by James Somers
“I wasn’t thinking about that,” she explained, her tone growing angry. “I just wanted to get him finally.”
Cole studied her, considering her story. “It was a trap,” he said after a moment.
“Probably, but—”
“No,” he interrupted. “I don’t mean Adolf. I’ve known him most of my life. We were close back in our youth. Adolf did not have the ability to create portal constructs. He’s not a spell caster. Someone else must have—”
“Who else?” she asked.
“Lucifer was the only one, that you know of, who knew where you were,” he said. “He could have appeared to you as Adolf and he can generate portals all day long.”
Sadie’s anger began to slip. She considered what he was saying. “He was taunting me,” she said. “Like he wanted me to follow him.”
Cole was nodding in agreement. “Of course, but why?”
Sadie looked into his eyes. “That’s where I can’t remember,” she said. “I was chasing him, dogging his heels. He emerged several times and leaped back through different portals. I thought at the time that he was trying to slip away from me. Each time I thought I might lose him only made me try that much harder. The last one I barely got through.”
Cole gave her a questioning look.
“He was drawing the portals down after he went through,” she explained. “Like he was pulling away even the portal traces so that I wouldn’t be able to follow.”
“Making sure that you would rush ahead without thinking about whether it was really Adolf?”
Sadie nodded. “I was so angry. I didn’t care that it all seemed strange to me. I just wanted to catch him and end this mess once and for all.”
Cole smiled. “I understand,” he said.
“But you don’t really believe it was Adolf?”
“Do you?” he asked.
“I suppose not, now that I consider the evidence.”
“Where did he lead you?” Cole asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I barely made it through the last and then…nothing. Pain, maybe. But I don’t remember anything else other than waking up here. I found this note also.”
Cole looked at the paper again. “Obviously, Brody knew that you were in trouble. But if you didn’t tell him then someone else must have. He would have gone without hesitation and without delay. Whomever told him must have known that also.”
“You think Lucifer used me as bait in order to trap my father?” Sadie asked, tears welling in her eyes again. She stood, beginning to pace. “Of course, he did. That’s just the sort of thing he would do, and I fell for it. Because of me!”
Cole stood also, trying again to calm her before she began to panic. “He left me a note,” he said. “He knew where he was headed. He knew where you were, even though he didn’t leave it written for me to follow.”
“Yes, and he went,” she said, becoming even more agitated than before. “I caused this!”
“But you’re here,” Cole said.
“What?”
“You’re here,” Cole repeated. “You were being held, possibly unconscious, since you can’t remember, and now you’ve awoke here. Brody must have been successful. Whomever did this surely wouldn’t let you go. Even if they wanted Brody, they wouldn’t just send you home once they got him. He had to be the one to save you and send you back here.”
Sadie had stopped pacing, trying to comprehend what he was saying. Then the obvious struck her. “Then why didn’t he return with me?”
Cole puzzled. “I don’t know.”
“And why can’t I sense him now?” Sadie asked. “I can’t feel him anywhere. He’s my father and I can’t sense him in the world at all.”
Cole considered this. “You’re right,” he said after a moment. “We shared a blood bond long ago, but I can’t feel him either.”
“And our blood bond is even stronger,” she continued. “It’s as though he’s vanished from the face of the Earth.”
Josef Mengele paused at the newsstand. He had been allowed another three hours out in the city with a military escort. This escort had been assigned to him the next day after his arrival. He had been identified rapidly as a foreigner and the heavy military presence currently in Hiroshima meant that he was turned over quickly by the local authorities.
Both the 2nd General Army and the Chugoku Regional Army were headquartered in Hiroshima. Fortunately, he had been able to successfully identify himself as a member of Hitler’s staff. It may have been the only thing to save his life. Still, the Japanese were on high alert and they weren’t about to let him go running about on his own.
Josef was allowed to take walks, so long as his guards remained with him. As much for his own safety as anything else, according the local battalion commander. Josef had not argued the point.
His silver case containing the Rage Virus had been abandoned almost as quickly as he arrived. Fortunately, it had been after midnight in the Japanese islands at the time. Josef had known what would happen if anyone spotted the case. The virus would be confiscated immediately. And, if they had discovered what he was carrying, the local officials would have put him to death, supposing he meant to unleash it upon the population here.
Josef had managed to remove the necessary vial and hide it on his person. The vaccine remained with the Fuhrer himself, contained within his blood. The case had been buried within a trash bin. When the local authorities came to him the following morning, he presented his papers and was led straight to the battalion commander.
Mengele looked out over the harbor. The sun was beating down upon him, sparkling off of the water there at Ujina Port. Great battle ships were preparing to depart for the war still raging in the Pacific.
He turned back to the newspapers lying on the shelf of the newsstand. Josef did not have to be able to read Japanese in order to know what was written there. Splashed all over the front page of the paper was the black and white photograph of his Fuhrer. It was clear from the din around him and by the prominence of the picture that Adolf Hitler was dead.
His Fuhrer’s final command rang in his mind, overtaking his thoughts. Hitler had ordered him to unleash the virus here in Hiroshima. He considered this action for a moment. He had no desire to disobey. There was only the matter of how to accomplish the task effectively.
The man running the newspaper stand was saying something to him in Japanese. His tone and his motions made it abundantly clear that he was not running a library. If Josef wanted to read the paper then he would have to pay for the privilege.
The method came to him then.
Josef fingered the vial in his pocket. He thumbed off the stopper, allowing the liquid medium inside to spill into his palm and wash over his fingers. He removed this hand, rubbing it with his other as though applying lotion.
The doctor then approached the man behind his stand. He smiled at him, holding out his hand in a show of good will. The man looked at him askance for a moment and then, noticing the armed military escort with the foreigner, held out his own hand and shook with the stranger.
Since the man’s hands were sweaty already and no doubt dirtier than Josef’s, he didn’t seem to notice the moisture. In fact, upon withdrawing his own hand, the man drew the back of it across his mouth and nose. Nodding and smiling now, he handed Josef a newspaper.
When the doctor offered to pay, the man shooed him away affectionately. No doubt the presence of the military guard had been the reason for his sudden good mood. But Josef didn’t mind. He had received the paper, despite the fact that he couldn’t read a word of it. In return, Josef had given this man something no one else in the world could impart. He had given him Rage.
Little Boy
Colonel Paul Tibbets could not relax at the controls of his B-29 bomber. The Enola Gay had been a faithful girl. She and her crew had come through many tough scrapes during her career. But this flight was different. They had never flown a mission like this before. No one had.
Flanked by two ot
her super fortresses, one to monitor the weather for them and the other do principle photography for the event, the Enola Gay carried on, driving high through the sky with the Japanese islands now below them. If all went well today, another mission would soon follow.
Paul’s hopes were high. Their new super weapon, it had been decided, could not be spared. The dire situation in Japan required an extreme response. Already a number of cities had been subjected to firebombing. Many had died. But the greatest threats from the Japanese remained in two principle cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Here, it had been discovered by Central Command, were the hotspots for a super virus evidently developed by the Japanese as a last resort against Allied invasion. During the war in the Pacific, the American Navy had already witnessed the sort of tactics the Japanese were willing to employ in order to kill their enemies.
The Kamikaze had destroyed numerous vessels. Flying their bomb-laden planes into the sides of destroyers and cruisers, they had managed maximum damage. They did not consider their lives too great a cost to accomplish the desires of their emperor.
The boys on the ground had already taken to calling this terrifying disease the Kamikaze Plague. All because the Japanese were willing to sacrifice themselves in order to spread this killer virus to the soldiers encroaching upon their territory. Just like the Kamikaze pilots ramming their fighter planes into Allied ships, the citizens of the island nation were willing to feed their bodies to this monster in order to wrestle their enemies into death with them.
As far as Paul and his crew were concerned, the bomb couldn’t have come at a better time. “By the grace of God Almighty,” a few had even said. He had never known the boys to be religious, but he couldn’t help agreeing with them on this point. The firebombing campaigns had done a good job in smaller outbreak areas, burning everything down to the ground, but this was large scale. It required more than what they could accomplish with conventional weapons.
Before he knew it, Hiroshima lay before them, the early morning sun bathing it in bright light. “Ferebee,” Paul called over the radio headset.
“Yes, Colonel?”
“It’s time,” Paul said. “Turning over control to you on my mark. Three, two, one, go.”
“I’ve got her, Colonel,” Ferebee said. “Commencing our run.”
Major Thomas Ferebee assumed control of the Enola Gay, marking the time at 8:09AM. Little Boy waited in its harness. Time crept by onboard, every second ticking by with enough anxiety to put the whole crew in sanitariums for a year. Bombay doors opened in preparation. The bomb was armed and ready to drop.
At precisely 8:15AM, Little Boy was released from the belly of the Enola Gay. A crosswind blew that morning. Not so much that it would make a difference. Eight hundred feet off the mark wasn’t much when you were packing one hundred and forty pounds of Uranium-235 and a yield of sixteen kilotons of TNT.
At precisely 8:15AM, Hiroshima time, patients in the Shima Surgical Clinic were fighting against and breaking their bonds asunder. As impossible as it seemed to the nurses and physicians on staff at the clinic, the infected were chewing through the leather gauntlets meant to keep them in their beds. In some cases, patients had erupted into such violent fits that they overturned the stretchers and dragged them along behind them, tethered to the devices but too enraged to care.
They wanted one thing and one thing only—to attack and kill and feed upon those who were attempting to care for them in the clinic. Nurses and physicians scrambled amid a growing chaos, administering analgesics for pain as well as anesthesia drugs that were used for surgery alone, all in a desperate effort to calm their patients, or put them under. Nothing was working.
All across the city, outbreaks were growing worse. Hospitals were filled to capacity with the infected and the injured and the dead. Despite Hiroshima being the headquarters for the 2nd General Army and the Chugoku Regional Army, they were losing to this unprecedented plague outbreak.
Where medicine was failing, the military had taken over, shooting citizens in the streets. Still, the doctors fought on in the hospitals and clinics, wanting to save those they could. But even the caregivers were becoming infected. Clawed and bitten, bruised and beaten, they came down with the same disease within twenty four hours.
At Hiroshima Castle, not far away, the 2nd General Army Headquarters was under siege. The soldiers had been deployed two days before. Barricades had been erected, but the infected clambered over the tops, piling upon one another to breach the army’s makeshift defenses.
The soldiers retreated steadily back toward the castle. After all of their efforts, this was what the war had come to. The Allies, with their supposed humanitarian ideals, had committed genocide upon the people of Japan. Clearly, they had infected the people with a horrific plague meant to transform their own citizens into ravening monsters. All the Allies had to do now was watch as the noble Empire of Japan consumed itself from the inside out.
This was the general belief. This was where the evidence appeared to lead. The Allies were invading. The Japanese were defending their home. Unable to force their way in, the round eyes had taken to subtler tactics. And those tactics were doing their worst.
The streets had turned into killing fields. The infected seemed to be everywhere. Men, women and children. No one was spared. The lines had quickly been drawn. Either you were one of the infected—a mindless, bloodthirsty killing machine—or you were one of the hunted. But running for their lives did little good. The enemy was unseen. You were just as likely to become one of these gruesome ghouls by the next sunrise.
At precisely 8:15AM Hiroshima was in the grip of terror, ripping itself apart. Forty three seconds later, an object that no one could see from the ground, and that no one was looking for, dropped to a height of six hundred meters above the city and detonated.
Directly below Little Boy, within the Shima Surgery Clinic, Doctor Kumao Imoto was screaming for an orderly to pull his scrub nurse off of him. Her eyes were rolled back into her head and her teeth were driven into the flesh of his shoulder through his lab coat. Minutes ago, she had been sitting at the nurse station. Now, she was screaming herself hoarse, rending the man she had worked with for over twelve years.
The orderly Doctor Imoto had been calling to for help was otherwise indisposed, having been assailed by three infected patients who had burst through a barricaded set of doors leading onto the ward. Sho Kanoko battered the plague victims with a steel pipe taken from an IV pole. One went down, writhing on the floor, her skull impacted just behind her left ear.
The two others beset him while he was gathering steam for another swing. All three went down to the floor, one beneath Sho, the other, a child, raking and tearing with bloodied teeth into his back. Sho was attempting to choke the woman caught beneath him while the small boy on his back tore at him furiously.
Then Little Boy rained down fire upon the city. Doctor Imoto and his plague-crazed nurse assistant, along with Sho and the infected assaulting him, as well as every other caregiver and raving mad patient were vaporized instantly as the temperature rose at the ground to 6000° Kelvin, approximately the same as the surface of the sun.
The struggle for survival at Hiroshima Castle some nine hundred yards away was still in motion when detonation occurred. The castle’s resident military command, as well as the hundreds of soldiers fending off hundreds more of the raging infected, were burned to ash in less than a second. Almost every building within a one mile radius was incinerated and then obliterated by the shockwave. Many more, for miles around, were set ablaze.
Only then did the infected cease their wailing and moaning. Only then did they escape the terrible burning pain and hunger to feed. Days later, when Nagasaki burned, Hiroshima would still be quieted of the infected. However, the pain of those surviving had only just begun.
Out of Time
The flashes of light that accompanied his arrival were not in any way produced by the portal which had delivered him to his present destinat
ion. Fireworks popped in the air above him. Launched from a giant Ferris wheel the likes of which Brody had never seen before.
It was absolutely monumental. Then his eyes roved over the scene around him. Where had he come to? He had been following Anna Parks, pregnant with Adolf’s child, if he was any guess.
But this was not Berlin. It wasn’t even Germany. The river beyond the giant wheel—he recognized that river. The Thames. And nearby was the Clock Tower, more recently called Big Ben. He remembered the days when it had not been so.
He stood there among what appeared to be thousands of people celebrating. Had the war ended while he was confronting Adolf in his Berghof bunker? That didn’t make any sense. Besides, the city didn’t look like it had before.
London had been in ruins. Bombs had scattered across the cityscape over the past few years. London had suffered much from Adolf’s Luftwaffe. Yet, the city was unmarred. Not a building in sight was damaged now. In fact, it appeared very modern in comparison with what he had witnessed recently on rare visits.
Brody felt a headache coming on. He was confused. This wasn’t right. Yet, he could sense that no magic was at work here. This was not an illusion. But there were bright lights, electric images projected here and there. He did not know what they were.
He wasn’t sure why the people were celebrating. Everything was wrong. The clothes on the individuals around him, and, in some cases, the lack of clothing on them bore no resemblance to the fashion of the day when he had last seen London. That had only been a year before.
Everywhere there was the din of celebration, of revelry. The bright lights only added to his dismay. What was happening to him?
Couples embraced one another, singing a song he did not recognize. A man holding the hand of another man. What? They began to—
This world was not the world he knew. Some of the buildings and the Thames were right, but the rest…he couldn’t figure out how all of these changes could take place in so short a time. London had been his home for so many years. He had known her as a refined lady, but this was a harlot in comparison with the splendid city he had come to call home.