“You’re not the first man to say so.”
Keep him talking. Keep him busy. Take him before he raises the alarm.
Marsh gauged the distance separating them. He sidled around the desk.
Von Westarp dropped the plate of toast and pulled a short-barreled pistol from the sagging pocket of his gown. He had it trained on Marsh before the toast and porcelain fragments came to rest underfoot. When he strode forward, his hairless legs poked through the opening of his gown. His sash was coming undone. He was pale and skinny.
“Stop,” said the doctor.
The Luger in his hand predated the Great War. Marsh wondered if the half-naked madman knew how to use it. Probably. What sort of lunatic carried a gun in his dressing gown?
Marsh said, “I doubt you fully understand what’s—”
The doctor cut him off. “This isn’t a conversation. I’m no fool.” And he raised the Luger at Marsh’s face.
He was too close to miss. The barrel looked a foot wide. Marsh tensed, rose to the balls of his feet, prepared to dive as the doctor’s finger tightened on the trigger. Tendons stood out in bas-relief beneath the doctor’s papery skin.
A door scraped open. Von Westarp’s gaze flicked from Marsh’s face to something behind him.
Marsh clenched the bundle of wires on the desk behind him. He swung the skull at von Westarp’s outstretched hand. It connected with a solid crack at the same moment von Westarp fired.
A dead child’s teeth clattered to the floor like hailstones. Somebody gasped.
Marsh leapt on the doctor. He wrenched the Luger from his grip and broke a couple of his fingers in the process. A punch snapped the doctor’s head back hard enough to daze and subdue him, but not before von Westarp screamed to raise the dead: “Help! Children, help me!”
Well, we’re in the shit now, thought Marsh.
He said, “Gretel! Get Kammler ready! We’re going to have company in about ten seconds.”
Then he shot von Westarp. The bullet split the doctor’s glasses at the bridge of his nose. A jet of blood and brain matter geysered from the neat round hole between his eyebrows. Warm blood spatter stippled Marsh’s face for the second time in as many days, but this time no Eidolon swirled about him to demand greater carnage.
“Somebody should have done that long ago, you twisted bastard.”
That made two gunshots in the doctor’s study. Shouts echoed up the rear stairwell. The rest of Von Westarp’s children were awake and agitated.
Bloody fuck.
He kicked the dead man for good measure, for frustration’s sake, for time spent rotting in Berlin, for time lost watching Agnes grow …
… and glimpsed the rest of von Westarp’s journals crammed on a shelf between a pair of specimen jars.
He yanked the flour sack from behind his belt. Unfurling it, he said over his shoulder, “Don’t kill Reinhardt until the house is burning. Let him do our work for us.”
Marsh shoved the doctor’s snack-time reading into the bag. Then he ran to the shelf, swept the other volumes into the sack, and spun it closed.
Two doors. Two exits. Two entrances.
He slammed the door that opened on the front stairwell. Marsh hooked a mahogany armchair with his foot, wedged it under the knob. It wouldn’t keep everybody out, not in this nightmare factory, but it would keep the mundane soldiers out for a minute or two. Long enough. If he and Gretel were still barricaded in the doctor’s study when the soldiers broke in, it would mean their bid to destroy the Reichsbehörde had failed.
Next, he turned for the rear stairwell, where Gretel’s perfectly timed entrance had distracted the doctor. Von Westarp’s desk looked to be half an acre of solid oak. Pain rippled through Marsh’s knees and shoulders as he strained to force it across the room to barricade the door.
Couldn’t get it there in one go. He wedged himself under the edge of the desk, strained, forced the damn thing past where Gretel knelt on the floor, slammed it against the servants’ door.
Right. Now we can make a good run at this.
“Doctor!” The servants’ stair reverberated with footsteps and panic, the scuffling sounds of a brainwashed family scrambling to be the first to leap to the aid of its insane paterfamilias.
Marsh said, “Gretel, get ready.”
Then he looked down.
Kammler lay slumped against the wall. All color had drained from his face. He stared up at Marsh, wide-eyed and afraid. He was crying. Gretel’s braids hung in disarray. She had tied her ribbons around Kammler’s left thigh. Her hands were the color of stewed beets, as was the long smear of blood from Kammler’s gunshot wound.
“God damn it!”
“Temper,” said Gretel. Her face was unreadable.
“Can he work?”
Kammler was the key to everything. What was Gretel’s escape plan?
The door to the servants’ stair rattled. The edges turned black. Marsh scooted away from the heat. Tongues of flame licked into the study while Reinhardt assaulted the door with fists and Willenskräfte.
Reinhardt called, “Doctor! Let me in!”
Klaus yelled, “You idiot, you’ll kill him! Give me that battery!”
Marsh knelt over Kammler. Gretel’s tourniquet hadn’t staunched the bleeding. She was too small, and the ribbons too slippery, to pull tight enough. Marsh’s belt, or even a stick to twist into the knot, might have done the trick. But they hadn’t time. Heat poured off the door in waves thick enough to crisp Marsh’s hair.
The chair barring the other door screeched backwards half an inch, tracing bright gouges in the dark varnish of the floorboards. Another good shove would snap it apart.
Marsh took Kammler’s face in his hands. “Look at me, son. Remember me?”
The fear and confusion on Kammler’s face softened under Marsh’s attention. He shrunk away from Gretel’s touch. He smelled like sour milk and peppermint, shit and warm iron.
“M-m-m—”
Marsh gave a little smile of encouragement.
“That’s right. I need your help.” He pulled one of Kammler’s arms over his shoulder. Gretel did the same. Marsh lifted the telekinetic to his feet. Christ, but he was heavy. Klaus passed through the barricade like a ghost wreathed in smoke and anger. He disregarded the growing flames. Marsh fired at him with the Luger, but the shot passed harmlessly through him to crack the chalkboard. But then Marsh started to lose his grip on Kammler, and he had to keep the large man on his feet.
Klaus rematerialized. Stumbled over the doctor’s body. Howled. Spun. His gaze paused on Marsh for an instant, just long enough to recognize him, but Gretel and Kammler were the targets of his rage.
“You sick bitch! And you, you fucking retard. What have you done?”
He rushed them.
Marsh pointed. To Kammler, he said, “Crush.”
*
Gretel’s bombers had arrived at Coventry. Stealth was out of the question now. I left the headlamps on and drove like a demon while the Luftwaffe unleashed hell behind me.
The bombers came in waves, the heavy thrum of their engines creating a basso profundo counterpoint to the hysterical soprano shriek of the sirens and kettledrum percussion of ack-acks. This wasn’t a routine bombing run. They’d come to pulverize the city, burn it to ash, salt the earth. They’d come to redraw the map.
Gretel wasn’t taking chances. She was thorough. And who was I but a scarred and sweaty madman railing against the woman who twirled history around her fingers like so much yarn?
Explosions like flashbulbs strobed the night and shook the earth. Thunder rolled over me. The steering wheel danced in my hands, tried to shake free of my grip.
On I drove.
*
The farmhouse disintegrated.
Klaus disappeared into a cyclone of debris. So did the floor, wall, and ceiling behind him. The agitated yelling became screams of panic, shrieks of the injured.
The blow from Kammler’s Willenskräfte tore through wood and glass and stone
with equal ease, squeezed the shattered pieces together, then flung them apart like confetti.
It didn’t disturb one hair on Marsh’s head.
Cold night air swirled around him. Overhead, beyond the missing ceiling, a faint cloudy halo wreathed the moon. Firelight shone on the training field. Kammler shivered. The floor shifted underfoot. One of the doctor’s bookcases toppled into the jagged hole where the floor had been, followed by the chair Marsh had used to barricade one door.
A handful of mundane soldiers—those who hadn’t been standing where Kammler had smashed part of the balcony to flinders—burst into the room.
“Crush,” said Marsh. And Kammler did. An invisible, impenetrable wall punched down from the sky like the fist of God. It slammed down on the men and most of the farmhouse behind them, crushing three stories of farmhouse into a volume not two feet tall. Kammler swung his open mouth toward Marsh, wanting another peppermint stick.
Gretel yelled, “Raybould!”
Searing heat rolled over them. Kammler mewled. Marsh glimpsed Reinhardt blazing with fire and fury. But then the devastated farmhouse shifted again, and the floor lost its fight against gravity. It tossed the trio into the hole. Marsh lost sight of Reinhardt.
He landed on what was left of the floor of Heike’s room. Kammler slammed atop him, hard enough to bruise bone and empty lungs. Gretel landed on the mattress and bounced daintily to her feet.
Kammler wailed. He rocked back and forth, crying.
Marsh couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t get his lungs to work, not with Kammler rolling on top of him. He’d been pierced by debris in a dozen places, and something in his chest was fractured. He looked to Gretel. Her face shrank at the end of a dark tunnel. Above him, the ragged remains of the doctor’s study burned like a torch. The fire had no shortage of debris on which to feed, and an open sky from which to breathe. It inched downwards.
Gretel took Kammler by the hands. The large man rolled away from her, which made the pain still worse, but it freed Marsh. Air trickled into his lungs. The spasms in his chest stopped, and he sucked down a lungful of breath in one explosive inhalation. Razor-sharp pain in his ribs threatened to flay Marsh wide open.
Night became day. All around them, klieg lights bathed the Reichsbehörde in stark white brilliance. The light streamed through the void where Heike’s outer wall had been. So, too, did shouts, screams, orders. LSSAH troops scurried back and forth. Pabst was there, shivering in the cold without his topcoat. Under his orders, the soldiers took positions in a loose line surrounding the farmhouse.
The colonel called for Buhler. The captain and the colonel’s brief discussion ended with Buhler running toward the farmhouse. They recognized the pattern of destruction. Perhaps they lacked a complete picture of the situation, but they certainly knew Kammler’s work when they saw it.
Marsh stood, then took Kammler’s arm over his shoulder again. The mentally deficient man left a thick red smear on everything he touched. Gretel’s ribbons had come undone in the fall.
“Hold him up,” said Marsh. He slipped off his belt, flipped it around Kammler’s leg, and pulled until the large man cried. It wouldn’t hold forever, but it was better than the ribbons. Tears and snot traced wet trails down Kammler’s face. His skin had gone gray.
“Get us outside.”
They couldn’t demolish the rest of the house from inside. Any one of them, or all three of them, could have been impaled on debris in the fall. Another blow from Kammler was likely to bring the rest of the burning structure down on their heads.
“G-g-g—” Kammler mumbled to himself. “T-t-t-t.”
Gretel led. Kammler—shivering, weeping, and limping—was a heavy burden. Marsh pushed as hard as he dared, but he couldn’t move very quickly while supporting the confused telekinetic. It would have been impossible to descend the servants’ stair side by side, but Kammler’s assault had torn away several load-bearing members, so the stairs now sloped away from the remains of one interior wall. It made the stairwell precarious but passable.
The damaged house fell apart around them. Overstressed timbers creaked and snapped; warped windowpanes spat shards of glass. They passed the doctor’s laboratory, the incubator rooms, the kitchen. Their footsteps crunched on fragments of the stained-glass window. Marsh swept the floor with the soles of his boots; Kammler was barefoot.
Kammler’s confused mumbling trailed off. He grew heavier, partially owing to Marsh’s exhaustion, but mostly because the man was weak with blood loss. He shivered with cold and the onset of shock. Marsh doffed Pabst’s coat and put it on Kammler.
Stay alive. Just a few more minutes. Please.
Buhler’s voice called from deeper in the ruins. “Kammler! Where are you?”
“B-buh-buh!” Kammler perked up. He squealed and clapped, weakly.
Marsh pulled von Westarp’s Luger from his belt. Gretel reached up and covered Kammler’s eyes with the palms of her hands. Buhler crept around the corner, flinching at every groan from the slumping farmhouse. Marsh put two bullets in his chest. Gretel pulled Kammler away before he glimpsed his dead handler.
They paused to check the gauge on Kammler’s battery. A bit more than half its original charge remained.
Marsh glanced out the window. Another line of soldiers had formed up along the gravel drive, rifles at the ready, facing the main entrance. Marsh started to point through the window, but Gretel stopped him.
“He needs an unobstructed line of sight. He’ll think you want him to break the window.”
“They’ll fire the second I kick open that door.”
“No, they won’t.”
Gretel opened the door. As one, the soldiers aimed. Hands up, she stepped into the glare of the kliegs. “He’s taken Kammler!” she said. “He’s going to destroy the farm.”
The soldiers hesitated. Which bought Marsh just enough time to pull Kammler into the doorway. Gretel dove aside as Marsh pointed. “Crush.”
Kammler pounded the soldiers into the ground like tent pegs. Another blow extinguished the spotlights and snapped the masts like matchsticks.
They pulled shivering Kammler outside. Marsh took him by the hand, coaxed him deeper into the darkness toward the forest. The sack of von Westarp’s journals slapped against Marsh’s leg, threatening to trip him. But they needed distance. The more Kammler could see of the farm at once, the better.
“Smash,” said Marsh. “Crush!”
A final blow flattened the burning farmhouse into a raging bonfire. A funeral pyre. Next, Marsh directed Kammler’s willpower against the chemical hut where batteries were manufactured: two blows to destroy it, a third to grind it into powder. The debris cloud roiled with black smoke that carried the eye-watering sting of ammonia.
Spotlights swept the grounds, accompanied by the chatter of a machine gun. Soldiers had turned the heavy armaments from the training field toward defense. They didn’t rush Marsh’s position; instead, they hung back, keeping to the shadows behind the lights. Nobody wanted to be caught in the open where Kammler could see them.
A light raked across them, swept back, pinned the trio in its glare like butterflies beneath a stickpin. The defenders unleashed a fusillade from rifles and pistols. Marsh tackled Kammler aside as bullets sizzled through the night. The light followed them. Kammler sobbed in pain.
He pointed and yelled, but Kammler just gaped at him. Gretel snapped a peppermint stick and waved it under Kammler’s bloody nose. He stuck out his tongue. She placed a fragment of candy on it.
The next blow took out the spotlights and the gun emplacement.
Barracks: destroyed.
Surgical ward: pulverized.
Each flattened building revealed the portions of the farm behind it, bringing more structures into Kammler’s field of view. Some structures, like the icehouse and pump shed, weren’t worth the expenditure of battery life.
Marsh pointed to the battery storage shed. “Crush!”
Kammler scowled at the low brick building. It shudde
red, then nothing. Spittle trickled from one corner of his mouth, faint pink in the moonlight.
“Crush!” Again, nothing. The defenders got another spotlight up.
Marsh checked the gauge on Kammler’s battery. Just about empty.
The light slewed across the grounds, carving zigzag patterns in the darkness in its search for the assailants before another blast of Willenskräfte destroyed the light.
The light hit Marsh just as he undid the latch on Kammler’s harness. “There they are!”
Marsh dropped the dead battery into his sack, then tackled Kammler again. Gretel tossed him the spare. He fumbled it. The soldiers unleashed another fusillade.
Somebody, perhaps Pabst, called an order to kill the spotlight. They’d reacquired Marsh and company, but didn’t want to provide Kammler with another target. The light died, yet still the darkness retreated, as though the night had suddenly come to fear the farm.
Marsh inched forward on his stomach, toward the battery he’d dropped. Night became day. He looked up, dreading what he’d see.
A figure stood in the center of the training field, sheathed in a swirling corona of violet flame.
Reinhardt blazed like a vengeful sunrise.
*
My world was chaos. Peals of man-made thunder deafened me, suffocated me, slapped me. My eyes burned from constant readjustment to darkness and light. As the bombers overflew me, so, too, did their payloads catch up, then surround me. Every explosion strobed the night and etched a still life of the dying city into my eyelids.
Miles behind me, a massive detonation turned night into day. I knew, before the shockwave hit, that the Jerries had punched through the roof of a munitions factory. The swirling fireball rose over the city, large enough for me to see in the mirrors. Its light outraced the thunder, but the concussion reached me a few seconds later. The earth shook with such violence that the Mulliner’s wheels left the road. I lost control.
Drive wheels pushed to starboard, I steered to port as I skidded into a roundabout. Stephenson’s car slid right across it and slammed to a halt against the empty fountain at the center. My door dented inward, head-butted by a cherub with pursed lips. Shattered window glass winged through the cabin like grapeshot. A jagged crack appeared in the fountain’s empty basin. My arm felt as though I’d just been kicked by a pony.
Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) Page 28
