Brother Mine, Zombie.

by Trevorah, Peter

  “That’s given me another idea,” said the smiling Mengele slyly. “An idea for a follow-up experiment, consequential on the results of the first.”

  And, with that, his gaze fell upon my own body. He ordered my clothes to be torn from me and stepped evenly towards me, cattle-prod still in his hand. I well remember the jolt of the first application of the rod to my skin – on the forehead, as it happens – and I also remember hearing my own screams echoing in that bare-walled room.

  But I only got to know (later) how often, and where, the prod was applied to me by the evidence of the scorch marks it left on my skin. (I had blacked out pretty early in the process.)

  It looked like I got about the same treatment as I saw David get.

  It was some minutes, or some tens of minutes perhaps, after the last application of the prod – and Ingrid’s last data point - that my mind rose once again into consciousness. The first thing I heard was Mengele’s voice:

  “Remarkable. Truly remarkable.” (Apparently, the word ‘remarkable’ was his favourite descriptor.)

  A conversation followed between him and Doctor Ingrid. I was still too groggy to take in all of it but the salient point of it was that, once David had seen me being tortured, his EEG read-out had suddenly ceased flat-lining and had shown unmistakable signs of neuronal activity. There was apparently nothing at all normal in the patterns recorded – some lines remained completely flat - but there was no doubt that a discernible pattern was to be observed (but only while I was being subjected to serious torture).

  “I hope this isn’t an experiment that those two need to replicate too often,” I thought.

  My skin felt like it was on fire and David’s continued roaring was giving me a headache. I passed out once again and did not wake until we were both back in our concrete cell.

  CHAPTER 21

  DOCTOR INGRID

  “Are you in need of pain relief?”

  The voice was that of Ingrid, through the peep-hole of our cell door. I was ready for her – I had given our next meeting some thought.

  “Tell me, doctor,” I replied. “What’s it like working with Doctor Josef Mengele? What’s it like working in Auschwitz instead of Puckapunyal?”

  She gasped involuntarily – evidently she knew of the evil reputation of the bestial Nazi doctor and how that reputation had been earned. I had struck a real nerve. I had intended to. So, I pushed on that nerve hard.

  “Tell me, doctor. If you can’t answer that one, what about this one: When did you decide to renounce your Hippocratic Oath? When did you decide it was okay to ‘do harm’?”

  The peephole was abruptly snapped shut. I heard the sound of rapidly retreating feet.

  Advantage: me.

  The peephole stayed shut for some hours until Ingrid (who had apparently now composed herself) returned once again.

  “Are you in need of pain relief?” she repeated, without emotion.

  Actually, I was. My skin was still on fire from all the scorch marks inflicted upon my body – and my genitals were very bruised and achy. (There had been no need to put the cattle prod in my groin to get the desired reaction from David – this had been pure malice, pure payback. Then again, as he’d been so thorough in applying the prod to David’s testes, he probably just thought he needed to be completely even-handed about the matter. Hmmph!)

  I decided I could put the mind-games to one side until I had gotten the relief I craved. Even so, I tried to make light of my suffering:

  “Yes, as it happens, an Aspro or two would be most welcome,” I said, as sweetly as I could.

  She passed a tablet through the peephole and I took it with some water. It was no mere Aspro – it was something morphine-based and sent me into la-la land for some hours.

  (I recall dreaming that I was at some dark, smoke-filled dive listening to Muddy Waters strutting his stuff – obviously one of the more pleasant experiences of the day, listening to the music outside the common room, had infiltrated my consciousness. This helped further to blot out the pain.)

  As the opiate started to wear off and the pain returned, it occurred to me that Ingrid need not have given me such powerful pain relief – or, indeed, any at all. Maybe there was some remorse for the evil which she had actively participated in – and which had caused me the pain in the first place. Or, maybe, there was another motive. I would wait and see.

  If it was remorse, that was something I could work with, something I could manipulate.

  o0o

  Next day, Ingrid came with the goons and gave orders to have me bound hand and foot and taken to an interview room. David remained in the cell, groaning and moaning.

  Ingrid and I sat either side of a small wooden table in the airless room. She ordered the guards to wait outside. They did so without hesitation or question.

  Her outward manner had softened a little but I could not trust her, of course. She had willingly participated in my systematic torture only the day before. She had sat calmly and taken notes while I suffered. She would need to earn my trust.

  “What’s on your mind, doctor?” I asked.

  “We can talk freely here. The Captain is temporarily off the base and there is no recording equipment in this room and we are not being observed.”

  I shrugged. Where was this going?

  She continued: “Those things you said in the lecture theatre the other day, are they true? I need to know this. Are they really slaughtering kids who might recover?”

  Still bound hand and foot, I leaned forward, looked her in the eye and said with as much conviction as I could muster:

  “I was there on day one, sister! I saw all those kids bitten by those first zombies – the ones who appeared from nowhere. I saw most of the guys who got bitten become zombies, too – or just die. But, I also saw guys, very close friends of mine, get bitten, get sick and then recover! They ended up as well as you or I - or, at least, as well as you…”

  I saw her wince a little at this oblique reference to the injuries that I had indirectly suffered at her hands. Good! I continued:

  “… I saw this happen with my own two eyes. Those guys recovered completely – though they’ve probably been burnt to a crisp by napalm now. All they had to show from their infection were the scars from the actual zombie bites.”

  I paused and sighed. Ingrid remained silent. So, I pressed my ‘attack’:

  “But you can believe whatever you want, doctor,” I said, “because, actually, I don’t care anymore. I know that I’m going to die, too – and, unless I miss my guess, the ‘Angel of Death’ will be arranging for my, very painful, passing very shortly – when he has no further experimental use for me or David. Maybe he can arrange for a ton of napalm to be dropped on me as well? What do you think?”

  This was a bit of theatrics on my part. I didn’t actually believe that my death was imminent – I considered that I was still far too ‘useful’ to the Captain’s research – whatever that really was (apart from sadism). I thought that he might kill me but that, if that happened in the near future, it was more likely to be by clinical error or oversight.

  Furthermore, you will have noted that, in talking to Ingrid, I glossed over one very salient fact: my gay friends had indeed survived zombie bites – and still bore the scars - but they had never become zombies themselves. I knew of no case where a zombie had reverted to normalcy. As far as I knew, this was impossible. It was a definite one-way street – but Doctor Ingrid didn’t need to know that.

  “So, these guys, the ones who recovered, what do you think made them different from all the other guys – the ones who became zombies?”

  I smiled. This wasn’t information that I wanted lightly to volunteer. Ingrid cast a meaningful glance through the glass at the goons still loitering, with interest, outside the interview room. It was not in my best interests to be too coy, it seemed.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” I said. “These guys, these close friends of mine, seemed to me to be very like the other young people who neve
r succumbed to the infection.”

  Ingrid seemed, at first, to be puzzled by this ‘hint’. ‘Other young people’? her expression seemed to say. Ingrid was not stupid but, sometimes, a little ‘slow on the uptake’.

  “But the only others who didn’t succumb were girls,” said Ingrid, stating the obvious. “I don’t understand your hint at all.”

  “Think about it, doctor: guys who seem a lot like girls?”

  Ingrid half-shook her head before the look of revelation suddenly burst across her face.

  I nodded and smiled: “Well done, Doctor. It seems you’re making progress.”

  Actually she was still a bit slow. She took some moments before blurting out:

  “Gay? Is that what you’re saying? That gay guys recover?”

  “My friends, the ones who recovered from the zombie bites were definitely gay – one of them was ‘out’ and the other may as well have been. So, that is indeed what I’m saying: Gay guys do get better,” I replied.

  “But that’s awful. Our best estimate, based on the current research, is that one in six guys is gay,” she said – to no-one in particular.

  “You’ve got the stats, sister” I replied. “Not me.”

  “If one in six zombies will recover,” she said, now somewhat incredulous, “and is therefore now being killed unnecessarily by our forces, then that’s, that’s …”

  “…A major war crime.” I completed her sentence. “Yes, I think that was what I said the other day to anyone who cared to listen – before Dr Mengele had me silenced. Am I right?”

  Ingrid ignored my rhetorical question – and ignored also my reference to her superior officer as ‘Dr Mengele’.

  “But this is simply appalling,” she continued. “If it’s true what you say, we are bombing, shooting and burning thousands of kids who would otherwise recover. Why didn’t you say anything about this at the lecture when you had the chance?”

  I raised my eyebrows are her in mild surprise. She obviously had stopped listening carefully to me now. I let it pass.

  “Cast your mind back to the lecture, doctor. Firstly, you may recall that I was rather rudely interrupted before I was able to finish my comments to the assembled troops…”

  Ingrid did cast her mind back – and nodded a sheepish concession to me.

  “…and secondly, what exactly do you think our ‘military planners’ would do differently if they knew that the ones who might survive were ‘just a bunch of poofters’ or ‘faggots’?

  If I’d told them that, do you really think they would care? Do you?”

  Ingrid nodded again – slowly this time. She understood what I was saying only too well. The armed forces of the early 1970’s did not tolerate gays within their ranks and would have little care if some gays were ‘wasted’ as ‘collateral damage’. Official tolerance of gay personnel would have to wait until the 21st century.

  Maybe Ingrid herself was gay – I didn’t ask and was never told. (How ironic - in view of later U.S. military policy.)

  In any event, she fell silent for a time and we continued to sit opposite each other at that small wooden table in a stuffy interview room.

  I decided it was opportune to assess the fallout, within the camp, of my little performance at the first lecture. If Ingrid wouldn’t tell me now, she was unlikely ever to tell me.

  “By the way, doctor, you said that Captain Mengele was not well pleased with my contribution to his presentation. What was the problem?”

  Ingrid’s mind was apparently still elsewhere – where exactly I cannot say. She answered me as if in a dream, a bit like an automaton.

  “Oh, the doughboys complained that we should have let you keep speaking. They said we must be hiding something, that it’s some kind of grand political conspiracy and that they don’t trust us anymore. Stuff like that.”

  “I suppose they’ve started writing to their congressmen?” I asked.

  Still in a dream, Ingrid answered simply: “Yes, they are actually.”

  Then she suddenly snapped out of it, realized that I was milking her for information:

  “Hey! How did you know that? That’s classified information.”

  “Just a wild guess,” I replied.

  Although I did not actually know that the GI’s had started writing to their congressmen, I guessed that this was likely – and Ingrid had merely confirmed my guess. This was my next guess:

  “But none of those letters will ever get off this base, will they?”

  Ingrid set her mouth in a tight line – thus answering my question in the positive. (There was not readily available overseas phone access in those days and so, if the letters were stopped, sensitive or controversial information would not leak back to the States in any short time frame.)

  Ingrid stood abruptly: “The interview is concluded, prisoner. Guards?!”

  The guards came running and took me back to my cell.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE NEXT EXPERIMENT

  There was a decompression chamber on the base.

  Why? Where there any sailors on the base? Any army divers?

  Pass.

  Had it ever been used before?

  Pass.

  If not, Doctor Mengele had now found a use for it.

  Different laboratory, same cast of characters: me and Dave, three goons, the Angel of Death and his trusty assistant, Ingrid. (I wondered idly if she ever performed a little dance for the audience when things got a bit dull.)

  Ever seen a decompression chamber? I hadn’t. It’s like this big, metal room - all sealed about and shaped like a giant suppository. (And I definitely knew whose arse I wanted to stick it up.)

  There was a thick metal door at one end, big enough for one person to crawl in. It was sealed tightly with a sort of screw arrangement – a bit hard to describe – don’t remember it all that well.

  After the usual argy-bargy ‘encouraging’ David into a pseudo-electric-chair and strapping him in, I was likewise encouraged into the decompression chamber itself.

  I didn’t like this particular ‘game’ of the Nazi doctor but I didn’t protest too much because I didn’t want let on that I actually suffered from mild claustrophobia. (I didn’t mean to give Josef Mengele any further ideas about how to make me suffer.)

  “Hey, doctor,” I said. “Can we talk about this one first? I think we might need to review procedure so that I don’t mess it up on you.”

  Slimy smile time! (Yuk encore.)

  He motioned to one of the goons – who promptly added to my scorch-mark collection. Ow! I entered the decompression chamber without further ado.

  There were two viewing windows to the chamber. I guessed that I was the show. At one window, stood what would now be considered an ancient video camera of considerable bulk. My ‘show’ was to be recorded. The chair into which David was securely tied faced the other viewing port – he had a perfect view of me - and I of him.

  A second ancient video camera was pointed at David.

  I was not hooked up to an EEG machine this time but, curiously, David was. He had all the electrodes stuck to his shaven scalp - just like last time- and these were hooked up to a screen. But me? Nothing.

  What did this remind me of? Suddenly, I became very anxious and loudly demanded to be let out of the chamber. Could they hear me? Would it have mattered if they could?

  David could see my anxiety and started to roar.

  None of this mattered to the Captain. Did Ingrid know what was about to happen?

  I screamed for mercy – in a flash, I had remembered what this was all about. I had seen the horrific archival film from Auschwitz. This guy really was Mengele’s successor and I was about to die an agonising death.

  Why? Was there a reason?

  “Start the vacuum pump,” he ordered – and I heard the electric motor thump into action.

  Fuck!

  I looked through the window at David – he was no use. He was just complaining, as usual.

  Dr Slimy-smile Mengele wa
s peering intently at me from behind one of the cameras. Ingrid was not visible to me but, no doubt, she was somewhere in the background.

  Soon, the air began to thin and my breathing became more rapid. Just as with a mountain climber’s body, my body was trying to compensate for the lack of oxygen by making me take in more air. More air meant more oxygen. It would only work for a short time – I knew that.

  Within a minute or two, the rapid breathing was not enough and my lungs began to burn. There was a sudden and enormous weight on my limbs and a sensation of heat within my brain. Trickles of sweat began to run from my brow.