The Big Reap

by Chris F. Holm

  “Thanks,” I said, my tone biting, but it didn’t matter. If my gut was to be trusted, Lilith was gone.

  As I approached the door to Hitler’s office, it swung open, and I was buffeted by what sounded like heated conversation. My heart fluttered in sudden fear, so certain was I I’d been discovered. But then a man – older, birdlike, with a faint dusting of close-cropped hair across his liver-spotted pate – burst forth from the door, dressed in doctor’s whites and clutching a full-grown German Shepherd to his chest. The dog, I saw as he shouldered past me, was dead, eyes bulging, tongue lolling, pink-tinged foam dripping from the corners of its mouth. The man I recognized from many a newsreel, always standing beside Hitler or close behind. His name was Werner Haase. He was Hitler’s personal physician.

  Haase muttered a few words to me as I passed, the only one of which I understood was Adolf. But his tone was concerned. Tender, even. It was clear he was worried for his friend, as, he assumed, would I – would Goebbels – be.

  I nodded tersely and continued to the office, stopping short in shock as I laid eyes upon the man himself. Partly because he always seemed more an abstract concept to me – a black-and-white capital-letters Bad Guy writ large across the silver screen, while here he was full-color flesh and blood. And partly because that full-color flesh-and-blood Hitler looked small and wan and frail behind his broad oak desk, which was scattered with maps and papers all weighted down by a Walther PPK. His hair, normally slicked back, dangled oily and lank down over his forehead; his trademark mustache was unkempt, as if it’d been too long since his last trim, his face was sallow; his eyes were red-rimmed, wet, and swollen. In one hand, he held a brown glass bottle filled with pills. In another, a kerchief, damp with the Führer’s tears. And as I stood in the doorway, greeted by the stares of Hitler’s inner circle looking stricken to a one – though Hitler himself had scarcely noticed my approach in his despondency – I detected the faint note of bitter almonds in the air.

  It took me a moment to piece together what had happened. The pills inside the bottle were suicide pills – cyanide, unless Goebbels’ nose was much mistaken. And the dog – one of Hitler’s own – was their first victim. A test subject to ensure they’d work.

  Which meant this human monster, this man who had the deaths of millions on his hands, was crying because he’d lost his dog. A dog he’d ordered killed. And all because he wanted to ensure his exit plan would prove successful when the time came.

  For a brief second, I wondered if that meant I was off the hook. If Hitler was considering suicide, why bother going to all the trouble of killing him? But in my heart, I knew the truth. This man could not be allowed to decide his own fate, to dictate the terms of his own exit.

  And I realized something else, as well. I wanted to be the one to end him. Wanted the last thought that passed through his mind to be a fearful one.

  I looked forward to collecting him.

  Hitler dabbed his tears and tossed his kerchief onto the desk. Then he waved his hands in dismissal at the dozen-odd people scattered around the office and barked a few quick words in German. The room cleared, all its occupants save three shuffling past me. Two of those who remained were clearly guards – uniformed, armed with rifles and sidearms both (the former held across their chests, the latter holstered at their hips), and standing at attention on either side of Hitler’s desk. Both struggled to remain stoic, pretending with all their might they hadn’t seen their Führer just break down.

  The other occupant of the room was Eva Braun.

  I knew nothing of her at the time, of course. Her relationship with Hitler remained secret until the war ended. Seems he thought he’d have more sway with the women of the Third Reich if they thought him a bachelor. Which, technically, he was, at least until two nights before I found myself standing in his presence; as I’d soon discover, the two had recently and, of course secretly, married.

  But as I said, I knew none of that. In fact, the notion that Hitler might have a lady friend seemed so preposterous – like a shark keeping a housecat – it had honestly never, until that very moment, crossed my mind. And if it ever had, I suppose I might’ve pictured him secretly cavorting with some severe Aryan bombshell complete with skintight uniform and matching riding crop, not the vapid, mousy creature who stood before me.

  Her face was round and unlined. Kind, even. Her clothes were neat, if plain. Her hair was done up all nice in mouse-brown curls; her eyes were vacant, and tinged with concern. As I stood watching, she placed a hand on Hitler’s shoulder, and cooed a German platitude I could not understand.

  The gesture made me sick. It was more than he deserved. I turned away, only to have him call to me. Seems he mistook my anger for politeness. As if I were allowing them their quiet moment of affection, rather than seething at them for it.

  “Joseph,” he said, “Kommen Sie, bitte!” I looked up at him once more to suss out the meaning behind his words, and found him beckoning for me to enter. Hesitant and trembling, I acquiesced.

  “Joseph, was ist los?” he asked. I blinked in response. I had no idea what to say to him. Turns out, I didn’t have to say anything. I was saved the trouble when the small device at the corner of his desk began to move.

  It was a strange looking device, two crossed sticks atop a spindle such that they sat parallel to the desk’s surface, with cups at each stick’s end to catch the wind and spin the crossed bits clockwise. Only there was no air current in the room to speak of, and anyway, the device wasn’t spinning clockwise, it was spinning counterclockwise – ever faster as I approached.

  I had no idea what it meant, but evidently, Hitler did. He slid back from his desk so fast, his chair toppled, and with a barked order, had both his guards train their rifles at me.

  “Mein Gott,” he muttered to himself, “war Mengele richtig!” And then, to me, “Das Passwort.”

  I said nothing, instead putting my hands up like some busted movie bank-robber. The strange wind machine – an anemometer, my brain uselessly supplied – continued to pick up speed, spinning so fast its cups blurred, and riffled the papers on his desk.

  “Das Passwort, Joseph – jetzt!”

  I shook my head. Couldn’t figure a way out. The anemometer spun so fast it began to shake.

  “Jetzt!”

  The anemometer toppled. When its spinning rotor hit the desk, it flew apart in a crazed scatter of debris.

  “I don’t know your fucking password!” I shouted, clenching shut my eyes in anticipation of the shots to come. But the shots did not come. Hitler stilled them with a hand on each barrel, lowering them away from me.

  “Aaah,” he said. “American.” The word was heavily accented, but nonetheless in English. No small feat, for a man not thought to speak it. “Tell me,” he said, his words halting and heavily accented, “is Joseph still in there?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, over Goebbels’ insistent cries in the back of his own mind. “He’s still here.”

  “Good,” he said. It sounded more like goot. “Mengele said that someone like you would come. That is why he constructed for me this machine.” Vat eesss vye he contructed for me zees machink. “Und insisted on using passwords. I thought him a fool. It would seem that he is not.”

  With a smirk, he gave the guards an order in rapid-fire German. From what little I could glean, it seemed the plan was to knock my ass out and keep me in the brig until I could talk German again.

  The guards approached me. I closed my eyes and swallowed hard. A rifle-butt to Goebbels’ temple, and he went down like a sack of potatoes. Then the two guards slung their rifles over their shoulders and each grabbed one of Goebbels’ arms, dragging him from the room.

  It mattered not to me. In fact, I was kinda glad they knocked him out. If they hadn’t, he mighta ratted on me.

  But, unconscious as he was, he couldn’t. Nor could this Mengele’s magic anemometer, now in pieces on the floor. So, Goebbels and the guards gone, I crossed the room and closed the door, wearing the f
lesh of Hitler’s new bride, Eva Braun.

  16.

  “Collector!”

  Lips like summer peaches against my own, warm and sweet. Fingers caressing my bare chest. My eyes opened to slits, eyelashes crosshatching the scene before me as I struggled to raise my head. Lustrous curls of fire-red hair that smelled of vanilla and musk cascaded down across my field of vision. Through the gorgeous locks, which tickled as they dragged across my naked skin, I caught a glimpse of wine-colored nails leaving half-moon imprints on my pectoral muscles. Felt the pressure of the palm attached to them against my breastbone, a steady rhythm.

  A fella could get used to this, I thought.

  Then my chest seized and I doubled over, expelling a chum-bucket’s worth of murky, bilious water from my lungs and stomach both. That part was somewhat less erotic.

  My lungs’ contents purged, consciousness began to return in dribs and drabs as blessed oxygen suffused my cells with its glorious, life-sustaining whateverness. (Seriously, I sometimes feel like I shoulda paid more attention in biology – if for no other reason than the stranger aspects of it seem to play a very real, and very squicky, role in my everyday existence.) Much to my surprise, I was not in Guam, but in the cave beneath Grigori’s castle keep, a cave in which I’d been certain I was going to expire.

  I racked my brain, remembered crushing Ricou’s soul with my bare hand, remembered his bear-trap jaw not letting go even in death. Remembered too his weight pulling me down down down into the cold, black depths.

  Then a taste like summer peaches. And then right back to the here and now.

  I looked around, slick hair splashing water to and fro as I did. My clothes were sodden, my shirt undone. Buttons scattered on the rock ledge all around me; the stone was splotched dark where I lay, and dusty brown everywhere else. Not the one nearest my point of entry through the cemetery, but the other; the one framed out by the pointed arch. Though as I looked across the chunky fish-stew water of the underground lake, its surface pocked with sickly bits of bobbing gore and pale white flesh, I realized the dock onto which the cemetery tunnel opened was likewise framed. How I could see so far with no obvious source of illumination, I had no idea.

  Then, as I cast my gaze about, I saw Lilith’s silhouette – framed in a corona of light of her own making, which rendered her as obscure as an eclipse – and I realized it was she who saved me, and it was she who lit my way.

  “What… why…”

  “That thing you killed,” she said, looking fresh and dry despite the fact she’d not only just pulled me from the murky water, but resuscitated me as well, “was somehow tied to Grigori’s occlusion spell. It was not Grigori, was it?”

  “No,” I said, my voice hoarse, my punctured trachea aching from the strain of speaking, “that wasn’t Grigori. It was Ricou.”

  Lilith smiled in triumph, and a hint of something else as well. I don’t know why, but it looked to me like relief. “Ricou,” she said. “Of course. That’s why he was funneling money into Chile, Bolivia, Guyana, Colombia, Brazil, and Peru. He was looking for his brother. He was trying to keep us from getting to him first.”

  “Guess we showed him,” I said, wincing as I ran my hand across the crescent of bite-marks that curved from my right clavicle down to my armpit.

  “Indeed,” she said, arching an eyebrow at the mess that was me.

  “So the occlusion spell…” I prompted.

  “…lifted once you killed Ricou,” she said.

  “Why? Why wouldn’t Grigori keep this place hidden?”

  Lilith frowned a frown that coulda won awards. “Perhaps he did not anticipate Ricou would be so easilydispatched. Or perhaps he simply did not intend to return, and needed a physical anchor onto which to transfer the spell. Who am I to speculate as to the peculiarities of his magicks?”

  I shook my head. Doing so hurt. “Dunno. Seems fishy. Doesn’t track.”

  “I think that’s you you’re smelling,” she said, her perfect nose crinkling. “Tell me, Collector, did you kill Ricou by crawling inside him and then burrowing your way back out?”

  “Near enough,” I said. “But that business with the occlusion spell, it doesn’t explain what prompted you to come, or to pull me from the drink.”

  Until that moment, I don’t think I’d ever seen Lilith look sheepish before. “I thought you may have needed help, is all. Turns out, I was right.”

  “You know you saved this meat-suit’s life.”

  “Yes, well, this one – unlike the corpses you’ve historically favored – happens to contain a living, breathing mortal man, and I know how you hate to have deaths not assigned to you weighing upon your conscience.”

  “Why Lily, that may just be the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  Lilith bristled. “You misunderstand me, Collector. I merely meant to suggest your subsequent moping at the sacrifice of this man would stand in the way of doing the job at hand. And time, I’m told, is of the essence.”

  “You know what, Lil? I think I understood you fine.”

  In the distance, I heard a scrape of metal on stone. It was the door to the cave through which Yefi – or rather Grigori – and I had entered, grinding open once more. Lilith glanced toward the noise, her brow furrowing in worry.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  She answered with a question of her own. “Can you walk, or must I carry you?”

  I flexed my legs each in turn. Climbed unsteadily to my feet, while a strange, scrabbling sound drew ever closer on the far side of the underground lake. Found to my great surprise that I could support my own weight. Said, “I’m good to walk – why? What’s out there, Lily? What’s headed our way?”

  Lilith put a hand to the small of my back and pushed me into the narrow aperture at the back of the small stone platform. It led to a spiral staircase, carved into the natural rock. “Grigori’s little hamlet may be once more visible to me and those like me– “

  As if there were anyone who fit that bill, I thought.

  “–but that does not mean he’s left it unprotected.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning by the time that I arrived, every man and child in town was dead, bled dry by the townswomen – or, rather, the beasts that they’ve become. The blood gives them strength, and stokes their hunger. And,” she said, closing her eyes as we ascended, the glow she emanated dimming slightly as she allowed her attentions to wander beyond this narrow staircase to the town beyond, “it seems that they can sense their master’s absence, because to a one, they’re on their way here. And they’re not happy.”

  “Jesus,” I said, feeling Lilith’s glare of disapproval on the back of my head as I ascended in front of her, “he wanted to keep this place safe, he couldn’t just use ADT?”

  From below us, snarling. Lilith’s hand on my back, urging me onward. “The fuck is going on down there?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry. They can’t cross water. They’ll have to find a way around to reach us –scale the walls, perhaps – which should slow them down a little, at least.”

  “Okay, a) I think you haven’t the faintest idea what the words ‘don’t worry’ mean if scaling the walls is only gonna slow them down a little, and b) how the fuck could you possibly know that?”

  “I’ve seen their kind a time or two before. This isn’t the first time Grigori’s employed them as a smokescreen to mask his flight.”

  “Nor the first time hell’s gone after him, apparently,” I observed drily, which might have been tough for her to discern on account of my rising panic and stair-induced huff-and-puffing.

  “You forget, Collector, that I’m a good deal older than the Great Truce, and so are the Brethren.”

  “Here’s hoping his hell-bitch version 2.0 didn’t get the aqua-upgrade.”

  “Honestly, do you hear yourself sometimes? What you people have done to the language of Shakespeare seems far more blasphemous than anything Lucifer or I have ever done.”

  “See?” I
said, smiling. “You can act your age. All you’re missing is an impassioned ‘get off my lawn’.”

  A strange slavering kicked up behind us. The townswomen had reached the base of the stairs, their animal utterances echoing up the spiral staircase like ocean-sounds through a conch shell. As I glanced worriedly over my shoulder, I caught a glimmer of amusement in Lilith’s eye. “I could think of nothing more fitting to punctuate my point than those being the last words this poor vessel of yours has the ignominy of uttering.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve never had much use for punctuation.”

  We reached the top of the stairs. Hit the wooden door – arched to match the stairwell, and the platform below – at a run. Pushed it open so hard I damn near toppled out.

  Good thing, too. If I hadn’t stumbled when I went through the door, the crazy undead townie chick woulda taken my head off with her goddamn battle-axe.

  The lady wasn’t looking so hot. Too thin and wiry by half, all bone and gristle and harsh angles. Skin so pale it appeared translucent, and hypoxic blue as well. Red-rimmed eyes shot through with blood, and retinas blood-red to match. Nails grown unnaturally long and sharp, thick and yellowed and splitting – from her fingers and her bare feet. Face smeared red around a wide gash of mouth too wide for her face, as if Grigori’s infection had warped her very physiognomy, inside which gleamed elongated canines glazed pink. I wondered if that was her husband’s blood all over her face, or her child’s. It was spattered elbow-high across both arms, as well, and her simple cotton housedress was stiff from it – an apron of gore. But given her crazed, lustful stare – inhuman eyes rolling, her pupils pinpricks on account of the castle’s ample lamplight – I’d say whoever’s blood that was, it had only served to whet her appetite.

  She’d been swinging for my head. Which, thanks to my stumble, was a good head lower than it usually was. The axe-blade whistled past so close, she parted my meat-suit’s hair. I stumbled forward, Frank’s muscle-memory carrying me through a tuck-and-roll before I so much as realized what was going on. I came out of the somersault on one knee, pivoting and reaching for a gun that wasn’t there.