The Monster Novels: Stinger, the Wolf's Hour, and Mine

by Robert R. McCammon

  A small, black loaf of bread, shot through with veins of green mold, was thrown in among them. The prisoners fell upon it, tearing chunks out of it. “Bring your sponge!” one of the soldiers who stood in the corridor said.

  Lazaris crawled forward, a gray sponge in his hand. He had at one time been a husky man, but the flesh had shrunken over his large bones. Dark brown hair spilled down his shoulders, his beard clotted with hay and filth. His facial flesh had drawn tight over his jutting cheekbones, and his eyes were dark holes in the pallid skin. His nose, a formidable beak that might’ve made Cyrano tip his hat, was crusted with blood around the nostrils, courtesy of Michael’s fist. He glanced at Michael as he crawled past, and Michael shrank back. Lazaris had the eyes of a dead man.

  The Russian immersed the sponge in a bucket of dirty water. Then he withdrew it, swollen with liquid. The bucket was pulled away, the kennel’s door slammed shut—a brutal sound—and the iron latch slid back into place. The next kennel down the corridor was opened.

  “Dinnertime,” Lazaris said as he crawled past Michael again. “Everyone gets a drink from the sponge. Hey, you bastards! Leave something for my comrade!” There was the noise of a quick and decisive struggle, and then Lazaris nudged Michael’s arm. “Here.” He put a damp bit of bread in Michael’s hand. “That damned Frenchman always tries to get more than his share. You’ve got to be fast around here if you want something better than a crust.”

  Michael sat with his back against the rough stones and chewed on the bread. He stared at nothing. His eyes stung. Tears crept from them and trickled down his cheeks, but who they were for he did not know.

  8

  THE IRON BOLT SHRIEKED back.

  At once Michael was on his haunches, roused from a nightmare of chimneys whose black smoke covered the earth. The door opened. “Send the girl out!” one of the three soldiers who stood there commanded.

  “Please,” Lazaris said, his voice husky from sleep. “Please let her alone. Hasn’t she suffered e—”

  “Send the girl out!” the man repeated.

  The girl had awakened, and was shivering in a corner. She made a soft whimpering noise, like a trapped rabbit.

  Michael had reached the end of what he would bear. He crouched in front of the doorway, his green eyes glittering above the darkness of his fresh beard. “If you want her so badly,” he said in German, “then come in and take her.”

  A rifle bolt was cocked. The barrel thrust in at him. “Out of the way, you vermin.”

  “Gallatinov!” Lazaris pulled at him. “Are you crazy?”

  Michael remained where he was. “Come in, you sons of bitches. Three against one. What are you waiting for?” He shouted it: “Come on!”

  None of the Germans accepted his invitation. They wouldn’t shoot him, Michael reasoned, because they knew Blok and Krolle hadn’t finished with him. One of the soldiers gathered saliva in his mouth and spat at Michael, and then the door was slammed shut and latched again.

  “Now you’ve done it!” Lazaris fretted. “God knows what you’ve awakened!”

  Michael spun around and grasped the other man’s beard. “You listen to me,” he said. “If you want to forget you’re a man, that’s fine with me, but I’m not going to lie here and moan for the rest of my life! You protected the girl when you thought I was after her; why won’t you protect her from those bastards?”

  “Because”—Lazaris worked Michael’s hand off his beard—“you’re only one, and they are legion.”

  The door was unlocked again. “Mercy of God!” Metzger shrieked. The door opened. Now six soldiers stood in the corridor.

  “You!” The beam of a hand torch found Michael’s face. “Come out of there!” It was Bauman’s voice.

  Michael didn’t move.

  “You won’t like it if we have to drag you out,” Bauman promised.

  “Neither will the Kraut who tries to drag me.”

  A Luger emerged from Bauman’s holster. “Do it,” he told the other soldiers. They hesitated. “Do it, I said!” Bauman thundered, and he gave the nearest man a kick in the pants.

  The first soldier crouched and started into the kennel. He reached out to grasp Michael’s arm, and Michael smashed a handful of filthy hay into the man’s face and followed that with a blow to the jaw that cracked like a gunshot. A second man hurtled through the door, and a third right behind him. Michael warded off a punch, then struck into the second soldier’s throat with the flat of his hand. The third man caught Michael’s jaw with a glancing blow, and a fourth soldier lunged upon him and hooked an arm around his throat. The girl began to scream, a high thin shriek that had years of terror behind it.

  The sound—so much like the voice of a wolf, calling in the night—galvanized Michael. He drove his elbows backward into the rib cage of the man who was throttling him. The soldier grunted with pain and his grip loosened, and Michael thrashed free. A fist struck his bruised shoulder, and another hammered at his skull. He shook off a body with such force that the man was slammed against the wall. A knee thudded into his back, and fingers raked his eyes. There was a shrill cry of pain, and suddenly the soldier who was trying to gouge his eyes out flailed at the emaciated figure that had leaped upon him. Metzger’s teeth had sunk into the soldier’s cheek, and he was ripping the flesh like a maddened terrier.

  Michael kicked out, and caught another soldier on the point of the chin. The man was hurled through the door and clipped Bauman’s legs. Bauman lifted a whistle to his mouth and began to blow quick, shrill notes. A fist swung past Michael’s head, thunking into a Germanic face; with a hoarse roar Lazaris swung again, and this time burst the man’s upper lip open in a spray of crimson. Then Lazaris grasped the hair of a guard whose SS cap had spun away, and slammed his forehead against the man’s skull with a noise like an ax blade meeting timber.

  A blackjack rose up like a cobra’s head. Michael grabbed the wrist before the soldier could strike, and drove his fist into the man’s armpit. He heard a rush of air behind him. Before he could twist around, a rifle butt hit him in the center of the back, between his shoulder blades, knocking the breath from his lungs. The blackjack crunched down on his arm, just above the elbow, and froze it with pain. A fist struck him on the back of the head, stunning him, and though he kept fighting wildly, he knew he was all but used up.

  “Bring him out!” Bauman shouted as other soldiers came to his assistance. “Come on, hurry it up!”

  The blackjack wielder began to beat at Lazaris and Metzger, driving them back against the wall. Two of the soldiers grabbed the blind girl and started hauling her out. Michael was thrown onto the corridor floor, where Bauman put a boot on his throat. The rest of the guards, most of them bruised and bleeding, scrambled out of the kennel.

  Michael heard a submachine gun being cocked. He looked up, his vision misted with pain, and saw a guard pointing his Schmeisser into the kennel. “No!” Michael croaked, Bauman’s foot pressed to his neck.

  The gun fired, two short bursts amid the remaining five prisoners. Spent cartridges clattered to the stones.

  “Stop that!” Bauman shouted, and uptilted the Schmeisser with the barrel of his pistol. Another quick burst pocked the stone wall and rained fragments and dust around them. “No firing without a direct order!” he raged, his eyes wild behind his glasses. “Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” the guard replied, thoroughly cowed, and he clicked the safety on his smoking gun and lowered it to his side.

  Bauman’s face had turned scarlet. He removed his foot from Michael’s neck. “You know every round of ammunition has to be accounted for!” he shouted at the gunner. “I’ll be filling out reports for a week with all that damned firing!” He motioned disdainfully to the kennel. “Close that up! And you men, get this trash on his feet!” He started striding along the corridor, and Michael was made to follow, his head pounding and his knees threatening to give way.

  He was returned to the room with the X-shaped metal table. A light bulb bu
rned overhead. “Strap him down,” Bauman said. Michael began to fight again, dreading the bite of those straps, but he was exhausted and the issue was quickly settled. The straps were pulled tight. “Leave us,” Bauman told the soldiers. When they were gone, he removed his glasses and slowly cleaned the lenses with a handkerchief. Michael noted that his hands were shaking.

  Bauman put his glasses back on. His face was haggard, dark circles under his eyes. “What’s your real name?” he asked.

  Michael remained silent, some of the fog clearing out of his mind but his back and shoulders still hurting like hell.

  “I mean what they call you in Britain,” Bauman went on. “You’d better talk quick, my friend! There’s no telling when Krolle might come around, and he’s aching to use that baton on you!”

  Michael was puzzled. Bauman’s tone of voice had changed; it was urgent, not superior. A trick, he thought it must be. Of course it was!

  “Chesna van Dorne hasn’t been captured yet.” Bauman lifted the table so Michael was almost upright, and locked it in place. “Her friends—our friends—are helping her hide. She’s also working on the arrangements.”

  “Arrangements?” His throat felt bruised from the pressure of Bauman’s boot. “What arrangements?”

  “To get you out of here. And also to find a plane and set up the fuel stops. You were planning on going to Norway, correct?”

  Michael was shocked speechless. It had to be a trick! My God! he thought. Chesna’s been captured, and she’s told everything!

  “Listen to me very carefully.” Bauman stared into Michael’s eyes. A pulse beat rapidly at the German’s temple. “I am here because I had a choice. Either fieldwork, which meant risking getting my ass shot off or being hung up from the balls by the Russians, or working here in this … this slaughterhouse. In the field I could do nothing for our friends; here I can at least communicate with them, and do what I can to help certain prisoners. Incidentally, if your intent was to get everyone in your cell murdered, you came very close to accomplishing it.”

  That explained the dramatics with the machine gun, Michael thought. Bauman was trying to keep the others from being killed. No, no! Blok or Krolle had set him up to this! This was all stage play!

  “My task,” Bauman said, “is to keep you alive until the arrangements are worked out. I don’t know how long that will be. I’ll get a radio code that will tell me how your escape’s going to be managed. God help us, because prisoners only leave Falkenhausen as bags of fertilizer. I’ve made a suggestion; we’ll see if Chesna thinks it’s worthwhile.”

  “What suggestion?” he asked warily.

  “Falkenhausen was built to keep prisoners in. The camp is understaffed and the guards are used to docility. Which is why you were very stupid just now. Don’t do anything to call attention to yourself!” He paced back and forth as he talked. “Just play the brain-dead prisoner, and you might survive a week!”

  “All right,” Michael said, “let’s pretend I believe you. How would I get out?”

  “The guards—and Krolle, too—have gotten lazy. There are no uprisings here, no escape attempts, nothing to upset the day-to-day routine. The guards don’t expect anyone to try to break out, simply because it would be impossible. But”—he stopped pacing—“neither do they expect anyone to try to break in. And that may be a distinct possibility.”

  “Break in? To a concentration camp? That’s crazy!”

  “Yes, Krolle and the guards would think so, too. As I said, Falkenhausen was built to keep prisoners in, but maybe not to keep a rescue team out.”

  A faint ember of hope sparked within Michael. If this man was acting, he deserved star billing with Chesna. But Michael didn’t let himself believe it yet; it would be utter foolishness to go along with this, and perhaps spill precious secrets in the process.

  “I know this is difficult for you. If I were in your position, I’d be skeptical as well. You’re probably thinking I’m trying to lead you into a trap of some kind. Maybe nothing I can say will make you believe otherwise, but this you must believe: it’s my job to keep you alive, and that’s what I’m going to do. Just do what you’re told, and do it without hesitation.”

  “It’s a huge camp,” Michael said. “If a rescue team did get through the gate, how are they going to find me?”

  “I’ll take care of that.”

  “And what if the team fails?”

  “In that case,” Bauman said, “it’s my responsibility to see that you die without revealing any secrets.”

  This hit a true note. If the rescue effort failed, that solution was what Michael would expect. My God! he thought. Do I dare trust this man?

  “The guards are waiting outside. Some of them have loose lips, and they tell everything to Krolle. So I’ll have to beat you, to make this look real.” He began to wrap the handkerchief around the knuckles of his right fist. “I’ll have to draw blood. My apologies.” He drew the handkerchief tight. “When we finish here, you’ll be returned to your cell. Again, I beg you: don’t put up any resistance. We want the guards and Major Krolle to believe you’re broken. Understand?”

  Michael didn’t reply. His mind was too busy, trying to sort all this out.

  “All right,” Bauman said. He raised his fist. “I’ll try to get this over as quickly as I can.”

  He punched with the spare economy of a boxer. It didn’t take very long for the handkerchief to become spattered with scarlet. Bauman gave Michael no body blows; he wanted all the damage—as superficial as it was—to be on display. By the time he was finished, Michael was bleeding from a gash above his left eye and a split lower lip, his face mottled with blue bruises.

  Bauman opened the door and called the guards in, the bloodstained handkerchief still bound around his swollen knuckles. Michael, almost unconscious, was unstrapped and dragged back to his kennel. He was thrown inside, on the damp hay, and the door was sealed.

  “Gallatinov!” Lazaris shook him back to his senses. “I thought they would’ve killed you, for sure!”

  “They … did … their worst.” Michael tried to sit up, but his head felt like a lump of lead. He was lying against another body. A cool, unbreathing body. “Who is that?” Michael asked, and Lazaris told him. The bursts of machine-gun bullets had delivered the mercy of God. The Frenchman was also hit, and he lay huddled up and breathing heavily with slugs in his chest and stomach. Lazaris, the Dane, and the other prisoner—a German who moaned and cried without pause—had all escaped injury but for stone splinter cuts. The fourteen-year-old girl had not returned to the kennel.

  She didn’t come back. Sometime during the next eight hours—or at least Michael judged it to be so, though his sense of time had all but vanished—the Frenchman hitched a final breath and died. The guards brought another small loaf of black bread and allowed another dip of the sponge in their bucket, but they left the corpses among the living.

  Michael slept a lot, rebuilding his strength. His thigh wound began to crust over, and so did the gash above his left eye: more signs of time’s passage. He lay on the kennel floor and stretched, working the blood back into his stiff muscles. He closed his mind to the walls and ceiling and concentrated on visions of green forest and grasslands sweeping toward the blue horizon. He learned the routine: the guards brought bread and water once every day, and every third day a bucket of gray gruel that Lazaris sopped the sponge in. It was slow starvation, but Michael made sure he got every bit of bread, water, and gruel that he could scoop up and squeeze out.

  The corpses swelled and began to reek of decay.

  What was Blok up to? Michael wondered. Possibly going over the histories of the Reichkronen employees, trying to uncover a traitor who wasn’t there? Possibly trying to find the fictitious camera and film? Or leading the search for Chesna? He knew that a resumption of torture was imminent; this time it would be with instruments instead of fists and Krolle’s rubber baton. Michael wasn’t sure he could survive it. When his torturers came for him again, he would l
et the change take him, he decided. He would tear out as many of their throats as he could before their bullets cut him to pieces, and that would be the end of it.

  But what about Iron Fist, and the forthcoming invasion? The gruel bucket had come twice; he’d been in this filthy hole for at least seven days. The Allied command had to be warned about Iron Fist. Whatever it was, it was deadly enough to make delaying D day imperative. If the soldiers who hit the landing beaches were exposed to the corrosive substance that had caused those wounds in the photographs, then the invasion would be a massacre.

  He awakened from a restless sleep, in which skeletons in green fatigues lay in huge piles on the shores of France, to hear the sound of thunder.

  “Ah, listen to that music!” Lazaris said. “Isn’t it lovely?”

  Not thunder, Michael realized. The sound of bombs.

  “They’re hitting Berlin again. The Americans in their B-seventeens.” Lazaris’s breathing had quickened with excitement. Michael knew the Russian was imagining himself up there with the swarms of heavy bombers, in the turbulent sky. “Sounds like some of their bombs are falling short. The woods’ll be on fire; it usually happens that way.”

  The camp air-raid siren had begun to wail. The thunder was louder, and Michael could feel the vibration of the kennel’s stones.

  “Lots of bombs coming down,” Lazaris said. “They never hit the camp, though. The Americans know where we are, and they’ve got those new bomb sights. Now there’s an aircraft for you, Gallatinov, If we’d had Forts instead of those lousy Tupolevs, we’d have knocked the Krauts to hell back in forty-two.”

  It took a moment for what Lazaris had said to sink in. “What?” Michael asked.

  “I said, if we’d had B-seventeens instead of those damned Tu—”

  “No, you said ‘Forts.’ ”

  “Oh. Right. Flying Fortresses. B-seventeens. They call them that because they’re so hard to shoot down. But the Krauts get their share.” He crawled toward Michael a few feet. “Sometimes you can see the air battles if the sky’s clear enough. Not the planes, of course, because they’re too high, but their contrails. One day we had a real scare. A Fortress with two burning engines passed right over the camp, couldn’t have been a hundred feet off the ground. You could hear it crash, maybe a mile or so away. A little lower and it would’ve come down on our heads.”