The Wolf's Hour

by Robert R. McCammon

  Mouse heard someone making a choking sound. It was his own throat, he realized. He felt the squeeze of the noose around it.

  “Well? Don’t stand there gawking. Get him down.”

  Mouse glanced back at the soldier. “Me? No… please… I can’t…”

  “Go on, runt. Make yourself useful.”

  “Please… I’ll be sick…”

  The soldier tensed, eager for another kick. “I said to get him down. I won’t tell you again, you little—”

  He was shoved aside, and he staggered over a pine stump and went down on his butt. Michael reached up, grasped the corpse’s ankles, and gave a strong yank. Most of the rotten rope parted, fortunately before the corpse’s head came off. Michael yanked again, and the rope broke. The corpse fell, and lay like a piece of shiny leather at Mouse’s feet.

  “Damn you!” The soldier leaped up, red-faced, thumbed the safety off on his Karabiner, and thrust the barrel into Michael’s chest. His finger lodged on the trigger.

  Michael didn’t move. He stared into the other man’s eyes, saw the indignant child in them, and he said, “Save your bullet for the Russians,” in his best Bavarian accent, since his new papers identified him as a Bavarian pig farmer.

  The soldier blinked, but his finger remained on the trigger.

  “Mannerheim!” the lieutenant bawled, striding forward. “Put down that gun, you damned fool! They’re Germans, not Slavs!”

  The soldier obeyed at once. He thumbed the safety off again, but he still stared sullenly at Michael. The lieutenant stepped between them. “Go on, watch them over there,” he told Mannerheim, motioning toward another group of prisoners. Mannerheim trudged away, and the dumpling-cheeked officer turned his attention to Michael. “You don’t touch my men. Understand? I could’ve let him shoot you, and I’d be within my rights.”

  “We’re both on the same side,” Michael reminded him, his gaze steady. “Aren’t we?”

  The lieutenant paused. Too long. Had he heard something false in the accent? Michael wondered. His blood felt icy. “Let me see your travel permit,” the lieutenant said.

  Michael reached into his mud-streaked brown coat and gave the man his papers. The lieutenant unfolded them, and studied the typewritten words. There was an official seal on the lower right-hand corner, just beneath the permit administrator’s signature. “Pig farmer,” the German muttered quietly, and shook his head. “My God, has it come to this?”

  “I can fight,” Michael said.

  “I’m sure. You may have to, if the Russian Front breaks open. Dirty bastards won’t stop until they get to Berlin. What service are you volunteering for?”

  “Butchering,” Michael replied.

  “I imagine you’ve had some experience at that, haven’t you?” The lieutenant looked distastefully at Michael’s dirty clothes. “Ever fire a rifle?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And why haven’t you volunteered before now?”

  “I was raising my pigs.” A movement caught Michael’s eye; over the lieutenant’s shoulder he saw a soldier walking toward Gunther’s hay wagon, where the weapons were hidden. He heard Mouse cough, and knew Mouse had seen, too.

  “Hell,” the lieutenant said, “you’re almost as old as my father.”

  Michael watched the soldier approach the hay wagon. The skin crawled at the nape of his neck. And then the soldier hoisted himself up into the back of the wagon and lay down in the hay to sleep. Several others catcalled and hooted at him, but he laughed and took his helmet off, cradling his head with his hands. Michael saw three soldiers sitting in the rear of the truck, and the others were spread out amid the prisoners. He glanced at Gunther, across the road. Gunther had stopped chopping a tree, and was staring at the soldier who lay unwittingly atop an arsenal.

  “You look fit enough. I don’t think the butchering service would mind if you cleared trees with my detail for a few days.” The lieutenant folded Michael’s papers and gave them back to him. “We’re going to widen this road for the tanks. So you see? You’ll be doing your service for the Reich and you don’t even have to get your hands bloody.”

  A few days, Michael thought grimly. No, that wouldn’t do at all.

  “Both of you get back to work,” the lieutenant ordered. “When the job’s finished, we’ll send you on your way.”

  Michael saw the soldier in the hay wagon shift his position, trying to get comfortable. The man smoothed the hay down, and if he felt any of the weapons underneath it…

  There was no time to wait and see if the soldier discovered the guns or not. The lieutenant was striding back to the truck, confident in his powers of persuasion. Michael grasped Mouse’s elbow and pulled him along, toward the road. “Keep your mouth shut,” Michael warned him.

  “Hey, you!” one of the other soldiers called. “Who told you to quit?”

  “We’re thirsty,” Michael explained as the lieutenant listened. “We’ve got a canteen in our wagon. Surely we can have a drink of water before we continue?”

  The lieutenant waved them on and swung himself up into the truck bed to rest his legs. Michael and Mouse walked on across the road as the prisoners kept on chopping and pine trees cracked as they fell. Gunther glanced at Michael, his eyes large and frightened, and Michael saw the soldier in the wagon winnow his hand into the hay for whatever was disturbing his recumbent posture.

  Mouse whispered urgently, “He’s found the—”

  “Ah-ha!” the soldier cried out as his fingers found the object and he pulled it free. “Look what these dogs are hiding from us, Lieutenant Zeller!” He held it up, showing the half-full bottle of schnapps he’d discovered.

  “Trust farmers to bury their secrets,” Zeller said. He stood up. The other soldiers looked on anxiously. “Are more bottles in there?”

  “Wait, I’ll see.” The soldier began burrowing through the hay.

  Michael had reached the wagon, leaving Mouse about six paces behind. He dropped the ax, reached deeply into the hay, and his hands closed on an object that he knew was there. He said, “Here’s something for your thirst,” as he drew out the submachine gun and clicked off the safety.

  The soldier gaped at him, the young man’s eyes blue as a Nordic fjord.

  Michael shot him without hesitation, the bullets stitching across the soldier’s chest and making the body dance like a marionette. As soon as the initial burst was released, Michael whirled around, took aim at the soldiers in the back of the truck, and opened fire. The axes ceased chopping; for an instant both the prisoners and German soldiers stood as motionless as painted statues.

  And then pandemonium broke loose.

  The three soldiers in the truck went down, their bodies punctured. Lieutenant Zeller threw himself to the floorboards, bullets whining all around him, and reached for his holstered pistol. A soldier standing near Gunther leveled his rifle to fire at Michael, and Gunther sank his ax between the man’s shoulder blades. The other two Resistance fighters lifted their axes to strike two more soldiers; Dietz’s ax all but took a man’s head off, but Friedrich was shot at point-blank range through the heart before he could deliver the blow.

  “Get down!” Michael shouted at Mouse, who stood dazed in the line of fire. His bulging blue eyes stared at the dead German in the hay. Mouse didn’t move. Michael stepped forward and punched him in the stomach with the submachine gun’s butt, the only thing he could think to do, and Mouse doubled over and fell to his knees. A pistol bullet knocked a shard of wood out of the wagon beside Michael, its path grazing the horse’s flank and making the animal shriek and rear up. Michael knelt down and fired a long burst at the truck, popping its tires and shattering both rear and front windshields, but Zeller hugged the truck bed’s floorboards.

  Gunther chopped down with his ax again, cleaving the arm of a soldier who’d been about to blast him with a Schmeisser. As the soldier fell, writhing in agony, Gunther picked up the weapon and sprayed bullets at two other soldiers who were running for cover in the trees. Both
of them staggered and fell. A pistol bullet whined past Michael’s head, but Zeller was firing without aiming. Michael reached over the edge of the wagon, his hand searching in the hay. Another bullet knocked a storm of wood splinters into his face, one of them driving into the flesh less than an inch beside his left eye. But Michael had what he was after; he pulled it out, ducked down, and wrenched the pin loose on the potato-masher hand grenade. Zeller shouted to anyone who could still hear him: “Kill the man at the wagon! Kill the son of a—”

  Michael threw the grenade. It hit the ground short of the truck, bounced, and rolled up underneath it. Then he flung himself over Mouse’s body and covered his own head with his arms.

  The grenade exploded with a hollow whump! and the blast lifted the truck up off its flattened tires. Orange and purple flames roared, their violence hurling the truck to one side on a pillar of fire. It crashed over, the rending of metal followed by a second blast as the gasoline and oil ignited. A column of black smoke with a red center rose into the sky. Zeller didn’t fire again. A rain of burning cloth and scorched metal fell, and the wagon horse jerked its reins free from the branch Gunther had tied them to, then fled madly down the road.

  Gunther and Dietz, who’d scooped up a dead man’s rifle, were kneeling amid the pine stumps, shooting at the four soldiers who’d escaped the first blaze of bullets. One of the men panicked, got up from the ground, and ran, and Dietz shot him in the head before he’d taken three strides. And then two prisoners rushed forward, into the midst of the remaining soldiers, and their axes began a merry work. Both men were shot before they could finish, but three more prisoners took their places. The axes rose and fell, the blades smeared with scarlet. A final shot rang out, fired into the air from a falling hand. There was a last shriek, and the axes stopped.

  Michael stood up, retrieving the submachine gun he’d thrown aside. It was still warm, like a comforting oven. Gunther and Dietz got up from their shelter and quickly began to inspect the bodies. Gunshots flared as they dispatched the wounded. Michael reached down and pulled at Mouse’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  Mouse sat up, his eyes watering and still stunned. “You hit me,” he gasped. “Why’d you hit me?”

  “Better a tap than a bullet. Can you stand?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can,” Michael said, and hauled him to his feet. Mouse still held his ax, his knuckles bleached white around the handle. “We’d better get out of here before any more Germans come along,” Michael told him; he looked around, expecting to see the prisoners disappearing into the woods, but most of them simply sat on the ground, as if awaiting the next truckload of Nazis. Michael crossed the road, with Mouse a few paces behind, and he approached a thin, dark-bearded man who’d been among the chopping party. “What’s wrong?” Michael asked. “You’re free now. You can go, if you like.”

  The man, his face stretched like brown leather over the jutting bones, smiled faintly. “Free,” he whispered in a thick Ukrainian accent. “Free. No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “There are the woods. Why don’t you go?”

  “Go?” Another man, even thinner than the first, stood up. He had a long-jawed face, and was shaven almost bald. His accent was of northern Russia. “Go where?”

  “I don’t know. Just… away from here.”

  “Why?” the dark-bearded man inquired. He lifted his thick brows. “The Nazis are everywhere. This is their country. Where are we to go that the Nazis wouldn’t hunt us down again?”

  Michael couldn’t fathom this; it was utterly against his nature that anyone whose chains had been broken wouldn’t try to keep them from being forged again. These men had been prisoners for a very long time, he realized. They had forgotten the meaning of freedom. “Don’t you think there’s any chance you might be able to—”

  “No,” the bald prisoner interrupted, his eyes black and remote. “No chance at all.”

  As Michael talked to the men, Mouse leaned against a pine tree nearby. He felt sick, and he thought he might faint from the smell of blood. He wasn’t a fighter. God help me get home, he prayed. Just help me get ho—

  One of the dead Germans suddenly sat up, about eight feet from where Mouse stood. The man had been shot through the side, his face ashen. Mouse saw who it was: Mannerheim. And he also saw Mannerheim reach for a pistol lying beside him, pick it up, and point it at Green Eyes’ back.

  Mouse started to scream, but his voice croaked, unable to summon enough power. Mannerheim’s finger was on the trigger. His gun hand wavered; he steadied it with his other hand, which was covered with crimson.

  Mannerheim was a German. Green Eyes was… whoever he was. Germany was Mouse’s country. I DESERTED MY UNIT. Runt. And went home to the Devil.

  All these things whirled through Mouse’s mind in an instant. Mannerheim’s finger began to squeeze the trigger. Green Eyes was still talking. Why wouldn’t he turn? Why wouldn’t he…

  Time had run out.

  Mouse heard himself shout—the cry of an animal—and he strode forward and smashed the ax blade down into Mannerheim’s brown-haired skull.

  The gun hand jerked, and the pistol went off.

  Michael heard the whine of a wasp past his head. Up in the trees, a branch cracked and fell to earth. He turned, and saw Mouse holding the handle of his ax, the blade buried in Mannerheim’s head. The man’s body slumped forward, and Mouse released the ax as if he’d been scalded. Then Mouse fell to his knees in the dirt; he stayed there, his mouth half open and a little thread of saliva hanging over his chin, until Michael helped him to his feet.

  “My God,” Mouse whispered. He blinked, his eyes bloodshot. “I killed a man.” Tears welled up and ran down his cheeks.

  “You can still get away,” Michael told the dark-bearded prisoner as Mouse’s weight leaned against him.

  “I don’t feel like running today,” was the answer. The man gazed up at the pewter sky. “Maybe tomorrow. You go on. We’ll tell them…” He paused; it came to him. “We’ll tell them the Allies have landed,” he said, and smiled dreamily.

  Michael, Mouse, Gunther, and Dietz left the prisoners behind. They continued along the road, keeping to the woods, and found the hay wagon about a half mile ahead. The horse was calmly chomping grass in a dewy field.

  They got away as quickly as they could, black smoke like banners of destruction now hazing the western horizon as well as the eastern. Mouse sat staring into space, his mouth working but making no sounds, and Michael looked ahead, trying to shake the image of the young soldier’s face just before he had slaughtered him. The bottle of schnapps, unbroken in the gunfire, had been sipped from by all and deposited under the hay. In these times liquor was a priceless commodity.

  They went on, and every turn of the wheels took them closer to Berlin.

  2

  Michael had seen Paris in sunshine; he saw Berlin in gray gloom.

  It was a huge, sprawling city. It smelled musty and earthy, like a cellar long sealed from light. It looked ancient as well, its stocky buildings the same shade of gray. Michael thought of tombstones in a damp graveyard where deadly mushrooms thrived.

  They crossed the Havel River in the Spandau district, and on the other side were immediately forced off the road by a column of Kubelwagens and troop trucks heading west. A chill wind blew off the Havel, making faded Nazi flags snap from their lampposts. The pavement was cracked with tank treads. Across the cityscape spouts of dark smoke rose from chimneys, and the wind curled them into question marks. The stone walls of rowhouses were adorned with battered posters and proclamations, such as REMEMBER THE HEROES OF STALINGRAD, ONWARD TO MOSCOW, GERMANY VICTORIOUS TODAY, GERMANY VICTORIOUS TOMORROW. Epitaphs on gravestones, Michael thought; Berlin was a cemetery, full of ghosts. Of course there were people on the streets, and in cars, and flower shops, and cinemas, and tailorshops, but there was no vitality. Berlin was not a city of smiles, and Michael noticed that people kept glancing over their shoulders, f
earful of what was approaching from the east.

  Gunther took them through the elegant streets of the Charlottenburg district, where dwellings styled like gingerbread castles housed equally fanciful dukes and barons, toward the war-worn inner city. Row houses crowded together, grim-looking structures with blackout curtains: these were streets where dukes and barons held no power. Michael noticed something strange: there were only elderly people and children about, no young men except for the soldiers who swept past in trucks and on motorcycles, and those men had young faces but old eyes. Berlin was in mourning, because its youth was dead.

  “We have to take my friend home,” Michael said to Gunther. “I promised him.”

  “I was ordered to take you to a safe house. That’s where I’m going.”

  “Please.” Mouse spoke up; his voice quavered. “Please… my house isn’t far from here. It’s in the Tempelhof district, near the airport. I’ll show you the way.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gunther said. “My orders were—”

  Michael clamped a hand around the back of his neck. Gunther had been a good companion, but Michael didn’t care to argue. “I’m changing your orders. We can go to the safe house after we get my friend home. Either do it or give me the reins.”

  “You don’t know what a risk you’re taking!” Dietz snapped. “And us, too! We just lost a friend because of you!”

  “Then get off and walk,” Michael told him. “Go on. Get off.”

  Dietz hesitated. He, too, was a stranger in Berlin. Gunther quietly said, “Shit,” and popped the reins. “All right. Where in Tempelhof?”

  Mouse eagerly gave him the address, and Michael released Gunther’s neck.

  Not too much farther, they began to see bombed buildings. The heavy B-17 and B-24 American bombers had delivered their freight, and rubble choked the streets. Some of the buildings were unrecognizable, heaps of stones and timbers. Others had split open and collapsed from the force of the bombs. A haze of smoke lay close to the street. Here the gloom was even thicker, and in the twilight the red centers of smoldering heaps of rubble glowed like Hades.