But later on, he assumed that it was just a dream.
It was midmorning when Itchy woke up for the sixth time.
He was back in the same field where the men had taken him prisoner. They were off the truck. It was nowhere to be seen. Instead a large CH-47 Chinook was on hand. The soldiers were loading their gear into it as another dozen or so new troops maintained a tight defensive ring around the LZ.
Itchy was kept awake while an intense discussion about his fate carried on between the man who appeared to be the leader of the sixteen soldiers and the pilots of the big troop helicopter. Through stuffed ears, Itchy was able to hear the gist of the debate, which was that the Chinook was overloaded and underfueled and even one more person on board could make the difference weightwise as to how successful the flight would be.
It was very apparent that no one involved wanted to spend much time on the question. This made Itchy itchy. If he was simply excess weight to them, then a bullet to his brain would quickly solve the problem. Yet that option never really came up.
One of the pilots blew a whistle and immediately the troops began climbing aboard the helicopter. The man in charge of the sixteen soldiers walked over to Itchy and untied his hands and feet. Then he tossed the rope at Itchy’s head.
“As long as you live,” the man told him, “you’ll never have a day as lucky as this one.”
With that, he climbed aboard the chopper, closing the door behind him. Then in a great burst of power and engine wash, the Chinook took off, and went straight up until it was out of sight.
Chapter Eleven
THE TWO FOURTH REICH soldiers who manned Outpost #6406 began the day with a meal of powdered eggs and stale coffee—and no drugs.
The Wabash River was running particularly rough this morning, too rough for the men to take their usual morning bath. Instead they gathered some of the brisk water in cans and took turns dumping them over each other’s head, the “in the field” equivalent of taking a cold shower.
The outpost—a thirty-five-foot high tower which sat on a slight bend in the Wabash—was equipped with state-of-the-art video equipment, infrared sights, NightScope devices and even thermo-detection gear. Its weaponry included two .50-caliber heavy machine guns, a small rocket launcher, an SA-7 portable SAM system and a small arsenal of light weapons. The outpost had spy drone launch capability and three ways of instant communication back to the main NS HQ in Bundeswehr Four.
The job was simply to keep an eye on things. A half mile to the south there was a large tract of farmland which was worked by two hundred slave laborers. Directly to their east was a small truck repair facility, also worked by slave labor. Next door to that was a small jail which held people marked for execution. Outpost #6406 provided surveillance and early warning threat detection for all three of these facilities. By keeping constant tabs on the many slave laborers in the area, they helped cut down the escape rate, which was fairly small to begin with.
They were also charged with looking for any refugees who might be inside the Bundeswehr Four military district illegally. Such a crime usually meant execution. From their vantage point, they were able to watch several roads leading down from the north, roads that the sputniks were likely to travel. This was the most active part of their mission. They averaged spotting six refugees a week, many of whom were simply tracked down and locked up in the jail next to the truck repair facility to await their turn before a firing squad or years of backbreaking labor in the fields.
Directly to the north of the station, a mile and a quarter up the Wabash, was the small rusting bridge. This too was supposed to be under the watchful eyes of Outpost #6406, but neither man had turned his scope in that direction for days, not since the strange incident in the river with the priest and the two drowning people.
Their lives began to change the moment the Mercedes staff car pulled up in front of the outpost tower. The two soldiers were horrified. They recognized the car right away as belonging to Colonel Lisz, their overall commander. His sudden appearance could only mean a surprise inspection, something Lisz was not known for in the past.
The two soldiers barely had enough time to fasten up their uniforms before Lisz and an entourage of six bodyguards rode the small elevator up to the watchtower and walked in.
There was a barrage of heel clicking and crisp salutes, with Lisz making the two soldiers stand at attention for about ten seconds longer than was needed.
“I am here at the personal request of the First Governor himself,” Lisz began, his usually booming, Teutonic voice appreciably subdued and hesitant. “He has asked me—as well as every officer on his staff—to visit every outpost under their command. To talk to soldiers, such as yourselves, about a subject which has become very, very important to him.”
The two soldiers looked at each other with twin expressions of puzzlement. What the hell was Lisz talking about?
“It has come to the First Governor’s attention,” Lisz began again. “That there may be a man within our territory who: perhaps unknowingly, has displayed certain … powers.”
“What kind of ‘powers,’ Colonel?” one of the outpost soldiers asked.
Lisz was growing more uncomfortable by the second.
“Let us just say, ‘unusual powers,’” he replied, the tone of his voice sounding embarrassed at such a silly notion. “Things that are out of the ordinary …”
The two border guards now eyed each other with considerable consternation.
“Well? Should I assume you’ve witnessed nothing of the sort?” Lisz asked them. “I’ve reviewed your reports for the past month and saw nothing in them that would indicate …”
Both soldiers were trembling slightly by this time. Both were eyeing Lisz’s particularly fierce looking bodyguards.
Finally one soldier bucked up and cleared his throat.
“Herr Colonel,” he said, stuttering. “May we speak to you alone?”
Colonel Franz Hantz was the chief medical officer for Bundeswehr Four.
His typical day would begin by making the rounds at the main infirmary which was located on the edge of the Aerodrome. This large, well-equipped facility was for the care of Fourth Reich personnel exclusively. It boasted a large staff, state-of-the-art medical technology and the latest in procedures and diagnostic care. Hantz would usually spend three hours at the hospital, reviewing the most important cases, even assisting in critical operations. It was, in many ways, the castle of his kingdom.
A second hospital—smaller, poorly staffed and poorly maintained—was located on the far edge of town, near the all but abandoned railroad station. It was used for little more than a storage facility for ailing civilians and the occasional sickly sputnik. The patients there received the bare minimum of care—food, water and antiseptics—and little else. Few operations were performed and when they were, the surgeons were usually undertrained medics or even unqualified nurses.
The second-class hospital had an even darker side however. Since its opening, there had been dark rumors that Dachau type human experiments were performed there, under the tacit agreement of the Bundeswehr Four leadership. Though meticulous records were kept on all patients entering the facility, there was virtually no accounting for what happened to them once they were admitted.
So it was an extremely rare occasion when Colonel Hantz, the physician, would visit the place. And never in the past had he stooped so low as to actually walk through the patient wards.
But things had changed drastically inside Bummer Four. And so on this morning, Colonel Hantz was indeed walking the floors, speaking with the sick, the injured, the dying, a demeaning task that could only be forced upon him by the First Governor.
Most of the four hundred or so second-class patients were ailing from lack of care of routine maladies—ulcers, appendicitis, swollen tonsils, cataracts. Some had sustained injuries in typical household or roadway accidents. Others were simply wasting away from incurable diseases.
But there was a small psychiatri
c ward, and it was here on his last stop of the hurried, distasteful tour, that Doctor Hantz met the sputnik from Gary, Indiana.
The man’s story, according to the ward nurse, was typical in many respects. He claimed to be from the large industrial city to the north and that he’d witnessed a horrifying artillery attack several weeks before. A routine check by Hantz with Bundeswehr Four’s military intelligence section confirmed that a section of Gary had been the target of a “fright” shelling earlier in the month. The man then made his way south, stumbling inside the Bundeswehr Four military district and making his way up to the crosspoint of Wabash River.
That was when a strange thing happened.
“I had to ford the river,” the man told Hantz from his bed. “I was certain that troops were chasing me and I had to get away, or drown trying. I was injured though, and weak from my long walk. So I cried for help, near the place where the drawbridge is located.
“A man came out of the bridge tender’s hut and lowered the bridge. He was a priest. He carried me across and brought me to his quarters. He gave me wine and a blanket—a blanket which he had dipped into the waters of the river.
“It was a very hot evening and the wet blanket cooled me considerably. I fell asleep and enjoyed my longest slumber in months, despite my many injuries.
“But when I awoke …”
At that point, the man’s voice trailed off. Hantz resented the break in the testimony.
“What happened?” he demanded of the man, glancing to make sure his restraining belts were secured to the bottom of the bed. “You awoke and found what?”
The man tried to fight off a bout of tears, but lost the battle.
“I awoke …” he said in a halting, raspy voice, “to find that I’d been healed.”
Chapter Twelve
The Reich Palast
THE TWO ENORMOUS OAK doors opened slowly to reveal the opulent living quarters of the First Governor.
Two heavily armed Nicht Soldats stood in the doorway, their powerful CETME G3-J rifles up and ready as always. Between the soldiers stood two teenage girls. Both were dressed scantily. One was wearing the tightest of bikinis. It looked small against her young, well-developed body. The other was clad only in a T-shirt and high heels, an unlikely combination that nevertheless showed off her alluring, if petite, figure.
The two girls had been selected from the vast pool of “talent,” that was always available to the First Governor and the top officers of his high command. They’d been sufficiently liquored up and each had been given a codeine tablet for passivity. Exactly what awaited them depended solely on what the First Governor’s substantially deviant imagination was conjuring up at the moment.
The soldiers nudged the two girls forward, escorting them across the vast room and toward the pillow filled corner which was known as the First Governor’s so-called “recreation area.”
The Fourth Reich high commander was sitting on his thronelike chair poring over a ream of paper as the girls and their escorts approached. Lost in the sea of documents was the Daily Situation Report, a written summary of the previous day’s activities within Bundeswehr Four. It carried three main items—one was a preliminary report which indicated that the crashed air pirate jumbo jet was probably shot down by unknown forces. Another reported an air strike by forces unknown on the city of Cleveland, which was now a major manufacturing center for parts and ammunition for the Fourth Reich’s gigantic terror gun, the Schrecklichkeit Kanones.
The third item was a report on a so-called special prisoner who escaped from one of the work farms over the night. The man, who had been sentenced to death by crucifixion only to have his execution botched, had been recovering on a work farm to the north. He’d somehow managed to sneak out of the heavily guarded camp and was now the subject of a massive search. He’d left behind a note indicating that his purpose of escape was not a flight to freedom. Rather, he wanted a private audience with the First Governor.
Despite the potential implications of all three reports, the First Governor had barely given them a cursory glance.
He was too busy drawing pictures.
A small, moleish man, dressed in the uniform of a Fourth Reich propaganda officer, was uncomfortably perched on a huge satin pillow below and to the left of the large chair. He was surrounded with a myriad of artist’s supplies—crayons, rulers, French curves, several large erasers—as well as a sea of crumpled pieces of paper.
“Excuse us, sir,” one of the Nicht Soldats said with a sharp salute. “I believe you requested these visitors?”
The First Governor barely looked up.
“Can either of you two men draw?” he asked, his voice unnaturally restrained and struggling in English. “With pen or ink?”
The soldiers looked at each other briefly and both gave nonmilitary shrugs.
“No, sir,” came the crisp reply to the odd question. “You are in need of an artist?”
“I have an artist,” the First Governor declared, nodding toward the moleish man; his voice regaining some of its former voracity. “I need someone who can draw.”
There was a confused silence as the mole man shifted even more uneasily in his pillow seat, scattering some of his artist’s crayons in the process. It was obvious that the First Governor had desired his illustrative talents for a specific purpose but that the man was missing the mark. Perhaps dangerously so. The tension was only sharpened by the roar of two Fourth Reich Jaguars taking off from the Aerodrome’s auxiliary runway, barely a half mile from the Reich Palast.
Once the roar died down, the uneasy silence returned to the huge room. It was broken finally by an unlikely source.
“I can draw,” the young girl in the T-shirt and high heels said, her voice sounding very unsure and barely above a whisper.
The First Governor looked up for the first time and examined both girls. Then he turned to the propaganda officer.
“Please supply her with a pen and paper,” he told the man in German. “And then everyone else is dismissed.”
The officer did as told, and then joined the pair of NS men and the relieved bikini-clad young girl as they briskly exited the room.
“If I tell you a vision, can you draw it for me?” the First Governor asked the young girl, his heavily accented German sounding nearly incomprehensible.
She nodded bravely if uncertainly. “I can try.”
The First Governor smiled and gently stroked her light brown hair.
“Sit,” he said, gently prodding her to her knees right in front of him. “Let us see how good you are.”
As the young girl took pen and paper in hand, the First Governor leaned back in his regal chair, closed his eyes, and wet his lips.
“The other night, I saw a ghost….” he began.
Twenty minutes later, the young girl was putting the finishing touches on her drawing.
“Let me see it,” the First Governor ordered her, his impatience getting the best of him.
She slowly turned the piece of paper over and held it out before her.
The First Governor was at once delighted. It was all there. The apparition of Finn MacCool, almost hovering above his bed. The midnight dark clothes. The strange black helmet beneath the hood.
“Perfect!” the First Governor declared, taking the drawing from the girl with the care and sensitivity of someone handling a Van Gogh. “You have captured it completely.”
The young girl smiled.
“You are now my official illustrator,” the First Governor told her, never taking his eyes off the eerily accurate drawing. “You will live here with me, and you will draw what I see in my dreams.”
The young girl didn’t know what to say.
“What is your name?” he asked her.
“Seventy-three,” she replied.
“I mean your real name,” he said, for the first time taking his eyes off the drawing. “Your given name …”
The girl shrugged sadly. “I don’t remember.”
The First G
overnor squinted slightly. An unlikely bolt of compassion ran through him. He actually felt sorry that the young girl could not even remember her name.
“From now on you are Brigit,” he declared, looking down at her as a grandfather might his first granddaughter. “And from now on, you have nothing to worry about.”
Outside the Reich Palast, at the small concrete building that served as the main guard post for the palatial seat of the occupying government, a man boldly approached two sentries. He was shirtless, thin, and wearing only tattered socks on his feet. He had red hair and a bare hint of a beard. His face was dirty, with long tracks in the grime made by a recent onslaught of tears.
“I must talk with the First Governor,” the man told the grimfaced soldiers.
Already in bad temper due to the searing heat and their heavy wool uniforms, the NS guards simply ignored him.
“I must see him,” the strange man insisted. “Now.”
“Leave, sputnik, or we will shoot you,” one of the guards barked at him in thick, German tortured English.
“If you do not let me see him, it will be you who are shot,” the man insisted.
The soldiers lowered their G3 barrels and pointed them directly at the man’s heart. They’d summarily executed others for less.
“Even if you shoot me,” the man began, somewhat cryptically, “I will still live.”
“We shall see,” one of the guards interrupted, his finger wrapping tightly around the rifle’s trigger.
“I have met the man of water,” the strange man went on.
The words froze both soldiers. They knew the First Governor was on an almost religious quest to find a “man of water.” Everyone inside Bummer Four did. Indeed, the day before, their entire guard company had spent 18 hours walking from house to house inside the city, asking citizens if they’d seen or heard about a man in their midst who might be able to perform some rather incredible feats. With each question, they were either answered with blank, confused stares and just a slow shaking of the head. (The real story, the citizens whispered when the guards were gone, was that the First Governor was quickly going mad.)
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