. One gaseous wave could provoke involuntary vomiting in one not used to the noxious odour. However, the vagabond now combing the mired beach, searching for any forgotten finds, was not troubled at all by the stench.

  His battered hobnail boots caked with mud, a filthy woollen hat pulled over the untamed mess of his hair - his wiry, grey beard just as bad - he puffed on a clay pipe clenched between tobacco-yellowed teeth. With his right hand he held a rough hemp sack over one shoulder and in the other he gripped a pole for support when traversing the sucking mud.

  Old Samson might smell as bad as Old Father Thames, and be inured to the Stink - as it was called - but how his ratting terrier Jip ever managed to sniff out one scent amidst that miasmic stench, God alone knew.

  The old man paused in his scouring of the mud flats, lent back, legs braced, unbending his crooked back, and took in a great lungful of London air. It was laced with the tarry smell of the pollutant smog that shrouded the city from the early autumn sun. That same sun still warmed the land, drawing the stinking smog from the streets until it hung over the capital, a gargantuan squashed mushroom cloud. To Samson, the river's unique smell was as familiar and as reassuring, in its own way, as the stale baccy aroma of the Dog and Duck, as welcoming as the rosewater and sweat scent of a two shilling whore.

  The beachcomber gazed at the jaundiced haze streaking the lightening sky, and absorbed the sounds of the city, the rattle and clatter of the Overground, the blaring horns of the traffic filling the thoroughfares of Southwark and the steam horn voices of the tugboats on the river.

  A broad, near-toothless smile spread across his crab apple face and for a moment he closed his wrinkled eyes, enjoying the warmth of the September sun on his weather-beaten skin. All was right with the world. This was the best time of day to be out, combing the shoreline for anything that had been disposed of by the city that might be of value to someone still, and so furnish Samson with another bottle of gin or perhaps even a tumble with Nancy. If he were really lucky perhaps their union might take place in a bed this time, upstairs at the Dog and Duck, rather than up against the wall behind the chandler's. Thoughts of Nancy filled his head, sweet as sugarplums.

  Jip's urgent barking roused his master from his reverie. Focusing on the yapping, Samson saw the dog worrying at something down by the water's edge. At first it looked like a bundle of black cloth, exposed by the retreating tide. Putting his weight on his stick, Samson pulled his mud-caked boots out of the sucki
ng mire.

  "Give over there, Jip. What's got you bothered as a Whitechapel street-walker?"

  The terrier was growling, tugging at the cloth gripped in his teeth. It wasn't just a piece of cloth though; something was bound up within it, something that shifted with the push and pull of the waves.

  "What is it, you daft bugger?"

  Samson was practically standing over the terrier now as it wrestled with the bundle. Under the relentless worrying of the dog something flopped loose. Samson saw the sodden cloth of a sleeve and the pallid, waterlogged flesh of what was left of a hand, after the eels and other murk dwellers had had a go at it.

  It was unmistakeably a body - a man, partially smothered by the other detritus that had been washed up with him, face down in the stinking shallows. Lank tresses of black hair moved in the sudsy surf, moving as if blown by a gentle breeze.

  "God's teeth!" the beachcomber swore, the colour draining from his cheeks. He prodded at the corpse with his stick. "Get away from there, Jip!" he suddenly snapped, giving the dog a kick. Whimpering, the terrier released its hold.

  Dropping the sack and bracing himself with the pole again, Samson leant down. With one strong hand he grabbed the collar of the dead man's suit and heaved. As the surge of the river lifted the corpse, Samson turned it over.

  "Bloody hell!" he gasped, seeing the dead man's bloated features. "Poor bugger," he breathed, turned away and threw up.

  II - Inspector Allardyce Investigates

  "Not another one," Inspector Maurice Allardyce said with a sigh, giving the body a cursory visual examination. "So, what do you make of it Sheldon?"