Return from the Inferno

by Maloney, Mack;

  Now this strange man was claiming he might hold a key to the First Governor’s frantic, bizarre search.

  “What proof do you have?” one of the NS demanded.

  The man stared at both of them for a moment. Off in the distance, two Mirage fighters were coming in for a noisy landing. One at a time, the man turned the palms of his hands up and displayed them for the soldiers. Each one had a huge scar in its center, scabbed over but obviously healing quickly. The man then kicked off his battered socks and revealed similar wounds on his feet.

  “Who are you?” the other soldier asked him.

  The man smiled broadly.

  “Who do I look like?” he replied.

  Chapter Thirteen

  At the bridge

  THE WABASH RIVER WAS flowing easily in the midafternoon summer sun.

  Fitzgerald looked up from his position on the near bank to see two of his young students dive into the small pool of calm water close to the shade of the bridge.

  “Look out for them now!” he called out to the two oldest students, both of whom were eleven years old. They were his lieutenants in supervising this rare outing for his schoolkids. “We don’t want them to be swept away.”

  Although there was little actual danger of that, the two older kids waded into the shallow water of the natural pool and stationed themselves between the younger kids and the deeper Wabash. His mother hen instinct thus sated, Fitz lay back down on his blanket and took another sip of wine.

  He’d been planning this outing for two weeks, knowing it would be a cure for restlessness among his twenty little charges. He’d told the NS officer in charge of reeducation within Bummer Four that the purpose of the field trip was to collect samples of “wild vegetables,” with which to start a garden in back of the schoolhouse. Someday, he told the officer, the garden might provide vegetables for each kid, an attempt at resource-saving efficiency that nearly brought a tear to the fascist officer’s eye.

  That fact that Fitzgerald didn’t even know if there was such a thing as wild vegetables had no bearing. The NS officer not only approved the trip, he allowed Fitz the use of an old beat-up military truck to transport the twenty young students.

  So now here they were, jumping and splashing in the cool Wabash just like kids had done for generations.

  Fitz didn’t want them to see him imbibing so he had skillfully disguised his wine bottle to look like a simple water container. He took another long slug and then closed his eyes. The woman down the road who sold him his homemade wine had done an especially good job this time. Though she could have strained it better, its alcohol content was about double her normal wares, something Fitz was too polite to complain about.

  In the midst of the gathering wine buzz, he searched for a tidbit of relaxation somewhere in the back of his mind. But there was none to be found. Even on this perfect summer day, with his extended family of youngsters enjoying themselves immensely and another two wine bottles back in his hut, Fitz could not find one iota of peace. Instead, his thoughts were filled with the unexplainable incidents of the past few days. The two people in the river. The wounded sputnik from Gary. The man hanged on the cross.

  How could these things possibly be happening to him? Could there be only one answer?

  Could he be going mad?

  They heard them before they saw them.

  It was just a low, dull tone at first; somewhere, way off in the distance, behind the trees, back toward Bummer Four.

  But the noise steadily grew, expanding into the mechanical timbres. Soon it was so loud, it was competing with the trickling of the Wabash and the rush of the wind through the nearby trees.

  The kids heard it all at once, and right away they were concerned. Fitz stood up, and from his perch atop the riverbank, circled around in all directions, trying to see anything that might be associated with the growing noise.

  “Look!” someone yelled. “Up there!”

  The twenty kids and Fitz all looked toward the southeast to see the sky filled with menacing black dots. As they watched, the dots began growing bigger, and the noise got louder. By this time, the kids were running out of the water, their concern growing by the second. Now, running up the bank, they huddled around Fitz, shivering slightly in the sudden cool breeze, wondering what was happening.

  Fitz watched with increasing trepidation as the aerial dots turned into helicopters. At least ten of them, all heading their way. The screech of their engines was now loud enough that the youngest of the young kids were crying. Fitz tried to gather them all closer to him, praying—literally praying—that the chopper force would simply pass right over them, on its way to some far-off, undetermined site.

  But soon enough, Fitz knew they were heading right for the bridge.

  Thirty seconds of their ear-splitting roar and the first of the two choppers was circling high above them. These were the OH-58Ds, a scout and command aircraft. The next chevron consisted of seven UH-60 Blackhawks, traditionally gunships and troop carrying copters. Bringing up the rear, even more ominously was a UH-1 Huey medivac copter.

  “All this?” Fitz asked himself grimly. “Just to arrest me?”

  Two of the Blackhawks swooped low overhead and then swung around, kicking up a windstorm the strength of a small tornado. They were landing, and it was easy to see that their bays were filled with heavily armed Nicht Soldats. One set down next to Fitz’s shack, the other in a small clearing adjacent to the bridge itself. Two more landed down the road from the bridge, with the remaining trio settling on the field directly across the Wabash.

  The kids were in full panic now. They’d learned to fear any sudden appearance of the occupying fascist troops since some kind of violent bloodletting usually occurred soon afterward. This response, coupled with the roar of the chopper engines, was quickly turning the pleasant swim trip into a nightmare.

  The first troops were now disgorging from the Blackhawks and running toward Fitz and his little group.

  Please don’t let them shoot me in front of the children, he prayed under his breath as the vanguard of NS reached his position.

  There was a young captain leading the charge, and he ran right up to Fitz.

  “You are the priest?” he asked, possibly thrown off because Fitz’s starched collar was not fastened.

  “I am,” Fitz gulped, imagining his life was already passing before his eyes. “Please don’t hurt the children.”

  The captain tried valiantly to ignore the statement, even as the rest of the troops from the nearby helicopters had surrounded the area and were bristling with weapons.

  “You must come with me,” he said. “Immediately.”

  Fitz habitually re-fastened his collar. He knew better than to ask where he was being taken.

  “What about the children?” he asked the officer. “They can’t be stranded out here.”

  “We will take care of the children,” was the man’s reply.

  He snapped his fingers and two husky soldiers were soon standing at Fitz’s side. Looking back at the kids, all huddled together and crying, he managed a brave half-smile and said: “Good-bye, children. I will see you all soon.”

  He turned and began walking with the two escorts, his gait slow and stooped, like a man walking to the gallows. Suddenly he felt a tugging at his pant leg and looking down saw one of the smallest children had run after him. The child was not crying as much as the others. Rather he was holding something up for Fitz to take.

  One of the soldiers brusquely shooed the young boy away, but not before Fitz had taken his offering—it was a folded piece of paper—and stuffed it inside his shirt pocket.

  It was only after he’d been put aboard the Blackhawk and it had taken off that he dared reach in and take out the folded paper.

  It contained two crude yet decipherable drawings. One showed a man in a jet fighter—a rough but identifiable F-16XL—and the other a man in priest’s clothing. An arrow pointed to each, under which was printed in gigantic letters: “Heroes.”
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  Chapter Fourteen

  Football City

  IT WAS HOT.

  The two men, both bathed in dirty sweat, fastened the pull chain around the huge piece of granite and yanked it tight.

  “Locked here,” one said, wearily.

  “Here, too,” the other replied, equally exhausted.

  The other end of the chain was fastened to a long, heavy block of wood the length of a telephone pole. Twenty-two men were handcuffed to this pole and it was their job to push on it like an ox pushes on a yoke and thus drag the large block of granite from one end of the prison work yard to the other.

  “Okay,” the first man yelled, “Pull it!”

  The gang of shackled laborers began struggling against the large, rotting, bloodstained wooden beam. Slowly the large block of granite behind them began to move.

  It took twenty long minutes to drag the five-ton piece of rock two hundred feet across the crowded work yard. The effort was all but ignored by the five hundred or so other prisoners. They were busy with their own miserable tasks: most were chained to their own yokes, chipping away on similar blocks of granite or washing and polishing finished pieces of stone.

  They were all unwashed, barely clothed, and malnourished. Many were sick. Many were dying. So many, in fact, that a small group of collaborative prisoners moved about the camp like sullen vultures, picking up the dead and the near-dead, haphazardly wrapping them in dirty white sheets and tossing them on to the back of a sputtering, rusted flatbed truck. On this, they would be transported to the huge burial ground several miles away from the prison, where they would be thrown into the day’s mass grave and covered over, dead or not.

  Watching over this little piece of Hell were fifty heavily armed men in black, Grim Reaper-style hooded robes and hobnail boots. These faceless soldiers were the omnipresent Tod Schadel—the Death Skulls. They were easily the most hated men in the prison camp.

  Most of the five hundred prisoners were either Free Canadians, Native Americans and other foreign allies of pre-invasion America. A larger, even more hellish prison yard lay beyond the north wall. It held nearly two thousand two hundred former United American officers and soldiers.

  The prison was known as Drache Mund—The Dragon Mouth. It was located on the western edge of the city once known as St. Louis, then as Football City, and now as Fuhrerstadt, City of The Leader. It was the capital of Fourth Reich America.

  Waiting in one corner of the shadeless prison yard was a small, wiry man of sixty years named Dave Jones. He was dressed in the same drab and dirty prison clothes as all the other prisoners. His hands and feet were calloused and bleeding, his body showing the fallow signs of creeping malnutrition. He was like the prisoners in every respect but one—he had been an officer in the United American Armed Forces. In fact, he had once been the Supreme Military Commander of the brief entity called United America. He was, in effect, the last President of the United States.

  Now he was a slave stonesman. A chipper. The man who made the final designated cuts on the huge pieces of stone before they moved on to the next station to be assembled and eventually erected.

  Jones wiped the sticky, stone dust grime from his sweaty face and checked the position of the sun. It was slowly creeping toward midafternoon, a movement he welcomed for it meant that his long day which started at 5 AM was nearly half over.

  “What is this one?” the man beside him asked. His weak and raspy voice barely audible above the nonstop racket of clinking chains, stone hammering, and despairing moans.

  Jones checked the ragged set of plans in front of him. They detailed the enormous statue which was being constructed with the sculptured slabs of chiseled concrete. The monument, one hundred fifty feet tall when completed, was actually a wedding present. It was being given by the top Fourth Reich official in the occupied lands—the rarely seen Amerikafuhrer—to his bride on their wedding day which was just a few weeks off.

  “If that is piece one-oh-four-east-seven,” Jones answered, looking at the rectangular slab of stone and then referring to his plan, “then it is the mustache …”

  The man beside him laughed derisively, the action quickly devolving into a hacking cough.

  “You mean it’s our privilege,” he said, trying to catch his breath, “to chisel out the paperhanger’s snot catcher?”

  “God must be looking down on us today,” Jones replied with equal bitterness and irony. The gigantic statue was indeed of Adolf Hitler and this piece was indeed his trademark mustache.

  Jones’s partner in hammer and chisel was his longtime friend and ally, Major Frost of the Free Canadian Armed Forces. Frost, like many of the United American’s inner circle, had been captured soon after the Fourth Reich invaded America. Like them, he was still reeling from the devastating air strike against the bulk of the UA air force following their decisive victory against the bloodthirsty Norsemen on the beaches of northeast Florida. Like them, he didn’t realize that the Norse raids had been little more than an elaborate feint to distract the United Americans while the Fourth Reich’s huge landing fleet waited in mid-Atlantic.

  Also like them, he’d lost his best friend when Hawk Hunter flew off to battle the fleet on his own and never came back.

  The gang of handcuffed slave laborers finally deposited the chunk of stone in front of the chiseling station. As one, they collapsed to the ground from sheer exhaustion. Jones quickly lifted a makeshift ladle from his pail of dirty polishing water and splashed it onto the nearest of the twenty-two men. The warm dirty water brought a single moment of relief for the men it hit. Some even licked it from their dirty arms, though they tried not to make their actions show. They knew that had Jones been caught by the Death Skulls providing them with this drop of comfort then he would most likely have been shot on the spot. This made them appreciate the brave gesture even more.

  The slave gang left the area, pronged and prodded by their Death Skull guards back to the far side of the yard where they would be chained to yet another slab of concrete.

  Once he was certain that everyone else was out of earshot, Frost knelt down close to Jones.

  “I think tonight is my night, General,” he whispered hoarsely. “I think it’s time.”

  Jones stopped chipping away on the piece of granite for a moment. “Are you certain?” he asked his old friend.

  Frost fought off another coughing spell.

  “Yes, I am, sir.”

  Jones resumed banging his chisel with the massive hammer again, reopening many of his hand blisters.

  “No one can make the decision for you,” he told Frost. “But…”

  “My time is running out,” Frost told him, splashing water on the stone where Jones was cutting. “Yours too.”

  The comment once again made Jones stop hammering for a moment.

  “I can’t take that step until that last possible moment,” he told Frost. “I think the others here still need me.”

  Frost simply nodded in dejected agreement.

  “With your permission then, General,” he said slowly, watching as the vultures loaded another recent corpse onto their oily, sputtering truck. “Tonight, it will be my turn to die.”

  It was close to midnight when the last of the Death Skull guards left the prison yard.

  They would return at the crack of dawn, roust the prisoners with whips and billy clubs, and direct the disposal of the ones who’d died during the night. But now, in these handful of hours, the prisoners were left alone, to sleep where they worked, to die where they lay.

  To dream.

  The dirty blankets were tossed about, and the wail of a particularly ailing prisoner echoed across the dusty yard. Most men were asleep quickly, their exhausted bodies knowing that the respite would be too brief. Others lay in a kind of limbo slumber, not conscious, yet not asleep; simply numb and reclining.

  Jones and Frost, however, were wide awake.

  On the opposite side of the courtyard, a man was slowly making his way toward Jones’s darkene
d chiseling station. Sometimes crawling, sometimes walking in a crouch, he passed the main knot of sleeping prisoners, jumped over the pair of slit trench latrines, and made for the shadows of the far wall. All the while he clutched a small plastic bag to his chest. Inside this bag was possibly the most precious commodity in the entire city of Fuhrerstadt.

  His name was Thorgils and he, like Jones, had once been a very powerful leader. Less than a year before, he’d been second-in-command of the entire Norse Legion, the brutally crude amphibious force which had wreaked so much havoc along the east coast of America. Now he was a prisoner too—a dupe of the Fourth Reich and the witch named Elizabeth Sandlake. It was she, he was convinced, that had murdered his father, the leader of all the Norse, and turned over their American conquests to the Fourth Reich in return for the promise of the largely ceremonial title of Queen of America.

  Once the Nazis took over, Thorgils was hunted down and arrested as quickly as any United American soldier. As it turned out, his crimes were many, at least in the eyes of the Fourth Reich authorities. Not only was he part of the Norse First Family (and therefore very disposable), he’d also committed the most mortal of sins: disobeying an order passed to him by the Witch Elizabeth Sandlake.

  Both were crimes punishable by death.

  Now Thorgils, his formerly sturdy Viking frame reduced to skin and bones, crept along the wall, around the carcass of a recently butchered dog, and into the slight pit where Jones and Frost waited.

  There were no exchanges of greetings, no handshakes or salutes. This was a business transaction.

  “You have it?” Jones asked him.

  “Do you have my payment?” Thorgils responded.

  Jones looked at Frost who could only roll his eyes. This man, this Viking, who had been their archenemy less than a year before, was now more pathetic than dangerous. His eyes were perpetually glazed over, his ragged clothes permanently soiled. His hair was long and stringy and his beard bore the evidence of every meal he’d eaten in the past two weeks.