Molded, warped wooden dressers, tables, and faded, torn, and decaying tapestries were all about the room. Something wasn’t right, but Deitel couldn’t put his finger on it. There was a hole in the shape of an inverted triangle all the way through the far wall of the room. It stretched from floor to ceiling and opened to the outside of the castle and a straight drop down the cliff. Deitel realized it was the result of damage from the earthquake in the 1880s that Amria had described.
“We already searched and secured all the rooms on this level and all the ones above it,” one of the two troopers said to him. “We found little more than rotten furniture covered by decades if not centuries of dust. This is pointless.”
The master’s bed was on a stone dais in the center of the room, the ornately carved frame warped and rotten. Over the decades, rainwater had poured into the room. The moisture had ruined the woodwork and rotted the Persian rug. The water that leaked in had, over the years, created a sluice through the accumulated dust on the floor, leaving a stain of its path that ran from the hole in the wall to the rug, where it stopped.
Where did the water go from there? Deitel wondered.
“Wait,” he said to the trooper. “Here, get that end,” and he grabbed the edge of the Persian rug. The troopers each took a side and lifted the rug. It split apart in their hands. Underneath, sunk into the floor, was an iron trapdoor.
The troopers and Deitel looked at one another.
“Vampires sleep underground, according to the stories,” Deitel said.
It was heavy, but the troopers pulled the door open with a nerve-wracking creak. Torch in hand, Deitel descended the stairwell it had hid. After another door, inscribed with ancient, indecipherable runes, they found themselves inside the private sanctum of the master of this castle—Vlad Tepes, the Son of the Dragon, Draculae.
Oddly, it smelled of fresh earth. Tapestries with gold dragons on a field of black and crimson lined the walls, and while dusty, they were not rotten. In the center of the room, a stone crypt bore the same runes as the door. In the torchlight, metal gleamed along the walls. The slab atop the crypt was pushed to the side. It was empty.
Not taking his eyes off the crypt, Deitel took a few tentative steps into the room. The gleam came from the handles of a score of weapons lining the wall to his right. There were hideous, ornately carved broadswords, short swords, pikes, maces, knives, and a two-handed great sword. The obsidian steel weapons looked like they’d been oiled that day. They absorbed the light. Only the decorative engraving on their scalloped handles and cross guards reflected the torches. The blades were razor sharp.
One of the two troopers stepped up to the wall and removed a broadsword.
“Gather these,” he said. “We need to take them up to the courtyard.”
In the courtyard, Terah saw to the wounded and got some of the lab technicians to round up field rations and water. So far all the wounds she saw were from the gunfire and the fighting that had occurred. She caught Amria’s eye and saw that the girl’s anger hadn’t subsided at all, but that the girl seemed oddly—disturbingly—self-satisfied.
“The murderers of my people will die tonight,” Amria said with bitter finality. “As will we all. I have made my peace. You should as well. Where’s your hope now?”
It wasn’t a question she expected would be answered, but she got an answer anyhow, from Deitel. He dropped an armload of obsidian weapons to the ground and said, “He’s out there. On his way here.”
Amria snorted. “You’re insane. Face reality,” she spat back.
Terah thought about that.
“Right now,” she said, “we’re barricaded in Dracula’s castle fighting off an army of the undead alongside some the most notorious Nazi storm troopers ever to goose step.” She picked up one of the black steel short swords. “Honey, we kissed sanity goodbye a long time ago.”
They turned the inner courtyard into a fortress within a fortress, complete with two additional redoubts for falling back. It had been four hours since Amria’s curse spoiled Übel’s experiment, and in the process unleashed those mindless dead creatures in the outer courtyard. It would be another four hours until sunrise. Their number was down to thirty-eight, including four wounded. Skorzeny didn’t bother counting how many were SS troopers, engineers, techs, or civilians.
They were just the living now, facing hundreds of the undead. All the creatures crowded outside the inner courtyard gate.
The worst thing was the sound they made when they chose to make sound at all. From each and every creature came a haunting, unnerving moan. There was something primeval about it, and it reached into the base fear center of the minds of the living. It set them on edge and rattled their nerves. It was incessant. Much longer, and men might start to break down, Skorzeny figured.
Still, the barricade had worked, surprising even Skorzeny. An obsidian steel mace tucked into his belt and a machine pistol on his shoulder, he walked through the courtyard inspecting his handiwork. He’d set up firing lines in the inner courtyard. Those who couldn’t handle weapons, he put to work erecting more barricades for their fallback positions in the main keep.
There were a few assets Skorzeny hadn’t expected. One of the survivors—Corporal Paul Lang—was one of the battalion’s snipers. Like the other snipers, he’d left his rifle on the roof of the tower where he’d been stationed, so he had his primary weapon now. Equipped with a landline field phone connected by a long wire to another field phone in the courtyard, Lang was now their eyes above.
They didn’t have enough ammunition to fight the things outright, so they simply worked on making sure none breached the barricade.
The creatures were getting smarter. At first it was one in a hundred who ever got the idea to try to climb the barricade rather than shamble into it over and over like a blind insect. More and more of them had attempted it now.
Lang’s precision shooting took care of those. It was Darwin’s natural selection in reverse, but they were losing ground. The creatures were getting faster and smarter. They were also continuing to mutate. On many of the creatures, arms were elongated like that of a simian and jaws jutted out like muzzles. For some, eyes were now glazed over and black. They hunched over and walked more like animals.
Terah and Skorzeny stood on the parapet over the inner courtyard wall, looking down on the writhing mass of undead.
“Don’t give up hope,” he said. “Before we had to retreat I ordered a radioman to send out a coded distress signal.”
“Do you think he made it? Got the signal out?”
“I don’t know. The engineers I sent with him restored power, so I think so. But I haven’t seen him since.”
Skorzeny lit a cigarette. The moans from below rose and fell, but they never ceased.
Terah shivered.
A scream from the far side of the wall drew their attention. An SS trooper was pulling a civilian woman barely out of her teens toward the edge of the wall.
“Achtung!” Skorzeny shouted. “What are you doing, trooper?”
The storm trooper didn’t release his grip on the girl, but he managed to pull his helmet and Senf mask off. His skin was pale and the dark circles under his eyes gave him a distinctly skull-like countenance, but the terror in his eyes and the nervous tics showed he was just a broken man forced to the brink of insanity. He wasn’t infected. He was just in shock.
“D-D-Don’t you see, sir? Those things. Those things—” His voice was cracking and disgusted all at once. “Those things are hungry. If we feed them, they’ll leave us,” he said in terrorized earnestness.
Skorzeny’s voice was like steel.
“Trooper, you will release the girl at once!” he commanded.
The young trooper’s eyes looked from Skorzeny to the writhing mass of death below. Duty and terror pulled him in opposing measure.
“B-B-But, sir—”
So fast Terah barely saw it, Skorzeny drew his pistol and shot the man between the eyes. The back of the trooper’s
skull exploded out. Dead before the sound could echo, his body fell off the wall into the throng below. Terah grabbed the girl and held her.
Skorzeny returned his pistol to its holster. He lit a cigarette and handed it to Terah. He lit another for himself. One of the family members fetched the girl, who was still crying.
When they were alone, Skorzeny broke the silence.
“Don’t say a word,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to,” Terah said.
Skorzeny was too far gone to smile, but he appreciated that this woman wasn’t acting like . . . well, a woman, but as a soldier who understood the necessity of sacrifice. Was it just the woman, or was it the Texas in her blood? he wondered.
For the most part, things had stabilized in the last hour. The barricade was holding. The mass of undead—which now included some of the black-clad storm troopers who’d fallen fighting against them—pushed against the barricade, but it held. Hundreds scraped at the walls, trying to climb, but to no avail.
Skorzeny and Terah stood in silence on the wall, smoking and looking out on the undulating sea of undead in the outer courtyard.
“How long before they can—”
An ear-splitting howl cut Terah off. It was a baying like the wehr-wolves, only more shrill and full of pain and hate. The mass of undead parted as something charged at the wall. It had an elongated muzzle and large, pointed ears. Its face was exposed to the bone. It was running on its hind legs, like a man, but those legs were elongated and bent at the knee like an animal’s. It was slower than the wehr-wolves but much faster than the other undead. Large chunks of flesh were missing, exposing bone and raw, bloody sinew. At its wrists and waist there were tatters of a crimson uniform. It had once been a human.
It howled again as its claws sank into the wall just below Terah and Skorzeny. Both opened up with their machine pistols, emptying their magazines into its head. The 9mm bullets deflected off the armored hide and thickened skull. It was clambering its way up the wall, its large, razor-sharp claws slipping but more often gaining purchase. When it grabbed the top of the wall, Skorzeny swung the obsidian mace into the side of its head. The force of the blow ripped its lower jaw off. A second upward swing drove the mace’s spikes into its brain and through the roof of its mouth. It fell to the cobblestones.
“What the hell was that?” Terah finally asked.
“It was like part man, part wehr-wolf,” he said.
Terah stared at the mass below.
“They’re changing. All of them. Mutating. They’re not only becoming faster and smarter, but like the ones that devoured the flesh of the transgenics,” she said, referring to the nachtmenn and wehr-wolves. “They’re mutating into something more.”
Both of them knew then that the stalemate they’d achieved so far would not last.
The crack of Lang’s rifle rang out. Terah looked below and saw one of the creatures that had been trying to climb the barricade fall to the ground, its head split in two. Skorzeny gave a thumbs-up in the direction of the roof of the grand tower.
“How long before your people could get here, assuming the signal got through?” she asked.
“There’s a fallschirmjäger—a regular German army, not SS—paratroop battalion stationed in Wolfsberg, Austria,” Skorzeny said. He looked at his watch. “They could mount a drop before sunrise. But I’m pretty sure the Reichsführer-SS wants to keep this disaster a secret, so they’ll probably wait until tomorrow night to launch an airship. They need cover of darkness. This is, after all, Romania.”
“Are you sure they won’t just send a bomber to destroy the castle?” Terah asked.
Skorzeny considered. “No.”
The outer courtyard was littered with the half-eaten bodies of SS soldiers. Dr. Übel’s orb was surrounded by piles of ash and bodies of Death’s Head Legionnaires who had stood too close when the machine activated.
“We can’t hold out for a rescue by your people,” Terah said. “This is bad. Look.”
A few of the undead were pulling at the barricade. It was ineffective so far, but it was new.
“They’ll eventually pull that barricade apart,” Skorzeny said.
What Terah saw next made her grab his forearm.
“It’s worse than you think,” she said. “Tell me what you see there.” She pointed to the back of the horde.
“More of the undead. So?” Skorzeny said.
“Which one isn’t like the others?”
Skorzeny saw. It was one of the draugrkommandos that Hauser and his men had thrown from the platform. A semicircle of black and maroon-clad undead stood around him. He was talking to the feeders.
“They have leadership now,” Terah said. “They’re starting to reason.”
Skorzeny and Terah climbed down a ladder and stood on their side of the barricade, looking for where it would need shoring up. There were a few gaps through which they could see the undead. Some of them were expressionless. Some snarled in anger.
One was barely ten feet away and looking right at them.
It was the second rogue draugrkommando.
Terah nearly jumped.
“We are coming for you,” it growled, its voice like gravel.
“He’s trying to cause them to panic,” Skorzeny said. “Smart bastard.”
“A battalion of German paratroopers is on its way,” Terah said to the draugr. “If you value your . . . um, your existence, it’s you that should retreat, monster.”
It took another creaky draw of air. “Good. More meat. More to join us.”
Terah’s face reddened. People always said she’d argue with a brick wall. Now here she was, arguing with a corpse.
“There’s a grave out there with your name on it,” she said viciously.
The draugr eyed her. It could tell he was getting under her skin.
“This is a castle,” it said, “but this isn’t a fairy tale. There will be no knight on horseback riding to your rescue.”
Then the draugr drew another long, raspy breath.
It laughed.
It was the worst sound Terah and Skorzeny had ever heard.
It drew another breath and spoke again.
“We will snuff out your lives and then the lives of every man, woman, and child on this earth. We will bring into this realm our ways.”
From the far side of the outer courtyard, they heard the clacking of the outer gate opening and then closing. In the distance there was the neigh of a horse and the clatter of horseshoes on cobblestones. Then came a cowboy holler.
Skorzeny and Terah looked at each other; it dawned on them at the same time. They were up the ladder in seconds. Deitel and Amria were right behind them.
Far across the outer courtyard at the main gate they saw a man on horseback. He was hollering and prancing his horse back and forth. He rode in circles and reined the horse to a halt, making it rise up on its hind legs. Then he rode toward the undead and through them like a barrel racer, past them and away again. More than half of the undead had turned to follow him.
Terah smiled and blushed.
Even Skorzeny drew a breath of surprise. Magnificent, he thought.
“It’s . . .” Deitel said.
“Impossible!” the draugr growled.
The back ranks of the undead crowded at the inner courtyard gate continued to peel away and shamble toward the rider.
“What is that?” Hoffstetter demanded.
“Not what,” Terah said. “Who. It’s Rucker. He’s back.”
“The dead man is back?” Hoffstetter asked stupidly.
“There’s a lot of that going around,” Terah said.
The draugr looked at the rider. Its eyes widened. A second draugr appeared next to the first and they started whispering to one another. Skorzeny thought he overheard his name, Der Schädel, and Rucker among the buzzing. The two draugrs were clearly agitated. In their dim memories from what seemed ages ago—back when they were alive—the draugrs vaguely recalled the whispers they’d heard among their fe
llow soldiers.
In the outer courtyard, Rucker was riding rings around the undead, drawing them away from the gate. He circled Dr. Übel’s machine in the north center of the courtyard. When his path was clear, he swung close to the gate and yelled at the survivors to make a hole in the top of the barricade.
Terah knew exactly what he had in mind.
She ordered the soldiers to start pulling down some of the crates in the center, the ones stacked atop the hood of a field car. She and two other soldiers stood watch, firing through the barricade at the heads of the few creatures still near the gate.
When the skinny captain saw the soldiers pulling down the barricade, he ran toward them screaming for them to stop. None of the soldiers even acknowledged him. Terah tried to explain to the captain what was happening, but the man reached into his holster, drew his service pistol and extended his arm to aim it at Terah. Before he could fire, one of the creatures, trying to wiggle its way through the barrier, grabbed his arm and bit his hand.
With her own gun, Terah shot the creature between the eyes. The captain fell to the ground clutching his bloody hand where a big chunk of flesh was missing.
Skorzeny, who had been up on the parapet, climbed down the ladder. As he neared the captain, the man started to say something to him.
Skorzeny pulled his pistol and shot the captain in the head.
“Christ, Skorzeny! You didn’t have to do that,” Deitel said. “He was only just bitten. It would be hours before he turned.”
“He was bitten?”. Skorzeny asked as he pulled the last crate off the hood of the field car.
Outside, they saw Rucker riding in and out of the undead creatures, drawing them farther away. Finally he stopped at the far gate, well away from any of them, and stroked the horse’s neck.
“Good girl. Good girl. We can do this,” he whispered to the horse. “Are you ready?”
The horse neighed, and he brought her back on her hind legs. And then she was off, charging straight at the barricade. Rucker rode low on her neck and gave her all the rein she wanted as they approached the barricade.
Shadows Will Fall: The Spear of Destiny: Part Three of Three Page 9
