by Ewing, Al
He didn’t wake again for eight months.
By that time, the war was all but over.
THE SURVIVING WILDCAT crew had recognised him from the newspapers, and, as a veteran of Yankee Bravo Seven, Djego was afforded the best of medical care at the hospital in Venice.
El Sombra was nowhere to be found.
His mask had been torn off in the explosion, along with some of the meat of his leg and arm. He walked stiffly, now, with a pronounced limp, and his left arm was all but useless, hanging limply at his side. The Wildcat crew had salvaged his sword, but Djego had little interest in using it. For him, it was a memento of times long past, not a weapon to be used.
Gradually, he regained his mobility, though his arm had lost most of its strength and the limp would never leave him. The back of his head itched constantly, and he suffered from horrendous mood swings, when he would rage against the Führer and the bastards, or weep helplessly, like a child. But gradually, he found his personality stabilising in the gentle, antiseptic atmosphere of the hospital. He found that Djego – so long despised as a weakling, a coward and a fool – was capable of a kind of gentle, melancholic wit that made him popular, although the self-depreciation still occasionally curdled into self-loathing. He found himself falling into a casual relationship with one of the nurses, a sunny brunette named Savina, who relieved him at last, after a decent interval, of the burden of his virginity; when finally she decided it was best to break it off, he took the blow with a grace and good humour the old Djego would have been incapable of.
Djego healed and grew, and the itch in the back of his skull began to subside, as El Sombra relinquished his grip.
MEANWHILE, THE WAR was ending. Castle Abendsen had been the death-blow for the Nazi forces; Reed had been correct in that the Ultimate Reich had sent their most precious resources to be destroyed on a fool’s errand. The old-fashioned Rocketeers were being phased out in favour of squadrons of Hawk-Men to battle the winged Luftwaffe on an even footing, just as the King Tigers were being outfought and outmanoeuvred on the ground by the new Wildcat Mark IIs, ‘compact tanks’ that sacrificed some of the indestructibility of the earlier design for added mobility; it was no good having the largest gun in the world if your opponent could move faster than it could track. From his prison cell, Richard Reed designed new Locomotive Men based on his ancestor’s designs, and they were cautiously tested against the few Zinnsoldats that remained. Very quickly, the allies began taking the cities, then the towns. There were patches of guerrilla warfare here and there, but for the most part the general populace surrendered without too much trouble.
The Nazi High Command had their own plan, in the event of total failure. They were already in the middle of building it.
Fortress Berlin.
A gigantic bunker, thirty miles across, stretching from Potsdam to Werneuchen - a great metallic dome, with walls two hundred feet high and ten feet thick, made of concrete and steel and the hardest known alloys. There were doors into it, that never opened and could not be broken down, but there were no windows. There was no sunlight.
One year after the incident at Castle Abendsen, having managed, through an inhuman effort, to hold off the attacking forces, the remaining Nazis simply closed the door and shut themselves away.
The European leaders debated the strategy. Were they building up forces? At some point in the future, would the Ultimate Reich stream like an army of ants out of its great mental anthill and swarm over them all? But then, what would they re-arm themselves with? Perhaps, some scientists considered, they were building a bomb, some great annihilation device to take everything they had lost with them. But from his cell, where he was provided every luxury as long as he continued to be useful, Richard Reed pooh-poohed the suggestion; it simply couldn’t be done with what they’d left themselves. In his opinion, they were waiting it out – waiting for Europe to grow complacent, or waiting for history to forget them. Or maybe they’d just turned the board over and built a place to sulk in.
The rest of Germany was split neatly in two, with half going to France and half to Italy, and their combined forces guarding the bunker against the day it opened. What the Russians though of this remains unrecorded, but Magna Britannia seemed happy enough with the outcome; easier to deal with the French and the Italians than with the Ultimate Reich.
A year and a half after he’d woken up in the hospital, Djego finally felt strong enough to travel from Venice up to the remains of Potsdam, and the edge of the dome. The Franco-Italian armed forces, who knew of his reputation as a war hero, let him pass, and he’d placed his hand on the metal, warm in the sun, and felt the itch in the back of his skull return, stronger than ever. There was a strong part of him, buried deep down inside, that wanted to smash his way in somehow, even though the most powerful shell could not; that wanted to kill every bastard in there, to storm the bunker like an avenging ghost until it was ankle-deep in blood. But his sword was back at his hotel room, and his mask was lost, and he was a man in his mid-thirties with a pronounced limp, and the door was solid steel and four feet thick, and behind it there was likely another door the same. So he turned around and left.
Oddly, he did not feel like a coward. After all, even El Sombra in his prime could not have broken in, and he was only Djego.
There was little to return to in Venice, so he headed west, eventually finding himself in Brandenberg – a French city now – where, while engaged in some cash-in-hand work to pay for his meagre lodgings, he discovered within himself a talent for gardening. It was good, physical work, and it kept him in shape and allowed him to think of nothing but the task at hand for hours at a stretch, and at the end of it, he was rewarded by beauty. The walls of the dome could be seen in the distance, above the houses, like some vast, forbidding mountain, but increasingly, that did not trouble him. He could not forgive the bastards – never that – but he found that he could forget them for a while, as he toiled and tilled the earth, and grew the flowers.
Djego healed. Djego grew. He became a fixture of the city, laughing and talking with the other residents. His gardening business grew. After a couple of years had passed and he had put down roots, he became romantically involved with a woman called Helga Vogt, whose husband had died in the war. Djego did not ask the circumstances, and she did not ask anything of him. The past was the past, and they had a good enough life in the present to let it rest.
Occasionally, Djego would still feel the urges from that other part of his mind, but they were feeble things, buried deep and easy to shrug off. If El Sombra was still some small part of him, he surely knew the situation was what it was, and there was nothing to be done.
Surely.
On these occasions, Djego quieted the old ghosts by visiting the local bierkeller and sipping schnapps alone, counting the years and reminding himself of how much time had passed. It had always worked before.
He was thus engaged when the thin man approached him.
“DJEGO THE POET?”
Djego blinked, turning to study the newcomer. He was tall, thin and bald, with sharp green eyes, deeply tanned skin and a curious blond-and-black stubble that seemed to cover most of his face. He seemed uncomfortable in his crisp black suit, though it fitted him excellently.
“No, that’s not me,” Djego said, warily. “I haven’t written poetry since I was a teenager. I am Djego Rossi” – they had given him the surname at the hospital, for records purposes; it was a traditional placeholder – “or, if you prefer to address a man by his job description, Djego the Gardener.” He half-smiled and fumbled in the pocket of his shirt for a business card. “My schedule is fairly full at the moment, but if you have any weeding that needs to be done...”
“Weeding. Very good.” The thin man grinned, and Djego noticed that several of his teeth were missing, notably the canines. The effect was unnerving. “Yes, I suppose that’s as apt a metaphor as any.” He tittered, softly.
Djego sipped his schnapps, wondering if he should make an excuse
and leave. “And your name is?”
“Leonard,” the thin man said, and grinned again, as if at a private joke. “Leonard De Lareine.” He tittered again. It was deeply unnerving.
“You’re French?” Djego’s eyes narrowed. The man’s accent was very difficult to place, but it did not seem native to any part of Europe he knew of.
“Are you Italian, Mister Rossi?” De Lareine’s grin did not leave his face. “Or is it Mister Sombra?”
“El Sombra,” Djego sighed, feeling a renewed burst of itching at the back of his skull. It happened sometimes. El Sombra had been a famous figure during the war, and occasionally people made the connection, or discovered Djego’s whereabouts through some means, and asked him to tell stories, or sign newspapers, or fight them, and he would courteously explain to them that he was not El Sombra and never had been. Then he would walk away, letting them believe it or not as they wished.
“I am not El Sombra, my friend,” he heard himself say, “and in truth, I have never been El Sombra. Believe it or don’t, as you wish. For myself, I would prefer to finish my drink alone.”
“Yes, of course,” De Lareine smiled, and there was a long pause, during which the strange, thin man did not leave Djego in peace, or do anything but stare at him, body twitching strangely. After a moment, he began talking in a low, purring voice. “How could you be El Sombra? You can just about walk, with a limp – not quite run. You leave the sword that was sacred to El Sombra in a dusty apartment room, wrapped in old paper, and spend your time poking at worms and soil when blood is crying out to be avenged. You are a coward –”
“Go away!” Djego snapped, incensed. “Leave me alone!”
“You are a coward in the way that all comfortable men are cowards, Djego who was once a poet. You allow injustices to continue, do you not? And for what reason? Simply that it would make you uncomfortable to end them by your own hand.”
Djego cursed, hand reaching to scratch furiously at the back of his head. “Damn you! What do you know?” He slammed his glass down on the counter, then reached into his pocket for thirty francs to pay his tab for the evening and slammed them down next to it.
De Lareine tittered, and tossed a long piece of red cloth onto the money.
Djego felt his heart seize in his chest.
The cloth was missing a scrap at the end, and there was mud ground into the fabric along with the old bloodstains; but it had two evenly-spaced holes in it, and was unmistakably a mask.
It seemed to be looking at him.
Djego shook his head and tried to step back from it, but his legs wouldn’t move.
“No,” he whispered. “No. Please.”
De Lareine only smiled, like some great cat.
“I was happy,” pleaded Djego. “Doesn’t that matter to you?” He picked up the cloth in trembling fingers, looking into the empty eyeholes. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”
There was no answer. The barman looked up for a moment from polishing the steins, and shrugged. The other patrons of the bierkeller did not even notice anything was happening.
“I was happy,” Djego choked, and then, in one spasmodic motion, he pulled the mask onto his face, and secured it tightly, so that the knot once again rested at the back of his head, where it belonged; so tightly that it might never come off again.
El Sombra looked at his hands.
He prodded his belly, amused at the rounded shape of it, and took a couple of steps back from the bar. The limp was gone.
He laughed, very softly, so as not to disturb the patrons. Then he turned to De Lareine.
“How did you find me, amigo?”
De Lareine tapped the tip of his nose. “I followed my nose.” He sniffed the air twice, then tittered. “Come. You have something waiting for you in Djego’s apartment, I think. Wrapped in newspaper.”
The two of them walked out of the bar, smiling like old friends.
The barman watched them go, then picked up the thirty francs.
THE DOOR TO Berlin swung open with a low creak, and El Sombra stepped inside, De Lareine padding behind him.
Outside the metal dome, it was a late summer afternoon, passing into early evening. Inside, it was a black, moonless night. What little light there was came from an oil lamp De Lareine held, although El Sombra could make out the occasional pinprick of light ahead of them.
“How did we get in?” El Sombra muttered. “The Franco-Italian forces have been banging on this door with explosive shells every day for years, and you just knock a few times and it opens for you.” He frowned, hefting his brother’s sword.
De Lareine tittered and smiled his gap-toothed smile. “The doors are controlled by clockwork arrays, wound every day by the human robots of Berlin. You know of them?”
El Sombra shuddered. “People conditioned to be robots, because they couldn’t afford to mass-produce the advanced droids Magna Britannia has. They tried to turn my hometown into a human robot factory.” He glanced at the thin man. “You already knew about that, didn’t you, amigo?”
“I did. Look, there’s one now.” He pointed at a figure in the distance, walking stiffly along the road ahead – a woman of thirty, beautiful once, but now sallow-skinned and hollow-cheeked, her head shaved and a tattooed number gracing one temple. On the other was a lobotomy scar. She had not eaten in some days, and her teeth were black, as if before that she had eaten nothing but rotting meat for some considerable time. She passed them without comment, eyes staring dully ahead, as she walked her circuit of Fortress Berlin, moving from task to task.
El Sombra felt suddenly nauseous. It was as if De Lareine had conjured her from the air by speaking of her. De Lareine’s smile widened, as if to confirm the notion. “Now go not backward. No, be resolute,” he said, and El Sombra knew he was quoting something, but what it was he had no idea.
After a pause, the stranger spoke again. “The knock is a password. It is heard by the machines and the signal is given for the door to open. It’s supposed to be used from inside, but the signal works both ways.”
“People can’t open the door from the inside without the code?” El Sombra said, surprised, then he shook his head. “No, of course not. Nobody gets to escape.”
He looked around as they walked, at the deserted countryside, the empty buildings, the endless night. Occasionally, on the road, the two of them would see one of the Nazis, cold and dead, riddled with bullets or stab wounds, occasionally beaten to death with bare hands.
De Lareine tittered softly.
“How do you know the knock?” El Sombra asked, suddenly.
De Lareine looked at him for a moment. “Suspicious of me? Going to turn on me?” He tittered. “Will we fight?”
El Sombra scowled. “Yes; maybe; and it depends on whether you answer the question. Speak.”
The tall, strange man licked his lips. “It’s my job to know things. I’m an agent.”
El Sombra’s eyes narrowed. “Of S.T.E.A.M.?”
“S.T.E.A.M. no longer exists, but yes. Once you take S.T.E.A.M.’s mask off, we are what you find underneath. Agents of the Queen.”
“Victoria?” El Sombra blinked, dumbfounded. Surely she couldn’t be... no, not after what had happened.
“No. The other Queen.” De Lareine smirked. “The more important one. She has decided it would be best for the world to come if the Führer, too, no longer existed.”
El Sombra raised an eyebrow. “So why involve me, amigo? I mean, I wouldn’t miss it for the world, but...” He stepped over the rotting corpse of an Oberstgruppenführer. Something had been eating it.
In the distance, one of the human robots slowly trudged across the road, between buildings.
“The Queen knows you.” De Lareine grinned. “Eleven years ago, in New York. You made quite an impression. She remembered this was an ambition of yours.” He grinned. “Aren’t we generous?”
El Sombra frowned. “I don’t need S.T.E.A.M. in my life, or whatever you call yourself now.” He muttered petulantly, almost
under his breath. “I was doing fine on my own.”
“You were doing fine on your own, weren’t you?” De Lareine smirked. “You had a good job, working with your hands. You were trying to fall in love. You were content. But you weren’t walking through a city of death in an endless night to kill the man who murdered your soul, were you? No. For that, you did need us.” He let out another noxious giggle. “You made your bargain, El Sombra. Too late now.”
El Sombra decided not to reply to that.
“WHAT HAPPENED HERE?”
The corpses were piled in the streets, and the stench of putrefaction was so bad that El Sombra and De Lareine had been forced to hold their hands over their faces from a mile distant; eventually, the thin man had produced a pair of breathing-masks to fit over the mouth and nose and block the very worst of it, for which El Sombra was grateful. Here and there, the Nazis were pushed into great, obscene piles of flyblown flesh, as if some attempt had been made to clear them from the streets, and every so often one of the city’s remaining human robots would stagger mechanically through the stink and the flies, retching despite itself. One, an old man, collapsed in front of them, and when El Sombra checked his pulse he had already died; another they saw in the distance, engaged in pulling rotting meat from the bones of the dead and chewing mindlessly at it.
“They were sealed in.” De Lareine smiled. “The Ultimate Reich had a history of thinking big; Fortress Berlin was to be a gigantic bunker to control the war and the world from. Then... Castle Abendsen. And suddenly the war was lost, thrown away, and the bulk of the high command were locked inside their bunker waiting for an opportunity that would never come. There was talk of remaining in the bunker for a thousand years, like a Phoenix in its egg. The kind of grand plan the Führer was known for coming up with. And in a thousand years, he would still be here to see it.” Another titter. El Sombra was finding himself as unnerved as Djego was by it.