by Tad Williams
And right now, that well-scrubbed torturer was right above me, fifty yards or so uphill in his redwood mansion, rejoicing in his victories. My priority was to free his prisoner and get out again. But if I had the time and the opportunity, well, I would be happy to give Uberhardt a little taste of his own medicine. A fatal dose, if possible. Ugly thoughts for an angel on Christmas Eve, I know, but there they were.
Over the next couple of minutes I thought up at least a dozen different ways of getting past the fence and onto the property, all of them stupid or far more complicated than likely to succeed. At last I decided on the Gordian Knot approach, which is where I usually wind up.
You ever seen a Scotsman tossing a caber, one of those telephone-pole things they like to chuck around at the Highland Games? I found a big chunk of fallen tree, a sodden log longer than I am tall, then heaved the heavy, moss-covered thing up into a rough vertical and staggered back toward a part of the fence with a generator hut just on the other side. I’m grateful for my greater-than-human strength (I don’t think an ordinary guy could have done it, because it nearly herniated me to death) but I was even more grateful when I could finally let it fall. It did, taking down the chain-link fencing with a thump, a crash, and a twang of curling razor wire. I ran as lightly as I could over the log and, once inside, clambered up onto the generator hut and lay flat on the roof with a large rock in my hand.
At that point, with my adrenaline levels pushing all meters into the red, my earbud beeped right in my ear. Pleep! It startled me so badly that if I’d had a less angelic bladder I’d probably have wet myself.
“What? I said radio silence, George!”
“Bobby? I know you said not to call, but Javier’s not answering me from up in the cab. It’s been a while. I’m worried.”
I tried to calm myself by imagining what it might be like to be a pig with a man’s brain trapped in the back of a truck parked in the middle of Werewolf Country Safari. “Look, he probably just stepped out for a piss and he’s staying quiet, which is actually good strategy. Seriously, George, I can’t talk right now. Just hunker down in the truck and when I have a moment, I’ll check back.”
“I’m not sure…”
I heard footsteps. “Can’t talk.” I broke the connection.
The slimy crunch of wet leaves got louder. I held my breath as the smaller biker guy I’d named Scrounger came around the edge of the house. He was on ground level now, looking so alert he could have posed for a Today’s Army recruitment poster, except for the scruffy beard and greasy hair and the Iron Cross tattooed on one cheek. He was glaring around in all directions, so I stayed flat against the roof of the generator shack. When he got to just beneath where I was, he crouched down to examine the log lying across the fence, probably trying to decide whether the fall had been an accident or not. He looked like he might be thinking “not an accident”, so I edged forward a little and brained him with my rock.
I could have finished him off then, quickly and silently, but as unpleasant as he appeared, I wasn’t willing to kill him, since I could already tell he wasn’t an immortal demon. In fact, compared to those guys, Scrounger might have been comparatively innocent -- you know, a few convictions for meth sales, a prison shanking or two. It’s God’s job to judge these guys, not mine. So once I was certain he wasn’t going to get up anytime soon, I climbed down off the generator shack and left him there as I headed for the house, keeping my eyes open for Smokes, the big guard with the cigarettes.
The house was built on the side of a hill, and dropped off steeply on one side to a cement and brick patio that looked as if it didn’t get used very often. As I got closer, I still saw no sign of Smokes, or of any general alarm being raised. I hoped the big guard had been inside using the can or something when I breached the fence; maybe he didn’t even know yet. I found my way around to the back stairs and went up them as quietly as I could. I figured I’d start at the bottom and search upward. But something caught my attention.
The first ground floor window was a big panoramic one, the kind you put in to take advantage of a great view. I’m not sure how good the view was from inside (you’d mostly be seeing cyclone fence between you and the woods) but from the outside the view was astounding. Because the room inside was beautifully decorated for Christmas, like something out of a magazine spread. Tinsel, fake icicle decals on the window, a gorgeous tree covered in sparkling lights, the whole deal. There were even wrapped presents underneath the tree, and not just a few. I stared so long my breath started to fog the glass -- maybe twenty seconds, which was stupid. Because right between second twenty and twenty-one, somebody hit me in the back of the head with what must have been a gun butt. Apparently Smokes was pretty fucking stealthy after all.
It got weirder, because the first thing I saw when I woke up was Santa Claus himself. No shit.
I was now inside that room with all the lights and decorations and the beautiful tree, and the person staring at me was the smiling, white-whiskered fellow who comes down your chimney once a year. The two of us weren’t alone, though. Santa had one of his helpers -- the large, biker-ish elf I’d named Smokes stood a short distance away with a sawed-off shotgun in his hand and a sour expression on his face. But it was Santa that really freaked me out. Alive and sitting right in front of me with a bushy beard and a big, friendly grin on his face.
Look, I’ve seen as many stupid movies as you have. I know what Nazi scientists are supposed to look like -- lean, cruel, maybe with a scar. What they are definitely not supposed to look like was Jolly Old Saint Nick. But the guy smiling at me had the round, red cheeks, the full white beard, the friendly, jelly-jiggling belly. Further departing from the approved Hollywood model of scientific Nazi-hood, he was wearing not a bloodstained lab coat or an SS uniform but a pair of red striped pajamas, an expensive red bathrobe, and fur-lined slippers.
I, on the other hand, was in a chair, wearing only my pants. My ankles had been duct-taped, and my hands were secured tightly behind my back, too. I was pretty sure they’d already decided I was naughty, not nice. I cleared my throat. “Doctor Uberhardt, I presume.”
He held up my wireless earbud. “Who is on the other end of this? Who sent you?” He had a bit of a Germanic accent, so I was pretty sure this was the Monster of Mauthausen in person, although he looked awfully damn good for one hundred and three. He said, “Tell me quickly and perhaps you will get a bullet in the head and a quick death.” His eyes were the only part that didn’t look like something out of an old Coca Cola ad, glinting little flecks of blue that might be the last color you saw before hitting Arctic water under the ice.
“What a lovely gift idea,” I said. “You’re clearly in the seasonal mood.”
The earbud crackled in his fingers, so low I wasn’t sure if anyone heard it but me, Old Angel Ears. I heard George’s voice saying “Bobby …?” then Uberhardt crushed the earbud between his thumb and index finger like it was a fragile, blown-glass ornament. Centenarians shouldn’t be that strong.
“Well, you won’t need that anymore … Bobby,” he said, and dropped a small shower of plastic fragments on the carpet.
I was testing my bonds -- duct tape, which is always nasty. But not impossible. Even with my angel-ized body, I couldn’t just snap it -- they’d wound it around my ankles and wrists several times -- but I’d found what felt like a loose screw head on the back of the chair seat, so I began sawing the edge of the tape that held my wrists against it, and talked to cover the movement. “Seasons greetings from Petar Vesić.”
“Petar Vesić died yesterday. You no longer have an employer.”
“Some deals last longer than you’d think. Vesić wants his grandson Anthony back.”
Santa-Nazi raised an eyebrow and his smile widened. “Is that all? You can find him buried in a shallow grave out by the south fence.” My heart felt cold in my chest: from the offhand way Uberhardt said it, I knew it had to be true. “I took what I wanted from him a long time ago. In a sense, Vesić already has him
back.”
Damn, now I really wanted to kill this bastard -- if I could ever get free. I felt the edge of the outermost strip of tape part where I was working it. I’d have to tear through a lot more before I’d be able to do anything, though, and even if I got loose, what was I going to do? My guns were gone somewhere with my jacket, shirt, and shoes. All they had left me seemed to be Petar Vesic’s silver bullet, which I could feel pressing against my leg in my thigh pocket. Of course, without the Colt revolver still buried in the hospital garden, it was quite useless, unless I could somehow convince Uberhardt to swallow it and choke.
I set to work trying to stretch the loop of tape around my ankles. They’d taped right over my pants, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. “So you went to all that trouble to kidnap the man’s grandson, then you just killed him?” I asked. “What was the point? I mean, I know you concentration camp doctors are all supposed to be crazy, but come on! That’s just wasteful.”
Uberhardt got out of his chair and walked over to me. He leaned down and grabbed my face in his surprisingly strong fingers -- no fucking way this guy was forty years past retirement age! -- and dragged it up until I was staring into his bright blue eyes. “Wasteful. Hah! Do we speak of things wasted? You are one of God’s angels, and you spend your time on things like this, things that don’t concern you… or God.”
Okay, that surprised me. I lost the thread of wherever I’d been leading him. “You know what I am?”
“I have been around a long time, by the standards of mortal men. I have seen many things -- things even you might find hard to credit. Oh, yes, I have met your kind before.” Uberhardt let go of my face and straightened up. “I know you can die, or at least your body can. I know you can feel pain. And I am good at making people feel pain. Now tell me, why are you truly here. No angel would waste his time on a mongrel like Petar Vesić.”
“I already told you.”
He nodded. Smokes leaned over and hit me hard with the back of his hand, hard enough to make my head buzz and my vision blur. “Do not treat me like I am stupid,” the doctor said. “Tell me who truly sent you.”
“Okay, okay! You’re right, it was… it was the Festivus Fairy, Mr. Claus. I think she’s moving into your turf.”
He didn’t even nod. This time Smokes hit me with the butt of the shotgun just beside my right eye. I was pretty sure my cheekbone was broken. Blood dribbled from my face onto my bare chest.
The jolly old elf looked from me to the floor with distaste. “We are going to make a mess. My daughter worked hard to decorate this room. She would be upset if there is blood. We should take him downstairs to the lab.”
“Carl’s busy puking in the bathroom down there,” said Smokes. “I think he’s got a concussion. We owe this guy for that, too.” And he gave me another shot with the gun butt, this time on the back of my head, and only slightly less vicious than the previous blow. I heard nothing but jingle bells for long seconds afterward. “Some angel,” he said. “Look at him. You sure, Doc?”
“I know the stink of sanctity,” said Uberhardt. “We will not take him upstairs, because the boy is sleeping there.” He turned toward me, and said the following like it was supposed to make sense. “The boy needs his rest. He gets too excited and thinks he hears Santa Claus coming. Then he does not sleep.” He turned to Smokes. “Go and bring some towels to put on the carpet, Henry.”
So Scrounger was really Carl, Smokes was named Henry, and I was about to become a series of stains on some towels. I was learning things, but they weren’t exactly the kind of things I’d wanted to learn.
I felt another layer of the tape around my wrist come apart at the edge, but it still wasn’t enough to let me do anything useful. I decided to concentrate on my legs for a while. As I mentioned, they had taped my ankles right over my pants -- dumb move, because duct tape doesn’t hold fabric the way it does skin. I started trying stretch the tape. Discreetly, of course, since Herr Doctor Santa was still sitting across fro me. Meanwhile, I was putting together the bits of what I’d heard, and although I didn’t know exactly what it all meant, I sure didn’t like the shape of it. Uberhardt had a daughter. The daughter seemed to have a child. Vesić’s grandson was dead, but he’d “served his purpose” first.
Henry came back with a pile of fluffy white towels in his arms, like an ugly giant carrying clouds. I discreetly slowed down my work on the taped bonds as he bent to arrange them around me, but Henry’s pockets were full of tools that looked like they belonged to a demented leatherworker, and I didn’t think he was going to be making toys with them, so I kept scraping quietly at the tape around my wrists and desperately pushing my ankles apart to stretch the tape, like a Thighmaster exercise in reverse.
When the towels were arranged beneath me like the blanket at the base of a particularly disturbing Christmas tree, The Artist Formerly Known As “Smokes” stood up and began to gag me with a rank bandana. I was still a few seconds short of having made enough of a gouge in the tape around my wrists to snap it outright, but I was out of time. So when Henry moved around in front of me, I tugged my pants-leg out of the loosened duct tape (not as easy as it sounds) then kicked him right in his popcorn balls. My feet were bare, as I mentioned, and it felt like I broke my big toe, but I used the leverage of my seat in the chair to drive that kick so hard that I lifted Henry up onto his tiptoes with it. He fell like a bag of rocks, so far beyond useful speech he only gagged and made little whistling noises.
Feliz Navidad, fuckhole, is what I wanted to say, but I didn’t waste the breath. My attack on Henry had caught Uberhardt by surprise, but the doctor was already fumbling in the end table beside his chair for what I felt certain was a gun -- probably something cool and Nazi-ish like a Luger that would blast me full of cool and Nazi-ish bullets. I heaved against the tape on my wrists as hard as I could, tensing every muscle in my arms, neck, and shoulders until they felt like swollen blood-sausages. I shouted in agony, but finally snapped the bonds. Even as I did, I saw that Henry had recovered just enough from his ball-booting to level his sawed-off toward me with one wobbly arm. I threw myself out of the chair and under his line of fire, bumping his arm with my shoulder to knock the blast up and out of line. It still went off next to my ear like a bomb, and I couldn’t hear anything except a distant ringing as I got hold of his greasy head and banged it several times against the floor until I felt him go limp. I was exhausted, deaf, and in a lot of pain -- hey, you sit for an hour with your hands taped behind your back while people slug you in the skull -- but I was worried Uberhardt might have found what he was looking for, so I rolled to the side and looked back. Turned out, I didn’t need to worry. Somebody had killed Christmas.
Well, that’s what it looked like at first, because Dr. Jochen Uberhardt was sprawled on his back. It wasn’t immediately obvious because of the angle, and because of his red dressing gown, but he had taken the largest part of Henry’s shotgun burst, mostly in his head and upper torso. The doctor was a bloody mess, his beard and face spattered in scarlet, but he was still alive, still breathing; as I crawled toward him his weird blue eyes followed my movements. I grabbed his cane, a heavy wooden job now lying next to his empty chair. I briefly contemplated beating the rest of the life out of him, but I could hear somebody coming up the stairs toward the main room. I remembered that the other guard, Carl, had been in the lab on the floor below, recovering from the rock I’d laid against his head, so I clambered to my feet and staggered like a George Romero zombie to the doorway.
“What the hell’s going on down here?” Carl yelled as he came in. “Did you get that…?”
I didn’t have much time to admire the big old swollen bruise I’d put on his forehead as he stopped in the doorway and stared in shock at the groaning, blood-spattered lump that was Uberhardt and the less bloody but more silent lump of Henry. I didn’t have time because I was busy swinging that big knob-headed cane of Uberhardt’s.
You might think it was just a poetic coincidence that I smashe
d Carl in the same place I’d recently kicked Henry, but really it wasn’t: I was getting tired of all this bullshit, and I fucking well aimed for those nuts. If you’re going to tie me up and beat the shit out of me, and you’re not named Exotic Mistress Christina and I didn’t pay you to do it, you’d better not let me get loose again.
As he lay writhing on the floor, I gave Carl a couple of more taps on the skull to shut him up, because I was getting tired of the sound of guys with crushed gonads retching. Then I went to hunt for my guns, but I couldn’t find them in Uberhardt’s table or anywhere else in the room. What the doctor had been reaching for was a button that apparently triggered a silent alarm, which meant anyone else on the property would know by now that bad shit was going down. I had no time to waste -- I knew a woman and a child were on the premises somewhere, and there might be more guards as well.
I stood over Uberhardt, listening to his breathing noises, which sounded like someone trying to drink liquid fat through a straw. I hoped it meant the vicious bastard was dying, as long as he didn’t die too fast.
“Where are the others?” I asked him. “You said your daughter and a boy. Is that child something to do with Petar Vesić’s grandson? Are there any more guards?”
“Schwächling…” he grunted. “Ich werde dich toten…!”
“I dropped out of ‘German For Interrogations’, so let’s just keep it English.” I put my foot on a concentration of blood-oozing holes in his upper chest and leaned a little weight on it. He gasped and coughed bloody froth. “Answer the question, Doc.”