The Hunter From the Woods (41 page)

He was by now very good and very fast at opening his soul cage and letting Hell loose.

Several things happened at once, in rapid succession. There were the crackings of bones and joints and the wet slidings and rearrangings of sinews that might have been taken for the work of the rack, but it was not. Bands of black and gray hairs rippled across the pick-pocked flesh. The face seemed to dissolve, to be replaced by a second, darker face that had been hidden beneath the mask of the first. It, too, was battered and bloody as the first one had been; the man’s wounds were also the beast’s. Fingers warped and toes warped into claws. Fangs exploded from bleeding gums. Ears burst forth fur as they lengthened like strange flowers. The ribcage shivered and changed shape. The torso altered, the spine shifted, the neck thickened, the shoulders grew muscles like pulsing gray ropes and then the black hair scurried over them and across the chest and groin where the pierced testicles tightened. The pain was exquisite. The pain was a religious experience, because through it Michael Gallatin was reborn.

All this happened in a matter of seconds. It happened so fast the black wolf streaked with gray was there on the rack before Axel Rittenkrett could cry out around his cigarello or step back from the blood-dripping muzzle that now snapped up at his face. The fangs caught cheek, nose and forehead. Then the wolf’s head thrashed side-to-side in a blur, the muscles standing out in its neck, and very suddenly Axel Rittenkrett really did have, as Franziska had said, two faces.

Both of them were red. One was streaming blood around torn and twitching facial muscles. That side had no eye, because the eye was crushed between the wolf’s jaws like a hard-boiled egg and swallowed. It had a gaping hole where the nose had been, because nose went very well with eyeball. In fact, much of the whole side of the face had gone down the gullet. A smoke ring red with gore burst from the mouth. The teeth clacked, like the sound of a rack’s ratchet or white shoes on a checkerboard floor. And Rittenkrett’s shoes were, alas, no longer the color of virgin snow.

Michael Gallatin tore the Ice Man’s throat open with his next snap and thrash, and perhaps it was due to the wolf’s rage or his strength or his purpose returning, but the Ice Man’s mangled head was ripped off and went rolling across the stones like a large red rubber ball. It rolled past the shoes of Sigmund, who like the others in the room were for the moment truly ice men: frozen in absolute, apocalyptic horror.

As the merely human stood stunned, the monster of miracle’s hind legs slipped out of the loosened bindings. One rope on the right foreleg had to be gnawed off, the matter of a few heartbeats, but the left foreleg came free easily enough. In his fever dream, Michael smelled that every man in the room had just peed in their pants. A couple of them needed their diapers. The wolf leaped to the floor, and the slitted green eyes searched for the next throat to savage.

Could five men scream as one? They could.

There was a rush toward the door. An entanglement of Gestapo men. A crashing together, stumbling and falling of the Master Race, reduced to Marx Brothers comedians.

He paused to kill one man who’d fallen. It was fast and clean, and it tasted good. Then he was moving again, his shoulders hunched. It was unfortunate, Michael thought as he loped across the stones, that a bolted door couldn’t be opened when so many hands were slipping and sliding all over the place.

“Help us! God help us!” one of them shouted, banging at the wood. Was that Sigmund, whose account had suddenly become due?

The wolf lunged forward, seized Sigmund’s ankle and dragged him away, and that debt was paid in bloody full in about three seconds.

Someone had either gone mad or found courage, because a Luger began firing into the dark. A bullet whined off the floor to Michael’s left. “Get it open!
Open it
!” a man shrieked; now
that
was the sound of madness, for sure. A second Luger fired, the bullet hissing through the air over Michael’s spine. Then suddenly there came the noise of the bolt being drawn, light from the staircase streamed in as the door was opened, and a trio of rabbits in pee-stained trousers were fighting to get past each other.

Michael slouched forward as beasts do. He could slow time down to his own desires, so the merely human were moving as if through sludge. He let them all get started up the stairs. His muzzle was throbbing with pain. Something was not totally right with his lower jaw. The agony of two stabbed balls still writhed in his belly.

Oh, he thought as he listened to them scrambling up those stairs and wheezing in fear, you are
mine
.

Then the purely animal took him. He growled deep in his throat and flung himself through the door and up after the three men, rivulets of saliva crawling from his mouth.

Ross was going up first. He had a Luger. When he turned and saw the monster coming, he got off a wild shot that was unfortunately not wild enough to miss the head of the man just behind and below him, who also had a Luger. Ross’s hair was standing on end, as if electrified, and his face was the color of wet paper. As the man in the middle fell, the one closest to Michael screamed like a woman and tried to kick like a little girl, but he died like a pile of dirty laundry when Michael bit into the leg and threw him almost disdainfully down the stairs where his chin hit the railing, his neck broke, and he slithered down in his stinky pants.

And now there was just the common thug.

Ross started shooting over his shoulder, without looking. The bullets whacked risers and walls but no wolf. Then Ross got to the top of the stairs and turned to the right, and with a keening shriek he fled along the corridor in the direction of the large window. He ran out of one of his shoes. Michael, a green-eyed and ravening juggernaut, went after him. A bullet suddenly hit the wall and another cracked through the window’s glass; someone, likely the guard at the door, was firing a pistol. Michael could imagine the man’s dumbfounded wonder: how in the name of Gabbling Goebbels had a big
dog
gotten in here?

The big dog now wanted out, and he saw the way.

He managed a burst of speed, and he leapt.

An instant before Michael hit Ross, the thug must’ve felt the death fangs at the back of his neck and somehow he mustered the courage to face them. He turned and fired, possibly his last shot. Michael felt the bullet go into his left hip and do serious damage, and then he was on top of Ross and Ross was being propelled backward along the hallway the last few feet to the window. They crashed through the glass and into a snowscape, with Ross taking the brunt of the injuries. The air whooshed out of the man’s lungs, but in the next instant Ross didn’t need that air anyway since claws and fangs removed the lungs in a small frenzy of maddened revenge.

Ross, hollowed-out, lay twitching in the snow. Michael heard soldiers shouting, and the hard authority of an officer’s voice: “
This way
!
Move
!”

He took his bearings. He was in some kind of courtyard. A small park? Lights glowed on lampposts. There were snow-covered bushes and bare trees and a concrete pathway winding through. Life-sized statues of, presumably, famous Gestapo torturers stood about, and there were small concrete benches where one might enjoy a quick respite from working the electric gut-grinder. The snow had begun to fall harder, no longer the light flurries. He had to find his way out of here. His hip…now, that was bad. The pain in his hip was a thousand degrees of fire, yet he had the sensation that his left leg itself was becoming cold, losing all feeling. Going dead. His nostrils were so full of blood, both his own and others, that he could hardly draw a breath.

He had to get out.

He staggered along the pathway in what was nearly desperation.

A wolf without four good legs on which to run, to evade and escape?

Not good.

He came to a wall. A high wall. Too high.

He went in another direction, burst through the undergrowth and into another wall.

“
Blood on the ground over here
!” shouted a soldier, off to his right.

Oh, yes. He was bleeding pretty badly, too.

This would be called a cock-up, Michael thought. But he was not yet ready to go belly-up.

He turned away from the voice and ran low, the pain in his left hip nearly making him whine. He ran past two soldiers who never knew he was there. He heard a shot, but it came nowhere near him. “Over here!” came the yell, followed by another errant shot. They were seeing big dogs under every bush.

This courtyard…was there even a way out of it? How had the soldiers gotten in? From the building, of course. He couldn’t go back into there, not with this leg.

He was going to have to get over the wall, while he still had enough strength.

He circled from wall to wall, aware that the soldiers were circling too. A rifle shot hit a treetrunk to his right and sent a tremor through him; it had been much too close. “It’s here, sergeant!” shouted the sharp-eyed rifleman. “I’ve got it!”

Michael pushed through the undergrowth. He came out with snow on his back and a wall before him. On his left a few feet along the pathway there stood a stone bench. On his right, closer to the wall, was the statue of a man with his arms extended and palms offered heavenward, as if asking the help of God in smiting down the evildoers, perhaps with a blowtorch to the genitals.

The wolf measured distances. It was a long jump, especially with the injury.

But he really had no choice.

They were coming. He heard the crunch of boots in the snow. Someone had a flashlight, the beam sweeping back and forth. How many men? Too many to kill all of them. A Gestapo security squad, ten at least.

He had to go
now
.

He ran back along the pathway.

“There it is!” The light grazed him, lost him, searched for him. “Shoot it!” came the command, but the big dog had abruptly turned and was no longer there.

Michael ran, one leg starting to drag. The pain was tremendous. It stole his breath. If he misjudged this, he was dead.
Faster! Faster!
he told himself.
And when you give it,
give it everything.

He leaped upon the stone bench, sprang off its snowy surface with a jolt that this time did make him whine and brought a red mist whirling before his eyes, and in midair he stretched the long muscular black-and-gray body out as far as bones and sinew would allow. A rifle fired and the bullet went past his right ear. Another grazed his tail. A third hit the statue of the supplicant and threw stone chips into Michael’s pelt.

Michael’s paws scrabbled on the outstretched palms. He heard something crack: his bones or the statue’s arms, he wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. He leaped again with all his power, upward from the Gestapo’s hands, and then the snow-slick top of the wall was in front of him and he was hanging onto it with his forepaws and trying to push himself over with one good leg.

The rifles spoke. Bullets ricocheted off the wall. Someone fired a submachine gun in short, deadly chatters. The top of the wall blew up. Smoke and snow spun together in airy whirlpools.

“Cease firing!” cried the sergeant. The last few rifle shots rang out, and the sergeant glared back at whomever had been slow to obey. Then, satisfied he wouldn’t get shot up by his own men, he walked forward and aimed his flashlight at the wall beyond the statue of Rudolf Diels, the first commander of the Gestapo from 1933 to 1934.

“Damn,” the sergeant said. Because the big dog was not lying dead on the ground. Maybe it was on the other side of the wall, they’d have to go and look, but at least it was out of the courtyard. There was a mess to clean up inside. This might send him to the gallows. Maybe tonight he and his wife should take a little trip to the West. Like beginning in the next fifteen minutes. He’d seen many stray animals, but never one like this. Maybe it was a wolf that had escaped from the zoo?

The sergeant, an old veteran with one hand, knew all about wolves. When he was a child his grandmother Tippi used to scare the shit out of him with her stories of wolf men. He still had nightmares about waking up with hairy palms, because in his dreams he was always a boy and he always had both hands.
When
the full moon shines bright, then the beast shall roam at night.

All that kind of rubbish.

But there was no full moon tonight. In fact, it would soon be morning. “Blast,” he said, mostly to himself. “All right,” he told the men around him, “let’s go out and see if we killed anything.”

They had not.

The wolf was on the move.

It staggered, in great pain. Its left hind leg dragged. It rested for awhile, leaning against the corner of a building just as a weary man might. Then it went on a little further, and staggered again, and again had to find a place to support its unsteady weight.

Snow fell, white upon the streets and bricks and stones of Berlin. The wind picked up and began to keen. Night could be brutal. Night could be the no-man’s land of the soul, and so it was this night for Michael Gallatin.

But he was alive.

A truck carrying soldiers was coming. He turned into a trash-strewn alley and stood against the bricks, the left hind paw up off the ground above a puddle of blood. The truck passed. They were in no hurry, all the soldiers smoking cigarettes with their rifles at ease. They weren’t looking for him.

Michael lowered his head.
Franziska
, the wolf thought. Oh my God.

Picture it. Poor Franziska, fighting for the life of her noble knight.

And earning only bruises and a poison pill for her sacrifice.

The green eyes dimmed. It seemed to Michael that in the battle called life a skirmish had been lost. It seemed to him that on this day the sleepwalkers had won just a little more ground.

I will hold you forever
, he thought.

And then through the pain of broken heart and damaged leg he considered the fact that he was alone, hurt and naked in Berlin, and if the ex-Ice Man was correct, some fearsome secret weapon called the Black Sun was being prepared to destroy the enemies of the Reich.