Return from the Inferno

by Maloney, Mack;

  He took another long swig of wine and wiped the excess that ran down his cheek.

  Sleep, he prayed. His words hanging in the brutally humid night air, Please put me to sleep….

  Whether he ever actually drifted off, he didn’t know.

  He was stretched out on the bunk, bathed in sweat; the bottle leaking wine at his side when a cry pierced his eardrums.

  “Help!”

  He was up in an instant. Was it a dream? Was he thinking back to the strange rescue earlier in the day?

  “Help!”

  He rolled off the bunk and scampered to the front door. It was the dead of night. He must have gone to sleep! Now he was wide awake. On the far bank he could just barely see the outline of a man, up to his waist in the water, trying to ford the rapid current and losing the battle.

  Fitz was out of the hut in a shot. He knew there’d be no replay of his miraculous rescue the day before.

  “Stop!” he yelled to the man. “I will lower the bridge!”

  Somehow the man heard him over the roar of the Wabash and managed to haul himself back up onto the shore. Fitz was in the bridge control house by this time, punching the controls, swearing at them to work properly.

  It took a few tries, but finally the ancient gears meshed and the rusting, creaking bridge descended.

  He ran across the span and down to the far bank, where he found the man sprawled, coughing up a combination of river water and blood. It was obvious that the man was injured even before he tried to cross the river the hard way.

  Fitz yanked him up as gently as possible, and then slinging him over his shoulder, carried him back across the bridge and into his shack.

  He helped the man down onto his bunk, studying him as he did so. His upper body, neck and face, were covered with small cuts and abrasions, like he’d been hit with dozens of tacks. His arms and legs were in even worse condition.

  “What happened to you?” Fitz asked him, wrapping him in the blanket and passing him the wine bottle. “Where have you come from?”

  The man took a deep breath and a long swig of wine.

  “I can just barely remember,” he gasped. “I have been walking for days, down from what used to be Gary, Indiana.”

  He took another long drink of wine.

  “I must tell you,” he began again. “It happened two, no, three days ago. It was early in the morning. I’d worked until midnight at the steel mill and I’d just come home to go to sleep.

  “My quarters were across the main square from what used to be the city hall. It was converted into the local headquarters for the NS garrison. The day before there was a small demonstration in front of this building. The people—it was about twelve old women and some young kids—were asking the NS for more food. We’d had very little to eat in the past few months. Everyone was going without.

  “This little demonstration—you couldn’t even call it a protest—lasted no more than ten minutes. Some soldiers simply came out and shooed them away.

  “That night, as I was coming home from working at the mill, I saw the NS moving out of the city hall. They were taking everything with them—weapons, computers, even the desks. I didn’t think anything of it. I thought they were moving to better quarters.

  “Anyway, I’m sure it was right after sunrise, when I was awakened by this noise. It was so strange, so eerie. Like a loud, echoing whistle. I actually got up and looked out my window.

  “That’s when it happened.”

  The man took another long gulp of wine and wiped his weary brow.

  “It hit about a quarter mile away, right on the other side of the square. First there was this tremendous roar and then an explosion. An incredible explosion. I was thrown against the wall and halfway through it. The entire building came down around me. Why my skull wasn’t crushed, I’ll never know.

  “Somehow I stayed conscious and I was able to dig myself out of the rubble. What I saw I couldn’t believe at first. Where the wide avenue and the square used to be was now a gigantic crater. It must have been a quarter mile around. Probably one hundred fifty feet deep—or even more. It was already filling with water. And bodies.

  “Everyone else in my building was killed. Just about everyone in the surrounding buildings was killed too. It was horrible. The flame. The smoke. The screams. The clothes shredded right off me. I was naked, cut, burned. But I was alive. Somehow. To the day I die, it will haunt me. Why me? Why was I spared?”

  “Do you have any idea what it was?” Fitz asked him. “Did an airplane drop a bomb?”

  “No,” the man replied. “I’m sure it wasn’t that. I looked. I could see no airplanes. I heard no engines.

  “I pulled myself up and out and then another explosion hit. About a mile away. It was tremendous. Then there was another a minute later. And another after that I counted twenty-three in all over two hours. I was hiding under rubble, praying that whatever was happening would stop. Now I know why the NS were pulling out. The first explosion was exactly where the old women had held their little demonstration the day before.”

  “If they weren’t bombs dropped by airplanes, what were they?” Fitz asked.

  “It was something more terrifying …”

  “Such as?”

  “Have you ever heard of the Schrecklichkeit Kanone?”

  Fitz’s post-inebriated brain strained to make the correct German to English translation.

  “‘Frightfulness gun’?”

  “A good description,” the injured man replied. “We’ve been hearing rumors about this. Huge guns set up on high ground. Cannons whose barrels are as long as a ten-story building is high. They were said to be able to fire a shell weighing seven hundred pounds more than one hundred miles.”

  “Surely such a weapon would have little military value,” Fitz said. The rational side of his brain telling him that this kind of gun would be very impractical to use, operate and service, especially by the terminally practical Fourth Reich soldiers.

  “Exactly,” the man replied. “They are used simply for terror. For ‘frightfulness.’ I’m convinced that is what they used against my city. I am also convinced that I’m the only one left.”

  With this, the man broke down; a gush of tears and emotion flowing out of him.

  “For the first time ever, I am really all alone,” he cried through the anguish.

  Fitz ran a hand through his own thinning scalp.

  “I know how you feel,” he said.

  He took his last clean blanket and walked down to the river, soaked it, and then returned. The wounded man was asleep by this time, so Fitz gently laid the wet blanket on top of him, hoping it would keep him cool during the mercilessly hot night.

  When the man awoke in the morning, he would find that all his wounds had been healed.

  Chapter Nine

  Bundeswehr Four

  OBER-COLONEL KARL LISZ HAD reason to worry.

  He was holding a printed message from the First Governor himself. It was a notice for all of the commanders, of Bundeswehr Four to attend a high-level emergency staff meeting to be held in less than a half hour.

  Attendance was absolutely mandatory.

  The message gave no reason for the meeting; that was why Lisz was worried. The First Governor was an extremely busy man. His schedule was planned out weeks, if not months, in advance. Every official minute of every day was filled, with very little room for contingencies. It was a typical timetable for such an efficient and methodical Fourth Reich high official.

  Calling high-level gatherings on such short notice was not the man’s style. Not unless something was wrong.

  Drastically wrong.

  Lisz could only grimly speculate just what that might be. As head of the district’s border soldiers, he was among the most high-profile officers inside Bundeswehr Four. His soldiers, human barrel scrapings when compared to the rest of the Fourth Reich army, were known for their efficient brutality in dealing with the dozens of refugees (derisively known as sputniks) that wandered i
nto Bundeswehr Four every day. That was, after all, their one and only job. But because of their necessary crude behavior, his men sometimes overstepped their bounds. When they did, Lisz was usually the first to hear about it.

  He called for his car and then glumly climbed into his formal uniform. He was already beginning to tremble. He’d seen staff officers brutally executed on the spot at such hastily called meetings with the First Governor, sometimes for petty offenses such as requisitioning more fuel or food than allowed. The First Governor was a great believer in punishment by example. One way to stop fuel pilferage was to shoot the officer whose man had taken a gallon more than he should have. It was a frightful, yet highly efficient way of ending fuel theft.

  Lisz had just buttoned his stiff uniform collar when the call came that his car was waiting. He was visibly shaking now. He needed something to calm down. He was out of valium. And being only nine in the morning, it was much too early for a drink of brandy. What could he do?

  It came to him just as he was affixing his hat to his balding head. He’d attended the raucous dinner reception for the air pirates two nights before. Although he wasn’t high enough on the staff ladder to have been invited to partake in the drinking of the myx, he had managed to steal a glass which contained a dozen or so precious drops of the powerful nectar.

  Perhaps a dab on his tongue would be enough to settle him down.

  He quickly opened his wall safe and retrieved the martini glass holding the drop of myx. He took first one, then two, then a half dozen drops; ritualistically placing each one under his tongue and letting it absorb into his system.

  By the time he closed the wall safe back up, he felt like he was walking on air.

  A minute later he climbed into the back of his stretch bulletproof Mercedes and commanded the driver to proceed to the Reich Palast immediately. The short journey through the streets of the town provided Lisz with a myriad of pleasant, myx-induced sensations. Every man he saw—be they a slave or NS—looked weak, ugly and nonthreatening. Every woman he saw, from schoolgirls to mature women, looked delectable, sensual, easily dominated. The few drops of myx had set his hormones raging. He vowed that if he got out of the staff meeting alive, he would reward himself with the gift of a young girl that night.

  The limo arrived in front of the Reich Palast to find a small traffic jam of staff cars waiting outside. It was apparent right away that the First Governor had ordered the entire command structure of Bundeswehr Four to the meeting. Even the sky above the huge structure was crowded. Helicopters bearing officers from the outlying districts were lined up for landing at one of the three helipads near the Reich Palast. And, as always, the air was filled with the sound of jet aircraft taking off and landing at the nearby Aerodrome.

  Lisz got out of his car and joined the somber procession up the marble stairs and into the Reichstag-like building. He could almost feel the trepidation of the other officers. They likewise knew what could happen at one of these meetings.

  The First Governor was already there when they filed into the vast meeting hall—a highly unusual occurrence. Most times, he was ushered in only after the staff had assembled, and then to a bombastic overture of trumpets and drums. But now, the sixty-year-old man was already at his seat at the head of the massive meeting table, his uniform jacket discarded, his sleeves rolled up, documents scattered all around him, a swarm of underling officers elbowing each other in an effort to attend to his every need.

  Lisz couldn’t believe it; none of the Fourth Reich officers could. They had never seen their supreme commander so informal.

  The rest of the usual formalities attendant to such a meeting were also missing. The First Governor was actually smiling. He seemed anxious for everyone to take their seats so he could begin.

  “Please sit down,” he boomed out with unlikely exuberance. “Please take any seat. Any seat will do.”

  Finally the ninety-two officers of the command staff were seated, their eyes and ears at peak reception for what surely would be a highly unusual session.

  The First Governor stood at the end of the table and seeing that everything was in order, cleared his throat and began.

  “We are entering a new era, my friends,” he enthused in an uncharacteristically vibrant voice. “This is Day One. A new life awaits us all …”

  A few brave souls dared to look to their fellow officers to see if they were just as puzzled. “New era?” “Day One?” “New life?” What the hell did that all mean?

  “Take no notes, gentlemen,” the First Governor went on. “What I have to say to you should go right into your ears and directly to your brains. It should not be slowed down or misinterpreted by your act of writing.”

  Instantly every man inside the room dropped his pen onto the table.

  Lisz stole a look around the room. It was, to a man, filled with puzzled expressions. The officer to his right was the chief medical officer for Bundeswehr Four. He tapped Lisz and slyly passed him a note. Lisz read its two words: “Acute myx poisoning.”

  Lisz felt a shudder go through him; the effects of his own minuscule dose of myx were still reverberating throughout his body. It was easy then to agree with the doctor’s covert diagnosis. Ingesting large amounts of the mind-altering liquor could loop anyone—including the First Governor.

  The First Governor cleared his throat and began again. “What I have to tell you—or rather to ask of you—should be spread far and wide. To your soldiers. To your own staff officers. To the people here under our guard. To any refugees who might stumble into our territory. It is a message that should be blanketed throughout our domain. Carried to its farthest reaches. My quest will become your quest.”

  The First Governor paused for a moment and studied the ninety-two officers. Then he smiled broadly once again.

  “To begin, gentlemen,” he said, “we must find ‘a man of water.’”

  Chapter Ten

  THE AIR PIRATE NAMED Itchy was one second away from death.

  He was lying flat out in an open field, the remains of his tattered parachute wrapped around him, no less than sixteen assorted machine guns pointed at his head. He’d landed there after punching out of his fuel empty F-105 which he had run bone-dry chasing what he thought was the airplane that had iced the jumbo and his comrade, Bone.

  “Don’t shoot …” he said once again, staring up at the gun barrels. “I have heroin. Pure gold scag. I have crack. Good stuff. I can even get you some myx. The real stuff. Not the fake stuff. I’ll give it all to you. Just don’t shoot.”

  It was Itchy’s fortune that the sixteen soldiers hovering over him had no interest in these drugs. He’d mistaken them for a band of outlaws, but it was an understandable error. They were dressed like bandits: each was wearing a black nondescript uniform. Their weapons—M-16s and AK-47s mostly—were of the type favored by many outlaw gangs roving the northern tier of the American continent. Even their general appearance—long hair and days-old beards-fit the bill.

  But the sixteen men were not outlaws. Quite the opposite. They were members of the elite Football City Special Forces, specifically the Ranger Corps. They’d seen Itchy eject from his Thud and had him surrounded before he even touched the ground.

  “This is a complication,” one of the Rangers said now, as Itchy squirmed on the damp ground. “What are we going to do with him?”

  “He’s already seen us,” came the reply. “So we’ll have to take him with us.”

  Itchy wasn’t sure what the men were talking about, but it didn’t really matter. All that was important to him at that point was that the men apparently weren’t going to kill him outright.

  “Okay, ‘sleep him,’” one of the soldiers said.

  “How long?”

  “Give him three hours, for now.”

  With that, one of the men knelt beside Itchy and injected him in the right arm. Itchy blacked out two seconds later.

  The next eighteen hours were ones of total confusion for Itchy.

  He would
wake up every three hours or so only to be injected back into unconsciousness again. In the few brief moments that he was awake, he saw things that made little sense, either separately or collectively.

  In his first awakening, he found himself being trundled along in the back of a truck with the same sixteen grimfaced men. It was just sunset and the destination was unknown. He noticed before he went under that, besides the rifles the men carried, they were also equipped with several laser devices, the purpose of which he did not know.

  When he came to the second time, it was the dead of night and the truck had stopped. In the minute before the soldiers injected him again, he managed a peek out of the back of the vehicle and saw that it was parked in an old highway rest area. One that looked out over a well-lit city about six miles away.

  Waking up a third time, he found that the men had deployed their laser devices and were working over them feverishly. In the background he could hear tremendous explosions, the chattering of AA guns and the peel of air raid sirens. Still groggy, he leaned further out of the back of the truck to see that the city was now in flames and under heavy air attack. In the thirty seconds he had before the soldiers realized he was conscious and stuck him again, he was able to determine that the men were using laser sighting devices—probably PAVE/PENNY—to target smart bombs falling on the city with ear-splitting regularity.

  His fourth conscious period came close to dawn. The truck was just moving out from its targeting perch and heading back down the abandoned highway.

  The soldiers quickly injected him again and when he lay back down he could see the sky through the flap in the back of the truck. It was filled with smoke, but there were brilliant patches of light blue and red, the prelude to a clear warm summer’s day.

  Just as he was going under for the fifth time, Itchy thought he saw a very strange sight. It looked like hundreds of W’s written in contrails across the sky.