Hunter rechecked his ammo load and began to move out when he saw the tiger.
It was about 25 feet off to his left, pawing through a garbage pile looking for food. Hunter hadn’t anticipated this—but it wasn’t that hard to figure out what had happened. Berlin had a large zoo. It had obviously been caught up in the firebombing and now hundreds of exotic animals were on the loose in the enemy capital. The tiger spotted Hunter a moment later. He growled and showed his teeth. But clearly he was more afraid of Hunter than Hunter was of him.
He grabbed something from the trash and then ran off. Hunter began moving across the plaza.
He reached the enormous steps and was mildly astonished to see a small herd of zebras run by off to his left. Above him, three condors were circling. He hoped that they weren’t looking down on him. At least not yet.
He finally reached the top of the stairs of the Reichstag and pulled one of the enormous wooden doors open. It was dark inside—no surprise there. There hadn’t been any electrical power in Germany for more than a week. Hunter walked in, and shut the door behind him. He wanted his eyes to adjust to the darkness before he went any further.
Strange that it would come to this, he thought, inching his way forward again. His foggy memory seemed to recall that more than once he’d hunted down his nemesis through dark hallways, approaching yet another final confrontation. And what would he do when he found the Devil himself this time? He’d vowed to kill him on the spot many times back in his old world. Nothing had changed that now.
He walked through the dark hallways, hand cannon up, sensing that he was getting very, very close now.
Then he turned the corner and saw before him the doors of a huge office. There was a light inside this room, and he could hear it flickering. It was battery-powered; the juice was wearing thin.
Hunter walked into the room, pistol raised high. The place was a mess. There were many war gaming boards thrown about with thousands of black and white wooden pieces representing armies scattered everywhere. There were hundreds of battlefield photographs and instant-news reels thrown about too. And the paintings on the wall, originally intended to depict glorious German victories on sea, land, and air, were now all scarred and ripped, and even fading. Particularly ironic was one showing a massive bombing of New York City; German bombers overhead, the Big Apple, entirely engulfed in flames, below. It was, of course, an attack that never took place.
History is made up of the lies that historians all agree on, Hunter thought as he quickly studied the mural.
In the far corner of the room was a desk, and at the desk, there was a man. Head down, back to Hunter, it was as if he’d spent the last few days just looking out the window as the city of Berlin burned down around him.
Hunter slowly moved towards the man; his sixth sense was vibrating him madly. At the same time he could tell that there was no other danger about. Just this man was here, the one who had foisted this latest version of German Imperial misery upon the world. Hunter had vowed it would never happen again, in this world or any other. He was so sure that he was close to fulfilling that pledge, he could feel it in his bones.
Strange were the thoughts that went through his head though. That day, in the middle of the Atlantic. It seemed like many years ago now, when the truth was, it was barely nine months ago. What would have happened if the Germans had picked him up—and the Americans had gotten this man? Or any other permutation of three? Hunter just shook his head; there was no sense thinking about it. This was how the dice fell here, in this place. Who knows where they were falling in another place entirely.
He crept even closer, being as quiet as possible. But he sensed that the man knew he was here, knew why he had come, and wasn’t really going to do a lot about it. The scent of crushed human spirit was almost a stink in the air. This man was a failure—he’d rebuilt an enormously powerful war machine in such a short amount of time, only to see it crash almost as quickly as it was born. That would break anyone’s spirit, no matter how clever, how cruel, how cunning.
He was but 10 feet from the man now. His back was still to him, but Hunter saw the characteristic black clothes and long black hair.
The last time he’d seen Viktor was up in space. At that time, he’d been dressed in an outfit that look liked a cross between the pope’s finest garment and those of a drag queen. But now this man, this broken human being who was about to have his life taken by Hunter, was dressed simply in a black uniform, almost bereft of ornaments or insignia.
Hunter took three steps closer and then stopped. He was about six feet away from the man now. He raised his weapon—it would be a clear shot to the head.
Hunter’s fingers began to tighten around the gun. He was finally a microsecond away from completing a task that took nothing less than a transuniversal dispersal to accomplish.
It seemed almost too easy.
And as it turned out, it was.
Hunter was loath to shoot the devil himself in the back—so he took a deep breath and then spoke.
“You know I’m here,” he said. “And you know why I’m here. So just turn around, slowly, and take it like a man.”
The person stirred, but did not move in panic. He wasn’t that surprised to hear Wingman’s voice or the unmistakable click of an automatic pistol getting ready to fire.
“We’ve been through a lot,” said the muffled voice from the desk. “And I knew it would be you who would come after me. I knew you would figure out what happened to us, how we found ourselves swimming in the middle of the ocean—and I knew it was just a matter of time before we met again.”
Hunter clicked the safety off his gun.
The man started to turn around. Hunter tensed, and tightened his finger on the trigger just a bit more.
“I’m not a religious man,” he started to say. “But I hope there’s a hell, Viktor, so you can have front-row seat.”
That’s when the man swung around finally and their eyes met and Hunter’s hand went so numb he nearly dropped his weapon.
“Viktor?” the man said, looking at him with a twin expression of bemusement and astonishment. “I’m not Viktor…”
It was true. It wasn’t Viktor.
It was Elvis.
Now what passed was the longest minute of Hunter’s life.
They just looked at each other, not talking, not blinking, just staring, and putting the pieces into place.
Finally it was his old friend who began to talk.
“Many things happen when you go through what we did,” Elvis said, tears beginning to form in his eyes. “It’s not guaranteed that you stay the way you were. That you will remain a good guy. You stayed the way you were. I changed. And Viktor…God knows what happened to him.”
Hunter could barely speak. “But how do you know all this?”
Elvis just shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s just in my head, just like I’m sure a lot of things are in your head. But when I got here, people thought I was a god or something. And that was my reality. I just remembered everything quicker than you.”
Hunter had lowered his gun by now; inside him, his very soul was being torn in two.
“Don’t worry about it,” Elvis said, wiping the tears away. “At some point I guess I knew it would end this way.”
He reached into his desk drawer and took something out.
“So let’s just leave it at this,” he said. “See you next time.”
With that, Elvis put a gun to his head and blew his brains out.
Chapter 36
New York City
Two Weeks Later
THE FIRST THING HAWK Hunter saw when he woke up was an empty bottle of champagne.
He rolled over on the massive bed, the silk sheets clinging to his body, and felt the very warm form of Sarah sleeping softly beside him.
He wiped the sleep from his eyes and stared at the very ornate ceiling above the bed. They were in the Presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, New York�
��s finest. They had been here for three days now, and all Hunter had done was eat, sleep, drink champagne, and have sex. He had to admit that so far, the sleeping part might have been the best. He’d been that tired.
Today was the big day. There was going to be a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in his honor. More than 2 million people were expected to attend. For while the rumors of his death had been greatly exaggerated, they did nothing to quell the excitement and sheer disbelief when it was announced that he was in fact still alive. America simply went nuts and the War Department, citing the good of the country, urged him to go along with it.
They were giving him the parade because they were saying he was the person who had finally won the war. But Hunter knew this wasn’t true.
The war was over—completely and finally. It had ended three days before. But its conclusion had taken place while he was on an airplane, heading back to the States.
The end came when five B-l7/36s left the deck of the Cape Cod and headed for five separate targets around Occupied Europe. At precisely midnight, May 1, each plane dropped an MK-75 thermonuclear bomb on its targeted city, the same weapons Hunter had discovered in the washed-out ammo bunker in the Ruhr.
Berlin, Rome, Madrid, London, and Moscow had been utterly destroyed, any last vestiges of Germany’s High Command reduced to radioactive sizzle. Millions had been killed as well, of course, and millions more wounded or burned by radiation. The war was over simply because there was no more Reich; no one was left to tell what remained of Germany’s troops what to do. So they surrendered in droves.
Added to this were the tens of thousands who had died in the Great Ruhr Flood, and the hundreds of thousands who had died in the firebombing campaign, and the death toll for the victory went into the tens of millions.
Not exactly something Hunter would consider throwing a parade for, but such was life here in this strange but not so strange place.
He rolled out of bed and quietly padded into the other room. The suite was enormous, but frankly it reminded him of a mausoleum.
He stared out the window at the crowds already starting to gather below. They said he was the man who won the war because he was the one who brought the battle back to Germany, the one who firebombed the cities, the one who caused the great flood, the one who found the H-bombs. But Hunter did not feel like a hero.
His mind had ached so much in these past two weeks, he believed his head was about to burst.
No one really knew what he had lost in this long strange adventure. He’d lost an entire universe, full of friends, life, history. And the only friend who had come through to this place with him was now dead, an innocent victim of the unpredictable twists of transuniversal travel.
He shook his head and felt the sick feeling in his stomach again. No, he was not a hero, and anything he might gain from this day, or whatever days lay ahead, would not change his mind one bit. For what he wanted, he believed he could never get—that was, a way back to where he had come from.
He just wanted to go home.
A knock at the door disturbed these thoughts. He threw on a bathrobe and answered it.
It was a man wearing a pair of huge sunglasses and carrying an easel covered by a small curtain.
He introduced himself as the person who was writing the story of Hunter’s exploits in the war. Though the details of how Hunter actually got here to this world were still top secret, everyone across the country knew just about everything he’d done since being assigned to the Circle Wing, thanks to America’s rabid media.
Which led him to ask this writer a question: If everyone knew how many times he’d blown his nose in the past 10 months, and everything else in between, why would anyone want to publish a book detailing all these events?
The writer just shrugged and said: “Beats me, that’s just showbiz, I guess.”
He unveiled the easel to display the cover art for this book. It showed a huge air battle taking place over London. Big Ben was in evidence, surrounded by lots of smoke and fire, and two German warplanes were zooming around, all seen from the view of a third airplane’s cockpit. But if this was meant to depict one of Hunter’s many exploits, then somehow, something had been lost in the translation.
“So, how’s it look to you?” the writer asked him.
Hunter just shrugged. “Well, if it’s supposed to be me, that looks to be the inside of a Pogo’s cockpit. I didn’t fly any Pogos overseas. And we never really bombed London. And those German planes, they’re not Natters, or Me-362s, or Horton flying wings, which were the airplanes that we usually fought against. And I’m not sure London even looks quite like that.”
The writer laughed. “Well it doesn’t look like much of anything anymore,” he said.
With that, he shook Hunter’s hand and quickly went out the door.
Hunter closed it behind him, but then heard another knock.
He opened it to see his old friend, Zoltan the Magnificent.
“What am I disturbing?” the psychic asked him with a smile.
“You should know,” Hunter told him. “Absolutely nothing.”
Zoltan stepped inside but indicated he was only going to stay a moment.
“I had to tell you something I heard from a friend of mine who is still in the Psychic Evaluation Corps,” the mystic began. “Apparently there is a very secret project the government has been working on that may be related to your experience.”
Hunter ears started burning when he heard this.
“Jessuzz, where is it?” he wanted to know.
“That’s just it,” Zoltan told him. “No one really knows. The location is so secret because of the sensitive work they do there. But I hear it is a group of researchers trying to find other people who have fallen in, just like you. In fact, what they are trying to prove is that people have been doing this throughout our world history. And get this: they think these incidents are the origins of all stories about angels.”
“Angels,” Hunter exclaimed, the very word having some difficulty rolling off his tongue. “Tell me more…”
But Zoltan put his hand to his lips, indicating the universal sign that now was the time to shut up.
“I will find the location of this place, I promise you,” he told Hunter. “Until then, be well my friend. And don’t think too much. It’s bad for you.”
Then he shook Hunter’s hand and went out the door again.
Head swimming now, Hunter went to close the door once again when suddenly, there was another person knocking on it.
Hunter opened it and found himself staring into yet another familiar face.
It was, of all people, Captain Wolf, the commander of the Navy destroyer that had scooped him up from the middle of the ocean that day long ago.
“I’m sorry to bother you on this busy day,” he told Hunter, his voice reverent and low. “But I felt I had to come and see you.”
Hunter let him in.
“I’ve been following your exploits, of course,” he told Hunter. “Just like everyone else. It really makes me wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t picked you up that day.”
“You and me both,” Hunter told him. “And I don’t think I really thanked you properly. So let me do it now.”
He shook hands with the man, who finally broke into a smile.
“Well, thanks,” Wolf said. “But that’s not why I came up here.”
“Why then?” Hunter asked him.
The Navy officer reached into his pocket and came out with a small cloth bundle. He handed it to Hunter, who slowly unraveled it.
It was a tiny American flag, one with 50 stars on it. Inside was a picture of Dominique.
Hunter tried to say something, but couldn’t. He tried to take a breath, but had a problem doing that too. He tried to move, to do something, but he was frozen, staring down at the picture wrapped inside the flag.
“We took these off you that day,” Wolf explained. “I just thought you should get them back.”
Hunter finally
looked up at him; his eyes were really misty now.
“Thanks,” was all he could say.
Wolf smiled again, saluted, and then went back out the door.
Two hours later, Hunter was dressed in a uniform of Air Corps blue. He was standing at the mirror, and Sarah was brushing the lint from his jacket.
A knock came at the door. Hunter opened it, and Agent Y—his friend, Yaz—walked in.
“Ready?” he asked Hunter. “All of New York City is waiting to see you.”
Hunter just shrugged. Inside his breast pocket was the photo wrapped in the flag. He tapped it twice.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” he said.
Yaz checked his watch. “Well, good, because it’s time to go.”
Hunter turned back to Sarah and gave her a quick kiss.
“You’ll be here when I come back?” he asked.
“You can be sure of it,” she replied sweetly.
He kissed her again and then followed Y out the door.
They rode the elevator down to the lobby which was now cordoned off by hundreds of New York City police. A huge jeepster limo sat idling outside the door. A giant crowd waited beyond. Hunter took a deep breath, tapped his pocket again, had one more fleeting wish to be back in his cell at Sing Sing, and then walked out with Yaz.
The crowd erupted at first sight of him. He waved and then ducked into the limo, Yaz right behind him. Here they would wait until the front part of the parade passed them by. This gave Hunter a rare opportunity to talk to the OSS agent, who he hadn’t really seen much of since that day on top of the flattened German mountain.
“So, how are you adapting?” Y asked him. “Figuring out things?”
“Trying to,” Hunter replied, still uneasy.
“I can understand your predicament,” Y told him. “And who knows what theories our people will come up with concerning universe transfer once you’ve talked to them.”
“It should be interesting,” Hunter murmured, wondering if Y knew of the secret research project Zoltan had just told him about.
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