Several crime scene investigators theorized that the occupants had been pitched from the car during the initial crash, but that didn’t explain the excessive amount of blood on the hood of the car, or the pair of footprints leading away from the wreckage.
Weeks later the crash would be deemed purely accidental, and written off as a DUI. Nobody would suspect foul play. In fact, the only attention it would receive would be a little three-paragraph blurb on page twelve of the Durango Chronicle.
Sure, family members were notified and a little wooden cross was placed at the scene, but no one really cared. A few officers muttered “poor bastards” or “stupid sons of bitches” at the crash site, but that was the extent of the sympathy they received. Most people didn’t give it a second thought. The van’s driver and passenger became just another statistic, just another casualty of drunk driving.
BEST SERVED COLD
by
Marc Sorondo
Johan sat by the tiny fire, eying his surroundings for wood or paper or anything else that would burn. A puff of wind blew thin smoke in his face, and he crinkled up his nose. The fire smelled horrible, consisting almost entirely of burning garbage that had been dragged away from the village by the winter winds.
It warmed his face and brought a thin sheen of sweat out on his forehead. His uniform was warm and after all, it hadn’t snowed for the past few hours, so the air was dry and crisp. He was sweating, his armpits soaked, after running for what had seemed like miles. His uniform , heavy green wool marked by a red armband and various pins and emblems, had done its job well. He didn’t need the small fire to keep warm.
But he did need it.
His present situation, in Johan’s opinion at least, served to prove all that Der Fuhrer had said was correct. These people were inferior and dangerous at the same time, relying on their trickery to undermine Aryan supremacy.
Johan looked at the fire and then at his problem. He checked his ammunition and saw that it was running low – his rifle was almost empty and then all he’d have was a few shots of his pistol. Not that it mattered. Bullets weren’t the solution to this problem; he knew that. He’d tried them, and they’d failed.
The fire would buy him some time – time to think, to figure things out. Unfortunately the fire was not a permanent solution. It had snowed quite a bit lately, and the sky had darkened, promising more. His fire was doomed.
Johan looked at his situation again, and, finding that no solution would come to mind, muttered in rough, guttural German, “I’m going to kill that fucking Jew.”
~*~
The old rabbi had seen enough, he’d told them. He’d seen his people harassed, seen them reduced to little more than animals in the eyes of the state, seen them belittled and brutalized, but he would stand for no more.
Johan and the two soldiers who’d once been his best friends, Dietrich and Aldous, had just laughed at the old man, laughed right in his face in front of all of his people.
Three days, he said, holding up three long, arthritic fingers, swollen at every crooked joint. Three days and he wanted them out of his village, out of the whole area. One way or another the village would be rid of them, and the old rabbi suggested they leave of their own power.
“And if we don’t? What power do you have to make us leave?”
“I know a way. Taught to me by a rabbi in Prague. A wise and ancient man, he maintained all of the holy secrets, and some of them he taught to rabbis who had proven their holiness, and…”
Johan spit in the old man’s face, earning barks of laughter from his friends. “You are no holy man. You are a Jew. You’re subhuman. We’re never leaving.”
“Three days,” the rabbi repeated as he wiped the spit from his face. “Three days and you will leave.”
Johan, Dietrich, and Aldous laughed again. Johan scanned the faces of the people gathered around them. He saw anger and fear mixed in their eyes. They wanted so badly to end this, to lash out, but they knew better. Only the old man was stupid enough to think a dirty Jew could stand up to the power of the Third Reich.
As they left, Johan said back, “Why don’t you kill another Messiah, you piece of shit.”
This brought another chuckle from his friends, good friends who were now dead.
Johan knew the old man was bluffing with his mystical talk about holy secrets, that at best he’d scrounged up a few weapons and would try an ambush of some kind.
He went back to their makeshift base of operations to use the radio and call his commanding officer. He said that perhaps this little village was planning a resistance, and since there were only three of them who’d been left to keep order…
“A resistance?” his commanding officer had interrupted. “You haven’t been able to maintain control?”
“We have…nothing’s happened…but I think they may be planning…” Johan started.
“Planning? Just kill the ones that you think are planning and that will be the end of it.”
“Yes, sir, but…”
“No. Do it. Frankly, I’d rather have you wipe that village clean than lose control of it.” He broke the connection.
Johan knew then that the rabbi had to die.
~*~
The fire was getting weak, which made Johan nervous. He hadn’t come up with a plan. He needed to think, not to run himself into exhaustion, only to fall and….and let his problem catch up with him.
He took off the jacket of his uniform and dropped it into the center of the fire.
Now only the fire was keeping him warm, only the fire was keeping him alive, and even his thick wool jacket would only buy him a few extra minutes.
~*~
Johan had gone back to find the rabbi the next day, but couldn’t. He walked through the village, the snow falling in thick clusters, caught and pushed around by the gusting wind. When he finally decided to ask the others where he was, they all said the same thing: he left.
That was all they would admit to knowing. Every inquiry was met with the same response. Where did he go? He wouldn’t tell us. Why did he go? He wouldn’t tell us.
Johan finally got angry and unholstered his pistol: a Luger, and a nice one at that. It was his lucky pistol. He’d won it in a card game before being left to keep watch of this stupid little town and its herd of Jews. Usually only officers carried pistols, but Johan wore his strapped around his waist with pride.
He held the gun up, pointed the barrel at a young woman’s face, holding it just a few inches in front of her wide, glossy eyes.
Johan had the strange idea that her pupils were nothing more than the black reflection of his gun’s barrel in the mirrored brown surface of the woman’s eyes. It was like she wasn’t really alive, just some empty thing wrapped in living skin pretending to be human.
Johan looked into the black circle in the center of those eyes and asked again, “Where is the old man.”
A gust of wind threw air thick with snowflakes in the woman’s face, but she just stared back at him, her lips pouting defiantly. Then she said, “We’ve told you…no one knows.”
“Stupid bitch!” Johan screamed. He smacked her in the mouth with the back of his hand, the one loaded with the weight of his pistol. Her lip split against her teeth, and blood poured from it, coating her chin and dripping off.
Still she just looked at him, not giving him the pleasure of an outburst, not even a single tear.
Then Johan heard another man scream, a bestial growl that spoke in the simplest language: rage.
He turned in time to see a man – maybe the woman’s husband or brother, maybe just a friend – about ten feet away and running at him, his hands bent into jagged claws that wanted to what…tear his eyes out, rip across his throat? It didn’t matter.
Johan squeezed off one shot, a smooth action made easy by the Luger’s nearly perfect design.
The gun’s luck was still strong: the bullet hit slightly lower than the center of the man’s forehead, which had been Johan’s target. A mistake, bu
t one that made more of an impression on the people watching than a cleaner shot would have.
The man’s nose seemed to crush into his face, tearing skin and spurting blood. The body – most certainly the man had to be dead already with his whole face imploded into a mess like that – actually remained on its feet for a moment. The smashed, bloody crevice where the face should have been stared accusingly at Johan.
Then the dead body’s knees buckled and it fell back, the head hitting the ground with a squishy, hollow thud.
A woman screamed, and Johan couldn’t tell if it was the woman he’d struck with his gun standing right next to him or another from the crowd that had gathered around the scene.
He could not look away to find out, even as the pitch of it seemed to rise to an inhuman level and go on without end. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from that dark shapeless mess at the center of the dead Jew’s head, a swirl of black and red and white chips of bone.
The man’s lower jaw was still intact, making the wound a grotesque parody of a bloody gaping maw. It opened to let out a scream that no longer sounded like a woman, nor anything else Johan had ever heard.
Johan closed his eyes and pointed his pistol straight in the air. “Shut up!” he screamed as he squeezed off two shots.
Then everything was silent but the slight howl of the wind. He looked around at the sad, wide eyes of the crowd around him, stopping on the woman with the split lip.
She stared at him with her eyes narrowed. She hadn’t bothered to wipe at the blood streaming down her chin, and it dripped onto her shirt, spreading like a crimson Rorschach test on its white fabric. She hadn’t been the screamer, Johan was sure of that. Her will was too strong. She’d never give him the satisfaction of a scream like that.
He looked into her eyes. “Tell the old shit,” he spat at her, “that more die until he
comes back.”
Johan turned his back to the woman and walked away. He headed back to tell Dietrich and Aldous that things were going to get difficult if the old man didn’t come back, and probably even worse when he finally did.
~*~
The jacket was burning quickly. Johan was scared to let it burn away before putting more fuel on the fire. He needed just a bit more time. Something would come to him. Something always did. His best work was done under pressure, and this was more pressure than the bottom of the sea.
He unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, dropping it in a loose crumple on the fire. Now he sat in just a white, cotton undershirt, and even with the fire the cold caressed his back, drawing sharp fingers down his spine.
It bought him at least another minute or two. That would be enough. He just needed to think.
~*~
The next day Johan made sure that Dietrich and Aldous came with him into the village, and that they stayed close and watched each other.
The snow fell in quick squalls, intense for an hour or so, followed by periods of flurries or even clear skies, in a cycle that had persisted since early the night before.
The snow was thick in the air as they reached the village center, a white swirling that obscured the destruction of war. The little village square almost looked normal again, almost whole, until the rubble from a blasted building or the charred remains of a tree became visible through a clear patch.
As the three soldiers made their way to the center of the square, Johan noted the rough, snow blurred shapes of people at the square’s perimeter, moving on the threshold between rubble and storm, watching them.
“Where is the old man?” Johan screamed. He felt his words ripped from his mouth and dragged away by the wind, lost to all but his own ears.
Johan headed for a cluster of people, fleetingly visible through gusts of snowy wind. By the time he reached the edge of the square, the people, if they had ever really been there were gone, snuck away while hidden by the storm.
Then the wind seemed to ease. The blinding density of the snow in the air lessened. Within moments, the snow had calmed to a drifting flurry.
Johan repeated, “Where is the old man?” He held his rifle, careful that it was always pointed vaguely at some part of the crowd around them. He checked to see that Dietrich and Aldous were doing the same.
No answer came from the people. Although the intensity of the wind and snow had lessened, there was still a thick ceiling of smoky grey clouds that kept the day dark and gave the crowd adequate shadows in which to hide and watch.
Aldous leaned back and whispered to Johan, “They’re acting strong. I don’t like this, Johan. They’re up to something.”
“When we kill the rabbi, they’ll be easy to control again,” Johan said.
Dietrich grunted, but whether in affirmation or disagreement, the other two could not tell.
Johan took a few steps forward, separating himself from the other two. He lifted his rifle to his shoulder, squinted his left eye and looked through his right. He locked his line of sight down the gun barrel and onto an old woman wrapped and bundled against the cold.
Johan squeezed off a shot and the old woman dropped, the layers of clothing hiding all but the crimson stain as it spread outward from her chest.
Johan heard a hushed gasp, but couldn’t tell if it had been the people or the snowy wind around him.
“Tell me where the old man is hiding or I’ll kill a child next!” Johan announced.
Aldous gulped loud enough that Johan could hear him over the wind filling the space between them.
“Fine! Another will die,” Johan yelled after a moment of icy silence.
“Wait!”
It was a faint yell, either far away or caught and muffled by the wind.
Johan scanned the crowd, searching for the source of the plea, waiting for someone to say something more or step forward.
Then he saw movement, a small shape hunched a bit and moving incredibly slowly as it approached, blanketed by the shadow of a half demolished building. It seemed, when seen through the snow and shadow, as if the shape was followed always by a gust of wind, snow-filled and at its back. Following as loyally as a well-trained dog while the bent old shape shuffled forward.
“Is that you, old man?” Johan asked with a smile and a musicality that implied it had better be.
The old man stepped out from the shadow, the obscured light of the mid winter sun revealing a face so pale it looked dead. It was the rabbi, but his skin looked bloodless, white with blue and lavender hues showing in places. Moisture had frozen in his long grey beard, coating it with frost.
The cloth of the rabbi’s robes – different from the clothes he’d been wearing, had the appearance of ceremonial garments – were rigid and half frozen. Frost and snow clung trapped in the stiff folds, standing out against the black material. He looked frozen, as if he’d been out in the cold and storms since they’d last seen him.
Only his eyes looked warm. The brown within reddened by vessels that were engorged with blood, they sat over two bulges that were purple and swollen, as if he’d not slept the entire time he spent waiting in the deep freeze for this confrontation.
For a long moment, Johan didn’t understand. Freezing himself for three days was supposed to make them leave? How? Some sort of protest? No, it didn’t make sense. If the old Jew thought that torturing himself would somehow prove some point, he was wrong.
“I said, wait,” the rabbi declared. His voice was still strong, as if his frozen exterior didn’t bother him in the least.
“Waiting,” Johan said. He held his rifle in both hands. He had to kill the old man. His orders were explicit on that, but he was too curious as to what the rabbi might have to say.
“I offered you a chance to leave,” the rabbi said. He had stopped just past the shadow’s end, and the strange impression of a frozen mass behind him remained.
“You would rather kill innocent people than save yourselves. So be it,” the rabbi said, extending one open hand towards them, as if blessing them.
Aldous grunted as he quickly leve
led his rifle, the butt pressed firmly against his shoulder.
“You’ve let the cold get to you…” Johan started with a chuckle.
“Yeah,” Dietrich agreed.
Then the movement from behind the rabbi came forward, the illusion of mass came into the pale daylight. It was no illusion at all.
~*~
Johan debated trying to open a bullet or two to use the gunpowder to fuel his fire. Then he decided that, not only would the gunpowder burn far too quickly to be of much benefit, he risked it exploding and burning him. He’d never get away if one of his legs was injured, or even worse, if he was blinded.
His fire was dying down and there wasn’t much left he could do about it.
~*~
The rabbi called it golem as it moved out of the shadows, revealing its large, humanoid body, the misty translucence of its form carved of ice.
Johan and his friends thought that perhaps that was the creature’s name or that of the spirit which gave it life. Though Nazi ideology was full of superstition and mythology, they knew nothing of Jewish mysticism.
“You will not hurt my people,” the rabbi said as the icy beast moved around and past him, headed straight towards the three soldiers.
The size of the creature, taller and broader than any man could be, coupled with the way it had slowly followed the old man, gave it the impression of lumbering slowness. Instead the golem broke into a run that was altogether too fast for its form.
Johan squeezed shots from his rifle as fast as he could, as did Aldous and Dietrich, but the monster didn’t even slow. Each bullet sent chips of ice out in all directions before ricocheting off into the village square or lodging just below the frigid surface.
Anthology of Ichor III: Gears of Damnation Page 16