American Reich

by Pliss, Todd

  “Where are the tests with radioactive material done?” Wayne wanted to know.

  The scientists kept silent.

  Linda aimed the gun at the female scientist’s chest and stated, “I’ll just have to waste them.”

  “Ninth floor,” the male scientist mumbled.

  “What was that?” Wayne loudly asked.

  “Ninth floor,” the male scientist said in a higher volume. “That is where that type of testing is done.”

  “Good boy,” Linda said. “Now you’ll live, though you certainly don’t deserve to.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Wayne said. Gilda shook her head and frowned disapprovingly at her counterpart.

  They walked down the corridor cautiously. Linda turned to Wayne, the gun clutched tightly in her hand, “How do we get upstairs unnoticed?”

  “I’ll let you know when I know,” he said and, eyeing the pistol, he added, “And put that thing away. It looks odd that a research person is carrying a gun.”

  Linda nodded toward the corner, “Let’s find the elevator.”

  They turned the corner and

  a plainclothes German man exited from the elevator down the hall. Wayne looked down as the stranger passed them, careful to not make eye contact. The door hissed closed behind them and, Wayne pushed the button for the ninth floor. He said, “I have to get a hold of the crystals that I came here for. I didn’t intend to drag you into this with me. It would have been safer for you to have stayed back at the plant.”

  “My life has never been safe. I was going to escape from Ravensbruck soon, anyway. You saved me the trouble.”

  The elevator halted at its destination and the door slid open. Sauntering out onto the ninth floor hallway, with its generous view of the bomber and the feverish activity taking place below, Wayne became focused on the task at hand. He only had one chance to do this. It wouldn’t be long before the two scientists were found and a small army would be searching for them.

  “Which way?” Linda asked.

  Wayne surveyed the long corridor, devoid of people, which branched in an inviting way in the left direction and also in the right direction. Turning his gaze to the right, he said, “This way is as good as any.”

  Passing by an unmarked door, Wayne said, “I might as well take a look in this room. Stay here by the door and keep a watch out for any trouble.”

  “Okay,” Linda responded.

  Wayne turned the doorknob and slowly walked into the unknown room. Inside, human skulls sat lined up neatly in a big bookcase, as if they were great literary works being displayed in a library. A youthful doctor, busy performing an autopsy on a corpse strapped down to a rolling medical table, had just finished the intricate process of removing the brain from the cadaver. The doctor, his smock bloodied and holding the head organ in his blood soaked arms, turned around at the intrusion. Wayne flinched at the sight he beheld. Nausea swiftly overcame him. He darted out of the room.

  Wayne ran past Linda, to the nearby corner of the corridor, next to a casement that contained a fire extinguisher. His esophagus went into convulsions. He threw up.

  Linda approached him in the corner and asked, “What did you see?”

  Wiping his mouth with his shirtsleeve, Wayne regained his composure. The feeling of nausea left him. “Nothing worth talking about,” he paused, “Why don’t we look for some type of warning sign for the dangerous material outside the room?”

  “Makes sense to me,” Linda agreed.

  They casually surveyed the entire floor, each time having to avoid passersby.

  “Shit!” Wayne exclaimed after the fruitless search. “We covered most of this floor and still nothing.”

  Linda looked at a steel door down the hall with a digital readout, “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. The sign was out.”

  Linda approached it. The sign blinked on and off before reading: ACHTUNG – RADIOAKTIV MATERIELL.

  “Please, let this be it,” Wayne said. “How many...” He paused as a person, dressed in lab clothes, passed by. “How many radioactive areas can this place have?”

  “Hopefully, only one,” Linda returned.

  “Have that gun of yours handy,” Wayne said. “We might need it. In case there’s anyone in the room, do you think you could ask, in German, where the Gadolinium crystals are stored?”

  “The what crystals?”

  “Gad-o-lin-ium.” Wayne spelled it out, as if trying to teach a kid a new word, “G-a-d-o-l-i-n-i-u-m. Can you remember that?”

  “Gadolinium, got it.” Linda said, irritated.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’m just—“

  “Time is wasting,” Linda reminded him.

  “You’re right,” Wayne concurred. “Let’s go.” They quietly entered the room.

  Two middle-aged chemical engineers were busy at work on a contraption that Wayne thought looked much like an electron particle generator machine that he had used during his first year Introduction to Physics class at NYU. The intruders went unnoticed. “Ask about the crystals,” Wayne silently mouthed to Linda.

  Linda cleared her throat to get the attention of the preoccupied men. The chemists turned around and fixed their gaze upon the uninvited interlopers. Linda said, “Wo ist der Gabolidium Kristalls?”

  Neither man offered a response.

  “Wo ist der Gabolidium Kristalls?” Linda repeated.

  Wayne trailed the bearded chemist’s stare to the identity tag. His stomach sank, “All right, just give us what we want and we’re out of here. You won’t be hurt. I need Gadolinium crystals. Where are they?”

  Linda retrieved the gun from her coat pocket and directed it at the worried chemists.

  Dr. Krauss turned the intruders’ attention towards a large industrial-sized refrigerator that had a locked padlock on its door. “The mixture is not a stable one,” he warned.

  “Why do you want them?” a chemist asked in broken English.

  Wayne ignored the question. Studying the appliance, he demanded to know, “Where’s the key to this thing?”

  Not bothering to wait for the answer, Wayne firmly grasped the handle of a hammer that had been resting on a worktable with other tools of its kind. He banged, with all of his muscular force, the pounding tool down on the padlock. It remained intact. He pounded the tool again. On the fourth try, the padlock broke apart. Wayne swung open the refrigerator door. Inside, it was stocked with jars, vials, flasks, and bottles of many different sizes and shapes, all of which had been punctiliously labeled with the correct names of the various compounds and mixtures that they boldly held. Wayne spotted a vial containing a light, greenish substance. He examined the word on the label: GADOLINIUM. Wayne cautiously picked up the small vial and removed it from the icebox. “I go it, Linda,” he exclaimed and placed the sealed vial in his shirt pocket.

  “Great,” she said, still aiming her gun at the chemists. “What are we going to do with them?”

  Wayne glanced around the laboratory-workshop and observed a roll of electrical cable wire. “No problem with that.” With his hands, he motioned to the chemists to move towards the room’s head radiator. “Come on, get together; no wasting time.”

  The two middle-aged men did as instructed and bunched close to one another. “Please,” Dr. Krauss pleaded, “you must be very careful with the substance that you have taken. It can be...”

  “Keep your concerns to yourself, Doc,” Wayne said. He grabbed a pocketknife from the tool table and began to rapidly tie the cable wire around the chemist’s collective arms and feet, using the knife to cut the wire as needed.

  “Your type sickens me,” Linda informed the captives. “Have you no conscience about what you do?”

  “They don’t care,” Wayne replied for them. “They just follow orders like the rest of them. Mindless robots.” He finished securing the bound chemists, with additional cable, to the radiator. “Thanks, gentlemen. You have just saved the world. Before you know it, you’ll both be working as hi
gh school science teachers.”

  Their mission accomplished, Wayne and Linda left.

  “Hans,” Dr. Krauss said, “reach into my back pocket. I have a lighter. Use it to burn the wire.”

  Wayne pushed the first floor button on the elevator’s control panel, in the same elevator that, formerly, he had freely taken up to the ninth floor. The door slid shut and the cab initiated its descent. Linda at his side, he said, “You screwed up.”

  “What?” she barely raised her voice.

  “You asked for Gadolinium crystals,” Wayne pointed out. “They are GADOLINIUM crystals. You pronounced them wrong. I thought you had it down.”

  “Are you calling me stupid?”

  “No, I didn’t say that. It’s simply that you have no idea...”

  Linda became mad. “What are you bitching about? You got them, didn’t you?”

  “It’s important!” Wayne stated irately. “That’s probably what tipped them off that there was something fishy about us. There’s too much riding on this.”

  “Maybe we should think of getting out of here now instead of arguing,” Linda firmly suggested.

  The elevator stopped. Wayne pressed in the “door close” button, preventing the lift’s door from opening.

  “What are you doing?” Linda asked.

  With his hand, Wayne wiped away freshly formed droplets of salty perspiration from his forehead. “Everything has gone smoothly so far. I need a few moments to think.”

  “About?”

  Wayne, after remaining silent for half a minute, said, “About how we can get safely back to New Berlin. Our best bet is to get a hold of a car.” As if to build up his confidence, he reiterated, “Yep, that’s what we’ll have to do. Get a hold of a car.”

  “We can do it,” Linda reassured him. “I know we can.”

  Wayne released the “door close” button. When the door opened up, with the building’s first floor spread out before them, he said, “Just act like we belong, and no one will bother us. I used to sneak into these fancy, rich folks beach clubs all the time. It was easy. Just acted like I belonged there.” They exited the elevator.

  They ambled toward the main door. Each time a passerby walked by, Wayne’s heart would skip a beat. He avoided eye making eye contact with anybody. Finally reaching the big main entrance, Wayne extended his hand to grip the large door’s brass handle, splendidly bedecked with little ornamental swastikas. Wayne’s fingers, a mere six inches from clutching the gateway to freedom, paused in its movement.

  A shrieking whistle, much like the one that would wake the prisoners at Hollenburg, sounded out. Wayne, temporarily immobilized by a sudden terror, tried hard to brush off the alarm. He could not, for he knew the purpose of its being. In a mania, he threw his sweaty fingers around the brass door’s big handle. Linda heard something click in the door that sounded like a lock. Wayne pushed on the swastika-garnished handle. It would not budge. He slammed his upper body into the large door, with no success in getting it in motion.

  “Shit,” Linda exclaimed, almost inaudible above the deafening alarm that continually blared through the numerous loudspeakers.

  Wayne twisted around to behold a Nazi Rottwachtmeister and two Nazi military policemen less than one hundred feet away and rapidly closing in on them.

  “You got any good ideas now?” Linda questioned.

  “Run as fast as you can.” He sprinted off, with Linda keeping a steady pace behind.

  Corporal Bruener clicked his walkie-talkie, “We have located the intruders on the first floor near the entrance.” He gestured and the police took off after them.

  Wayne and Linda darted past the huge German bomber, knocking technicians, busy at work, out of their way.

  Not far behind the intruders, a Nazi Unterwachtmeister aimed his high-powered machine gun at them. As he was about to pull the lever, the Nazi Corporal snatched the deadly weapon from his hands. “No. Not near the plane,” Corporal Bruener scolded him.

  With a cluster of more Nazi military policemen gaining ground on them, Wayne was aware that his only chance was to escape the building. He came upon a red emergency door exit. “Excellent,” he said and tried to pry it open. “Jesus,” he vented his frustration and pounded a fist on the door.

  “I see a staircase over there,” Linda urged. A bullet hit the emergency exit door a mere two inches above her head.

  “Go!” They ran into the stairway and moved up the steps. “We have to get out of this damn complex,” he said between puffs.

  “I’m taking out any of those Nazi bastards that I can,” Linda grasped her pistol tightly.

  Corporal Bruener, a squinty-eyed slender man of average height, and a squad of military policemen, their weapons drawn, entered the stairway taking three steps at a time. Just as he turned the corner, the Corporal saw the passageway door shut.

  “Ah, yes,” the Corporal said self-satisfactorily in his low voice, “they are not as smart as they think.”

  An alert military policeman pressed, “Sir, are you sure it’s not a trap?” Corporal Bruener, unlike most of the men of his rank, lent an open ear to his subordinate’s opinions.

  “Spread out. Consider them armed and dangerous. Max and Bernhard, with me.” The Corporal and his two extensively trained men strutted into the fourth floor corridor as the others continued moving speedily up the stairs.

  Bruener and his goons, firearms cocked quietly swept into a room with a heavy leaded glass wall. A silhouette shifted across the wall; he had the same build as Wayne. Bruener, never shy about taking credit for his good actions, situated his gun on the murky figure in the room and fired. The glass crumbled.

  “Are you crazy?” the injured man, who had been shot in the left thigh cried out. The Corporal frowned and looked down at the scientist. His walkie-talkie chirped.

  “Bruener, report!”

  “We are narrowing in on the intruders, sir,” Bruener responded.

  “State your position,” the powerful voice beamed through the communication device.

  “Floor four, south wing.”

  “Carry on. Over.”

  Bruener clipped his walkie-talkie back onto his black leather-banded utility belt. He waved his men on.

  Wayne and Linda frantically tried to open any door on the fourth floor as they rushed down the hall. All of them, though, had been automatically locked by the building’s advanced security system. Turning a bend in the hallway, into the east wing, Wayne spotted a fire extinguisher.

  “When I turn this on, grab any guns that you can,” he told Linda.

  “Sir,” one of the military policemen uttered, drawing his superior’s attention to a welcome sight across the way. The search was over.

  The pack of Nazis roved into the east wing corridor. They were greeted with a spray of foamy white, chemically based fire retardant. Their hands went to their eyes as they screamed in pain. Their weapons dropped to the ground as they were covered head to toe in the white foam until they resembled Nazi Snowmen.

  Linda snatched up the pistols off the floor and wedged one into the waist of her pants. She handed the other to Wayne.

  Two more guards rounded the corner with their guns raised to fire. Linda popped hers off first and shot one of them in the head. The other guard leaned out of cover quickly and fired, missing both of them. Linda attempted to fire again, but her gun jammed.

  The guard heard the clicking of a jammed weapon and stepped out of cover. He aimed at Linda, but before he could fire Wayne shot at him and missed. In the time it took for the guard to realize that Wayne had missed; he and Linda were already through the door with machine gun fire echoing behind them.

  Another pair of well-armed military policemen arrived on the scene. “Have they been located?” one asked.

  The private nodded at the broken glass, then kicked out the remaining pieces that were still attached to the door frame.

  The three men cautiously entered the room, coming into a large area that functioned as an administrative o
ffice, complete with computer terminals, bland desks, and unattractive file cabinets.

  They wandered slowly, light on their feet, searching for their prey. Nothing stirred. The military policemen roamed past one of the six bulky metal desks present in the room, which seemed to be laid out in a random configuration.

  Wayne pushed a rolling desk chair smack into one of the guard’s spidery legs. The guard tripped back against his partner and they both tumbled to the ground.

  Linda, hiding behind a tall beige file cabinet, shoved the heavy organizer onto them as they fell.

  Wayne turned his gun on the remaining military policeman. “Don’t move, asshole,” he said simply.

  The guard didn’t hesitate. With a lightning-quick jerk of his foot, he kicked the weapon out of Wayne’s hand and jumped him.

  “Fucking swine,” he growled. His partner, having freed himself from the filing cabinet, jabbed his closed fist into Wayne’s face, giving him a taste of his own blood.

  The third man stood up carefully and as Linda turned to take his gun, he grabbed Linda’s right leg and twisted it. She collapsed to the floor.

  The private pulled her hair and snickered, “You want to play games, bitch? Is that what you want?” He elbowed her in the mouth hard. He grinned sadistically.

  “How about one more, you troublemaking bitch?” He swung back about to elbow her again when she rammed her foot into his crotch. He groaned in pain and released his grip on Linda as he curled into the fetal position.

  “How’s about one more, you Nazi piece of shit?” Linda sarcastically said as she whacked him again.

  She snatched the private’s gun from him, stood up, and aimed the firearm at the military policemen, busy dishing out their own brand of punishment, on top of Wayne.

  “Get off of him,” she instructed them.

  The military policemen did as ordered and backed up. After a moment of truce, one man lunged forward at Linda. She didn’t wait a second and he was promptly shot in the gut. He fell to the ground groaning in pain. His partner, not nearly as brave a man, stood in place and swallowed hard.

  “Head or tails?” Linda asked Wayne.