SecondWorld

by Jeremy Robinson

  “Take care of them!” he shouted to Vesely, pointing at the approaching group of workers.

  Vesely drew his second pistol. Between the two, he’d have eleven shots. Miller knew he’d need just nine to finish the job, but when Adler took up her solid shooter’s stance next to the cowboy, Miller didn’t think the man would even need both guns.

  Miller ran right, sprinting through a row of cylinders. He quickly lost sight of the mob, but knew their fate when he heard the occasional boom of Vesely’s handguns, each, without doubt, a well-placed kill shot. The single cannonlike rounds from Vesely were complemented by the less loud triple shots that Miller recognized as Adler. Two to the chest, one to the head. With very few shots fired in return, and lots of screams off to his left, Miller knew the pair had the situation under control.

  Miller, on the other hand, did not. An arm stretched out in front of him and caught Miller across the chest. Miller fell backward, but his forward momentum turned the fall into a slide. As he slipped across the polished floor, he leaned back with his MP5. Aiming upside down while sliding would have been a challenge, so he just pulled the trigger and let loose a barrage that sent his attacker diving for cover before he could get off a shot.

  Miller got to his feet and dove behind the nearest cylinder. As he rolled to his feet, he ejected the MP5’s magazine and slapped in a new one. The staccato roar of his enemy’s rifle, accompanied by the ping of bullets on metal, echoed through the chamber.

  Miller leaned out and fired a volley, then ducked as his adversary took a turn. They could go at this all day, or until one of them ran out of ammunition, Miller realized. Lucky I came prepared. While the other man finished his volley, Miller pulled the pin on a flashbang grenade and tossed it toward the man’s position. While the weapon wouldn’t kill the man, it would effectively render him blind and deaf, and confused as hell.

  Miller closed his eyes and covered his ears. The explosion wouldn’t be close enough to render him helpless, but it would still hurt like hell. When it came, the boom hurt his ears, but it wasn’t enough to slow him down. Miller whirled around the cylinder. He planned to come around behind the man and finish him off without a fight. But as he rounded the cylinder behind which the man hid, he realized his plan had a fatal flaw.

  The man’s strange mask. The tinted lenses protected him from the flash. And the rest clearly protected him from the noise. Miller would have a ringing in his ears for the next week and this man was no worse for the wear. The man saw Miller coming and spun his weapon toward him.

  Miller knew the bullets wouldn’t pierce the man’s armor, but he unloaded anyway as he continued his charge. The kinetic force of each round was diffused by the thick armor, but a series of high-speed projectiles in a row at close quarters was enough to send the man reeling. As he spilled back, the man pulled the trigger, firing the full contents of his clip toward Miller.

  But Miller wasn’t there.

  When the man caught his balance again, and began to reload, Miller jumped out from behind the man and leapt onto his back. He got his arm up under the man’s mask and squeezed. The man’s armor could deflect bullets and his mask could ward off the effects of a flashbang grenade, but the man still needed to breathe. The man slammed Miller against one of the cylinders and nearly shook him off, but when the man tried again, he missed. The pair fell back onto the floor. With his leverage gone, the man was defenseless. He died thirty seconds later.

  Miller shoved the man off of him and stood, listening. The gunshots had stopped, but he could hear Adler shouting. He couldn’t make out what she was saying, but he didn’t need to. He bolted toward the voice, weaving in and out through the endless rows and columns of the strange devices.

  When Miller reached the end, he found Vesely aiming a gun at a white-clad man standing at a mobile computer console. It wasn’t plugged into anything, so he assumed its power source was inside the big black plastic case beneath the computer. And if it was connected to a network, it was wireless. The man’s finger hovered over the Enter key of a computer keyboard. Adler stepped closer to the man, hands raised. “Don’t do it,” she said.

  Miller didn’t know what “it” was, but doubted the man was about to send out a blog entry. Though it could be a communication. Or something worse. Miller gave the slightest of nods to Vesely, who pulled the trigger. But the man must have seen the gesture, because a microsecond before his brains exited the back of his skull, he pushed the button.

  In the silence that followed the cacophonous gunshot, Miller heard the rev of a tiny engine. The man had triggered another of the killer Roombas. But then the engine sounded different. Louder. When the small robotic Bouncing Betty rounded the corner from the far end of the cylinder field, Miller knew why.

  The man hadn’t activated one Betty.

  He’d activated hundreds.

  45

  The robotic army’s whirring engines grew louder as they closed the distance. Miller rushed to the computer. The screen was covered with text, flashing and moving as the system worked. The text scrolled faster than he could read. He moved the mouse, but nothing happened. Whatever kind of operating system this was, it made little sense to him.

  Adler sidled up next to him. “It’s Linux based,” she said. She typed in a command faster than Vesely could quick draw, but nothing happened. She tried several different keystroke combinations and nothing happened. “The program is locked,” she said.

  “Please hurry, or start running,” Vesely said. “Roomba army approaches.”

  Miller glanced up and saw an endless sea of red LED lights. They were going to have to run in a second, but he doubted they could hide for long. And lying down probably wouldn’t work. One of the Bettys would eventually fire at an angle, assuming that’s how they all functioned. Some might just be bombs.

  Adler pointed back toward the entrance. “Cowboy, run that way.”

  “Happily,” Vesely said, and then ran toward the exit.

  A burst of text flowed onto the screen in response to Vesely’s movements.

  “There!” Adler said. “The robots’ movements are being controlled, or at least coordinated by the system. There must be sensors throughout this whole place. Maybe cameras. Motion sensors. But they are being controlled by the network. If the computers go down—”

  Miller took aim at the computer.

  “No!” Adler shouted. “The entire networked system. Shooting one computer will not stop it.”

  “Then what will!”

  “Fork bomb,” Adler said.

  Miller had no idea what a fork bomb was, but said, “Do it!”

  He watched as Adler struck three keys and opened a new window. It was a basic text system, like old DOS. She quickly typed in a seemingly random grouping of symbols.

  $ :(){:

  “A fork bomb is a bash function,” Adler said. “It is called recursively and runs in the background. Once it is started, it cannot be stopped. It opens itself again and again. It starts slow, but each function continues to operate. It is exponential so once it begins, it can happen quickly depending on the power of the networked computers.”

  She finished the sequence—

  $ :(){:|:&};:

  —and hit Enter. “There!”

  A single robot Betty rolled around the console. Too late! As the disk at the center of the mobile mine spun up, Miller tackled Adler to the ground. As they fell he realized he would be on top of Adler and quite possibly in the thing’s kill zone, even if it didn’t tilt.

  They hit the floor together, each letting out an “oof!” But the puff of air and clack of metal balls never sounded. The disk hit the floor next to Miller, but this time it didn’t spin. It fell flat to the floor, heavy with unfired rounds. Miller leapt up, afraid the thing might fire in his face. He pulled Adler up, too, and then turned to face the rest of the robotic horde. Not a single red light glowed. He looked at the computer screen. Black and dead.

  Adler had done it. Before he could thank her, Vesely shouted,
“Safe to come out now?”

  “Ja,” Adler said.

  Vesely slid into view from behind one of the cylinders. He looked down and then stopped. He crouched, scrunched his nose, and then said, “Survivor. Come see this.”

  “What is it?” Adler asked.

  “Come and see!” Vesely said. “Is labeled with man’s name. Rolf Bergmann.”

  Miller stood next to Vesely and looked at the name etched into the base of the strange device. Several gauges and valves lined the base next to the name. Three metal tubes on the far side exited the base and stretched out toward an identical device.

  Miller guessed there were at least one hundred of the things. But what really bothered him was that beyond cylinders left behind were several hundred more empty bases. Had they never been filled or were these things part of what had been transported out?

  He couldn’t imagine what they were, but they looked like futuristic giant-sized vertical coffins. He knocked his fist against it twice. It rang hollow.

  “Here,” Vesely said. “Is handle.” He took hold of a handle on the side and pulled. It stuck for a moment, held closed by a small amount of suction, and then opened. Cool air seeped out, steaming as it rolled around them. The inside of the device was cushioned with red rubber. Several tubes dangled from the side. But it was otherwise empty.

  The shape of the cushioning—perfectly fitted for a six-foot-tall man—held Miller’s interest. “I think these held people,” he said.

  “Cryogenics,” Vesely said.

  “That’s not possible,” Adler said. She moved a hand to play with her hair, but her blond locks had been cut. She squeezed a fist instead.

  Vesely turned to Adler. “The Nazis did many experiments on humans. Jews and Russians at Auschwitz were stripped naked. Placed in freezing water with temperature probe in rectum. Is documented. Test subjects were kept in water until death, or near death. Then, they would attempt to resuscitate the victims. Heat lamps. Internal irrigation—scalding water in throat, stomach, and intestines. And bath in near boiling water. To my knowledge, all victims died. But it seems process was perfected.”

  “Mein Gott,” Adler said. She walked along the line of cryogenic tombs, reading the names to herself. “There are so many. But where are the others?”

  “That’s what we need to find out,” Miller said. He turned toward the command center and saw Brodeur sitting at a computer, its screen glowing brightly. He’d apparently recovered from the attack, booted the system back up, and got back on task. His fingers clacked over the keyboard.

  “Where were you?” Miller asked.

  Brodeur glanced up for just a moment and gave an awkward smile. “Got lost. By the time I came back the army of killer gizmos was on the loose. When they shut down, I got to work.”

  Miller headed toward him. “Why did you scream?”

  Brodeur’s smile turned sheepish. “I tripped.”

  Before Miller could tease the man, Brodeur finished his flurry of keystrokes. “To quote Spaceballs, I ain’t found shit. Can’t make heads nor tails of this operating system, never mind that everything is in German.”

  Miller looked at the screen. Like the mobile computer, Miller couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing either. It looked something closer to the Windows operating system, but the learning curve would be steep with everything written in German. But Adler seemed to know her way around a computer.

  Vesely entered the command area and whistled. They were surrounded by computers, servers, and bundles of cables that descended from the grid of metal beams above them. As his eyes followed the cables up, Vesely went white and fell back. He landed in one of the floor-bolted swiveling chairs and would have spilled out if Miller hadn’t caught him.

  “You okay, Cowboy?” Miller asked.

  “No. I am not.” Vesely looked beyond Miller’s face, toward the ceiling. “Am terrified.”

  Miller looked up and saw what had Vesely so frightened.

  The Bell.

  It hung from the stone ceiling, fifty feet above their heads.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Miller asked.

  “I do not think it is prototype, but it resembles Bell, yes. I do not think this is meant for flight, though.”

  “Why?”

  Vesely looked at Miller like he was crazy. “Because is mounted to ceiling.”

  Adler joined them, looking up, looking nearly as pale as Vesely. Then she saw the computer screen. “Have you found anything?”

  “Everything is in German,” Brodeur said.

  “Let me,” Adler said, motioning Brodeur out of the seat. She looked the screen over for a moment and said, “Linux, same as the other. Should not have any trouble accessing anything that is not encrypted.” She looked back at Brodeur. “You are lucky starting the system did not restart the robots.”

  “Actually, I think it did,” Miller said, pointing out the red lights gleaming like a horde of angry, midget Cyclopes. “It just didn’t restart the last command.”

  “Well, good. Knock yourself out,” Brodeur said. “I’m going to do some recon and make sure there aren’t any stragglers.”

  “Cowboy,” Miller said. “Go with him.”

  Vesely didn’t look happy about the order. Neither did Brodeur. The two men had rubbed each other the wrong way from the beginning. But he didn’t like the idea of any of them being alone. After the two men left, Miller watched over Adler’s shoulder as she worked her way through the system.

  A series of folder icons appeared on the screen. She translated them. “Assembly. Stasis. Facilities. Schedule.”

  “Facilities,” Miller said.

  Adler opened the folder. The first name on the alphabetical list was “Auschwitz.”

  The number of sites was mind-blowing. Adler opened one at random and found several more subfolders, everything from schematics to construction reports to photos. They scanned it all, quickly realizing they were looking at the plans for an underground bunker and the evidence that it had been completed.

  “Go back to the list,” Miller said. If these bunkers had been built to survive the coming storm, and he believed they were, then one of them might hold the key to stopping it. He scanned the list.

  Several names sounded familiar. Some sounded foreign. One of the names had caught his attention. “Dulce.”

  “Have you been there?” Adler asked.

  “It’s a base so secret it’s kind of a modern myth. I served with a guy who claimed he served at Dulce. Said they had—shit—he said they had UFOs. Was real proud of it. Come to think of it, he was a racist prick, too. It’s our best bet so far.”

  “What about Area Fifty-one? Aren’t they supposed to have UFOs?”

  “They’ve got stealth bombers, which will probably turn out to be Nazi technology, but I don’t see Groom Lake on the list.”

  “I think I can print this if you want.”

  “Don’t need to.” He reached into his pocket and took out a thumb drive he’d requested along with the rest of the equipment. Nothing worked better for high-speed, mobile data transfers. “Thought it might come in handy. But don’t just copy the Dulce folder. Copy it all.”

  He handed it to her and she plugged the small device in the computer’s front side USB port. She went back to the display of the four folders, selected them all, and started the transfer. Ten gigabytes of information in ten minutes. Not bad. If they found nothing else, Miller would take the information back to the George Washington and have a team of people sift through it. He suspected Dulce was important and didn’t want to stay in the Nazi stronghold any longer than he had to.

  “You think that’s what we came for?” she asked.

  “We’ll find out when we—” A horrible thought occurred to him. “Can you open the personnel file while that’s transferring?”

  She did. Three new folders appeared.

  Current.

  Deceased.

  Stasis.

  Miller’s stomach churned. “Open the stasis folder.
”

  Adler’s shoulders shrunk in. She’d figured out what had him concerned. “You don’t really think?”

  “Just open it.”

  Inside the folder was a single file. She opened it.

  A long list of names, in no discernible order, opened on the left side of the screen. As she scrolled through the names using the arrow keys, a photo and profile for each person opened on the right side of the screen. Images and text flashed past.

  “Stop!” Miller said. He moved her hand away from the keyboard and hit the Up key three times. A face he’d hoped to never see again appeared on the screen. It’s true, he thought. Vesely is right.

  He scanned the man’s profile. Ulbrecht Busch. Born in 1921. Member of the Schutzstaffel—Germany’s elite SS. He served in World War II under a man named—

  “Mazuw,” Adler said. She’d seen the name, too.

  Miller nodded. “I’m willing to bet most of the men in this database served under him, perhaps were handpicked by him.”

  “You recognized him?”

  “I killed him,” Miller said. “In Miami.”

  He scrolled through the names again. Images of grim men flashed on the screen, but his eyes were on the names. The first name he recognized sent a chill through his body.

  Hans Kammler—the man who’d overseen the building of extermination camps and many of the Reich’s more exotic weapons, including the Bell.

  A second name caught his attention as it quickly scrolled past and made his knees nearly give out.

  Before he could think about the discovery’s ramifications or point it out to Adler, she said, “Stop!” and brushed his hand away. “The names on the left, highlighted in red. I think they’re the men who have been revived already.”

  Miller scanned the list, looking for the name. It was colored mustard yellow.

  That was good.

  Above it, near the top of the screen, Kammler’s name appeared in red.