The Front (Book 3): Berlin or Bust

by DiLouie, Craig

  Above him, glass shattered. He looked up in time to see a ghoul claw at the air as it plummeted to the earth. The thing struck the ground with a splat that sprayed blood across Wolff’s boots.

  Then more draugr burst from their apartment windows to smash against the pavement like bombs filled with rotting meat.

  “Keep going,” Wolff told his squad. “The Platz is just ahead.”

  The Belle-Alliance-Platz loomed in front of a wall of smoke rising up from some uncontrolled fire on the other side of the Landwehr Canal. The circular plaza was surrounded by tall tenements.

  A practical location for a regimental stand.

  As they approached, Wolff saw no signs of life. The rising wall of smoke was closer than he’d thought. A building surrounding the Belle-Alliance-Platz appeared to be burning.

  And there was no sign of the regiment.

  “Halt!”

  Three Fallschirmjäger stepped out of concealment and aimed their weapons.

  “Second Platoon,” Wolff called to them. “Eagle Company!”

  The paratroopers didn’t ask if they were all that was left of Hauptmann Werner’s command. They appeared to simply assume it.

  Wolff had made it back to the 3FJR, but things seemed nearly as bad here.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ESCAPE

  Muller fired wildly and bolted down the hallway while Schulte dropped draugr with calm precision.

  He came to a window and stopped. “We’re trapped!”

  “Or,” Schulte said as he drilled another ghoul through the skull, “you could break the window and we could climb down.”

  “God, you’re insufferable even in combat!”

  Muller raised his K98, turned his head to avoid flying glass, and worked the bolt and trigger until he’d punched several big holes in the window. His rifle butt finished the job.

  Freezing wind howled into the hallway like an angry spirit, flinging a cloud of Nazi papers across the advancing draugr. They marched steadily with their bayonets, the tramp of their booted feet vibrating through the floor.

  “Sie, sie, sie, sie—”

  “Any time would be good,” Schulte called out.

  Muller looked down. “It’s pretty high.”

  “You’re Fallschirmjäger, kid. Jump!”

  He dropped his rifle onto the snow below. The wind had swept a tall dune of it against the side of the building. Cushion for his landing.

  “I’m going down!”

  Fortunately for him, the architects of the Reichstag had chosen a neo-Baroque architecture, with a highly ornate facade offering numerous projections as handholds. He lowered himself from the ledge and began to work his way down.

  Schulte flew past him, hit the ground, and rolled. Muller sighed and did the same, landing hard in the snow.

  The sniper held out his hand. “You all right?”

  “Ja, fabulous.”

  “Four more of those, you’ll earn your parachute wings.”

  Muller looked around. “It’s just us.”

  “Just us.”

  They ran, sluggish in the snow, until they reached the street. Behind them, the draugr spilled out the shattered window. The ghouls went rigid in the air until smashing against the ground.

  “They’re scary, but they’re idiots,” said Schulte.

  The draugr pushed themselves out of the massive pile of squirming bodies and hobbled after the paratroopers.

  The sniper paled. “Or I am. We’d better keep moving.”

  The paratroopers ran south on Stresemannstrasse, pausing to shoot any ghouls who came too close. As they passed a group of motorcars snarled in an accident, Muller slowed to inspect the vehicles.

  “Look at this.” He stood in front of an old BMW R12 Wehrmacht motorcycle with a sidecar, which had an MG34 mounted on it. “I wonder what happened to the driver?”

  “Wonder about it later,” Schulte snapped. “Get the MG and let’s move.”

  “The bike isn’t damaged. It might have fuel.” Muller hopped onto the seat and kick-started the motorcycle, which roared to life. “Hop on!”

  The sniper smiled. “Good thinking, kid.” The smile disappeared. “But I’m driving. Get in the sidecar.”

  Muller climbed into the sidecar as Schulte sped off. “Where are we going?”

  “The airport,” the sniper shouted over the wind.

  “Nein! We need to rejoin the regiment!”

  Neither man spoke as the motorcycle navigated a loose herd of ghouls in front of the Reich Chancellery building, weaving around them spraying rooster tails of snow. Muller hunched behind the machine-gun, holding his fire to conserve ammunition.

  Once they cleared the undead, Schulte said, “Our mission is to get the Overman serum out of Berlin.”

  “My parents,” Muller cried. “They live in Schöneberg.”

  Schulte let off a bit on the throttle. “Listen, Yohann. I know you want to find your folks, but even if you did, all you’d end up doing is dying with them. If you want to save them, help me get the Overman serum to England.”

  Muller knew all that. He knew his family was very likely dead or, worse, roaming the streets with the other cannibals. He knew if they were alive, there was a good chance they’d fled the city and could now be anywhere. And even if they were alive and sitting at home waiting for him, there was little he could do to keep them alive.

  But he had to know. He had to see. He had to help if he could.

  “All right,” the sniper sighed. “I’ll drop you along the way.”

  “Nein,” Muller said. “I’ll go with you. I’ll leave after we reach the airport.”

  For all he knew, they were the only survivors of Eagle Company, which made him the only man with the Overman serum. Besides, he owed it to the men who’d died to get it to England. He was a Muller and family would always come first for him, but he’d also become a Fallschirmjäger in his heart as well as his uniform. He was one of them now. They were family too.

  Schulte was no longer listening. “Get that MG ready. We’re going back.”

  “What? Why?”

  The sniper wheeled the motorcycle and turned right at the intersection they’d just crossed. They were going back north again, toward the draugr.

  Then he spotted the figure Schulte had seen.

  It was the British paratrooper, half jogging, half limping while using his carbine as a cane. Behind him, the SS marched steadily after him, rank after rank bristling with bayonets. They were gaining with each step.

  Schulte opened the throttle, flying up the avenue. “Get him in!”

  He slowed as they neared. Muller jumped out of the sidecar and shoved Wilkins into it before hopping behind the sniper, who cranked the throttle again.

  Herr Wilkins fought to catch his breath. “I never thought I’d be so glad to see a bloody German. I thought I was dinner.”

  “If you’re bitten, that is going to complicate things,” Schulte said.

  The Englishman shook his head. “Accidental shooting.”

  “Who was it? Beck?”

  “No, your lieutenant. Who then left me for the draugr.”

  The sniper chuckled. “This is why I don’t take Benzedrine.”

  “Are you able to shoot?” Muller said.

  Wilkins said, “I can fight.”

  “Good...” Muller pointed at the street ahead, which was swarming with ghouls.

  “Hang on,” said Schulte.

  The motorcycle roared onto a side street, heading west again. Muller recognized a bakery, post office, and bookstore that had good books before the Nazis took over. All of them had been looted for food or kindling.

  Which meant people were still alive and in hiding. It gave him hope.

  Then they were on Reichsautobahn 2, built for the Nazis by prisoners of war, Social Democrats, Communists, and other inmates from reeducation camps. British small arms fire crackled in the east. Plumes of smoke rose up from mortar strikes. The airport was close, and they drove quickly over stre
ets where the draugr hordes had stomped the snow into a hardened sheet.

  Schulte swung east onto Kolonnenstrasse and swore at the dismal view of undead thronging the avenue near the airport. “Damn it, they’re everywhere.”

  He wheeled south onto Boelckestrasse, trying to get around them.

  Muller pounded the sniper’s shoulder. “Bad idea!”

  “Why?”

  “Residential district!”

  A square kilometer of narrow streets and houses set on treed land. Horrible for tactical maneuver. The draugr could come from anywhere and surround them. Many of the houses and trees had been turned into piles of rubble and shattered stumps, like some surrealist nightmare Max Ernst might have produced.

  “No choice,” said Schulte.

  Muller held on tight as the sniper careened through a crowd of lurching undead, hands clawing at his jacket as he passed. Wilkins fired bursts from the MG34, which rapidly consumed the link ammunition belt.

  “Turn left here,” Muller shouted.

  “But that’ll take us—”

  Schulte’s helmeted head pitched to the side with a metallic crack. Slivers of brick raked Muller’s face. Then the motorcycle flipped.

  Muller tumbled through the snowy road until he landed on his back facing the gray sky. He couldn’t breathe. Cold stabbed his flesh. Snow was packed around his neck and down his back. He spat a mouthful of it and struggled to his feet on shocked limbs, fighting the pain in his gut enough to take quick, shallow breaths.

  Schulte lay two meters away in a tangle of limbs half under the bike, head cocked to the side. Muller worried his neck was broken. The wheels pointed in the air, still spinning as the engine howled and sprayed hot oil. Wilkins was trying to gain his feet but kept falling back on his ass. Muller looked for his rifle and spotted it just as a draugr picked it up and pointed its bayonet at him. A woman in a simple dress, beautiful even in death, smiling with an irresistible urge to kill and eat.

  He fumbled for his Luger and managed to get it out of its holster. The draugr closed in on shuffling feet. Soon, they’d lunge like coiled springs. Wilkins was on his knees and firing his carbine. Schulte was moving, somehow still alive after the awful fall, trying to extricate himself from under the downed cycle.

  An old man in a Volkssturm greatcoat staggered toward him and raised a brick in his hand. Muller fired, struck the man in the shoulder, fired again. The ghoul spun, half his head gone.

  He shifted aim at the woman.

  “Yohann! Help!”

  A teenaged couple knelt beside Schulte and reached for him with bare arms turned blue by death and cold. Muller shot them both in the head.

  When he turned back, the woman was there, beautiful face still plastered with that awful frozen smile.

  She thrust the bayonet into his guts, which exploded in pain.

  He screamed as he hit the ground.

  Blood crashed in his ears as he lay on his back in the bloodied snow. Schulte was yelling at him. Wilkins was still shooting, roaring something that sounded like, Waho Mohammad! He didn’t care about any of it. The entire world had suddenly filled with waves of horrific pain.

  A draugr stepped into his view on his left.

  A boy in a Hitler Youth uniform.

  He remembered wearing one just like it when he was a kid.

  “Nein,” he whispered.

  The woman dropped the rifle and entered his view on his right.

  His hands pawed the snow for his Luger. His fingers brushed it, locked on.

  He raised it and fired.

  The gun clicked empty.

  Not even a round left for himself.

  Smiling, they reached for him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  HELL RIDE

  Gefreiter Steiner didn’t have breath or energy to scream.

  He staggered through a snow drift blanketing rubble torn from a bombed-out building near the Opera House. He gripped his MG42 in one hand and a bloody entrenching tool in the other.

  He thought he was losing his mind. That he’d wake up in a hospital, far from the front, with a metal plate in his skull from a brain operation. The doctors would tell him the bad news that Ivan had broken the line, and he’d laugh and say, Is that it, Herr Doctor? That’s the worst news? The Russians are coming?

  Steiner had lost his squad. Watched the Führer’s bodyguard swarm over his platoon, feasting. Hacked over a dozen skulls in his pell-mell flight from the slaughter. And saw Hitler himself turned into a raving ghoul, reminding him nobody was running his country.

  He reached the street, its snow stomped into something like rock by thousands of marching feet. The footprints led south, toward the airport.

  A terrible vista greeted him. Allied bombings and plague battles had stripped downtown Berlin into an alien landscape of skeletal buildings, single walls, and delicate structures.

  This wasn’t just Berlin. It was Germany, and, soon, the entire planet. Though dead, the Führer might still carry through on his promise to conquer the world, though there’d be nobody in it but the living dead.

  The only thing that might stop them was the evil little bug in the steel canister looped around his neck.

  “Wake up,” he muttered. “Wake up, wake up.”

  What he was experiencing was something far more horrific than a sense of humor could cure.

  A stroke of luck—a bicycle half buried in a wind-sculpted snow drift stacked against a blasted apartment building. He headed over to it, staggering like a draugr himself.

  Dream or no dream, he had to reach the British at the airport. For all he knew, he was the only Fallschirmjäger left. Until he woke up, he had to play along.

  A large figure spilled out of the doorway to tumble in the snow. The matron righted herself, still gripping a rolling pin.

  “Pay your bill,” she snarled.

  “You’re not real,” Steiner shouted in her face.

  He lunged and swung his spade. The tool’s edge bit into her neck, half-severing her head, which flopped onto her shoulder. He struggled to tug it out.

  The entrenching tool ripped free in his hand as the rolling pin crashed against his helmet. Steiner bit his tongue and saw stars.

  Fueled by rage, he finally found the energy to scream, letting loose every obscenity he knew. The head finally tore free under his frantic blows and rolled across the ground. The ghoul’s mouth continued to open and close until it came to a stop like a wind-up toy.

  Steiner punted it across the road. “Not real!”

  A headache bloomed in his battered skull. He returned to the bicycle, which at first glance seemed to be in a condition suitable for riding.

  As he laid hold of it, something big thrashed under the snow. Steiner caught a glimpse of grasping blackened fingers and the stumps of legs. Gibbering, he reached for his spade and hacked at the snow until it became bloody and the thing stopped moving.

  “Danke, mein herr.”

  Steiner righted it and climbed on. He flung his bloody entrenching tool away in revulsion and propped his machine-gun on the handlebars.

  “Look out, everybody. I’m a Macaroni tank.”

  Steiner started pedaling toward the sound of the guns. The compacted snow made the road suitable for riding, though keeping his balance with his MG on the slippery road sucked even more of his limited energy. He winced at the ruts, which made his headache even worse.

  The bicycle sped down Dresdener, eating up meters. After crossing the Landwehr Canal, the ghouls began to thicken.

  If he swerved too hard, the slick road would send him into a crashing tumble.

  He braced his machine-gun and fired a burst. The rounds struck a ghoul in the chest and knocked it to the ground, where it immediately struggled to rise.

  By the time it did, Steiner had already zipped past.

  He fired again, adjusted his course, and then again, working his way down the street through the moaning draugr. His arms already ached from the effort of firing like this and keeping the bicyc
le stable against the recoil.

  He braked to a skidding halt.

  “Now would be a good time to wake up,” Steiner said, laughing and crying at the same time.

  Ahead, the road swarmed with draugr.

  The ghouls were laying siege to Tempelhof Airport. The Luftwaffe had fortified it during the bombings and the plague, surrounding the airfield with sandbag walls topped with barbed wire. The Red Devils had stormed the airport, overwhelmed the defenders, and taken over these defenses. Steiner could see the British paratroopers in the watchtowers, shooting into the ghouls when they pressed against the walls in too great a number.

  There was no way he could make it to the up-armored three-ton truck serving as the airport’s gate.

  The Red Devils would have to help.

  Trusting British paratroopers with his life. That put the apple in the strudel in all the insanity of this mission.

  Moans behind him. The draugr he’d passed were catching up and looking hungry. He couldn’t go back now even if he wanted. He was going in.

  Steiner took out his flare pistol, inserted one of the fat rounds, and shot it into the air. Then he started pedaling, gaining speed, feeling the freezing wind in his laughing face.

  He was going to make it to the airport with the Overman serum or get eaten alive.

  Either way, he was waking up from this nightmare.

  The machine-gun bucked in his hand, clearing a path he sailed through at an alarming speed. If he lost control now, he was done.

  The Red Devils signaled him from the watchtowers, but he couldn’t spare a second to see what they wanted. The throngs of milling ghouls grew larger with each passing second. One by one, they turned with delighted smiles toward his MG’s ripping sound. The creatures growled words that blended into an eerie murmur, as if the draugr were all a single entity praying to a dark god.

  Steiner was going to ride full speed right into the thick of them, and there was nothing he could do to stop.

  The three-ton rolled out of the way—

  “Waho Mohammad!” came the Red Devils’ strange battle cry.

  A bolt of fire shot into the crowd, turning ghouls into shrieking human torches. A paratrooper with a flamethrower emerged, followed by two more. They blasted the throng with arcing sheets of flame.