Ray winced at the thought.
“Walt, that sounds so crazy,” Ray said. “What did the police say?”
“Cops didn’t care. They got crimes against the living to worry about, and no valuables were taken from the body. Chalked it up to a cult or something. Patrolled the cemetery. Gave up when it didn’t happen again.
“Then last year, Carter passed up in Enid,” Walt continued. “Fool fell off his own roof messing with a satellite dish. Someone dug him up the very next night. Same thing, body mutilated all to hell.”
“Two times? Did the police make a connection?”
“Hell, no. Four years apart and counties away from each other? They couldn’t find a McAlester police report. All but told me I was crazy.”
Ray couldn’t fault the cops on that one. It did sound crazy.
“What about other men from our squad?” Ray said.
“Well,” Walt said. “A few have died. And nothing happened to them.”
Ray shrugged. Walt sat up again. The beep of his heart rate monitor accelerated.
“But that doesn’t mean I’m safe. Higbie and Carter, both from our squad. What are the odds?”
The rarity of grave desecration set the odds of two occurrences with two related people pretty long. But that was the definition of a coincidence, wasn’t it? After all, other squad members had rested in peace for years. And no McAlester police report? How much of this was in Walt’s chemo-soaked brain?
“Walt, you’re getting all overwrought,” Ray said.
Walt grabbed Ray’s shirt with surprising strength. His eyes in his hollowed out face flashed Ray again back to the faces in Dachau.
“Promise me,” he pleaded. “You’ll watch and make sure they don’t do it to me!”
“Sure, sure,” Ray said to mollify him. “I’ll watch your grave.”
Walt lay back in his bed. His face relaxed for the first time. The heart rate monitor slowed to a calmer tempo.
Ray wondered if this was a promise he really had to keep.
1945
Higbie held one of the farmhouse doors open with the barrel of his rifle. New concrete stairs led down into a well-lit white basement. A gas mask hung on a nail to the right. A stench like rotten meat rolled up the staircase, a thick invisible fog.
“Christ, I thought the outside air smelled bad,” Carter said. He pulled his T-shirt up over his nose.
“Never seen a farmhouse basement like this,” Walt said. He led the others down the steps, rifle at the ready.
The basement was no root cellar. It looked more like a laboratory, with white tile walls and long black marble tables filled with titration apparatus and glass beakers. Three bodies in black and white striped inmate uniforms lay strapped to gurneys against the wall, Yellow Stars of David sewn on their chests.
The four searched the room. Glass crunched under their feet. A large container had shattered into a thousand pieces on the floor. From the point of impact, a brown powder covered the floor like a misshapen starburst. Tan puffs of dust rose with each of their footsteps. Ray stifled a sneeze.
“Sarge,” Carter said. He stood over one of the bodies, shirt still coving his face like a bandit. “What kind of sick…”
The other three soldiers gathered around a sight common after over two years of combat. The bodies had the reek and bloating of advanced decomposition. Each had its head severed neatly, surgically at the neck.
“From the looks of these bodies,” Walt said, “they abandoned this place a while ago. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
The four retreated up the steps to the first floor. Higbie stopped short of the front door.
“Hey, where’s the Kraut?” he said.
The soldier’s body was gone. A swath of red blood painted a path where it had been dragged out the front door.
“This could be a trap, Walt said. “Get back to the Jeep, now. We’ll cover you.”
Ray and Walt took overwatch positions on the front farmhouse windows.
“Go!” Walt ordered. Higbie and Carter nodded and ran for the barn.
“Sarge, what in the name of God were the Nazis doing here?” Ray said.
“Whatever it was,” Walt said, “God had nothing to do with it.
1985
At half past midnight, Ray sat in his Oldsmobile in the dark parking lot of the 45th Infantry Museum. Across the street, a knee-high mist shrouded the Oklahoma Veteran’s Cemetery. He hadn’t seen another soul in hours.
He was being an idiot. Yeah, he’d promised Walt he’d watch his grave. But that was just to calm the poor guy down. There weren’t grave robbers working the Oklahoma circuit in the 20th century.
But Walt had saved Ray’s life. Twice. Once in Sicily and that time outside Dachau, debts Ray had never repaid. So whether out of guilt or respect, he’d execute this last senseless obligation. A seven day vigil. Three more to go.
He got out of the car to stretch his legs and smoke. He lit a cigarette. Across the street in the cemetery, something scraped.
No way, he thought. My damn imagination is—
He heard it again. Steel on earth. Like digging a foxhole. His pulse picked up. He tossed the cigarette to the ground and crossed the street.
He passed under the wrought iron entrance that read Union Soldiers Cemetery. He paused. A few more shovels of earth sounded, then the final sharp thrust of a spade into the earth. Two hushed voices spoke. Female voices in…German.
He advanced among the tombstones, along the same path he’d taken to watch Walt interred. The headstones rose just above the mist. The air cleared near the gravesite, and he knelt behind a bulky monument.
Two women in their thirties stood at Walt’s ravaged gravesite, one triumphant atop the pile of excavated earth, the other half-visible within the grave. Short sentences in German bounced between them.
A vengeful rage Ray hadn’t felt in years boiled up. Decades of Cold War unity had dulled, but not dismissed his lingering hatred for all the Germans had put him, and the world through. The buddies shot to pieces at the front. The walking dead he’d seen in Dachau. Now in some act of retribution, Krauts were here desecrating a dead veteran, a dead friend.
He charged the gravesite. He pulled a shovel from the ground on the run. The woman at the graveside turned in surprise just in time for Ray to slam the spade into the side of her head. She dropped unconscious like a sack of potatoes. The woman in the grave froze in surprise beside Walt’s glossy, obsidian coffin
“Nein, nein,” she cried. She threw her hands up in the air. “No, wait. I can explain.”
Her face was careworn, beyond her years. Premature gray streaked her ponytail of blonde hair. Fear and regret filled her weary eyes. Ray paused, shovel blade aimed at her neck.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said. Her German accent was thick. “We don’t want to.” She nodded at the woman who moaned at Ray’s feet. “If you don’t let me finish, Sergeant Buckner will rise.”
1945
Higbie and Carter made it to the barn and disappeared around the corner.
The farmhouse’s back door burst open. Ray and Walt whirled to see the dead SS private coming at a run. His eyes burned bright blue, his face stark white. Blood still seeped from the ragged wounds in his chest. He brandished an SS dagger in one hand.
The SS soldier was on Ray before he could bring his rifle to bear. The German clamped one hand around Ray’s neck. Ray choked. The German raised the dagger for a killing blow.
Walt charged and bashed the German in the head with the butt of his rifle. The impact should have sent the German to the ground. Instead, he turned toward Walt, face twisted with hate. He released Ray. Ray slid to the floor.
Walt butted the German again, straight in the face. The private’s head snapped back as its nose crushed with a crunch. The nose didn't bleed. It growled and went for Walt.
Walt flipped his rifle around in time to shove the barrel into the German’s mouth. He jerked the trigger. The rifle’s muffled, wet report e
choed in the room. The back of the German’s head exploded all over the wall. Walt jerked back his rifle. The private dropped to the floor.
Ray stood and scrambled way from the corpse. Its hands opened and closed, though the rest of the body lay still.
“Jesus, Walt,” Ray croaked. “What the hell was that?”
“Nothing I can explain,” Walt said.
“He must not have been dead when we saw him.”
“Christ, Ray, I think we know dead by now. He was definitely dead. And he still was when he charged back in here.
“You okay?” shouted Higbie from near the barn.
Ray looked to Walt.
“We’re fine,” Walt shouted out the window. “Cover us.”
“What are we going to say?”
“Not a damn thing! You gonna tell someone what we just saw? Would they believe you? This war’s almost over. I want an honorable discharge, not a psychiatric. Everything that happened here is gonna stay right here.”
Walt knelt by the straw in the corner. He flicked on his lighter. The flame licked the dry, tan stalks. The pile caught in an instant, and flames crawled up the wooden wall. He stepped back to the door.
“Whatever this was,” Walt said, eyes on the flames, “should never have seen the light of day.”
1985
“You are Ray Toomey,” the woman in the grave said. “Corporal, M Company, 3rd Battalion. You and three others found a secret lab near Dachau in 1945.”
Ray caught his breath. No one knew that. None of them had reported it. None of them had spoken about it after that day, even to each other.
“My father, our father, was the doctor in that lab. He confessed on his deathbed to us. He used concentration camp inmates to test Nazi immortality drugs.”
Ray’s hazy memories returned. The lab, the three bodies in inmate uniforms. He lowered the shovel a few inches.
“The experiment went horribly wrong,” she continued. “The drug didn’t keep the living from dying. It let the dead go on living.”
The corpses in the lab, Ray thought. Restrained. All the heads severed.
“A container of the dried extract broke in the lab. The SS guard was exposed. My father was outside the building when you arrived, decontaminating himself. He watched you go in, watched the SS private reanimate, watched you kill it.
“You were exposed as well. All four of you. No later than seven days after you die, you will rise. A strong, soulless, murderous creature bent on destruction. My sister and I watched you all, waited. If I don’t dismember Sergeant Buckner’s body, he will be back.”
Rational thought returned to Ray. Rising dead? Evil scientists? This was B-movie stuff.
Something pounded inside the coffin and Ray jumped back.
“We’re too late!” she said.
The lid of the coffin burst open. Walt’s body sat up. Its mouth dropped open and it gurgled an unintelligible, angry sound. It looked up at Ray with vacant, cloudy eyes.
Ray tossed the shovel into the woman’s waiting hands. She aimed and swung it into the corpse’s neck. It passed straight through and stuck in the underside of the lid. The corpse’s head teetered on the blade and then rolled back into the casket.
The woman in the grave yanked the shovel from the casket lid. The headless corpse flopped back into a truly final resting place.
Ray lowered himself to the ground as the shock of it all seeped in. He looked at Walt’s decapitated body and saw his future.
1998
“He’s not doing well,” Chloe Toomey said to her brother. They stood alone in the hospice hallway.
“How well can he do at this point?” Ted said in frustration. The increasingly aggravating hospice visits wore thin after long days at the office.
They entered their grandfather’s room. Grandpa Ray lay in bed. Congestive heart failure had withered his body to near nothing. His gaunt face twisted into the look of anxiety his two grandchildren knew too well.
“It’s all arranged?” he said. “The cremation?”
“Grandpa, yes,” Chloe said. “Please, such a morbid thing. Everything will be okay.”
“Do it right away,” he said. “As soon as I am gone... She promised…but it was a long time ago…”
Chloe shot Ted a quizzical look. He returned a clueless shrug.
A blonde, fiftyish woman walked in behind the grandchildren. She stopped and stared at Ray. His eyes went wide in recognition, then his face relaxed.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. The “s” sounded like a “z” with her German accent. “I must have the wrong room.”
She backed out into the hallway. Chloe took a seat beside her grandfather’s bed and took his hand.
“You’re right,” he said. “Everything will be okay.”
Nazis are tailor-made horror story villains. The true believers were so devoted, so sociopathic, that no imagined evil assigned to them becomes unbelievable. Everyone gets one Nazi-themed story, and here’s mine.
Ω
Premonitions
“Alfie, what is all this?”
Stan poked through a pile of photographs and handwritten notes on Alfie’s cheap kitchen table. The battered manila envelope next to them was still half full.
“That’s what I needed to talk to you about,” Alfie said.
Alfie rubbed his tense, sweating palms against his thighs. His chair creaked as his right leg shuddered in time with his racing pulse. Tension filled every corner of Alfie’s claustrophobic apartment to the bursting point. It was a big gamble, letting Stan in on this. If his brother would support him, just this once …
Stan picked up a picture from the top of the pile. The tips of his thin fingers held it by the corner, as if some infectious disease might pervade the photo. A few locks of his perfectly coiffed hair dipped down into his field of view and he swept them back with his free hand. He studied the picture with first alarm and then sadness.
The picture had the grainy texture of a cell phone snapshot blown up to three times normal size. The woman in it was dirty blonde, in her late twenties, with blue eyes and a petite nose that came to a slight upturned point. Her long, wild hair was temporarily tamed into a ponytail by a bright red scarf. She walked through Central Park in the surreptitiously shot candid picture.
“So who is she?” Stan said.
Alfie shifted in his seat. He hitched his pants up a bit. They were now at least a size too large. He gave the dark stubble on his chin a nervous scratch.
“Well, it’s going to be hard to explain, so you need to listen first…”
Stan looked down at the pile of pictures. One by one, he flicked them across the table with his index finger, each photo a bit faster than the last. They were all of the same woman. Entering a subway station. Walking along Madison Avenue. Sipping coffee with another woman at an outdoor café.
“Jesus, Alfie, are you some kind of stalker?”
“No, no. I’m not stalking her. She’s stalking me. In my dreams.”
Stan dropped the picture like it was white hot. He stepped back from the table, back from Alfie. His lips tightened into that disapproving grimace Alfie had seen on his older brother’s face so many times before. Alfie pushed himself up out of his chair, as if he had to head off his brother’s escape.
“Now, Stan. Hear me out. For once, don’t shut me down.”
“Alfie, this is way around the bend.”
“No, look. It started a few months ago. I started having dreams. Dreams so real you could touch them. Perfect clarity, down to smells. Beautiful dreams in wonderful places around the city. The Aquarium, botanical gardens, museums, along the Hudson. In every dream, she was there.” He pointed at the pictures on the table. “Over and over. Every time.”
“Dreams are just dreams.”
“But then it got worse. They turned from dreams to visions. I’d get flashes during the day. Snippets that would just jump into my head. I’d see her sleeping, the morning sun on her face. Or a few seconds of her cooking someth
ing at the stove here in my apartment. And every time, I’d get this warm feeling of love, of completeness.”
Stan started to look frightened. Alfie rushed to explain.
“So I figured that this must be a sign, a premonition of good things to come, of an end to being alone. Several of these flashes took place in and around the Museum of Natural History and Central Park. So I guessed she must be there a lot. So I started spending the afternoons there after work.”
“You spent every afternoon wandering around the outside of the museum? You’re lucky you weren’t arrested for planning a robbery or something.”
“Then one afternoon, I saw her leaving the museum. She carried books and a messenger bag, like she worked there.”
Alfie replayed the moment in his mind. The rush of adrenaline, the pounding of his heart, the unwarranted surge of complete familiarity and fulfillment. Just thinking of it made his skin tingle. He sorted through a few pages of his handwritten notes.
“From there, it didn’t take much to learn who she was. Linda Latsko. Assistant Curator of Minerals.”
Herself a diamond, he added to himself.
Stan rushed the table and grabbed the handwritten page and gave it a panicked once over.
“You have her address, her phone number, her email? Are you insane? This is wrong about ten different ways, and as a lawyer, I can tell you it’s a borderline felony.”
“You don’t understand,” Alfie said. “You haven’t seen her in the visions. The way she smiles at me, the way she feels when I hold her hand, the look in her eyes when I tell her I love her. This is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.”
“Neither is a year in Riker’s, which is what this will earn you,” Stan said. “She’s a total stranger.”
“Who’s also always alone. She lives alone, just goes to work and back every day, waiting for the right one.”
Deeper into Darkness Page 8