Red Devils

25

Steele had explored the tower while he’d been waiting for the others. His logic had been sound: from his relatively central vantage point he would have been able to see them coming from various angles, and having the benefit of the high ground meant he would have been able to defend himself had the need arisen.

‘If the scientist is still alive, I think I know where he is,’ he explained as he led the others deeper into the castle.

‘Are you sure this is safe?’ Wilkins asked as they climbed more steps.

‘As sure as I can be. I’ve not yet come across any of the dead this high. That’s not to say they won’t be up here, so keep your wits about you. This is just about the vilest place on Earth, from what I’ve seen of it, sir.’

At the top of the staircase, Steele took them out through a door and onto a short walkway which connected this tower to another identical one, either side of the main entrance. The wind up here was bracing, and carried with it sounds of fighting in the distance. ‘Captain Hunter and his men?’ asked Jones.

‘I assume so,’ Wilkins replied. ‘Damnation. It sounds like they’re having as torrid a time as we are.’

‘Then let’s keep moving, Lieutenant,’ Steele said. ‘Time is most definitely of the essence tonight.’

Jones hesitated. ‘Wait… Listen…’

‘What is it, Jones?’

‘More of the dead, I think. Down below us.’

He was right. The men peered down over the battlements. From here they could see the edge of another vast area of the camp. More dead soldiers and prisoners were gravitating towards it. ‘Where are they all heading?’ Barton asked.

‘Come with me and all will be revealed,’ Steele told them. ‘But brace yourselves. The news isn’t good.’

They entered the next tower, and Barton immediately primed his weapon to fire. He could hear the dead. And they were close.

‘Arm yourselves, men,’ Wilkins ordered.

‘Please… just wait,’ Steele said. ‘It’s perfectly safe.’

‘Nothing in this place is safe at all,’ Wilkins angrily corrected him. Steele beckoned for the others to follow. A spiral staircase led down into the dark depths.

‘Shine your torch down there, Jones,’ Steele said, and Jones did as instructed. ‘It’s all right. They’re not getting up this way.’

Jones nervously edged further and further down, then stopped when he saw it. A semi-solid mass of writhing flesh, like a scab blocking the stairs. An apparently endless number of bodies had become entangled and had formed an impenetrable blockage, no way up or down. Steele had made things certain by dropping furniture on top of them. Chairs. A desk. The staircase was permanently out of action, but there was clearly no way the dead would get through. Disfigured faces stared up at Jones from deep within the horrific mess. Dead eyes filled with desperation to get at him, and fury because they were trapped.

‘Where now?’ Wilkins asked.

‘This way,’ Steele answered, and the three men followed him into what was, unmistakably, a laboratory. It was like nothing any of them had seen before. A hellish place, the bloody remnants of abandoned experiments lay everywhere. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ Steele warned. ‘The entire place is almost certainly contagious.’

At one end of the room was a grey, bullet-marked wall which had been drenched with numerous splashes and fountains of blood. Nearby, parts of eviscerated cadavers still lay strapped to metal trollies and tables. Much of the medical equipment appeared to have been smashed to pieces and lay in ruin all around them.

‘So it seems our Doctor Månsson may have been a victim of his own creations,’ Wilkins said, surmising from the chaos.

‘That’s what I thought at first,’ Steele replied. ‘I think there’s more to it than that, though.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Take a closer look. Much of this equipment has been deliberately wrecked. From what we’ve seen of the dead, would they really be interested in doing anything like this? Electrical equipment has been smashed, the innards torn out. All these test tubes and phials… there’s not a single one that’s been left undamaged. No, gentleman, I believe this laboratory has been systematically destroyed, perhaps by the doctor himself.’

‘And what about Månsson?’

‘It’s my belief that he’s being held hostage, if he’s still alive that is.’

‘By whom?’

‘By the last Nazis left alive in this godforsaken place, that’s who. Allow me to show you.’

Sergeant Steele doubled-back and exited the laboratory, then followed another passageway which led in the opposite direction. They were now on the easternmost edge of the ancient building, overlooking a vast swathe of Polonezköy which had, until now, remained largely unseen. The four soldiers peered down through narrow slits in the stonework.

‘Good Lord,’ Wilkins gasped.

‘Bloody hell,’ Barton cursed. ‘You reckon our man’s in the middle of that lot?’

‘If he’s anywhere at all, yes.’

Below the east wall of the castle, stretching out all the way to the wall running around the entire perimeter of the concentration camp site, was a crowd of bodies the likes of which none of them had ever seen – nor had ever wanted to see – before. It reminded Wilkins of movie-reel footage he’d seen of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies: an apparently endless sea of heads, all crowding together in a show of slavish devotion. Unlike those Nazi events, however, the crowd here behaved entirely differently.

Less a crowd, more a swarm.

Nazis, prisoners, men, women and children…

Hundreds. Thousands.

Dead. Every last one of them.

When flocking to hear the Fuhrer speak, the faithful (or fearful, or both) remained largely stationary to listen and observe. Here, the vast numbers of people pushed ever closer to something just left of centre of the immense gathering. At first Wilkins couldn’t make out what it was he was looking at, but then the details began to come into focus.

There were a number of buildings in the midst of the chaos. Some had clearly already been overrun by the enemy: doors hanging open, crammed with corpses trying to get in whilst others forced their way out. The movement of the rotting masses around these wooden huts appeared strangely like eddies in white-water flows, turning in on themselves again and again, many of the creatures being dragged underfoot and being trampled by many, many more.

But there remained one building which was resolutely closed-up. It was also the one which appeared to be attracting the most attention from the decaying hordes. Steele saw that his colleagues had identified it as quickly as he had. ‘If our scientist chappie is still alive, I’ll wager that’s where he’ll be. Right in the middle of all that damned mess.’

‘Then we might as well give up and get out of this hellish place right now,’ Jones said.

‘We can’t do that and you know it, Jones,’ Wilkins snapped at him. ‘Good Lord, man, do I really have to remind you again what’s at stake here?’

‘No, sir, you don’t, you’ve already told me enough times and I know it anyway. But that don’t change anything. I don’t see how we’re going to get anyone out of that mess down there alive.’

‘It gets worse,’ Steele said.

‘How can this get any worse?’

‘If Doctor Månsson is down there, then he’s not alone. I believe he has plenty of company in that building, both Nazi and civilian.’

‘Why would the Nazis allow prisoners in there with them?’ Jones asked, perfectly sensibly.

‘Collateral,’ Wilkins answered quickly. ‘It makes sense. They’re desperate – desperate to survive and desperate to get out alive. There’s a perfectly good reason for them to keep hold of the doctor and any number of prisoners too. The doctor would be a bargaining chip, because I’m sure his significance to our side won’t have gone unnoticed.’

‘And the civilians?’

‘A cushion, if you will. A safety net between either us and them or, more likely, between Jerry and the dead.’

‘Way I see it, we’ll struggle to get anyone out of there,’ Barton said, sounding increasingly dejected.

‘We can do it,’ Wilkins said, eternally optimistic. ‘I have an idea.’

‘Excuse me, sir,’ Jones said, ‘but we’ve less than two hours and…’

‘And what, Lance Corporal?’

‘And there’s likely to be quite a number of Nazis down there along with several thousand or more of those horrible dead things. What hope do the four of us have against all of them?’

‘You’re absolutely right, soldier. That’s why we need to take a different tack and even out the odds. We need to get the dead working for us.’