Astronomy (15 page)
Authors: Richard Wadholm
Chapter Twelve
“Y
OU ARE CURIOUS ABOUT THOSE MEN.”
Florian laughed. He knew something. He had something she wanted.
In fact, her thoughts were deep and private, way beyond any hope of rescue. To the contrary—she had been wondering about the rescue of Charley Shrieve. Here he was, sending people off to die again, and helpless to do anything but save the world. When the time came, who would rescue him?
“Those white uniforms,” Florian intoned. “You don’t want to fool with them.”
Ralf Koehler nuzzled up beside her. “What we did to you was nothing. They make us look like gingerbread men.”
Florian chimed in: “I saw them put the Itch on a man who had jostled one of them in a corridor. He scratched himself till he bled to death.”
Indeed, he threatened to have them put the Itch on Susan if they were not convinced of her ardor. That, she figured, was the tragic outcome of reading the
Necronomicon
for pickup lines.
Ralf Koehler was more sanguine. He punched the top of her head in some Teutonic gesture of affection. “I will truly regret seeing you sacrificed,” he said. “Maybe if you treat us right, I will put a bullet in you before Yog Sothoth uses you.” He smiled and patted her on the shoulder.
He was feeling expansive, she realized. He was trying to be nice. Another minute and he’d be apologizing for that unseemly business with the ball peen hammer. What do you say about guys like this? Men amazed her.
Another tremor shook the island. The corridor went dark. Koehler cursed prodigiously. The lights had been flickering throughout the last two hours, some side effect of the Summoning, no doubt. But a night like this, darkness held terrors.
They heard something down the hall. Footsteps? Some sort of rustling. “Dammit,” Susan said. She didn’t even know if she could run away at this point.
Florian lit a match and held it before him. They were all half expecting some oily-skinned monster. He sighed with relief to find one of the white-uniformed men from the elevator standing before them.
“You got out of the Summoning too, eh?” Ralf and Florian chuckled.
Ralf said, “Come on with us. We are about to hold a little ceremony of our own.”
He was a tall man, and the light of the match seemed to disappear under the brim of his helmet. It caught maybe the glint of a cool blue eye, a little weary, a little sad. The soldier neither challenged nor shrank away. He just stood there, staring at them. Despite the German uniform, there wasn’t much question he represented a change in their plans.
Koehler demanded, “What is this about?”
Susan knew what this was about. All she had wanted since falling into this place was a fair fight. Until this moment it had been her alone versus roomsful of German soldiers. Suddenly, it was two on two. Her fair fight was at hand.
They were asking Charley for his name, for his unit. They were starting to fidget with their holster flaps, look anxious. Maybe they were starting to realize what was really up. No matter, they were so focused on him they never even noticed Susan step away from them.
She did a quick tally on her hand-to-hand skills. She had nothing to put into a punch, not till her shoulders healed a bit. She wondered how her kicks had been affected. Could she still kick hard enough to do any damage?
She heard Florian offer her to the silent man in front of them, first dibs.
No sloppy seconds for a serious man like you, Oberstürmführer.
Oh yeah, she could kick.
Florian may or may not have known whom he was dealing with. At some point, impatience got the best of him. He went for his pistol.
Susan stepped on the back of his knee, right at the pivot point between thigh and calf. Florian went down, firing a wild shot into the ceiling. Shrieve crushed his wrist under a boot heel and kicked him into silence.
Ralf Koehler managed to get his Luger in his hand before Susan turned a full spinning back-kick that ended with the boniest part of her heel about six inches into his ribs. The kid slammed against the wall. He struggled to right himself. He aimed the pistol down the corridor.
Charley stepped in past the gun and went for the rich field of nerve endings at the base of Koehler’s jaw—
bap, bap, bap
. She’d seen kittens expend more effort pawing at a ball of twine. Ralf went down. His eyes rolled up into his forehead.
Charley watched him a moment as if he might still have something left. He glanced back just once.
“How you doing, Red?”
She squatted down on Florian’s prone body. She kneaded her shoulders back into some kind of shape and fought off the inky spots that were crowding her peripheral vision. “I’ve been better,” she said.
“I knew you were in here somewhere. Kriene’s offices are here. I’ve been riding up and down this elevator for the last forty-five minutes, trying to find out what floor they had you on.”
“What about the summoning of Azathoth?”
“It goes on in thirty minutes. We’ve got to move.”
She needed a moment to realize what he was saying. “You risked the whole world to come after me?”
“Sometimes the world has to wait, doesn’t it.”
“You can’t be risking the whole world for one person. What if . . .”
She looked up at him. Somehow, they found themselves in one of those awkward moments of close physical proximity. His cheek muscle was jumping again.
He
’
s got to be doing that on purpose.
She thought she should say something. “You can’t be risking the whole world like that,” she said quietly. Which was not to say she wasn’t flattered.
The lights faltered again. Now the forced air went down as well. The scents of diesel oil and burning wood filtered through the room.
She took Florian Mueller’s big old size-twelve boots, and one other thing as well—
Each soldier on the base had been issued a couple of hand grenades, to aid in their negotiations with Azathoth’s attendant entities.
Ralf and Florian still had their full complement of two each. Susan plucked them from their belts. The world being what it is, a girl never knows when she’s going to need a hand grenade.
Chapter Thirteen
F
ROM THE METAL CATWALK,
Susan and Charley could overlook the whole of the
Vergeltungswerkes
.
The sky to the west was bone white. It rippled a little as Susan watched, the ripples coalescing around a misshapen black point where Sirius had recently been.
Shrieve raised his hand to it. “Azathoth’s Highway,” he guessed. “That must be the cosmic fracture zone we’ve heard so much about.”
Black as it was, Susan had to squint to look at it straight on. Something in it glared as brilliant and hurtful as the noon sun.
At first she wondered if it was growing larger. Then she wondered if it grew larger because it was coming their way, very fast. It occurred to her that this was the reason all the smaller monsters had cleared out. Even they were afraid of what was coming.
“Thirty minutes.” Shrieve rubbed the back of his head. “We’ve got problems.”
They would never make it to the Summoning Tower in thirty minutes. Probably not in ten days. The plant had been transformed since last she had seen it.
Between the catwalk and the Summoning Tower was an impenetrable crush of twisted iron. Fires from burst-open fuel lines licked at the belly of low-rolling clouds. The flames came up through a nearby train trestle, swirled furiously around the burst-open boiler of a small freight engine. Two charred bodies hung over the side of the cab.
The immense skyline that had blocked the ocean from here had been flattened in the last two hours, as if something huge had rolled over it. Now she could see all the way down to the harbor. The two U-boats anchored there had been upended by some cataclysmic force.
The same force had rolled over the air base across the road. The seven ME-262s standing on the tarmac had been wadded up like moths in an angry palm. They burned furiously from ignited jet fuel.
Susan felt a prickle of self-awareness at the nape of her neck, as if she were on display.
She turned fast. Azathoth’s attendant entities were nowhere to be seen. Nothing remained above her but the moon and stars. Yet she felt no relief at this. Under the influence of Kriene’s spell, the moon itself held a voyeuristic aspect. The stars possessed awareness. Some were malignant. Some held indifferent curiosity. None were undiscerning.
“Let’s get out of here.” Shrieve pointed to a stair leading into the gloom below. Susan concurred. Though she knew they weren’t going to make it to the Tower, she felt exposed on this bridge, under this bright, strange sky.
Susan sensed movement in the smoldering alleyways around them. She pointed out a darkness moving through the flames of an overturned mobile shower van. Another swift-moving shadow passed through the clearing right behind. She heard the first one clambering up the stairs at her back.
“Get ready for company,” she said. She knew who they were, of course—recognized them by the fluid quality of their movements. But she had forgotten how large they were. The same creatures as the ghouls. Instantly, she was trembling. She pulled one of Florian Mueller’s hand grenades off her belt. She wasn’t sure how far she could throw; she wasn’t sure it mattered. She would not be consumed—that was paramount.
“Hang on,” Charley said. “Something else is down there.” He pointed beyond the dark creatures moving up the ladder to a larger mass filling in the darkness below. “What do you make of that?”
It took her a moment to make out their pale faces in the reflected white light. They stared up at her dully. They wandered around each other. Now and then, two would bump together and tear each other’s limbs off.
“
Totenstürm
,” she said. “Walking dead.”
“This is what Malmagden went to find.”
“And these creatures are herding them around, like sheep dogs running a flock.” In its way, she supposed, it was a rather complex social interaction.
What did catch her up short was the silhouette standing on an overturned truck—an aristocratic German officer with a pleasant smile and a severed blonde head dangling from each hand.
Charley called down: “I was starting to worry if you’d found them, or if they’d found you.”
Malmagden laughed. “You would not believe the incompetents Herr Kriene put in charge of his
Totenstürm
program.” He raised the heads for them to see. “These two
Einsatzgruppe
idiots had a small army of walking dead. They had six creatures to lead them, even larger and more brutal and cunning than my ghouls. I could have terrorized the Red Army with such resources. What a waste.”
“So you relieved them of their, uhm, responsibilities.” Susan pointed with the hand grenade.
Malmagden was a little self-conscious about the heads. “These are a little token from the group. You know the way a cat will lay a dead mouse on your kitchen floor?”
Susan cringed at the comparison. Malmagden shrugged.
“I couldn’t very well insult them, could I? Not at a time like this.”
Charley frowned. “You say you’ve got six in your group. I only count four.”
“They are a skeptical lot. I told them of the
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
of Von Junzt. They required an example.”
Susan saw the four monsters look sideways at each other. That word “example” rankled them. They looked happy to make an example of Malmagden, if the opportunity arose.
Susan was dubious about alliances with dead people anyway. She couldn’t help noticing a pair of them near the back of the crowd. Each had hold of the other’s head and was trying to rip it off. She suspected Malmagden’s new guard may have set a poor example for their troops.
“Are they really going to be useful and controllable?”
“Oh, they’re calm now. They require only a firm hand. I’d say they are positively eager to please.”
One of the dead at the back of the throng had won his tug of war. Susan saw a head pop into the air like a slice of toast and bounce along on a sea of grasping, outstretched hands. A lowing sound of unrequited hunger rolled up from the crowd.
“Indeed.”
“You were in Berlin. You know what they can be like.”
“I remember you drowned hundreds of German children to keep them from establishing themselves on the surface of Berlin.”
“Oh, but this is an island,” he said. “They will be fine. If we can only find a way into the Summoning Tower, they will follow after us.”
“We’ve got maybe thirty minutes to get there.”
Malmagden waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “The island is riddled with sewers and accessways. You and I must use other means to get inside the tower. But my new recruits are familiar with the subterranean networks. By the time we breach the tower, they will be waiting. They shall pour in and destroy Jürgen Kriene’s unholy undertaking.”
Susan looked at Charley. He didn’t like it either. He shrugged at her,
Give me something better.
At thirty minutes till the point of no return, she was fresh out of ideas.
Malmagden addressed his personal guard: “We are going now to find the entrance into the Summoning of Azathoth. Your task will be to lead the
Totenstürm
into battle. Use the sewers between here and the Summoning Towers. They are passable. I expect the trip to take you half an hour—
no longer
. Remember, if you are late, the human race will die.”
“All those dead bodies, we might do quite nicely,” a sullen one at the front pointed out.
“Your kind might do nicely,” Malmagden replied. “If the human race dies, I will ensure that you four are not around to enjoy the largesse.”
One of the larger monsters turned his head at his fellows, to ensure a consensus. He stepped forward. Susan detected a petulant droop to his mouth.
“You humans will use the Angle Web to make your way into the Summoning Tower. You leave us with the task of getting a pack of mindless dead through the sewers of Totenburgen Island. We will be lucky if some don’t wander off in the dark.”
“I am experienced in these matters. The dead will follow you wherever you go.”
“One never knows; you might get a rogue now and then. We may arrive a few dead short.”
Malmagden addressed the sullen one directly. “I count seventy-eight dead heroes of the Reich,” he said. “I expect seventy-eight dead heroes of the Reich to arrive at the tower. I do not want to hear how this chubby one ‘
escaped.
’ Or that little dumpling with the gimpy leg ‘
ran away.
’ Do I make myself clear?”
The creature straightened indignantly. “Your insinuations are hurtful and unwarranted.”
“Perhaps,” suggested the one behind him, “our new master would care to have his cadre of dead soldiers bathed and tended by the Red Cross.”
“Enough.” Malmagden cut short the debate with an aggravated swipe of his hand; he had heard all this in Berlin. It had not improved with age. “Half an hour,” he called. “Or I select one of you for my next example.”
Susan took a bit of charcoal from the smoldering heap of a guard shack. Under Malmagden’s direction, she drew an Angle Web into the summoning castle, to a point where Malmagden himself had stepped out on numerous occasions.
Susan remembered the journey that had brought her to this island. She thought of that smothering black presence that had pursued her through the spaces between reality. The charcoal wavered in her hand. Someone nearby was whispering,
I can handle this,
repeating it over and over like a prayer.
* * *
The moment she stepped over the perimeter, she felt something latch itself onto her consciousness. She closed her mind to it. She whispered the words. She forced her hands to rise. She forced her fingers to form the signs of Voor and Kish.
The awareness dug in deeper. She felt herself draining away into the vastness. She could see the space around her grow rich and murky, like water around a bleeding fish. She could see the portal ahead of her, glowing and warm with light—but too far. Too far by just a step. But that step could have been a mile.
She closed her arms around herself, lowered her head, and willed herself toward the warmth.
As she fell across the threshold, she was barely conscious.
Charley was nearby. She heard him gasping for breath.
“Are you all right?”
She heard some sort of grunt of assent, and then a groan, and then, “Ohh damn . . .”
Her thoughts exactly.
She found herself on a ledge overlooking a darkened amphitheater. Charley was bent over on his knees as if to keep his stomach from lurching at the noisome contact he had endured. Malmagden? She didn’t see him anywhere. She hoped he was simply across the amphitheater, trying to open a door for his dead to come through.
But maybe Malmagden had slipped away. Or maybe he simply hadn’t made it.
She took her surroundings in with a quick glance. The ledge was some sort of transit point for Zentralbund coming in from around the island. Hundreds of quick-scribbled Angle Webs glowed faintly in the dusky light. Most returned their users to points on the island. A few went to Germany. Susan recognized them from the ones she had seen in the Four Winds Bar in Kiel. One of them even reminded her of Conrad Hartmann’s back-slanted scrawl.
The amphitheater was huge and dark. It spread out beneath a perfect crystal lens large as a zeppelin. A circular vault stood beneath the opening. Susan realized it was an astronomical observatory. Real-time images of the sky were projected onto a blank section of wall at the center of the amphitheater.
Just under the giant circle of stars stood an altar. Thirteen men in gray robes with wan faces and black eyes read from a profane text Susan recognized as the
Daemonalateria
of Remigius.
The array of sorcerers were going into the final arguments in the summoning of Azathoth. The chant echoed off the stone walls of the chamber with a ringing edge that got Susan’s teeth grinding.
They seemed to adjust the pace of their entreaties according to the instructions of a Nazi officer wearing headphones and, around his neck, a pair of binoculars.
Susan pegged him for some sort of liaison officer standing warlock watch. He would press his fingers to his headphones as data came in from the observatory. Susan guessed this to be Azathoth’s heading and arrival time.
The Nazi officer checked the giant wall projection through his binoculars for confirmation. Satisfied, he shouted instructions to a gang of black-suited
Einsatzgruppe
guards.
These were the operators and drivers for the black “mobile shower” trucks. People were hustled inside even as she watched—the three hundred mental patients from Agnes Dei, she guessed.
The door was slammed shut on the last one.
Einsatzgruppe
technicians knelt on the roofs of each van. They might have been fixing the air-conditioning unit up there.
Susan had a more exact idea what they did. They were preparing a mixture of prussic acid and hydrogen cyanide, known to its admirers as Zyklon-B.
“We’re coming up on a convergence,” she said. She pointed to the cross hairs at the center of the wall projection. There was the black mass of the fracture zone bearing Azathoth to Earth. It was just a little to the left of dead-on.
“That cosmic fracture is going to be right over our heads in a minute. As soon as it is”—she drew a line with her finger—“the word goes down to the
Einsatzgruppe
technicians at the trucks to turn on the gas.”
Shrieve nodded; he could see it. “Three hundred souls are unleashed from their bodies. Those electromagnets ringing the walls”—he pointed up at a ring of bulb-ended metallic rods passing electricity around the roof of the chamber—“direct and accelerate the stream of souls into a coherent beam. The beam is aimed right down the throat of the cosmic fracture to where Azathoth waits, licking His chops.”
She wondered if souls travel out of the body at the speed of light. Can they really be accelerated like a particle in a magnetic field?
Soul accelerators: human sacrifices carried out with Zyklon-B, their souls condensed by a magnetic device into a coherent beam and fired into the sky at the speed of light. Welcome to the twentieth century.
* * *