“Boss,” she said in Russian. His victim was a red mess on the bare wooden floorboards. Drool dripped from Vadim’s mouth. He straightened up and looked around at the room as Princess closed the door behind her and leaned against it. With the burning log fire, he suspected it was the warmest she had been since they’d abandoned the Dietrich.
The pub was small, cramped, bowed and blackened; the modern furniture and fittings looked strangely incongruous. The clientele were mostly middle-aged men clearly used to life working outside. Rough hands ingrained with dirt told Vadim the kind of people he was looking at. They were all staring at him, horrified.
“Fools!” the woman behind the bar spat. “They’ll kill us all.” She was a plump lady, in her mid-sixties or so. Vadim turned to look at her and she took a few steps back. He reached down, removed the weapons and the ammunition from the dead SS men, and placed them on the bar. The room watched, silent.
“My name is Captain Scorlenski –”
“You ’ere ’a finish t’ job?” a red-faced man in his forties demanded. Vadim had to play the sentence back in his head to work out what the man had actually said.
“Everyone thinks we dropped the bombs ourselves,” Princess muttered in Russian. A few faces turned to her.
“I’m here to kill Nazis,” Vadim finished.
“You can’t!” the bar woman cried. There were tears in her eyes.
“We have to do something, Denise!” another man shouted.
“They’ll kill them all!” the bar woman, presumably Denise, protested.
“Kill who?” Vadim asked with a sinking feeling.
“They took all the woman of a certain age, and all the children,” said another man in the corner. He had the same build as many of the people in the pub: reasonably powerful, but running to fat. All of them looked like people who did hard, physical work but enjoyed their food and drink. Vadim guessed he was in his seventies. Something about him made Vadim think that he’d served in the military. He was old enough to have fought in the last war; if so, he couldn’t have been pleased to see two men wearing SS uniform in his local pub. “They said the children were to be indoctrinated. That lunatic they have in charge is calling them the Stevie Jugend, but they’re just hostages.”
“The women?” Princess asked, her voice like ice.
“For their Joy Division,” the old man said. Vadim went cold.
“They’re not from here, are they?” he asked. “Why did you let them across the bridge?” It was out of Vadim’s mouth before he could think. It was just frustration, it wouldn’t help anything.
“’Tweren’t us,” the old man said. “They turned up a few days after the dead came, after we saw the flashes and the fires from Manchester and Liverpool. The way we heard it, they threatened to shell Vickerstown with the tanks, so they lowered the bridge.”
They weren’t to know that the main guns on the tanks weren’t working.
“Why are you telling him anything, Bill?” a short, hatchet-faced man at a different table said. “He’s one of them, look at him.”
“The Russians fought against the Nazis, Sam,” Bill said.
“I don’t mean Russian. He’s dead,” Sam said. There was a collective intake of breath and some shuffling away from Vadim. Princess rolled her eyes.
“Can’t be,” someone else said. “He’s talking, he’s not trying to eat us.”
“He’s not breathing. Look at his colour,” Sam persisted. Vadim caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror behind the bar. They were right. He didn’t look human anymore.
“Yes, I’m dead,” Vadim said. “But the Nazis have our people. We have a common enemy, that’s all that matters.”
“You people did this!” spat the red-faced man who’d first spoken. “You destroyed our cities, killed millions of people, brought this disease, turned our families – our friends – into cannibals!” He was on his feet, tears in his eyes. The men at his table were reaching up for him. Denise’s hand was over her mouth. It looked as though they expected Vadim to kill him. Vadim took a step towards him, and he held his ground, shaking off his friends’ hands. It was clear he’d had enough.
“My government did this. We had no part in the decision. My squad and I attacked New York, not Britain, but for what little it’s worth, I’m sorry. I wish you and yours no ill will. We’re deserters now, traitors. We just want to see our people safe. Yours too.” The man had tears streaming down his face. Vadim wasn’t sure why he did it but he took the man in his arms and hugged him. There was a moment of resistance and then the man was shaking in his arms, sobs wracking his frame.
Despite the heat of his life, despite the proximity of his flesh and the reek of blood from the corpses on the floor, Vadim felt none of his usual urges. He was just another sentient creature in pain. Pain inflicted on him by circumstances beyond his control, and compounded by petty, thuggish evil. Perhaps Gulag’s vision of the world was right.
But if it were – if the new world belonged to warlords like this Steven Kerrican – then he may as well go down fighting.
“They took my daughter,” the man sobbed. Vadim had nothing to say that would comfort him. They would try to get his daughter back – try to get everyone back – but they would be firing military weapons in a compound filled with civilians. It was a fight that had to be fought, but he wasn’t going to make promises. He let the man go.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Roddy,” the red-face man told him. He sniffed and wiped away his tears, and then nodded almost apologetically to Vadim. There was nothing more to say, but somehow the two of them had come to an understanding.
“New York was you?” Bill asked from the corner.
Vadim suspected the question had been asked just to break the awkward silence. He nodded.
“We saw there had been terrorist attacks all over the US. Here as well. Greenham Common, Holy Loch, Faslane.”
“That was people like us,” Vadim told them. He wondered if it made any difference to explain that the virus wasn’t supposed to have been used in Europe. He couldn’t see how. If anything, it might make things worse.
“Any idea where the closest Soviet forces are?” Princess asked.
People shook their heads.
“We haven’t seen any round here,” Sam told her.
“A few of the zombies wear your uniforms,” Bill added. “But that’s all. We heard rumours that you’d invaded, but the telly went off shortly after the bombs fell.”
For a moment, the futility of it all struck Vadim. Even if they managed to get the women and children out, it was only so they could die of radiation sickness or cancer from the fallout. This was assuming they didn’t freeze or starve to death, or die of disease. You have to keep fighting, he thought. He wasn’t sure why.
“We need you to tell us as much as you can about this Territorial Army compound, anything at all, but especially where the hostages are.”
“No!” Denise cried from behind the bar. “You should be ashamed of yourselves! My Barbara is in the compound, so are her two little ones! You can’t send people like that in there! They’ll get them all killed!” She had tears running down her cheeks as well.
“They won’t stop, Denise,” Bill said, looking down at his pint. “They’ve had a taste of power. They’ll fill the holes inside of them by hurting your Barbara, and Davie, and the tyke.” He nodded down at the Nazis bleeding onto the bare floorboards. “I saw people like that in the camps in Burma. Doesn’t matter if they’re Japanese, German, their lot” – he nodded at Vadim – “or English; by the time they get to this point, all you can do is put them down like a dog gone wrong.” He looked straight at the barmaid. “Now you won’t like this, Denise, but there’ll come a time that they’ve done so much damage Barbara and the children would be better off dead.”
Denise tried to stifle a sob. “But you came back, Bill,” she said through the tears.
He looked down, studying his pint again.
“It
was a close-run thing, love. A lot of my friends died, too many by their own hand, and I very nearly became the worst kind of man. If it hadn’t been for my Edna...” Another old man put a hand on Bill’s shoulder, and he looked up and nodded in acknowledgement and thanks. “These dress-up Nazis, they just can’t just let folk be folk.” And then to Vadim: “Like your lot.” Vadim wasn’t sure he disagreed.
“We can’t trust them,” Sam said, glaring at Vadim and Princess.
“You hate them?” Bill said to Vadim, gesturing towards the two fake SS men.
“I grew up in Stalingrad,” Vadim told him.
Bill crossed his arms and turned to Sam. “Good enough for me,” he said.
“They’re not just in the barracks,” Denise said. “The ones with families took over the nicest houses in Vickerstown.”
“Do you know which houses?” Princess asked.
“We can find out,” Roddy said.
“Do you have any weapons?” Vadim asked.
“What little we had was mostly confiscated, but there are probably a few bits and pieces still lying around. Those’ll help,” Bill said, nodding towards the MP-40 and the two pistols on the bar that Vadim had taken from the bodies.
“Can you clear the ones out in the town and we’ll do the compound?” Vadim asked. Bill thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Why were you drinking with them?” Princess suddenly asked. Almost everyone turned to look at her.
“They came here to look after me, love,” Denise told her. Princess didn’t seem entirely happy with the answer, but she didn’t say anything else.
“You realise, if it gets out what we’re trying to do, it’s all over?” Vadim told them.
“We’ll only get people we can trust involved. Nobody’ll tell ’em owt,” Bill assured him, to much mumbled agreement in the pub. Vadim wasn’t sure what had just been said to him, but it seemed to mean they wouldn’t share information with the enemy.
“Okay, tell me what you know, and be sure you get where the hostages are being held right,” he told them. And then to Princess: “And then you’re going back for the rest.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To meet with der Führer.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
0001 GMT, 25th November 1987
Vickerstown, Walney Island, North-West England
VADIM MADE HIS way through the streets of Vickerstown past rows of mock-Tudor housing. The wind howled down the road, blowing the black snow around, creating drifts. There were very few candles burning in the houses, and the curtains were all closed tight against the horrors of the world. It was a joke; a place to hide and pretend that their world hadn’t just ended. He had expected to see patrols, but found none. It seemed like the re-enactors just patrolled the shores of the island and manned the bridge and the shallow parts of the channel.
He was wondering why he was doing this. Walking into the wolf’s den on his own. He remembered what the Fräulein had said to him on the Dietrich about their encounter with the national guardsmen in New York: You look like you were trying to get yourself killed. Was that it? It would be easier than carrying on, in this world, in his strange, terrible state. But he didn’t think he was trying to kill himself.
He told himself he was going to negotiate, to see if he could arrange for the release of the hostages; but having sent Princess back to get the others, he knew he was on a clock. The Joy Division, the plan to indoctrinate the youth, were enough to want them dead. He suspected the real reason was to look into the eyes of this Hauptsturmführer Kerrican.
Vadim had done some very bad things over the years during various wars. He was already a monster before he died. He had served monsters, probably for most of his life. But he had limits, and when the likes of the KGB had tried to push him past those limits, he’d pushed back, as had the people he had commanded. Maybe it was the sickening maths of comparative atrocity. Maybe he was no better than Kerrican, but the Nazis’ commitment to evil as an ideology, rather than a means to an end, had always staggered him. To find someone like Kerrican aping them, to the point that he would take advantage of the current horror to subjugate and brutalise his own people, disgusted Vadim. He had to look in Kerrican’s eyes. He had to try and find himself in them; to see if he himself was anything more than a hypocrite unable to face what he really was.
Back in North Scale they’d agreed to move fast. Frightened people informed, especially when their loved ones were at risk, and they would be; the fewer people knew and the faster they moved, the less chance there was of someone tipping off the fake SS. Bill and his people would arm themselves as well as they could and contact people they trusted in other parts of the island. Then they would descend on the houses in Vickerstown that the re-enactors had taken over. They would leave the compound to Vadim’s squad. It was a lot of ground to cover, a lot of personnel to deal with for just five people. Assuming Gulag came along with the others.
Vadim heard the compound before he saw it: loud music and raucous cheering. It sounded like some sort of sporting event.
The compound was a squat, ugly, high-walled square of red bricks. A heavy wooden gate opened onto the main road through Vickerstown. Vadim could make out scaffolding towers at three of the compound’s corners, topped with sandbags. They were manned, and in the poor light Vadim could just about make out a machine gun in each tower. A larger building rose above the walls in the fourth corner, also made of red brick. No-thrills military architecture at its most utilitarian.
Vadim came down the middle of the deserted street under a dark sky. The moon and stars were still hidden from view by all the dust in the atmosphere. He managed to get quite close before the light of a powerful handheld torch stabbed through the night and blinded him. He raised his hands slowly and told them who he’d come to see.
THE FAKE SS men came rushing out of the gate to cover him. Before the war they may have been businessmen, or worked in shops, or driven lorries; but now they looked like Vadim’s forty-year-old nightmares.
Their search was perfunctory; they didn’t want to get too close to the dead, and they certainly didn’t want to touch him. They took what weapons they could find before escorting him into the compound, into madness.
He had a look around as they marched him across the slush-covered yard. To his left the two Tiger tanks were parked between the gate and one of the towers. To his right was the half-track and another Saracen APC, with space for the one they had taken. Four prefabricated buildings ran down the right-hand wall, between two of the towers. If Bernie and Bill’s information had been correct, and they seemed to agree, then the first hut was empty, unless the refugees and crew from the Dietrich were being held there. It looked dark. There was no way to be sure if there was anyone inside or not, though there were no guards posted outside it. The second hut was where the children were kept, the third hut was the so-called Joy Division, and the fourth was the barracks for the single men.
On the left in the back corner was the building he had seen, some kind of hall. A huge, blood-red banner with a swastika painted on it hung down from the roof. Vadim made out a number of military trucks parked against the rear wall.
In the middle of the grassy yard next to the hall, a pit had been dug out and then lined with multi-floored scaffold boxes, like crude bleachers around an arena. Nazis packed the stand, looking down into the pit and cheering.
Finally Vadim saw Captain Schiller, standing in the yard outside the bleachers. A chain ran from his neck to a substantial-looking iron ring that had been hammered into the tarmac. His ears had been cut off and he was very clearly dead. He was swaying from side to side like a caged predator, watching Vadim as he was escorted past the captain of the Dietrich. There was no recognition in his eyes at all. It took a great deal of effort for Vadim not to start killing there and then.
Then he got his first look at Hauptsturmführer Kerrican. Wooden steps ran up the side of the hall to a walkway overlooking the arena, ending in a door into
the hall. Kerrican stood on the walkway looking down into the pit, like Caesar on his balcony. The flickering light of a flaming torch illuminated his grinning face.
Vadim reckoned Kerrican would be thought of as handsome, though his high cheekbones and the cruel set of his mouth made him look arrogant. He looked at home in the grey SS smock and soft forage cap. Bernie hadn’t been lying when he’d claimed that this man had served; it was plain to Vadim that he was looking at a soldier.
The guards marched Vadim up the wooden steps to the walkway where Kerrican stood. On the way up, he got a view into the pit. New Boy and a badly-beaten Harris were facing off against three zombies, armed with a broadsword and a cricket bat with nails driven through it. The body of a fourth zombie lay on the muddy ground of the pit. New Boy and Harris looked exhausted. Part of the pit had been fenced off to form a corral for more of the zombies.
Vadim was staggered by the waste of effort and resources. It had been only nine days since the world had ended, and yet somehow these people had decided this was the best use of their time. Nine days. Again Vadim had to force himself not to react. He just turned away as another of the zombies lunged.
The Hauptsturmführer tore his eyes away from the spectacle in the pit to face Vadim. Up close, the captain realised Kerrican was wearing a necklace of ears. He looked into his green eyes and didn’t see himself. This man was irrevocably mad.
Kerrican looked him up and down.
“You look fucked, mate,” he said, and then grinned. He had a charming smile. Vadim had seen smiles like that before on other psychopaths. “Let’s talk in my office.”
Vadim nodded. There was more cheering from the scaffolding, and Vadim risked a glance. Harris had embedded the nailed end of the cricket bat into the head of one of the zombies. It sank to its knees, spasming. Another charged the police officer but New Boy rammed the broadsword into the thing’s mouth, the tip of the sword exploding out of the back of the dead man’s head. “Looks like the nig-nog can fight after all,” Kerrican muttered, before leading Vadim through the door and into an office. Vadim had no idea what a ‘nig-nog’ was.
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