by Greig Beck
Matt saw now it wasn’t kindling at all, but piles of age-browned bones. Bodies, dozens of them, and further down there were many more piles. “Oh god no, the missing prisoners of war,” he whispered.
“I think so.” Maddock toed through the sticky slime. “And this … this mess we’re standing in is what happens to bodies that are left to rot in dripping water.”
“People soup,” Klara said.
“There were nearly thirty thousand of them,” Matt said. “Please tell me they were dead before they were sealed into the darkness.”
“I think so. Those piles of bodies were probably machine-gunned.” Maddock swept his boot to the side again lifting another bone shard. “This is like the other bones I’ve seen – it’s been splintered. I think they might have thrown grenades in here and blown the rest up.”
“They could never kill them all with machine guns and grenades,” Matt replied.
“No.” Maddock shook his head slowly. “And at the end of the war ammunition was becoming scarce and expensive.”
“These poor souls were condemned to work like slaves. And their final reward wasn’t freedom, but this.” Alojzy made a guttural noise in his throat. “Those devils.”
Maddock turned away. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”
The group continued on slowly, carefully placing one foot after the other. The sludge deepened to mid calf and Matt didn’t look forward to when they left and took their breathing equipment off – it would undoubtedly smell like corruption and ancient death. And he bet it’d be even worse as it warmed up.
Matt had been around dead bodies before, and there was something about old death that stuck to you. Whether it was the fats in the human body starting to liquefy or other bodily fluids becoming toxic, it usually meant the smell stayed with you. More often than not, clothing had to be thrown out or burned.
It took them nearly an hour to reach the next junction point, which was another huge door blocking their way. In its center was a huge eagle with wings spread wide, holding a globe that held the Nazi swastika.
“This looks promising,” Matt said, and then looked closely at the handle. “Uh-oh, this might be a problem.”
It was locked and, even though the chain and locking mechanism was bubbled with orange corrosion, it looked professionally made and the steel as thick as two fingers.
“Blow it,” Maddock said.
“On it.” Klara stepped forward.
“What about methane … you know, from the bodies?” Matt asked.
“Should have oxidized and dissipated to below five percent by now,” Klara said over her shoulder. She turned. “And if not, kiss your ass goodbye, Professor.”
“Great, we’ll join the body pile.” He looked to Maddock who just shrugged.
Klara snorted and went to work, packing and shaping the plastic explosives around the lock and then inserting a detonator pin.
“Back up fifty feet and turn away.” She set the timer and slide-walked back toward them. When she reached the group she faced away and counted down from five, and then …
The explosion was more a metallic pop, but Matt still felt the percussion wave travel down the tunnel to press on his eardrums. Small pops of light went off around them as obviously the more concentrated bubbles of methane ignited in the air. He gritted his teeth and held his breath, but they quickly vanished.
When they looked back the smoke haze was already dissipating, but the lock had crumbled.
Klara was first back and grabbed the huge bolt that was now unencumbered by the chains and lock. She slid it back with a deep and solid thunk.
Maddock joined her and both of them leaned into the iron door. “Count of three, two, one – heave …”
The metal door sounded like it screamed in agony as ancient steel hinges worked for the first time in around three quarters of a century.
The door opened a few inches, then a foot, and then two feet before Maddock called a halt. “That’ll do.” He waved Matt forward. “You’re up.”
“Cool.” Matt hurried forward, not even thinking about any risk as his curiosity and excitement were through the roof.
Maddock swapped his powerful flashlight for Matt’s so he had the big one. Matt switched it up to maximum illumination and shone the brilliant pipe of light in through the gap in the door.
He slid in and eased his foot down. “First bit of good news, it’s dry in here.” The floor was dust-covered but thankfully the sludge hadn’t made it into this section. His light didn’t extend to the end of the massive tunnel-like room. But the second bit of good news was that it wasn’t empty.
“It’s a warehouse,” he said softly.
“What do you see?” Maddock yelled.
Matt grinned. “Wonderful things.” He thought it appropriate he echo the words of the great Howard Carter from nearly a century ago, the famous archeologist who was the discoverer and first inside the tomb of the great pharaoh, Tutankhamun.
Matt shone the flashlight beam slowly around the huge warehouse-type room. Gold glinted back at him. Bars of it, stacked on crumbling wooden pallets and rising in blocks six feet high.
Thankfully, this room had been sealed and was watertight, so the artworks lined up against the wall were still vibrant, and those containing human visages stared back mutely from the shadows. Matt wondered about the things those painted eyes had witnessed before the iron door was sealed up for so many decades.
There were crates, some coffin sized, and some only a few feet in length, all marked with the German Reich’s eagle. Among the treasure there were racks of wine, and tinned foods – ham, fish, caviar – undoubtedly the supplies that were to keep a fleeing Hitler in the luxuries he was accustomed to.
Matt tried to see how large the room was but his light couldn’t possibly reach down to the end. He took off his mask and sucked in a deep breath and let it out.
“Air’s okay,” he said over his shoulder, and in another moment the entire group was inside the underground warehouse.
Alojzy immediately hefted a bar of gold. “I have searched for this half of my life. It is a pirate’s buried treasure and Aladdin’s cave all at once.” He looked like he was about to stick the bar in his pack.
“There’s blood money, and then there’s corpse gold. I’m betting this treasure was formerly wedding rings, gold keepsakes, and maybe even gold teeth once.” Matt didn’t look at the Polish guide. “If I believed in curses, and some I do, then I would think this treasure is tainted by the death of millions.”
Alojzy dropped the bar and it thudded to the ground. “I’m sure there are others who deserve it more than me.” He shrugged, but kept staring down at the golden brick for another moment.
Maddock raised his voice. “This will all be for the Polish and German governments to sort out. But for us, there is one thing and one thing only we are interested in.”
“The stone tablet,” Matt finished. He turned to the group. “We’ve all seen what the other stone we have in our possession looks like, and we know what the one from Hitler’s diary looks like – it’ll be around four feet high and three wide. It probably looks like a green-tinged headstone.” Matt turned to look down along the dark room. “I just hope it’s not boxed as that will be –”
“Impossible,” Klara finished.
Matt turned to her. “Not impossible. Just time-consuming, when we don’t have that much of it. It means we’ll need to rely on luck as well.”
“Okay, people, we’ll all take a quadrant each, fifty feet square and begin our search. But first, Professor Kearns, I want you to do a quick reconnoiter up along the tunnel length. I’d sure hate to spend days opening boxes, and then find that this sucker is leaning up against a wall a quarter mile down the tunnel.”
Matt grinned. “Yeah, good idea.” He started to turn away.
“And, Professor …”
Matt turned back. The HAWC team leader half smiled. “Don’t do anything dumb.”
“Me?” Matt chuckled. “
Impossible.”
Matt headed on down the long central space between the shelves and stacks. Behind him he heard Maddock giving orders.
Wish I had a pushbike, he thought as he flicked his light to the left to a shelving system of smaller boxes. His curiosity was screaming at him to look through a few – just a peek, it whispered.
What could he find, he wondered as he shone his beam onto a stack of iron-cladded crates.
Hitler’s Übernatürliche Kriegsführung – the supernatural warfare unit – was rumored to have located and retrieved wondrous things. There were bound to be items in these boxes that might blow his mind. Hitler spent millions of marks, plus the last few years of his campaign, searching out artifacts that were occult based and he believed might give him a military edge or even win him the war. Maybe he found some. Maybe he found a lot.
Matt’s light illuminated a magnificent golden harp. It was breathtaking. Most of the items would be returned to their owners or their estates, if they could be identified. The gold that was untraceable would be absorbed into the Polish and German gold reserves.
But the artifacts, the mysterious and magical things, would probably just vanish. The government might study some, and if they could determine what the things were or how they worked, then they might try and make use of them.
Much as that pained him, he knew he needed to focus. They were here to do a job because there was some bad shit going down outside and people were dying. Lots of them.
He remembered the quote. They have come and they will come again. Each ending greater than the last. Only those from the core can stop them, when …
The quote scared the hell out of him. Something big was coming, and it was his job to help understand it, and then, if possible, stop it.
CHAPTER 25
South-west of Walnut Grove, Redwood county, Minnesota
Private 1st Class Tony Bianchi tilted his helmet back and wiped his brow. Full kit, plus armaments was damned hot when it was eighty-five degrees in the shade. Plus it was only mid-morning. By early afternoon it’d easily slide past one hundred.
He and around five hundred other guardsmen had been called out and assembled in a broad battleline formation. As yet, they had no idea what it was they were supposed to repel or defend against. Their superiors, if they knew, would only tell them that they’d know it when it came.
Big help, he thought.
But the guys talked among themselves, and some mentioned a swarm, or plague, or something that wasn’t people. That had to be dumb considering him and most of their forces had standard armaments such as M4 carbines, a shorter and lighter variant of the M16A2 assault rifle.
Tony gripped his a little tighter, feeling the heat of the steel on his hands. The M4 was top of the line: an air-cooled, direct impingement gas-operated, magazine-fed carbine, with a 14.5-inch barrel and telescoping stock. He felt he could have taken down a rhino with this baby. But a swarm of bees or sumthin’ … like, what the fuck?
But then again, not all of them had carbines: a few of his buddies had been ordered to fix M320 grenade launcher hardware, and the grenade rounds were the new mini thermobarics, called heat blasters. That was a little better. But the real kicker and strangest call-up he’d ever heard was the requisitioning of flamethrowers.
Those bad boys had been abandoned as a weapon of war in the US for decades, but in many states it wasn’t illegal to own them. They could still be seen in use for land clearing, snow melts and rubbish burn-offs.
The brass had called for them, the public responded, and now they were fueled up, tested, and on the front line.
Swarm of bees, huh? Tony’s breath hissed out through clenched teeth. Yeah, coz somehow he didn’t think the adversary they were called to stand against with goddamn flamethrowers was going to be Jack Frost or an army of White Walkers.
Tony glanced left and then right; his military unit was eighty strong, and was spread in a skirmish line on one side of a small creek. It was to be their drop-dead zone – nothing was to get past them.
Behind him there were military transport vehicles, plus around twenty M1161 Growlers, or ITLSVs, Internally Transportable Light Strike Vehicles, all fitted with M2HB fifty-caliber BMG machine guns – they were light, fast, and packed a serious punch.
He shifted his feet, hoping it was all part of a war games trial, or maybe even a readiness test. But the looks on the faces of some of the brass, as well as the stories he heard of towns being wiped out, gave him a cold, leaden feeling in his gut.
Tony felt the trembling beneath his feet and, looking down, saw tiny pebbles jumping and bouncing on the hard-packed yellow dirt.
“What’s going on?” His buddies beside him started to look one way then the other.
“Tanks maybe?” one of them asked.
The vibrations felt a long way off and after a moment subsided. There was nothing on their far horizon and, just as he started to settle into his sweaty boredom again, one of the growlers started to move past them from behind. Major Terry Thorne was standing in its rear, yelling commands.
Their group leader, 2nd Lieutenant Foley, listened to his radio for a moment before yelling for them to form up. Apparently, HQ had just picked up an approaching mass.
“A mass? What the fuck is a mass?” Tony muttered.
Beside him, big Hamish McDonald grinned, showing a mouth full of crooked teeth. “Ten bucks says it’s all gonna be a drill.”
“Yeah, I hope so,” Tony whispered.
“There,” someone said from behind him.
Tony’s head whipped around to see a smudge on the horizon that looked to be a growing cloud, or, mass.
“Ah, fuck.” Tony grimaced, wishing he had been away on holidays when the guardsmen call-up came. “That don’t look like no drill to me.”
The cloud grew, rising to about a hundred feet and filling the horizon for half a mile. It came fast, and as it approached, Tony began to hear the deep hum and then also feel its vibration right to his back teeth.
“It’s like a chainsaw,” Hamish observed and pulled his helmet down a tad.
“A cloud of chainsaws.” Tony squinted. “And coming at us fast.”
“Hold the line,” Second Lieutenant Foley yelled from the bed of the growler behind them. “They’re just critters, and they are not going to get past us to bother the good people of Walnut Grove.”
“Critters? Like bugs?” Tony felt a little relieved. “Maybe like a locust plague.” He nodded. “That’s why we got the flamethrowers, right?”
“We’ll barbecue ’em.” Hamish grinned and held up his gun with his hand now on the grenade launcher trigger. “Come git some, little buggies.”
The cloud grew darker and more ominous as it approached. Tony could feel the hum deep inside him. It made the inside of his ears tickle and reminded him of a model airplane he had as a kid.
“There’s lots of them,” he said, but probably just to himself.
“On my order. Target where they are at their thickest.” Foley’s voice was a roar, and thankfully it remained strong and calm.
Tony felt his heart hammering in his chest and he was getting a little out of breath. He began to count down the swarm’s approach: ten and nine and eight and seven …
“Fire.”
Foley’s yell was drowned by the roar of the gunfire, grenade launching, and heavy machine guns from beside, behind, and all around him. It submerged the hum of the approaching bugs and almost immediately the air became filled with orange blooms of heat and flame.
Clouds rose from the guns and also from the swarm as it entered the wall of bullets and fire.
If it slowed them, it wasn’t by much, because out the other side of the gouts of smoke and flame the bugs came through. Then they found the first of the guardsmen.
They’re so fucking big, Tony thought. And there were more bugs than soldiers. A lot more.
It wasn’t long before the gunfire began to peter out as soldiers now wrestled on the ground – firstly with a f
ew of the things, and then they became subsumed by them.
Tony felt one clamp onto his leg. He looked down, not believing what he was seeing was even real. It was the size that freaked him out: it was as big as a cat and clung to him with too many long sharp legs that pierced his tough pants. And the freaky bug’s eyes were more human than insectoid. They swiveled up to his face.
Then something hit the back of his neck and stuck. Something hung there like a hot pinch and then he felt a spike or needle immediately pressed into his flesh. He took a hand from his gun to reach back and take a grab at the thing.
He gripped it; it was huge, hard and sharp, and immensely strong. The wasp-like creature felt more like a machine than a living creature, and refused to let him go. Its sharp legs tore at his skin.
More and more slammed into him. Beside him, his big buddy Hamish writhed and screamed on the ground, and the last thing Tony saw was his friend being fully cloaked in black, bristling bodies.
Tony first went to his knees, and then fully collapsed. Not so much from the weight of the monstrosities, but because it felt like his legs were gone. His once muscular legs, which he was told looked great in shorts and had at one time won school sprinting races, were now spread beneath him like empty pipes of meat.
One of the things moved to his face, and the eyes looked directly into his. Tony believed in the devil, and he knew it was looking at him right now.
Mercifully, consciousness left him as the light was shut out when the noise and the pain became his entire world.
*
“We believe they’re all dead, sir.” Hammerson gripped the secure phone hard as he spoke to five-star General Marcus Chilton. “The machine guns, thermobaric grenades, and flamethrowers didn’t even slow them down.”
On the line it sounded like the general growled for a moment. “How many?”
“Five hundred, general. We’re sending in drones to do a low altitude check right now. But satellite says the area is cold,” Hammerson replied. “Reports are coming in from all over the world. These weird bugs are destroying everything biological they come in contact with. And they are on the move. China, India, European states all want to talk, to pool ideas and resources.”