The Living Dead 2

The Crocodiles by Steven Popkes

Steven Popkes is the author of two novels: Caliban Landing and Slow Lightning. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Twilight Zone Magazine, Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy, SCI FICTION, and in the annuals the Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction, and Year’s Best Fantasy. His story “The Color Winter” was a finalist for the Nebula Award. He is currently working on a novel about flying witches.

When it comes to horror, Nazis and zombies are like peanut butter and chocolate-very evil peanut butter and chocolate, that is. Dr. Mengele’s gruesome experiments on living subjects, German technological prowess-as demonstrated by the V2 rockets-and Hitler’s obsession with supermen and the occult make it all too easy to imagine fiendish Nazi experiments reanimating dead soldiers. A well-known example is the video game Wolfenstein, in which you play a lone American agent who must penetrate secret Nazi labs crawling will all manner of grotesque monstrosities. The recent horror movie Dead Snow-which features a memorable scene in which one of the heroes chainsaws off his own arm after it is bitten by a zombie-is about a group of tourists who inadvertently awaken a colony of frozen Nazi zombies left over from World War II. It must be said that these examples, and several others we could name, are pretty campy, with Nazis used as a convenient shorthand for faceless evil.

Our next tale is a completely different sort of story. This is a tale told from the point of view of a World War II-era German scientist, a man who loves his wife and child, which makes his inhuman detachment about his work all the more chilling. This is Nazi zombies as high art, a tale so full of plausible-sounding scientific and historical detail that you’ll start to wonder if maybe these sorts of experiments were real after all.

I could not make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. But I went over the data again to see if I could find a tiny tatter of bright thread in the otherwise disappointing results. There had to be a better use of a well-educated chemical engineer than cannon fodder. Willem, my wife’s uncle, called me.

“Max,” he said, a happy disembodied voice over the phone. “Very sorry about your work and all that. How was it going?”

It didn’t surprise me he already knew. “We didn’t get the results we’d hoped for,” I said. “But there are other areas in the war effort where fuel filtration research would be entirely applicable. Aircraft engines, for instance-”

“No doubt,” he said, chuckling. “However, by an astonishing coincidence I was planning to call you anyway. I have a good use for your skills.”

“Oh, really?” I said with a sinking feeling. I had no desire to work for the Gestapo. Uncomfortable work at the very least.

“Yes. There’s a Doctor Otto Weber doing some very interesting biological work in Buchenwald. He can use your help.”

“What sort of work?”

“I’m sure I’d be the wrong person to discuss it with you, not being a scientist or an engineer. I’ll work out the details of the transfer and send round the papers and tickets.”

“I really ought to find out how I can be of service-”

“There’s always the regular army. I’m sure a man of your caliber-”

“I’ll be looking for your messenger.”

“Fine. Oh, and Max?”

“Yes?”

“Weekly reports. On everything and everybody. All right?”

“Of course,” I said.

You don’t argue with the Gestapo. Even my Elsa’s uncle.

Otto Weber was a thin, elderly gentleman. Once he had been quite tall. He was now stooped with age. His eyes were washed out and watery, like blue glass underwater. But his hands were steady as he first lit my cigarette, then his own.

Weber called them tote Männer. Once he showed me their decomposing condition and single-minded hunger, I thought the term apt.

Weber was brought the first host in 1938 and had to keep the disease alive with new hosts from the Gestapo-which they were always willing to supply, though in small lots so he never had more than a few laboratory subjects at a time. He was never told where that first host came from but he surmised South America. Later, in 1940 when the laboratory was at Buchenwald, the Gestapo supplied him with a slow but steady trickle of Gypsies.

What he had discovered when I joined the project in 1941 was that infection was only successful by fluid transport from the infected host, infection was in two phases, and there were at least two components to the disease.

In one experiment, Weber took fluid from a toter Mann and filtered three samples, one through a 100 micron filter, one through a 50 micron filter, and one through a Chamberland filter. The 100 micron wash caused full infection. The 50 micron also caused a partial infection involving quick and sudden pain, followed by an inevitably fatal stroke. He called this partial infection type I-A. The Chamberland wash caused a particularly quick and virulent form of rabies-Weber referred to that as type I-B. Hence, Weber’s hypothesis of two components for a full infection, one large and the other the rabies virus. He had isolated a worm as the possible large component in that, when collected and washed of any contaminants, it seemed to cause an I-A infection similar to the infection caused by the 50 micron wash. When the Chamberland wash was recombined with the worm, full infection ensued.

Weber had even characterized the partial infections and the stages of the full infection. I found it interesting that the partial infections were both dismal, painful affairs, while the full infection showed up first as euphoria, followed by sleepiness and coma. The subject awoke in a few days as a toter Mann.

Even so, I was surprised that there hadn’t been more discovered in four years. After all, Weber had the tote Männer themselves and their inherent ability to infect others. The Gestapo was willing to provide a constant, if limited, supply of hosts. But Weber’s horror of contagion was so strong that every step had to be examined minutely until he had determined to his satisfaction that he could properly protect himself and his staff. Dissection was a long and tedious process; vivisection was almost impossible. I suppose I could not blame him. Even a partial infection would be fatal and full infection always resulted in another toter Mann. No one wanted to risk that.

Thus, my first task was the design and construction of a dissection and histology laboratory where Weber could disassemble the subjects in safety. It was not a difficult task. I came to Buchenwald in July. By the end of the month I had the design and began construction. Weber dissected his first wriggling subject by the first of September.

My fuel work had been much more interesting. It was exacting, exciting work with great applications. Here, I was barely more than a foreman. The war in Russia seemed to be going well and I wondered if I should have protested more to Willem.

But Elsa and our son Helmut loved Weimar. The city was pretty in a storybook way. It didn’t hurt that the bombers left Weimar largely undisturbed, instead striking in Germany proper. It lent the city a relative calm. Several young couples had taken over the empty housing. This was early in the war and food and petrol, though rationed, were still plentiful.

I didn’t work weekends and the three of us spent many summer days in the Park on the Ilm. It occurred to me, during those pleasant hours watching Helmut playing in front of Goethe’s House, that this was, perhaps, a better use of my time than the factory or the lab.

Within a week of opening the new facilities, Weber made some astonishing discoveries. Histological examination of the brain tissue of the tote Männer showed how the worms nested deep in the higher functioning brain-clearly explaining why there were only tote Männer and not tote rats and tote cats. He speculated that there could be tote gorillas and tote chimpanzees and went so far as to request animals from the Berlin Zoo. The Zoo was not cooperative. Weber reconsidered his New World origin of the disease and attributed it to Africa or Indonesia where the great apes lived. It stood to reason that a complex disease found suddenly in humans would require a similar host in which to evolve prior to human infection.

However, the worms were only one half of the disease. The virus followed the nervous system through the body, enabling worm entry into the brain but also enabling the growth of strong cords throughout the body. This was further proof of the two-component infection model Weber had developed. In the case of partial infections of the worm or the virus, the process only went so far. Forced by the absence of the virus to remain within the body’s major cavities, the worm caused fevers and paralysis, blocking blood vessels mechanically, causing a heart attack or stroke. The virus enabled the worm to penetrate directly into the brain, leaving the heart and circulatory system intact-at least for a while. Without the worm, the virus merely crippled the nervous system, causing fevers, seizures, and great pain. The cords only appeared when both were present. Weber was convinced by the pathology of the disease that the tote Männer virus was a variant of rabies, but the biological history of the virus, the worm, and the virus-worm combination was mysteriously speculative.

I dutifully reported this to Willem, along with descriptions of Weber, his assistant, Brung, and his mistress, Josephine, whom we had met at dinner in Weimar earlier in the summer. Unsure whether Willem’s desire for detail extended to the subjects, I included the names of the last couple of Gypsy hosts left from the Buchenwald experiments and the newer Jews we had appropriated from the main population of the camp. Weber was curiously reluctant to use the handicapped and mentally deficient and he hated using Poles. Perhaps this stemmed from some event in his past of which I was unaware.

Willem paid his niece a Christmas visit, visiting our laboratory only coincidentally. He was impressed with our progress. “With the tote Männer we will crush Russia,” he said over drinks that evening.

Weber paled. “There will be problems using the tote Männer in winter,” he said obliquely.

“Eh?” Willem looked at me. “Speak plainly.”

“The tote Männer cannot thermoregulate. This doesn’t show up in laboratory conditions but below ten degrees Celsius the worms do not function properly. By freezing they die and the host dies with them.”

Willem considered that. “We can clothe them.”

Weber grew excited. “They do not generate enough heat. Humans maintain temperature. Cats maintain temperature. Crocodiles do not. They do not eat-the hunger for brains is no more than the desire of the disease to perpetuate the infection-the way horsehair worms cause crickets to drown themselves. They do not consume what they put in their mouths. Metabolism keeps the body temperature above ambient somewhat like large lizards. Clothing lizards would have no more effect than clothing tote Männer.”

“I see,” Willem said. He patted down his vest until he located his cigarettes and lighter. “I’m going out on the porch for a smoke. Max, will you join me?”

Weber looked as if he’d swallowed a lemon. He rose as if to join us but Willem waved him back. “Don’t bother. This gives Max and me a chance to exchange a little gossip.”

Outside, we lit our cigarettes and watched the snow fall.

“It’s true what Weber said? We can’t use them as soldiers?”

I thought for a moment before answering. “Comparing them to crocodiles is apt. You can’t make a soldier out of an animal. And it’s too cold for them in the east.”

“Then what good are they? Is this all for nothing?”

“I did not say they could not be a weapon.”

“Tell me.”

“The crocodile simile is better than you know. They are very fast and very strong. There is so little to their metabolism that they are hard to kill. And they are terrifying-you’ve seen them. You know. We must be able to make some use of them.” I shook my head. “I don’t know enough yet. I need to perform some experiments. Weber has discovered the basic science. Now it is time to apply some German engineering.”

Willem nodded. “I’ll do what I can.” He grimaced. “Two weeks ago the Japanese attacked the Americans. The Americans declared war on Japan. We declared war on each other. They allied themselves with the British, which brings them into the war in Europe.”

“The Americans are too far away. They don’t have the strength of mind to make much difference.”

“So we thought in the last war. The point is I may not have much time to give.”

The goal was to deploy tote Männer to a suitable front and have them wreak havoc on the enemy while leaving our own troops alone. The tote Männer would terrify and demoralize the enemy. Our troops would march in behind them, clearing the area of enemy soldiers and tote Männer alike. Simple.

Only, we did not have a means by which we could create a large number of tote Männer simultaneously or a means by which we could be sure they would discriminate between our soldiers and the enemy.

Weber attacked the discrimination problem while I considered issues of scale.

Buchenwald was too small and low volume to be useful to us. Auschwitz was more appropriate to our needs. However, Auschwitz was already overwhelmed with the volume of its operation.

In October, the Birkenau expansion of Auschwitz had begun. It was scheduled to be complete in the spring. Willem had shown me copies of the plans. It was clear that only minor modifications to the Birkenau plans would accommodate our needs much more easily than building an addition to Buchenwald or moving to Auschwitz proper.

In January of 1942 I kissed Elsa and Helmut goodbye and boarded the train to Krakow. From there, I took a car west. It was beautiful country, full of gently rising mountains over flat valleys. Curiously unspoiled either by industry or by the war.

Auschwitz was a complex, not a single camp like Buchenwald. There were several smaller camps near the headquarters. Birkenau was further west. Here, construction was going on apace in spite of the winter weather.

The foundations for gas chambers and crematoria had already been laid. But that didn’t matter as far as I was concerned. The addition of some larger chambers and holding areas was an insignificant change to a well-managed engineering project. I went over the modifications in detail with the chief engineer, a man named Tilly. Willem had sent me with a certificate of authority. That gave me the full support of Tilly and the chief of the camps, Rudolf Hoess, even though they did not know the reason for the modifications. I finished working out the details in two weeks.

I spent a few days in Krakow. I planned to move Elsa and Helmut into an apartment in Krakow and then travel to work by automobile. It was not far and the roads were good. If that proved impractical in a hard winter-something difficult for me to predict as the weather was now mild-I could just stay in the camp for a few days or come home on weekends.

When I returned, I found I had been gone just long enough for both Elsa and Helmut to miss me terribly. It made for a sweet homecoming.

Weber was reluctant to plan the move but saw my logic. He was preoccupied with the discrimination problem. Since the tote Männer were attracted to normal humans as hosts, he had reasoned that it was easier to attract them to a particular prey rather than repel them from a particular prey. He had performed several experiments with different hosts to see if there was any preference for differing types, such as racial subtype, diet, or other variables he could control.

I looked over the data and noticed that there was a marked difference in attack percentages not according to his typing but to the time the subjects arrived at the camp. Those subjects that were at the camp the longest were the most attractive to the tote Männer. I showed my figures to Weber. He instantly grasped the significance in ways I could not. The older inmates at Buchenwald were considerably thinner than the newer inmates since the rations were short. Fat utilization caused excretory products to be exuded by the skin and from the lungs. Weber reasoned these were what attracted the tote Männer.

Immediately, he called Willem for a mass spectrometer and a technician to run it.

We were all very tired but elated at this new direction. We decided to take a few days off. Elsa, Helmut, and I went for a trip into the mountains.

Birkenau opened in March of 1942. Weber and I stopped work on the subjects, except to keep an incubating strain alive, and took the month to pack up the laboratory for the move. In May, we moved the equipment, materials, and tote Männer to Birkenau. Once the planning for the move was complete, Weber supervised the staff and aides Willem had supplied. Elsa and Helmut traveled down to Krakow by train and took up residence in the apartment I had leased for them. As for myself, I left Buchenwald and returned to Berlin for meetings with representatives of Daimler-Benz and I. G. Farben. The delivery mechanism for the tote Männer still had to be devised.

The mood in Berlin that spring was jubilant. The army was driving towards Rostov and trying for Stalingrad. Sevastopol was about to fall to Germany. The use of the tote Männer could only be necessary as a last resort. A doomsday scenario. The Reich would never need it.

Personally, I felt the same. Still, I had no wish to help in cancelling the project unless I could find better work. So I met with the Daimler-Benz mechanical engineers and utilized the I. G. Farben labs. I had brought with me a pair of tote Männer for testing purposes.

Not being a mechanical engineer, the problem of deployment was more difficult than I had initially imagined. Tote Männer were a curious mixture of toughness and fragility. You could shoot a toter Mann until he was merely chopped meat and he might continue to advance. Blowing apart his brain would kill the worms and stop him. But the tote Männer were so resilient and resistant to anoxia that they could still advance with their hearts shattered and their sluggish black blood pooled beneath their feet.

However, their flesh was soft enough and loosely enough attached to their bones that heavy acceleration, such as dropping them with parachutes, would cause them to come apart. Clearly, they had to be preserved long enough to reach their target.

The Daimler-Benz engineers were the best. On a chalk board, they drew up several ways of conveying them to enemy lines. The simplest idea was a cushioned cage dropped with a parachute. An impact charge would blow the doors off the cage and the tote Männer would be free. The engineers didn’t like the idea. They said it lacked elegance and style.

I pointed out the tote Männer could tolerate significant time without ambient oxygen, operating as they did largely on a lactic acid metabolism. They tossed the cage idea with abandon and attacked the problem again, coming up with a sphere containing carefully restrained tote Männer. A compressed-air charge would open the doors and break loose the restraints. This had the advantage of being quiet.

I only donated a little knowledge here and there as needed, letting their minds fly unfettered. It is a grand thing to watch engineers create works of imagination with only the germ of a requirement, a bit of chalk, and some board to write on. When they found I had brought a couple of tote Männer for experiments, they were overjoyed. I tried to explain the danger but they did not listen until one of their own number, Hans Braun, was bitten. He and his friends laughed but stilled when I came over. Wearing surgical gloves and a mask I carefully examined the wound but I already knew what I would find.

“You are an idiot,” I said as I sat back.

“It is a small bite-”

“It is a fatal wound.” I gave him a pack of cigarettes. “You have been killed by that thing out there.”

“But-”

“Shut up.” I couldn’t look at him: tall, healthy, brown hair and a face in the habit of smiling. “You have been infected. By tomorrow, you will feel wonderful. You will want to kiss and fondle your friends out of love for them. Then, after a few days, you will-still enormously happy-feel an overpowering urge to sleep. Sleep will turn to coma. Then, after three days, you will be one of those things out there.”

His hands trembled. “I didn’t realize-”

“No.”

Hans steadied himself. “There is no hope?”

“None.”

He nodded and for a moment he stood straighter. Stronger. I was proud of him.

“Do you have a gun?”

“I do. Is there a furnace where we can dispose of the body?”

He nodded, shakily. “Will you accompany me?”

“I would be honored.” And I was.

After the funeral, realizing the power and speed of the tote Männer and the infection they harbored, the Daimler-Benz engineers were more careful.

In a couple of weeks, my part was done and I took the train to Krakow to have a long weekend reunion with my Elsa and Helmut. The following Monday, I drove to Birkenau to address the problem of tote Männer production.

Elsa had mixed feelings about the rental. While she liked the apartment itself and the proximity of Park Jordana, she found the leftover debris and detritus disturbing. These were obviously Jewish artifacts and Elsa’s excitement might have come from a mixture of womanly wariness of another female’s territory combined with an aversion to having anything Jewish in the house. I assured her that the original owners would not be returning and she relaxed somewhat.

Helmut had no reservations about his new environment. Finding small objects of indeterminate origin covered with unfamiliar characters fastened in unexpected places gave mystery to the place. No doubt he observed I was more inclined to answer questions about this or that artifact than I was about the American bombers or air raid drills or what Father did at work. I protected my family as best I could from such things.

For the next several months we were collecting the breath and sweat of subjects into vials, injecting the vial contents into the mass spectrometer, and determining what was there. Then we concentrated the effluvia and tried it on the tote Männer themselves. Immediately, we found that the tote Männer were not attracted to merely any object smeared with the test substances, only when those attractants were applied to a possible host. Weber thought this quite exciting. It suggested that the tote Männer had a means of detecting a host other than smell.

In October of 1942, we hit on a combination of aldehydes and ketones the tote Männer found especially attractive. I synthesized it in the growing chemistry laboratory we had been using and applied it to a collection of test subjects. Control subjects who had no application of the test attractant were also present in the experiment and were ignored until the test subjects had been thoroughly mauled. At that point, the controls were attacked. We made careful note of this as it would strongly influence how troops would recover an infected area after the enemy succumbed.

We had proved our attractant in the laboratory by the end of October of 1942. But the war appeared to us to be going so well, our little military experiment would never be needed. We would win the Battle of Stalingrad in a month and concentrate on the western front.

That changed in November.

The Battle of Stalingrad evolved into what I had feared: a siege over a Russian winter. The Red Army began their counter-offensive along with the winter. Like Napoleon, the German army was stuck.

The Germans lost ground in other places. Willem suggested if I could hurry up the program, I should.

We were in part saved by problems encountered by the Daimler-Benz engineering team. Developing a deployment methodology had been proved harder than the engineers had foreseen. They had broken the problem into three parts. The first, and most easily solved, was how to restrain and cushion the tote Männer until they could be released. The remaining two issues revolved around deploying on an advance and deploying on a retreat. In both cases, they resolved into two kinds of scenarios: how to deploy the first time and how to deploy after the first time. If secrecy was kept (and Willem assured us the enemy did not know what we were working on), then the first deployment would be relatively easy. Deploying on a retreat could be as simple as leaving sealed containers transported by trucks to the target zone to be opened pyrotechnically by remote control. Similar containers, with additional cushioning, could be released by parachute.

But once the secret was out and the Allies were looking for tote Männer delivery devices, we would need a means to overcome their resistance. This had stalled the Daimler-Benz engineers. I saw presentations of stealth night drops, blitzkrieg raids with tanks carrying large transport carts-one enterprising young man demonstrated a quarter-scale model trebuchet that could catapult a scale model container holding six tote Männer as much as three kilometers behind enemy lines. Not to be outdone, his work partner showed how bracing a toter Mann could enable it to be fired from a cannon like a circus performer.

These issues so dwarfed our own minor problems that we were given, for the moment, no close scrutiny and I had the opportunity to address shortcomings in our own production.

In February 1943, Russia won the Battle of Stalingrad. Willem warned us that we would have to expect to send tote Männer against Russian troops before long. I argued against it. It would be foolish to waste surprise in an attack that could not work. At least, it would not work until summer.

I went home and spent a week with Elsa and Helmut. Each morning I sat down and drew up production schedules, scrapped them, smoked cigarettes, and tried again. In the afternoon, I played with my son. It was cold in Krakow and with the war not going very well, heating fuel was hard to come by. I was able to requisition what we needed due to my position but even I couldn’t get coal for the theater or the restaurants. Often, we spent intimate evenings together with just ourselves for company. I didn’t mind. Elsa and Helmut were company enough.

All that spring Willem told us of defeat after defeat-I don’t think we were supposed to know what he told us. I think we served as people in whom he could confide as his world crumbled. Germany retreated in Africa. The Warsaw Uprising. The Russian advance.

I buried myself in my work. I resolved that if there were to be a failure in the program, it would not be where I had control. Production was, in my opinion, our weak point. Weber’s approach to creating tote Männer was haphazard and labor intensive. I wanted something more robust and reliable. Something more industrial.

I came to the conclusion that our production schedule had to revolve around the progression of the disease. For three days there was a strong euphoria. Often, the new hosts tried to kiss anyone who came near them, presaging the biting activity of the fully infected toter Mann. Sometime on the third day, the host fell into a sleep that progressed rapidly into coma. Breathing decreased to almost nothing. The heartbeat reduced to a slow fraction of the uninfected. Body temperature dropped to nearly ambient though the infected were able to keep some warmth above room temperature.

The coma period lasted as long as five days, though we saw it end as soon as three. Arousal was sudden, so often precipitated by a nearby possible victim that I came to the conclusion that after three days, the toter Mann was ready to strike and merely waiting for the opportunity.

After that, a toter Mann was mobile for as much as ten weeks, though during the last weeks of infection the toter Mann showed significant deterioration.

Therefore, we required an incubation period of six days, minimum. Effectiveness could not be counted upon after eight weeks. This gave us a target window. If we wanted, for example, to deploy on June first we had to have infected our tote Männer no later than May twenty-fifth. This was the time domain of our military supply chain.

The first order of business was to synchronize the incubation period. I performed a series of experiments that showed that, as I suspected, once the coma period had been entered the toter Mann was ready to be used. However, there was unacceptable variation in the time between exposure and coma. We couldn’t reliably produce tote Männer in six days.

The new Chief Medical Officer, Mengele, delivered the necessary insight. Zyklon B was the answer. Though the standard Zyklon B dose would kill the subject quickly, a reduced dose weakened the subject sufficiently to allow infection almost instantly. Commander Hoess was able to supply me with enough experimental data that I could proceed with my own tests. We introduced the gas, waited for ten minutes, then sprayed the subjects with an infecting agent. The remaining three days were sufficient for subjects to recover from the gas just in time to provide healthy hosts for the organisms. This method had the added bonus that the same production chambers could serve two purposes.

By November, when the march up Italy by the Allies had begun and Germany seemed to be losing on all fronts, we could incubate as many as a thousand at a time, six days after exposure. The trains supplying the rest of the camp came in full and left empty so by using the empty trains for transport, we could send tote Männer anywhere in Germany or Poland. Delivery to the deployment launch point would have to be by truck. We were ready. Now, it was up to the Daimler-Benz engineers to deliver our tote Männer the last kilometer to the enemy.

Christmas 1943 was uneventful. Weber and I worked on various refinements to an already prepared system without damaging it too badly. My teachers back in Berlin had taught me the idea of schlimmbesserung: an improvement that makes things worse. At that point, the natural tendency of idle minds and hands to improve a working system into uselessness was our only real enemy.

Given that, we resolutely turned our attention away from the weapons system we had devised to a different problem we had discussed a year before: Why deliver tote Männer at all? The worm and virus were perfectly able to create tote Männer for us. Why did we have to supply the raw material?

Delivering a disease substance was perilously close to delivering a poison gas-something forbidden us from the previous war. However, we had already made some excursions into the territory with the production and delivery of tote Männer attractant-a colloid I had developed that would evaporate into the proper aldehyde and ketone mix the tote Männer found so irresistible. We had also attempted to deliver an infecting gas along with the Zyklon B but the attempt had failed. The worm succumbed to the Zyklon B before the subjects.

Creating an inhalant that carried both the worm and virus proved to be an interesting problem. The virus was stable when dry and the worm could be induced to encyst itself. However, it took time for the worm to de-cyst and by the time it did, the subject was fully infected with an undirected virus. Rabid humans made a poor host.

We went back to the colloid I devised for the attractant. Colloids are neither liquid nor solid but partake of the traits of both. Gelatin is a colloid. By adding nutrients to the colloid so that the worm could stay alive and not encyst, the virus could be delivered along with the worm when both were at their most infective stage. It was interesting work for a couple of months. Weber was quite elated with it. He called it the Todesluft.

In May of 1944, Willem paid us another visit. This time, he took both Weber and myself aside and spoke to us privately.

“It is clear the Allies are preparing a counter-invasion. The likely location is somewhere across from England on the coast of France.” He held the cigarette to his lips thoughtfully.

“We’re ready,” I said boldly. “We’ve been ready for months. What do the Daimler-Benz engineers say?”

Willem breathed out smoke. “They have made several methods available to us. Since this is to be the first deployment, we have chosen the retreat scenario. We will place the tote Männer in a bunker in the path of the Allies and detonate it when they come.”

“Are we expecting to be overrun?”

Willem shook his head. “Of course not. The tote Männer are a backup plan only. We will deploy them behind our own lines and only release them if we are forced past them. If the front line holds, we will not release them at all.”

I nodded. “How many?”

“We estimate six thousand.”

I thought quickly. “It takes six days for each group. Six thousand will take us thirty-six days.”

Willem smiled at me. “Did you know of the expansions of Birkenau commissioned early last year?”

“Of course,” said Weber. “They were a dreadful nuisance.”

“They are about to pay for themselves,” retorted Willem. “I developed Max’s original plans for Birkenau beyond his conception. The new facilities can serve as incubator.”

“How many?”

“At least forty thousand at once. Six thousand should not be a problem.” He pulled from his briefcase a set of plans.

I looked them over. I was impressed with the innovations I saw. “This is better than I had hoped.”

“I’m glad you are pleased. When can the first squad be ready?”

I looked over the plans again and did some figuring on a piece of paper. “May 12, if Daimler-Benz can provide the bunkers and the transportation.”

“I’ve been assured this will not be a problem.”

“Then we will be ready to deploy.”

Willem pulled a map from his briefcase. “Our sources say we will be struck here.” He pointed to the map. “Pas-de-Calais. That is where our defenses are located and just three kilometers behind them, our tote Männer. The Allies will not know what hit them.”

This was by far the largest group of tote Männer we had ever attempted to create. Weber took a fatherly approach to them. When the hosts entered the euphoric stage and called to him with affection, he responded, calling them his “children” and other endearments. I found this unnerving. When the tote Männer were finally ready and installed into their transportation containers I was glad to see them go. Weber watched them leave with a tear in his eye. I went home to my wife and son.

But, of course, the Allies did not strike at Pas-de-Calais but at Normandy, over three hundred kilometers to the southwest. The tote Männer were in their bunkers. The Daimler-Benz engineers had packed them like munitions. There was no way to extract them without releasing them.

It was terrible timing. All of the available tote Männer were in Calais and the next squad would not be ready for deployment until June 9: three days!

Willem conferred with his staff and said that if we could drop enough bunkers in the Cerisy Forest and fill them with tote Männer, we would let the Allies overrun the forest and open the bunker.

At this point the new squad was just entering the coma stage. We’d found the tote Männer were vulnerable to jostling during this period and had always transported them towards the end of the coma. But desperate times require desperate measures. Willem and I led the crew that took the newly comatose tote Männer, eight thousand strong, and trucked them to the forest. Meanwhile, three large prefabricated bunkers were erected on the sites. I barely had time to phone Elsa to say I would not be home that night. Weber, affectionate to the tote Männer as before, elected to stay and incubate the next squad. I was just as glad not to have him along.

The bunkers were not particularly explosive-proof but would stop bullets. They looked more like officers’ quarters than anything else. We locked them and moved away to nearby Trevieres. This was June 8th. By the afternoon of June 9th, the tote Männer would be alert. When fired, the bunker would first explode a smoke bomb containing the colloid and attractant we had devised to mask the area. A few minutes later, small explosives would release the tote Männer and break the outside walls. The tote Männer would have to do the rest. We hoped the smell of nearby prey would waken them to fury as we had observed in the lab.

The time passed slowly, punctuated with small arms fire and a few large weapons. The wind moved back and forth, sometimes bringing us the firecracker smell of the battlefield and then replacing it with the pine smell of the forests.

The afternoon came. An odd aircraft I’d never seen before, called a Storch, was made available to us. The pilot, Willem, and I boarded the airplane along with the radio equipment. The heavily laden craft took off in an impressively short distance and in a few moments we were high enough to see the bunkers and, worse, the advancing Allies. Willem pressed the button.

Smoke poured out of the three buildings. I could not hear the reports as the internal explosives ignited but there was motion-furious motion-through the smoke. Seconds later the advancing Allies were running down the hill away from the smoke. Directly behind them were the tote Männer.

The tote Männer were much faster than the humans they pursued and more clever than ever I would have guessed. One toter Mann leapt from human to human, biting and clawing, not even pausing to enjoy the “meal.” Eight thousand tote Männer poured over the Allies. Guns didn’t stop them. They were in and among the soldiers so quickly none of the supporting artillery or machine guns could fire. The smoke switched over them and we could no longer observe.

“Fly over them,” Willem ordered, “so we can look down.”

“Sir, we will be shot.”

“Fly over them, I say,” Willem shouted and brought out his pistol. “Or I will shoot you myself.”

We flew over the churning mass of tote Männer and humans. They took no notice of us. All of their attention was focused on the horrifying apparitions among them.

“Good,” said Willem grimly. “Return.”

It was a safe bet that each of the tote Männer had likely managed to bite at least three soldiers. Assuming an overlap of twenty percent, that meant better than thirteen thousand Allied tote Männer would be awakening in a week. This was a conservative estimate, assuming the infected soldiers would not infect others during the euphoric period.

We landed, and General Marcks himself joined us. Willem told him of the adventure and the anti-tote Männer equipment-mostly flame throwers and protective jackets-waiting in trucks not ten kilometers distant. The Allied invasion would not succeed.

And it did not.

The Allies, so demoralized by the Reich’s new weapon, were unable to advance. German bombers were able to sink support craft in the channel. The war stalled in western France all that summer.

When I returned to Krakow in July to see my wife I still smelled of burning diesel and gunpowder. She made me bathe before I could kiss her.

The Daimler-Benz flying barges were deployed. These, I had not known about. They were gliders filled with forty or fifty tote Männer, towed overnight by bombers and released near the front to land where they would. The crashes released most of the tote Männer but mechanical relays released the remainder. Willem informed us that there were now highly localized tote Männer infections in Britain, where wounded men had been returned before they had turned completely and before the Allies had realized what they were dealing with.

But the Russians continued to advance. They were no less ruthless than the tote Männer and had devised a simple but effective defense. Any group of tote Männer they found they slaughtered without regard to coincident casualties. We estimated they were killing as much as 10 percent of their own men with this technique. But it was effective. It was only a matter of time before they reached Germany.

The Allied advance had not been routed as we’d hoped but only stalled as they tried to cope with their own problems. Had Germany remained the fighting force it had been at the beginning of the war, this would have been enough. However, now the Allies had a foothold in France and would not give it up. Antiaircraft batteries were brought over the channel and the bombers could no longer eliminate the shipping. Soon, the Allies would figure out a method of containing the infection just as the Russians had done. A stalemate in this war would inevitably lead to an Allied victory.

Willem created the todeskommandos. These were the last paratroopers still left in the Luftwaffe. They were infected without their knowing and dropped far behind enemy lines. Their mission was to spy on the enemy and return in two weeks’ time. Of course, they transformed in less than half that time and infected the Russians.

I refused to participate in this activity. I would not be a party to infecting unwitting German soldiers. Willem did not press me at that point though I knew a day of reckoning was coming. Knowing this, I persuaded Willem to loan me one of the Daimler-Benz engineers-preferably Joseph Bremer, a friend of Hans Braun and the engineer who had later proposed the trebuchet. I liked the way his mind worked. Willem sent him to me with the warning that something needed to be done about the Russians.

Bremer, being a mechanical rather than a chemical engineer, immediately saw solutions to the issues we had not solved. We had to maintain the environment of the worm and virus for the duration of delivery and then spray it out into the surrounding area without shredding either. Weber and I had already determined that inhaling the inoculum would not infect the host unless some portion was swallowed. The worm needed to actually enter the digestive tract to enter the blood stream. The only result from a purely pulmonary inoculation would be a sterile partial infection.

It was Bremer who devised an irritant to be added to the mixture. The irritant would not be poisonous in any way but would cause a mucous flow from the nose. The subjects would be forced to swallow. It worked in Birkenau experiments with great success.

By this time, Hitler had been sending V1’s against Britain for a few weeks. My purpose was to be able to replace the explosive in the V1 with a Todesluft canister and infect the Allies in their home territories.

Once we had the Todesluft device perfected, we approached Willem with it. Willem at once saw the possibilities but denied us the chance to try it out in a V1. Instead, he told us of a new rocket, vastly more powerful and accurate. It was to be called the V2.

The bombers over Berlin never stopped during that summer. Up until we released the tote Männer, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and the other camps had been spared for some reason. By July, we had a version of the Todesluft device ready for the V2 and after the first few reached their targets, the Allies, realizing where our production facilities must be located, started bombing the camps. I had to drag Weber from our burning laboratories. He wanted to save his “children.” I triggered the containment-failure devices and incinerated the last remaining tote Männer squads but saved inoculum samples and the Todesluft devices to operate elsewhere. It was curious: the incubation pens and the holding areas were completely destroyed but the gas chambers survived the bombing.

I had thought to travel immediately to Krakow to be with Elsa. But before I could, Elsa showed up at the camp. Weber, Elsa, Helmut, and I were able to find safety in the basement of the headquarters building. I managed to locate an intact phone and called Willem to tell him where we were.

The bombing ceased in a day or so. The inmates were taken care of and we had food and water. Power was restored the following day.

Weber liked to be near us. Something profound had come undone in him. He mourned the death of his squad over and over. On the third day he accosted me out in the street as I cleaned up the front of the building.

“Could it have been the Jews?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The failure of our tote Männer.”

I sighed. “The tote Männer did not fail.”

“How can you say that? Germany is still losing the war!”

I considered responding to this. How could any single weapon ever win a war on its own? It was our failure, not any failure of the tote Männer. But that would only have encouraged him. “We haven’t lost yet.”

He ignored that. “We made tote Männer out of the Jews. Perhaps there was a judengeist that impaired them.”

“What would you have done instead? Made them out of Germans as Willem did?”

“I should not have been so reluctant to use Poles,” Weber said and sat on the bench, sunk in apathy.

I continued shoveling broken concrete and shards of wood out of the street.

Willem showed up that night. He was half-drunk and I was surprised he’d managed to drive all the way from Berlin. Morose and untalkative, he refused to speak until after dinner when Elsa had taken Helmut and herself to bed.

“The Americans are smarter than we are.”

“Beg pardon?” I said, ready to defend German intelligence.

“It had to be the Americans. The British would not have considered it.”

“Considered what?”

Willem stared at me. “Of course. How could you know? They have been raining tote Männer on Berlin. All over Germany.”

“That’s impossible. Did they drop them out of the bombers? Did they think we would be intimidated by smashed body parts?”

Willem shook his head. “Nothing so complex. All they did was harness them to a big parachute and then tie them together with a bow knot so they would not escape during transport. Then they shoved them out the back of a bomber on a strip line. It undid the bow knot and released the parachute. Some of them were killed, of course. But so what? Between ours and the ones generated from their own ranks, they have enough.”

“How were they released from the parachutes?”

“We found a wind-up spring clip. When the spring wound down, the clip opened and they were released. Diabolical simplicity.”

I drank some wine. “There are tote Männer in Berlin.” I tried to frame it as a logical proposition. I could imagine them lurching through the city.

“There are tote Männer all over Germany. There are tote Männer in London from the V2 Todesluft attack. Von Braun even managed to extend the range of the V2 with a V1 attachment. There are tote Männer in Moscow. Tell me, Weber. How many tote Männer must there be to become self-sustaining?”

Weber peered at him owlishly. “They cannot be self-sustaining. Eventually all of the raw material would be used up.”

“You are so comforting,” Willem said dryly.

I stared at the wine bottle. “When will they reach here?”

“They were behind me when I crossed the border. One day? Two days? They move slowly but steadily and they will be brought here by our scent.”

We had all underestimated them. They were in the camp by morning.

They had broken through the barbed wire holding the inmates easily. The inmates were bitten and mauled by the hundreds. The guards died when they insisted on firing on the tote Männer and the tote Männer, of course, did not fall.

The scent of the inmates was so strong that it overpowered our own smells. The tote Männer did not know we were there. We took care to remain hidden in the headquarters building. With so many possible hosts around, the tote Männer ignored the buildings. Each time a few seemed to take interest, there was another inmate to attack.

Elsa refused to let Helmut near the windows. During a lull in the fighting she sat next to me as I watched through the window.

“What are those things?” Elsa said quietly. Her face was milk white but her voice was calm. “Max? Uncle? What are those things?”

“We call them tote Männer,” I said.

“Is that what you were building in the camps? Is that your weapon?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Did they escape from another camp?”

“No.” Willem laughed dryly. “The Allies were kind enough to return these to us.”

“Helmut must not see them.”

“Yes,” I said. “More importantly, they must not see us.”

She nodded.

Eventually, the inmates were all infected. We had discovered in experiments that infected hosts were ignored by tote Männer. But there were still so many of them our own scent remained undiscovered. The tote Männer wandered off in small groups, heading east toward Krakow.

The remaining freed inmates, now euphorically infected hosts, were not so ignorant as the tote Männer. They tried to enter the headquarters building. Willem and I defended the place as best we could. Hoess and Mengele tried to gain entrance by sweet reasonableness and grumbled when we shot at them. They wandered off arm in arm.

By the end of the third day after the attack, we saw hosts finding small places to sleep. That evening the camp was entirely still.

“We have to leave,” Willem insisted. This was Monday morning. By Wednesday night we would be fighting for our lives.

“I’m ready,” Elsa said. “Those things will not hurt Helmut. I will kill him first.”

I nodded. It pleased me that Elsa understood the situation. “Where shall we go? Our tote Männer are to the west and south. Their tote Männer are to the north and east. We have no petrol-the depot was blown up in the bombing.”

“What shall we do, then?” demanded Willem.

“They are not very intelligent-as I said a long time ago, think of them as crocodiles. They can use their eyes but largely they depend upon scent. Therefore, we can block ourselves up in one of the gas chambers. They are air tight.”

“We will smother,” said Elsa.

“No.” I shook my head. “We have three days. I can devise air circulation. It will be slow and diffuse up through the chimneys. But I do not think it will be sufficient to cause the tote Männer to attack the chamber. We can hold out for help.”

It took most of those three days to set ourselves up. We had to change the locks on the doors so we could get ourselves out and convert the exhaust fans to give us a little air. We stockpiled as much food and water as we could carry. I even built a periscope through which I could observe the courtyard in front of the chamber and the areas around.

We were carrying one of the last loads into the chamber when a toter Mann leapt on Willem from the roof. Willem grabbed his pistol as he hurled the toter Mann to one side. Weber cried out and wrestled with Willem. The toter Mann attacked both of them. Finally, Willem threw down Weber and emptied the clip of his pistol into the toter Mann’s head. He turned to club Weber but Weber climbed the wall and was gone. Willem turned his attention back to the toter Mann, which had ceased moving as its head had ceased to have any shape. The worms wriggled out like thin spaghetti.

Willem looked at me and held up his arm. His fingers and wrist were bitten. “Do I have any chance at all?”

I shook my head.

“Well, then.” He replaced the clip in the pistol. “Perhaps I have time enough to kill Weber for this.”

“Don’t wait too long,” I advised. “Once you start to feel the euphoria you won’t want to kill him at all.”

“I won’t.”

He nodded at me and I saluted him. Then I went inside the chamber and sealed the door.

Which brings me to the present.

It has been ten weeks since we sealed the door of the chamber. No one has come to help us. Sure enough, the tote Männer have not detected us though they often walk around the building sensing something. Our scent is diffuse enough not to trigger an attack.

But they do not wander off as the previous tote Männer did. They have remained. Worse, instead of degrading in ten weeks as our experiments suggested, they remain whole. I am now forced to admit that the deterioration we observed in our experiments was more likely the result of captivity than any natural process.

I watch them. Sometimes a group of them will disappear into the surrounding forest and then return with a deer or the corpse of a man or child. Then they eat. We never took an opportunity to observe their lifecycle. It seems that once the initial infection period is over, they can, after their own fashion, hunt and eat.

We ran out of water two days ago. We ran out of food nearly a week before that. Helmut cries continuously. The sounds do not appear to penetrate the walls of the chamber-at least, the tote Männer do not respond.

I had planned to hold out longer-perhaps attempt an escape or brave the tote Männer and try to bring back supplies. It is now September. Surely, the impending winter would stop them. Then, when they were dormant, we could leave. But in these last days I have witnessed disturbing changes in their behavior. I saw one toter Mann walking around the camp wrapped in a rug found in one of the camp buildings. A small group of five or six gathered around a trash barrel in which smoldered a low fire. At first, I thought the disease might have managed to retrieve the host memories or that the hosts were recovering-both indicated disaster for us. We would be discovered.

But this is different. The tote Männer stand near the fires until they smolder and only then move away. They drape blankets and clothes completely over their heads but leave their feet unshod. Whatever is motivating them, it is not some surfacing human being but the dark wisdom of the disease itself.

They are still tote Männer and will infect us if they can. There is no hope of escape or holding out.

Always the engineer, I prepared for this. I kept back a bottle of water. In it, I dissolved some Demerol powder. Elsa and Helmut were so thirsty they did not notice the odd taste. They fell asleep in minutes.

I am a coward in some ways. The idea of me, my wife and my child living on only as a host for worms and microbes horrifies me. Death is preferable. Nor do I trust drugs. The faint possibility they might come upon us in our sleep fills me with dread. I have my pistol and enough bullets for Elsa and Helmut and myself. If they find us we will be of no use to them.

I believe that you, Germany, will triumph over these creatures, though that victory will no doubt be a hard one. The Third Reich will not live forever as we had hoped but will, no doubt, fall to the tote Männer. But good German strength must eventually prevail.

For my own part, I regret my inability to foresee my own inadequacies and I regret that I must die here, without being able to help. I regret that Elsa and Helmut will never again see the sun and that they will die by my hand.

But you, who read this, take heart. We did not yield. We did not surrender here but only died when there was no other way to deny ourselves to the enemy. You will defeat and destroy them and raise your hand over a grateful Earth.

It is there waiting for you.