Now, Der Schädel removed the pistols from Rucker’s hands and placed a chair behind him. “Sit,” he commanded.
For a moment Rucker was back in his own mind. He sat. Then he was back in German trenches, once again living Der Schädel’s life.
Rucker watched a handlebar-mustachioed old man in an ill-fitting uniform with so many medals on his chest that he leaned to the left pin an Iron Cross on his uniform. It was for killing people. He killed as many as five Allied soldiers a day. The challenge of reading—of getting to know—the targets became his only joy. Soon he found himself working without a spotter. He watched as his trench mates tried to distance themselves from him. In an office with a mud floor, a weary line officer told him he’d been awarded leave in occupied Paris.
As Schädel shouldered his travel pack to leave, he told his former spotter, Helmut, that while he would enjoy Paris, Helmut could take the war no longer. As the steam truck pulled way from the rear embarkation point, Schädel watched in his mind’s eye as Helmut walked into his squad’s bunker, pulled the pin on a grenade, and blew up the entire squad. The others on the truck looked up in morbid curiosity at the small explosion in the bunker. Rucker/Der Schädel did not.
At first he found Paris was boring and depraved. The women were already easy enough for the taking, and no matter what sexual depravities piqued his curiosity, he could find partners to carry them out. Rucker knew it wasn’t what he craved. Schädel could make them do anything. Rucker/Schädel felt dirty. Like Caligula. Out of intellectual curiosity he tried to come up with some deviant acts that he could manipulate a woman, man, or several people into performing. He wondered how low he could make them sink. Sodomy. Pederasty. Bestiality. Sexual torture. Sexual cannibalism. Necrophilia. Rucker saw it all play out in candlelit rooms, in hotel parlors, in gas-lighted streets.
He watched, and he knew then that there was no limit to the sickness of the human mind and motive. There was no end to the evil and filth of which man was capable.
Rucker saw it sicken Der Schädel as much as it sickened him. He sickened myself. In a moment of clarity and regret, he went to the cathedral at Notre Dame to find—to beg—forgiveness of something better than this foul creature man. Instead he found priests who, after little prodding, admitted they had doubts about what they pretended to believe. Rucker/Der Schädel wanted to rip away his skin. He wanted to be clean. He felt his skin blister as he bathed in scalding water. He felt the cut and sting of the razor as he dry-shaved his body. He felt the blood trickle down his back and limbs as he scourged it. Like a snake he tried to shed his skin by flensing the outer layers. He wanted to be born anew. He wanted to be free of being human.
Rucker saw himself in a dirty Paris alleyway behind a surgeon’s home. He saw the surgeon’s fat wife open the door. At a touch she sank to her knees sobbing, living one of her many old nightmarish regrets over and over. The startled surgeon looked up from his dinner and started to protest this intruder, but with little more than a touch and a word he was doing Rucker’s bidding.
Rucker was laying on the surgical table. He heard the drip of blood onto the floor. He felt the scalpel as the surgeon—on Rucker’s direct orders—remove every extraneous bit of the human weakness from him—the temptation inherent in the flesh.
Rucker felt the entire surgical process as Der Schädel had felt it. He underwent the medical flensing of his skin, his ears, his nose, his face—his entirety—while conscious and without anesthetization; he had to maintain his manipulation of the surgeon throughout the process. He felt every agonizing, cleansing moment of the scalpel cutting away every inch of excess flesh moment. A warm center of dull pain welled up comfortably in his stomach, spreading out through his body. It seemed it would it never end. He felt the bandages wrapped over the burning of the antiseptic.
He awoke a day later, still on the table. The surgeon was on the floor. He’d cut his own throat. He felt the bandages. He could feel pressure but little in the way of pain or any other sensation. The surgeon had done his work. He had removed the softness, leaving only the beauty like the hard inner core. Flesh stripped to a minimum. Nerves all but gone. All that remained was that which survives human weakness and deaths—the skeleton.
Rucker saw that Der Schädel never returned to his unit at the front. He saw himself hide his new, pure face beneath bandages. He watched as he talked another soldier into throwing himself into the Seine holding a large stone. He took the man’s identity and medical discharge papers as the man sank into the cold embrace of the river. He did return to hunting, this time in Paris, not at the front. Now, his targets were whoever struck his fancy. Rucker felt Der Schädel’s disgust with the weak and depraved. Women always caused the most commotion, although Rucker/Der Schädel found it amusing to target a child on a playground and then predict which way his toddler sibling would run—toward or away from the body—and get both of them in one sweep. He saw himself shoot a man at close range in front of his wife, and then he convinced the woman she’d never seen him. There was a tartness to the flavor of the pleasure that flowed into him that time, and every such challenge only strengthened his ability.
More scenes of wonton, cold-blooded murder unfolded before him. Old men. Women. Children. Babies shot in their cribs. Anger welled inside Rucker’s gut, as well as disgust. But he also felt Der Schädel’s joy. It was almost sexual.
Rucker saw the headlines in the German papers about the Armistice. He saw himself back in Vienna, where from the shadows he took his vengeance on the medical board members who had driven him away from his home and his practice.
He saw through Der Schädel’s eyes himself sitting at an outdoor café, drinking a beer through a glass straw. He saw the chance meeting with Reichsführer Himmler. The mousy man inquired about his war injuries. When he probed the man’s mind, he was astonished to find underneath this bland exterior a purity of purpose and an absence of emotional empathy like nothing he’d ever encountered. There was a complete lack of any sense of guilt or small-minded morality. Rucker felt the man was his lost kin.
Rucker saw the two sitting together in a hotel lobby, drinking tea and discussing arcane Aryan beliefs, ancient Germanic runes, the ills of modern society, the decadence, and this exciting new leader of the National Socialist movement.
For once, Rucker saw, this was a mind he didn’t want to manipulate. His drive—his passions—were pure and good. He, too, wanted the world cleansed of the filth infesting it. He, too, saw a better tomorrow where a handful of perfect, strong Aryan masters ruled a world without depravity. A world without guilt. A New Order for the world. He saw their collaboration. He saw himself giving to Himmler the symbol for his nascent SS, the Totenkampf—the Death’s Head.
He swore a blood oath to Himmler. He saw himself in the underground laboratories in Wewelsburg. Dr. Übel explained that he could expand his powers tenfold by tapping into the electrochemical pulses of thought itself and amplifying the innate psychic energies. Human thought is nothing but a charge of energy passing between neurons in the brain, the doctor said. Why is it hard to imagine these energies could be amplified? he asked.
He explored psychokinesis, thought transference, clairvoyance, psychometry, and telepathy. The limits they had yet to define. His powers grew with every mind he took.
Rucker felt whatever was in his mind pull away, and he was released, though he still could not move his body.
“What the hell did you do to me?” he gasped. His muscles trembled and his soul ached from living through Der Schädel’s life, seeing it with his eyes and feeling the perverse joy of his sadism.
Der Schädel turned and faced Rucker with that awful rigor mortis grin.
“I think you know,” he said.
“What are you?” Rucker asked as he fought for breath and tried to unsee what he had seen—what he had just lived through.
“I am the tool by which we will take this world and impose order at last,” Schädel said. “We will burn the impure, the mongrels, and the wicke
d from existence and memory.”
It was only then that Rucker realized that Der Schädel’s mouth—what there was without the lips—did not move when he spoke. The voice was inside his own mind.
“Of course I’m speaking to your mind,” Der Schädel said inside his head. “I don’t even speak English, and your German is pathetic. Now, let’s learn about you. What delicious sins and guilt does your little mind harbor? Let me live them that I might truly know you.”
A bony white hand touched the top of Rucker’s head. He felt dizzy, but that was all.
Again Rucker was a passenger in his own mind. Together they saw Rucker running away from home to join the Texas Volunteer Group, the recriminations of his father still echoing in his memory. He saw his mother crying.
“Oh, this is wonderful. Wonderful!”
Der Schädel removed his hand from Rucker’s head.
“I know who you are and why you’re here, Fox.”
Rucker sensed he was being allowed to speak.
“My friends call me Fox. You’re not one,” he said.
Der Schädel shook his head in mockery.
“Ah, defiance. Impotent defiance. To be expected, I suppose. Look, the fact is, you have nothing to offer me. You know nothing about the spear and its power to raise the dead. You know nothing of the Reichführer’s grand plan to march this army across the world, cleansing it of the stain of weakness and lesser beings, lesser races. You’re just a soldier of fortune hired by merchants and pimps—colonial children who reject order for the illusion of freedom, but who are enslaved by their own greed. I have no use for you,” Der Schädel said. “However, you have a strong mind, and controlling such minds is how I grow my power.”
Again he delved into Rucker’s mind. Rucker saw his father and mother looking down on him in stern disapproval. His mother had tears in her eyes. His father’s face held nothing but disgust. His father, who emigrated to West Texas in the late 1800s after fighting the horrific Indian campaigns for the Northwest Alliance, who sought his own redemption, who had taught his son to respect all life and never to engage in that great government enterprise—war. His mother, who feared for his safety when he started flying at such a young age. He promised her he would be safe. He promised he would help people—be it crop dusting or speeding medicines and supplies to remote neighbor ranches on the West Texas plains.
And yet he’d gone against everything they stood for and everything he promised when he marched off to war at the age of sixteen. Oh, it was an all-volunteer organization with no relation to the Texas government—but his father said it was the next worst thing. His mother had been heartbroken.
It wasn’t just the big regrets. It was the little things. Disappointing his parents and himself by spending an afternoon riding horses with a girl he fancied instead of taking care of his ailing dog. Selfishly taking for granted the generosity of his parents, forgetting to thank them for presents on his birthday, forgetting his parents’ anniversary party. He saw himself lying to girls, as boys so often did, offering them ploys when they were offering their hearts.
He saw all the things he only knew years later that he should have done instead, the missed opportunities, the many times he thought only of himself and not others, as if the world existed for his purposes and no one else’s.
Then there was the war.
He had mouthed the platitudes about defending liberty, about protecting their French brothers, about it being a defensive war—and it was. But that’s not why he wanted to go.
It was about a sixteen-year-old boy craving adventure and action, and not caring about the consequences. He knew it and he knew his parents could see past his lies, too. But he wanted the glory and the honor that a just war promised the knights who answered the call to valor.
Then he saw real war. Men ripped to shreds by industrial killing devices. Friends mangled and burned alive in their cockpits. Entire towns burning. Mass executions. The lie of pilots fighting as “knights of the sky,” as if they were jousting honorably among the clouds, when in reality the goal was to slip behind the enemy plane and shoot him in the back before he even knew you were there.
He saw himself after the war, trying to find the names of the almost always faceless twenty-nine pilots he’d shot down, the twelve spotters, and the two airship crews. He saw the butcher’s bill he’d written himself and carried for years.
And then there were the ones who weren’t soldiers at all.
Yes, the Texas Volunteer Group had gone out of its way to enforce its own very specific rules of engagement—no mass bombings, no targets in civilian areas, no artillery outside battle zones—but inevitably it would happen. What the other militaries—no, strike that—what politicians called “collateral damage.”
It happened to him.
The attack on the train. British intelligence said it was a supply train carrying munitions to the front in France. His wing attacked it well behind the German lines, dropping incendiaries and emptying their guns into it. But it wasn’t munitions. It was carrying refugees. As he flew his last pass over the burning wreckage of the train, he saw a woman running away, her dress on fire.
Oh God. Something cold and decaying gripped his heart and rent it asunder. Just like before. Only this time, in his mind’s eye, his mother and father watched him make pass after pass at the train, dropping death onto the people—children and women and old men who never asked for this war.
He saw again his mother lying in her bed, wrapped in wool blankets against the chill that could never be warmed. He saw his father sitting vigil over her as cancer ate away at her bones. He saw her cursing his name—saying he was not her son. He saw his father turning his back. He saw his mother and father on the train. The people who had given him life and love. He saw himself shooting them. Dropping fire on them. Laughing about adventure as they burned alive. He saw their corpses pointing accusing fingers at him. Damning him.
A cold blast of air shook him only for a second. The outer hatch to the cargo bay was open. He stood before it. It welcomed him. It beckoned him. It would end the turmoil eating him up inside. It would wash away the guilt and the pain. He merely had to step through it. He merely . . . had to . . . wait . . . the guilt? He had to ask . . . why?
It was guilt by which Der Schädel had a hold on him. But it wasn’t real. He’d never shot his parents. They were not on the train. He’d not been there when his mother passed. The more he forced his mind to relive his real memories and regrets, the more he was able to remember what had really followed. When he realized that, the grip on his mind loosened. Rucker realized then that he had a perfect, unbeatable weapon to use against all this guilt. He embraced the unconditional, undying love he knew his parents felt despite all the mistakes he had made. He saw his epiphany to not judge his child self by the standards of his adult self. He embraced the way he had dealt with the crippling remorse he felt after the war. The pocket of resistance in his heart and mind grew.
Rucker put hands on each side of the cargo bay door, ready to jump.
“I . . . I can’t,” he said meekly.
Der Schädel was expecting some pushback. Admirable, but useless. He approached Rucker from behind, goading his mind. The pressure on Rucker’s pocket of resistance grew, but it only hardened his resolve.
“Yes, Fox. You know your sins. You know your guilt,” Der Schädel whispered into his mind. He leaned over Rucker’s shoulder. “Wash it away. Jump. Ju—”
Rucker put all of his energy, his strength, and his heart into a single explosion of movement. His elbow smashed into Der Schädel’s face with a loud and enormously satisfying wet crunch.
“Shut up, freak show. It’s my mind. Stay out.”
The Graf von Götzen was scheduled to make port in the coast city of Volos, on Greece’s eastern coast, within an hour. The cool wind from the open outer hull door—some 10,000 feet above sea level—was a welcome breeze that blew away the stench of fear and despair.
Deitel was attending to Profess
or Renault, who despite his age and ordeal was none the worse for wear. Physically anyway. He’d be dealing with what Der Schädel had done to the professor’s mind for a long time to come. Terah held Renault’s hand.
The two Gestapo thugs were tied up, gagged, and nailed inside wooden cargo crates. Skorenzy was tied up but sitting in a chair, looking angry. Der Schädel, meanwhile, was on his knees, still reeling from the blow to the head he’d taken, as well as the hefty dose of scopolamine Deitel had administered to keep his mind out of focus.
Rucker sat on a crate. Sullen.
“I think Professor Renault is okay to move now,” Deitel said. “How are you?”
Rucker didn’t meet the doctor’s eye.
“I’ll live.”
“How did you? I mean . . . what . . . did he . . . ?” Deitel stammered, not sure what he was asking.
Rucker wasn’t upset by the doctor’s usual prying. But he didn’t feel like explaining to them what was rattling around in his head.
Der Schädel had gone after the heaviest burden Rucker had. When he went off to fly in the Great War, it went against everything his parents ever taught him and everything they ever valued. They’d given him everything good that he had in life, and he threw it all away like some spoiled child, telling them they didn’t know what they were talking about.
“He went after my guilt,” he finally said. “My parents. The war. All that.”
Maybe the war was the right thing, but he knew he went for the wrong reasons. It hurt them. It broke their hearts. And of course, they were right. It was horrible and he had done things he could never make right.
He never got the chance to say anything again to his mother—she died while he was still in France.
Terah was now holding Rucker’s hand. Deitel put a hand on his shoulder. Rucker looked at the doctor’s hand with annoyance.
“Hand,” he said. The doctor pulled it away.
Death's Head Legion: The Spear of Destiny: Part Two of Three Page 9