Monsters of the Reich

by Eric S. Brown

  The few remaining bat monsters apparently had their fill of being slaughtered despite the presence of their maker there to urge them on. They soared upward and out of the lab, smashing through the large, painted black windows of its roof. But the dead were just beginning to enter the fray, so the battle inside the lab raged on.

  Kristen and Payne found themselves surrounded. The bulk of the dead soldiers had formed an ever-closing circle about them. Payne was weaponless; her pistols out of ammo and holstered, her knives lost to the last of the bat monsters she had slain. Hand to hand was the only option left to her. Payne sprang into action, grabbing hold of one of the dead soldiers as it hurled itself forward to her. She caught it and spun to fling it into another of the soldiers near it. The two dead soldiers went down, a tangled mass of flailing arms and grasping hands. The soldiers around them were too close for Kristen to use her rifle as anything but a club and use it as club she did. Kristen danced among the encroaching dead soldiers, the butt of her rifle caving in skulls and breaking noses. Despite the upgrade she had gotten from leveling up though, she knew it wasn’t going to be enough, not even with Payne by her side.

  Kendal’s breath came in ragged gasps as he ran across the lab. The bat monsters’ sudden withdrawal had left him free to change his course. He raced toward where he had last seen Kristen and Payne. All he could see ahead of him in that direction now though was the backs of what seemed like countless dead soldiers. Without warning, Dr. Mephistopheles stepped into his path. Kendal tried to dodge the doctor’s backhanded blow as it swept toward him. He wasn’t fast enough. The backside of the doctor’s hand hammered into him, flinging him backward like a child tossed away by an angry adult. Kendal grunted as he skidded over the floor of the lab after crashing onto it. Before he could even start to get to his feet, the doctor was on him. Mephistopheles dropped onto him, the doctor’s legs spread over him, pinning him to the floor.

  “Can’t have you breaking up the party now, can we?” Mephistopheles purred as an impossibly long tongue unfurled from between his lips. The forked end of the tongue shot downward at Kendal like a two-pronged spear. Kendal jerked his head to the side as the tongue’s tips sunk into the wood of the lab’s floor where his head had rested only a fraction of a second before. What the hell is this guy? Kendal wondered as he struggled to get his pistol into a position where he could take a shot at the mad, demonic doctor. Mephistopheles wasn’t having any of that, however. He caught hold of Kendal’s pistol. The metal of the pistol bent and whined as the pressure of the doctor’s grip crushed it into something twisted and utterly useless. Mephistopheles flung the broken pistol away as Kendal managed to get in a punch that struck the side of his face. The blow knocked the doctor’s shaded glasses away to reveal the twin, burning red orbs of his eyes. Looking into them was like staring directly into the heart of the fires of Hell. Kendal gasped at the sight of them and felt his bladder empty itself in response. Mephistopheles was cackling above him, his forked tongue slashing about in the air.

  A pistol cracked from somewhere beyond Kendal’s field of vision. The bullet it fired opened up a gaping hole between Mephistopheles’ eyes. Foul, black pus rained onto Kendal from the wound as he heard Lance say, “Leave him alone, you bastard.”

  Mephistopheles stood up, leaving Kendal on the floor below him to face Lance. “What a brave little fool you are,” Mephistopheles snorted as the mangled flesh of the wound between his eyes slithered about to seal itself and leave the doctor’s face as unmarred as it had been before the bullet had plunged into it.

  Lance’s pistol fired three more times as the doctor leaped at him. Each of the bullets buried themselves in the doctor’s body but didn’t even slow him down. Mephistopheles swept Lance up off the floor of the lab effortlessly. Lance’s legs and feet kicked wildly above the floor as the fingers of the doctor’s right hand grew tighter around his throat.

  In a desperate attempt to help Lance, Kendal drew his knife and crawled across the floor to stab its blade into and through the lower part of the doctor’s left leg. The blade went completely through meat and bone alike as black pus splashed onto Kendal’s hand where he clutched its hilt. The pus was like ice, burning like a cold fire as it made contact with his skin. Kendal realized the spots where the pus had landed on his uniform earlier were smoking. He let go of the knife and rolled away from the doctor to begin shrugging off his uniform’s coat and shirt. Kendal used a clean portion of his discarded coat to wipe the pus that drenched his knife hand off of it. His skin was bubbling where the pus had made contact and hurt like hell. The pus was like some sort of demonic acid.

  Mephistopheles completely ignored the knife impaling his leg as if it wasn’t even there. His attention remained focused on Lance who was still putting up one hell of a fight. Determined, Lance brought up the barrel of his pistol and aimed it straight into the doctor’s face. The pistol cracked in rapid succession as Lance emptied the rest of its magazine into Mephistopheles. Silver rounds pulped the doctor’s nose and cheeks. Black pus exploded everywhere like a bursting water balloon. The doctor didn’t release Lance though. Instead, he rammed his other hand into Lance and upward behind his ribs. Mephistopheles tore Lance’s still-beating heart from his chest. The doctor’s features were already reforming, his flesh swimming around, shifting back into place. When his face had completely reformed, Mephistopheles raised Lance’s heart to his mouth and took a bite out of it. Blood burst from the tissue of Lance’s heart as the doctor’s teeth sunk into it. Mephistopheles’ lips parted in a red-smeared grin.

  “No!” Kendal heard himself screaming as he launched himself to his feet and charged at the demonic doctor. Mephistopheles was ready for him. With a careless flick of his hand, he brought Kendal’s charge to a halt and sent him bouncing across the floor of the lab.

  Kristen broke her rifle over across the face of a dead soldier. The blow caused the dead man to reel backward and crash onto the floor, the flesh of his cold cheek torn open and jaw shattered. If he felt any pain, he didn’t show it. Kristen grunted as she lunged forward to ram the sharp end of her broken weapon into the front of his skull. That he did feel. His body jerked and then collapsed unmoving to rest at her feet. Payne was still holding her ground. Her fists were like lightning, hammering into any of the dead soldiers that got too close to her. Payne lashed out with a kick that caved in a dead soldier’s ribcage. She followed up the kick by grabbing the man and twisting his body to where she could lock her arms about his neck and snap it. Payne released the dead soldier as another came lunging at her. She met it by slamming the flat of her palm up against the underside of its chin below its snapping teeth, breaking its neck. But even then, she was far from done. She caught the dead man’s falling body and spun it into the path of yet another of the dead.

  The floor around where Kristen and Payne fought was littered with the bodies of the dead soldiers. The things just kept coming as if there was no end to their numbers. Payne was exhausted, every inch of her body aching, burning with the pain of overtaxed muscles. She knew that it would be impossible to keep this up much longer…but there was no way out. The dead soldiers were packed around her to the point that their bodies made a wall of cold flesh that kept her from being able to disengage from them.

  With a start, Payne realized that Kristen was down. Several of the dead men had latched on her, ripping at her uniform as they dragged Kristen to the floor beneath them. Kristen’s screams chilled Payne to the core of her very soul. Then Kristen was gone from her sight, buried under the dead men clawing and biting at her. Payne put everything she had left into a charge toward the weakest-looking group of the dead soldiers about her. She plowed through them, knocking them from her path to go stumbling out of the circle they formed around her. Payne regained her footing as the closest of the dead soldiers moaned and reached for her. She batted its grasping hands away and sprinted away from the dead, leaving the slow-moving monsters behind her.

  Payne saw Lance’s corpse on the floor, the fro
nt of his uniform soaked red beneath a gaping hole in its chest. Seeing Lance dead stunned her. The man had seemed so unstoppable. Before she could even begin to wonder what had killed him, Payne caught sight of the thing coming at Kendal where he lay on the lab’s floor trying to get up. She knew the thing was the doctor they had met when they had entered the lab, but whatever the doctor had become was far from human. Payne could almost feel the evil flowing out of it as if it were a physical force. She had no weapon to fight it with, but that wasn’t going to stop her from trying to save Kendal’s life.

  Jumping into the air, Payne heaved herself at the thing in the lab coat. The outward stretched foot of her flying kick whammed into the center of the thing’s chest, knocking it backward. Payne landed on her feet in a fighting stance as it recovered with impossible speed. The demonic doctor reared its head back in an utterly inhuman howl that shook the entire lab. The glass of the ceiling’s painted black windows above them shattered and rained down upon them. The doctor just stood there, allowing its shards to slice into him. For Payne, there was no means of dodging them. She screamed as several of the shards hit her. One sunk into her right shoulder, another her left thigh. She brought up her arm in time to save her life, blocking a shard coming at her skull with it. The shard thunked into the flesh and bone of her arm, cutting completely through it. Payne dropped to the floor, unable to do anything but cry tears of pain and bleed.

  Kendal had rolled beneath a close by work table, escaping the falling debris. As soon as the rain of glass ended, he emerged from beneath it, a madness of anger too intense to hold in check raging in his eyes. Reaching into his pack as he ran, Kendal yanked a wooden stake from it. The power of his emotions gave him the will to tap into the points his character had earned during the gameplay thus far and he leveled up. His wounds were healed, and Kendal focused the rest of the power flooding through him into his character’s strength. Mephistopheles was laughing at his charge and moved to bat him away again, but this time, Kendal blocked the demonic doctor’s attempted blow. The doctor’s eyes went wide as Kendal closed on him, stabbing the stake he clutched into his heart. It entered Mephistopheles’s heart as black pus sprayed from around where it pierced his unholy flesh. Kendal kept applying force to the stake. It actually sliced an inch or two downward through the demonic doctor’s ribs before the wood couldn’t take the pressures on it anymore and snapped. Mephistopheles staggered, careening away from Kendal, the bulk of the stake inside him, its jagged, broken, thicker portion protruding from his chest.

  “Die, you bastard!” Kendal screamed as he watched Mephistopheles’ struggling to pull out the stake. Kendal used the time the stake was buying him to shrug his pack from his shoulder and rummage through it. His fingers wrapped around the object he was after and he yanked it out of the pack, getting back to his feet.

  Unable to tear the stake free, Mephistopheles hammered a fist into the part of it that was sticking out of him to push it on through his body. The stake clattered to the floor of the lab behind where he stood. Coils of smoke rose from the black, pus-drenched wood.

  Kendal grinned like a lunatic as he moved toward the demonic doctor again. In his hand was a grenade he had looted off the bodies of the Allied soldiers who had been slaughtered by the doctor’s bat monsters on the road.

  “You cannot stop me!” Mephistopheles roared. “This world will belong to the Reich and then to me!”

  “Yeah,” Kendal’s grin grew wider, “we’ll see about that.”

  “Bring it then, little man,” Mephistopheles growled, his eyes blazing with fury.

  Kendal charged the demon. Mephistopheles’ arms melted into masses of tentacles that slapped through the air at him. Kendal dropped, sliding beneath their reach. He skidded to a halt several feet behind where Mephistopheles whirled about toward him. The demon eyed him, seeing that Kendal’s grenade was no longer in his hand, and Kendal laughed, diving for cover.

  Mephistopheles looked down just before the detonation to see the grenade resting in the lower pocket of his lab coat near his groin. The demon wailed as the grenade went off, nearly vaporizing its legs and groin. The remaining, shrapnel-marred upper body of the demon doctor toppled onto the floor of the lab. Mephistopheles thrashed about and then recovered and calmed down enough to begin using his arms to drag himself toward Kendal. The damage to Mephistopheles’ body was simply too great for the demon to so easily heal as it had done before.

  Kendal had moved to kneel next to the body of one of the dead soldiers that doctor had used against him and his friends. The zombie’s body had a pistol holstered on it. Though the dead soldier had never had the mind to use the weapon, Kendal surely planned to as he drew it and rose to his feet again.

  Mephistopheles was trying to yell something at Kendal as he crawled forward, but instead of words emerging from his mouth, what came out was globs of black pus and a horrid choking noise.

  “It’s time to say goodbye, Doc.” Kendal aimed his pistol at Mephistopheles’ forehead and squeezed the weapon’s trigger. Kendal’s shot smacked into Mephistopheles. Gore exploded from the rear side of the demon’s head as the bullet ripped through it. Mephistopheles’ eyes dimmed and the demon’s head slumped upon its shoulders.

  Kendal jerked the cross from the necklace about his neck and grabbed Mephistopheles by the hair of his head, forcing it upward so that he could shove the cross into the demon’s mouth. When he did, the demon’s entire body erupted in a mass of raging fire that rivaled those of Hell itself. They consumed what remained of Mephistopheles in a matter of seconds, leaving only ashes scattered over the deeply scorched area of the lab’s floor.

  Exhausted, with nothing left in him, Kendal slumped to his knees, breathing a sigh of relief. The demon was destroyed and the game was nearly won. Looking around, he saw that the dead soldiers, animated by the doctor, had stopped moving. They stood frozen wherever they had been when the doctor died, like creepy statues. His eyes searched for Payne and found her. She had managed to remove most of the glass shards from her body but lay disturbingly still.

  “Payne!” Kendal shouted at her. She didn’t answer or even stir at the sound of her name.

  Kendal moved on his hands and knees to where she lay. She was covered in her own blood and her eyes closed.

  “Don’t you dare be dead,” Kendal rasped as he reached to check her pulse.

  Payne opened her eyes. “I’m not dead, you idiot,” she told him, a weak grin on her lips.

  Kendal was speechless. Tears welled up in his eyes as he leaned over to kiss Payne. She kissed him back. When their lips parted, he said, “Can you stand up?”

  “Not on my own,” Payne answered. Taking another glance at her leg wound, he could see why.

  “This is going to hurt,” Kendal told her and then heaved her to her feet, supporting the weight of her body with one of her arms around his shoulders. Payne grimaced as pain shot through her body. Kendal felt bad for her, but there was nothing he could do to ease it for her. He didn’t know exactly how her wounds would translate over to her real body or even if they would once they finished up their mission and the game ended. Kendal knew that the worst was over though. The game’s demonic boss was defeated, and his minions were either disabled or fled.

  The problem he had ahead of him now was how to blow up this complex. There were no explosives in his gear. He remembered the drums of fuel in the garage and decided that his best bet would be to use to the fuel to burn the base to the ground. Kendal made his way out of the base’s main building to the garage, helping Payne along with him. The walk was difficult for her even with him supporting the bulk of her weight. Payne toughed it out, not that she had a choice. Kendal wasn’t about to leave her alone in the base’s main building just in case some of the doctor’s creatures that hadn’t fled or been disabled by his death were still lurking around. The garage seemed safe enough though, and he checked it over thoroughly after finding Payne a warm spot to sit and rest. There was a fire going in the garage, and he left
her next to it as he began his work moving the heavy drums of fuel over to the base’s main building. It took him several hours to get the fuel moved to where he needed it to be. Kendal tipped over the drums of fuel at various spots throughout the base’s main building. He slicked the building’s corridors with the fuel but dumped most of it in the doctor’s lab. When it was all finally set up and ready to be ignited, Kendal returned to one of the doorways that led outside. He patted the pockets of his uniform until he found the matches he was carrying and then struck one. Stepping back, Kendal tossed it into the building. The fuel went up in a great whoosh. Despite the distance he quickly put between himself and the doorway, he felt its heat wash over his back. Kendal ran away from the building as it burned behind him. After reaching a safe distance, he stopped and turned to watch the flames spreading over the building’s walls and the tendrils of thick, black smoke that drifted upward into the clouds above. Kendal was still watching the building burn as the world around vanished in a flash of white light so bright that it stung his eyes.

  Kendal woke up screaming. Sweat slicked his flesh beneath his clothes. His fingers were curled up into white-knuckled fists, their nails digging into the skin of his palms.