The nameless dead

Twenty-Two

They were there again, the woman and the infant, standing on the far side of a fast-moving river. She had one arm extended, the other clutching the child, and her mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear her words above the rush of the murky water. Her eyes were fixed on me and I recognized her, I knew she meant something to me-what was it? And the child? Was it mine? It seemed it might be, but why couldn’t I join them, why couldn’t I leap into the stream and swim across? I looked down and saw movement in the water, rapid flicks and sudden thrashes above the surface. There were creatures in it, silver-scaled with long snouts. I couldn’t face them. I was afraid. I raised my head and saw that the woman and child had turned away. She was striding with her head held high, into a forest of tall, dense trees. They disappeared.

‘Buna.’ The word wrenched me back to myself. ‘Buna.’

I kept my eyes closed and brought some order to my thoughts. I knew the voice. It was Rothmann’s. Was the word a trigger? I searched my memory, flailing at a faint recollection. Buna. Yes, I knew what it was: the synthetic rubber produced by the Nazis. Dr. Rivers had told me so after I reacted to the stimulus. It was a trigger that we had neutralized. I immediately went into the zone that we had worked to reproduce. I reacted as I hoped Rothmann would expect, jerking open my eyes and clenching my fists. I tensed my entire body, realizing that I was on a bed and had been restrained.

Rothmann wore a strange gown of black material with a high collar. His eyes flicked from me to the screens in front of him. He was checking my heart rate and other vital signs to see if I was responding appropriately. I could only hope that the procedures Dr. Rivers had developed were adequate. Time passed very slowly. Eventually, Rothmann stood up and signaled to the technician beside me. The monitors were switched off and electrodes removed from my head and chest.

‘Untie his bonds,’ Rothmann said, sounding like a Biblical character-one whose teachings were the opposite of Christ’s. He moved closer and helped me sit up. His forearms were bony, but he was strong enough.

I played up my level of befuddlement.

‘Very good, Matt,’ Rothmann said, in an unusually soft voice. ‘You have done well. I have just one more thing for you to do today.’

I wondered what acting skills that would require. Then a short figure moved into the light.

‘How’d it go?’ Gordy Lister asked.

Rothmann turned and gave him a death stare.

‘How’d it go, Master?’ Lister said, dropping his gaze.

‘We are ready for the test I mentioned earlier. Pass the word.’

Before he left, the small man gave me a look that was oddly sympathetic. I began to get a bad feeling about what was coming. I reckoned drastic measures were required and went into rhetorical mode.

‘The National Socialist movement is not a cult,’ I pronounced, ‘but a racial and political philosophy grown out of exclusively racist principles. It does not have the meaning of a mystic cult, but aims to cultivate and command a people determined by blood. Therefore we do not have cult centers, but people centers. We do not have places of worship, but places for people to assemble and march. In the National Socialist movement, subversion by occult seekers for some hidden truth is not tolerated.’

Rothmann followed the translation of Adolf Hitler’s words that had been planted in my mind during the original indoctrination process, and then nodded impatiently.

‘Yes, yes, very good, but things are different now.’ He stretched his arms wide and spoke to an invisible congregation. ‘Cult is the basis of all we do. The Fuhrer’s ideology of discipline, racial purity and conquest is, of course, the intellectual underpinning of our work. But the keystone is our belief in Lucifer, inspirer of victories and god of baleful triumphs.’

I watched as spittle flew from his lips and his eyes shot back icy glints at the light. Something had happened to Heinz Rothmann. When I’d met him before, he had been the soulless son of a stonehearted Nazi. Now he was overflowing with the wide-eyed, utterly misdirected faith of a religious zealot. From using the Antichurch as a means to attract followers and bind the indoctrinated even more closely to his plans of domination, he had turned into a spokesman for the original force of evil.

‘And now,’ he said, coming out of his trancelike state, ‘you will show me how dependable you are, Matt.’

He took my arm and led me out of the treatment room. The surgical gown was pulled off me by a dead-eyed young man in blue denim. I was given a black cotton outfit and shoes, and motioned to put them on.

‘Ready?’ Rothmann said.

‘Yes, Master,’ I replied, choosing that title rather than Hitler’s and modeling my stance on the young man’s. How many of these zombies had Rothmann produced? I had hoped that his sister’s death would have left him without technical knowledge, but he must have retained some scientific personnel. He also seemed to have forgiven me for killing her-or was I about to find out otherwise?

I was led though a heavy door, and blinked in the sunlight. There was thin cloud cover, but I hadn’t seen natural light for some time and it hurt. When my sight got accustomed, I realized I was standing in a wide space between tall wooden buildings that looked like barns. A decrepit tractor stood against one of the walls, all of which were in need of several coats of paint. I breathed in. The air no longer had the rank edge of the Big Thicket. How far had I been taken from it? Without the bug in my arm, I could be a long way from help. Shit.

Then I saw what was in the middle of the space and my gut took a somersault. An upturned cross of roughly hewn timber stood ten feet in the air from a heap of rocks, its horizontal ends hung with black rags and a steel ring at the top of the vertical. My gut did another vault. A naked figure was hanging by the ankles from a rope tied to the ring, its arms bound to the horizontal beam. The skin was black and, as I looked closer, I saw that the figure was male. It was Quincy Jerome.

I felt Rothmann’s eyes on me.

‘You know this man, do you not?’

My heart was thundering, but I got a grip on myself and tried to think straight. It was important to keep up the charade until I could come up with a plan of action.

‘Yes, Master,’ I said obediently. ‘He is a paratroop sergeant assigned to protect me.’

Rothmann nodded. He had probably heard from Nora Jacobsen about the black man who was with me in Maine. ‘And what is his name?’

I supplied that in its correct form, feeling like a traitor, but I had to buy time and playing along was the only way I could think of to accomplish that.

‘What are your feelings about him?’ the Master asked, as we drew closer to the cross.

‘I don’t like soldiers,’ I said, trying to avoid Quincy’s eyes. His face was swollen and bloody.

Rothmann turned and looked at me expectantly.

I took a deep breath. ‘And he’s black, so that makes him an untermensch.’ I felt even more like a Judas-I had black friends back in the U.K.

The young man in blue denim stepped forward and clicked the heels of his boots. The Master nodded and his minion produced a metal baseball bat from behind his back. It was offered to me, the zombie drawing a semiautomatic pistol from his belt with the other hand. Rothmann didn’t seem to be afraid of me, which meant that my performance was working. I wasn’t quick enough to hit him before being shot, though.

‘You know what you have to do,’ the Master said, looking at Quincy disdainfully.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the muzzle of the pistol that was trained on me. I held the bat in a two-handed grip and did the calculation: I was too far from the gunman to hit him before he put me down. That left only one option. Keeping my eyes off Quincy’s, I stepped forward, measured the blow and drew the heavy bat back past my shoulder.

The Soul Collector was in trouble. She groaned and clenched the steering wheel as hard as she could. Why now? She’d only needed a few more hours. Couldn’t it have held off for a day? Wasn’t she entitled to the revenge she’d been waiting so long for? Why now?

The irony that she was in a perfect position didn’t escape her. Tailing Matt and his oversize black sidekick to the airport in Portland had been easy enough. She had turned herself into a seedy middle-aged man with the application of a gray wig and mustache, and some truly boring clothes. The flight to Newark hadn’t been full and she had stuck close enough to hear Matt mention Houston. That flight wasn’t full either, though she had to go business class. She thought she had lost Matt at the airport in Texas, but she picked him up again as she drove the Toyota Highlander she’d rented toward the exit. She’d seen which rental company he’d gone to after he’d picked up a bag from the luggage lockers, and she knew where its cars were stationed. She checked into the hotel opposite the one Matt had used and had been waiting for him in the morning, this time disguised as a dowdy woman in an oversize dress. She knew the black guy would be following Matt, but he wasn’t close-presumably they had a system.

The pain started as they approached the Big Thicket. Although it had initially been in her upper back, now she felt it in her midriff. She was sweating even more than the temperature merited and she felt nauseous-she actually threw up as they drove into Warren, the bitter liquid spilling down the inside of the Highlander’s door. The stink nearly made her vomit again, but her stomach was empty.

Sara had kept her distance when Matt headed down the road numbered 1943 and the plethora of tracks on each side of the road worried her. There was no shortage of turnouts, though, and Matt didn’t look like he knew where he was going. He pulled up at a tree with a strange mark on it, and then turned onto a rough track through the trees. It was after she’d stopped and followed him on foot that the pain really got to her, forcing her to her knees and then into the fetal position. She recovered in time to see her former lover’s unconscious form being loaded into a pickup truck by a figure in denim and a demon mask. The vehicle came slowly back up the bumpy track and she was able to attach a magnetic location finder to the rear axle.

That had exhausted her and she staggered back to the Highlander. The pickup was still in range and she followed it, keeping a mile between them and allowing other vehicles to pass her.

And now she was in a clearing in the Crockett National Forest, about forty miles northwest of Warren, waiting for the sun to go down. She had spent the previous day and night in another out-of-the-way spot, in too much agony to move. The vehicle she had bugged had been stationary for all that time, so she hoped Matt was still there-it was about a mile ahead, in the depths of the woods. She presumed it was Heinz Rothmann’s hideaway, although he didn’t have priority. Her former lover was the number one target. She would take him down whatever the cost to herself.

The Soul Collector took another couple of painkillers. There was birdsong all around, the light falling in shafts between the trunks of trees she couldn’t identify. Her back was racked again, and she recalled what the doctor had said. Apart from the cancer, she was in excellent physical condition, but she couldn’t expect that to continue. She would get weaker, and would eventually need twenty-four-hour care. With the right combination of medication, she might stave off the worst effects for a month, but after that her decline would be more rapid. The bastard had actually smiled when he advised her to get her affairs in order. No doubt her manner, her refusal to accept any of what he’d said, had made him uncomfortable, even riled him.

The Soul Collector didn’t care. She would be fighting to the end and she would take Matt Wells with her. That idea was all that kept her going.

Gordy Lister was standing at the edge of the space between the barns. A timber merchant had put the buildings up years back and there was a clearing of about a hundred yards outside. That made the place easy to fortify and, in recent weeks, the Master’s miniature SS had put listening devices in the open ground. Anyone trying to approach except by the single track that led to the main gate would be spotted and hunted down. The first of the Antichurch faithful had already arrived and had been assigned one of the barns. They were surprisingly normal-looking people, though you wouldn’t want to take them home to Mom. They had the faraway eyes and hair-trigger temper of all religious lunatics.

Not for the first time, Gordy wondered exactly what he had gotten himself into. Working for Rothmann, Jack Thomson, as he called himself at the newspaper, had been a gas: no two days the same, plenty of cash, the rush of wielding real power. Back then he hadn’t realized how cracked the boss was, but the attack in the cathedral had put him right. He should have hit the road weeks ago. Maybe he would, after this ridiculous rite was over. On the other hand, he also wanted to know who had killed his brother, and the Master was the most likely person to find that out. The Englishman Matt Wells knew more than he was letting on. Then again, the Englishman was about to beat the black guy’s head in and only a fully qualified zombie would do that.

Gordy Lister had turned his head from the men standing round the inverted cross, but at the last moment he couldn’t resist and turned it back as Wells raised the baseball bat and swung it with wicked force.