Return from the Inferno

by Maloney, Mack;

  Those that could, caught a brief glimpse of the bemedaled and beaming visiting Governor, the young girl in the frilly white dress on his left who was waving somewhat stiffly, and the man in the religious robes, who was simply staring out at them, his face a bucket of confusion.

  The motorcade passed the halfway mark and turned onto the main street which would bring it directly into downtown Fuhrerstadt. There, waiting at the main headquarters of the occupying German forces, was the Amerikafuhrer himself, the hermit Supreme Commander of Fourth Reich America. The plan called for him to greet the First Governor at the top step of the gigantic Reichstag, and then usher him and his entourage into the main dining hall for a four-hour, twelve-course state brunch.

  But very soon, that plan would go awry.

  The motorcade was about a half mile away from the Reichstag when the First Governor leapt to his feet and commanded the limo driver to stop the car. The man unquestioningly obeyed, screeching the vehicle to a halt so sharp, he was nearly ejected out the front window.

  As the security people in the first two vehicles turned around in horror, they saw the First Governor’s limo take a very unscheduled right turn off the main street and toward the largely abandoned west side of the city.

  When the security chief radioed back to the limo to ask why it had veered off course, the First Governor himself took the call.

  “This is where my work will begin,” he told the security man calmly. “Perhaps you should all follow and learn something.”

  By the time the scout cars, the APC, and the ambulance turned off the main street, the First Governor’s limo was roaring through the deserted streets, its driver following directions personally called out by the top man via the car’s radiophone. Two security helicopters had now joined the pursuit, alerted that something might be terribly wrong in the motorcade.

  The choppers reached the limo’s position roughly the same time the ground units did. They found the car had pulled over a dirty smoking truck, the First Governor apparently intent on questioning the driver.

  Upon arriving, the security forces bounded from their vehicles and set up a hasty protective ring around their charge. They were horrified to see that the truck the First Governor had stopped was actually a morgue wagon, carrying the nightly fatalities from Dragon’s Mouth prison to the mass grave on the other side of town. Even more amazing, the First Governor himself was out of his protective limo and was engaged in an animated conversation with the lowly vulture driving the sputtering hearse.

  “How many of them are dead?” the First Governor asked the driver.

  “All of them, I think,” the totally stupefied man replied.

  “Lay them out,” the First Governor ordered the man. “Lay them right out on this street for all to see.”

  The confused, yet savvy, security men didn’t have to be told to help. They practically knocked aside the driver and his goon assistant in their rush to take the two dozen bodies off the truck. Each corpse was wrapped in a dirty white sheet and sealed inside a reusable fiberboard box. These coffins had been recycled so often, however, that their lids barely stayed on.

  Once the dead were arrayed in a long straight line down the middle of the road, the First Governor addressed the fifty or so people, security men and NS street troops from the parade route, in a loud, ringing voice.

  “We are water,” he declared definitively. “We come from the water, which in turn, comes from the stars. Just as water gives us life at birth, it can too give us life after death.”

  The security troops tried to remain looking grim, but it was hard to do when the First Governor’s actions seemed so baffling. The six doctors who’d followed the scene in the rolling operating room had drawn out their own diagnosis of the First Governor’s peculiar behavior days before. It was so apparent. He was displaying every single known symptom of acute myx poisoning, from giddy irrationality to tenth-degree megalomania.

  “I have proof that this is true,” the First Governor went on. “I have talked to people who have seen it, and now I believe. I want to prove it to you, so you will believe too.”

  He took the young girl in the white dress by the hand and together they walked down the row of shabby, corroding coffins. They stopped about two thirds of the way down the line. The girl, edged on by the First Governor’s whispered instructions, pointed to a particular box.

  “Open it!” the First Governor commanded. The truck driver and his assistant, at last realizing just who was giving the orders, jumped forward and began prying the nails out of the coffin lid. While they did this, the First Governor raised his hand and motioned back to the limo.

  “Father!” he called to Fitzgerald. “Come forth and show us your secret of salvation!”

  Mike Fitzgerald was just about frozen to the spot.

  He’d been through many strange incidents in the past five years. Many strange incidents in his life, but this? This “Man of the Water” stuff? A messiah? Him?

  He climbed out of the limousine, past the edgy security guards, and down the line of coffins. The two oily workmen had pried off the coffin lid by this time. As soon as Fitz reached the open box, the First Governor turned back to the crowd and resumed his pontification.

  “This, my friends, is a true ‘man of water,’” he told them, his hand resting on Fitz’s shoulder. “Watch him. And believe …”

  The First Governor turned to Fitz and smiled.

  “Raise him,” he said softly.

  Fitz was almost paralyzed.

  “Raise him,” the First Governor repeated, pointing down at the sheet draped corpse. “Raise him, so they too will believe in you as I do.”

  Fitz had no choice. He knelt down and said a quick stalling prayer. He knew his masquerade would soon be over.

  He pretended to finish with a whispered “Amen.” Then he did a slow-motion sign of the cross.

  “Prepare to believe!” the First Governor bellowed.

  All eyes burning through him, Fitz reached into the box and placed his hand on the man’s forehead.

  Suddenly, the corpse moved.

  It startled Fitz so he nearly fell over. The gasp from the crowd sounded like the crack of a gunshot.

  “Believe!” the First Governor cried out. “Believe your eyes!”

  Fitz was shaking visibly as he tapped the side of the figure’s head. The body stirred again.

  “No … it can’t be,” someone moaned in the crowd.

  “Is this happening?” another whispered in a trembling, reverent voice.

  Somewhere deep inside him, Fitz found the countenance to reach down and lift the sheet from the man’s face.

  “Oh, my God,” he said as he stared down at the body.

  The man’s eyes blinked once and then popped open.

  “Fitz? Is that you?”

  Fitz couldn’t speak.

  It was Frost.

  That was why he knew it had to be a setup. He knew it must be part of some grand plan, a plan hatched to regain control of the country or something equally heroic. It was the only explanation. The trouble was that only one man could have arranged it all, And he was supposed to be dead.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mass Grave Site No. 1

  LIEUTENANT DONN KURJAN—CODE name “Lazarus”—checked his watch.

  It was 1700 hours—5 PM. He slowly lifted a small set of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the road beyond the graveyard. Besides a pack of wild dogs and some crows, he saw nothing.

  “What’s gone wrong?” he whispered to himself. “Someone screwed up …”

  Kurjan shifted uneasily in his heavy, branch draped uniform and continued to scan the long dusty road leading to the cemetery. In all the missions he’d been asked to perform in his three years in the Football City Special Forces, this one had to be the worst.

  He was invisible. Of that he was certain. He was in a shallow trench selected carefully on the side of a small hill which looked out over the entrance to the graveyard. On top of him was a ca
refully constructed shield of dirt, branches, leaves, and grass, that he built himself following the rigorous standard as set out by a decades-old SAS manual.

  This roof was indistinguishable from the topography around him. Indeed, more than once during this four-day, one-man mission, Death Skull guards had ventured very close to his hiding spot. One squad even took their lunch no more than ten feet away from him. Newly fluent in German, he had little choice but eavesdrop on the Nazi soldiers’ conversation which consisted almost entirely of past atrocities they’d committed as well as ones they were planning in the future.

  He could have easily killed all seven of them. His M-16-1EG was not only silencer equipped, it also had laser designated sighting. But to have done so would have given away his position, and therefore terminate what had been, up to this time, a bold yet highly successful covert field operation.

  Kurjan’s mission was to raise people from the dead. Literally. As point man for the appropriately titled “Operation Lazarus,” it was his job to station himself close to the Mass Grave #1. Once night had fallen, he would sneak down into the gravesites looking for the United American officers who had chosen to “die” that day via the controlled overdose of myx. Once found—and much talent lay in the finding—Kurjan would revive the escapee and spirit him away to a safe location, where he would be met by members of the local underground. These former militiamen would then escort the liberated man through a modern version of the Underground Railroad, a journey which culminated in the escapee reaching United Americans forces either in Free Canada or on the secluded islands in the Caribbean.

  In the twenty days off and on that he’d been working the mission, Kurjan had succeeded in getting twelve officers out of their graves and into the escape system. Even the fruitless trips into the hellish pit proved educational. They served to hone his odd but useful skill of quickly determining who was dead and who was myxed by jimmying the coffin lid, reaching inside, finding the candidate’s nose through the death shroud and squeezing it. This temporary interruption of the already drastically slowed-down breathing process always proved just enough to wake the person out of their myx-induced stupor.

  In other words, if the person didn’t cough, he was dead.

  Despite the perilous aspects of the mission—patience was the number one talent—he had managed to rescue that even dozen of officers without any problems at all.

  Now, it appeared as if something had gone wrong with Escapee Number Thirteen.

  He checked his watch again, the movement being painful as his shoulder muscles tended to cramp up after seven hours of studied nonmovement. 1710 hours. The stiff wagon supposedly carrying the “dead” officer was way overdue.

  “Maybe thirteen is my unlucky number,” he muttered.

  Another tense hour passed. Still there was no sign of the death wagon.

  The Death Skull detail had left twenty minutes before, leaving the cemetery unguarded against the looters who were known to sneak in at night and take the meager belongings of the prison camp fatalities. A thunderstorm had passed over and now the sun was dipping quickly in the west.

  “No one’s coming now,” Kurjan thought. “Maybe no one will ever come again.”

  But then, just as he was preparing to make a quick, near silent radio call back to the underground’s hideout, he saw a distant figure walking down the dusty road.

  Kurjan now had his NightScope binoculars up to his eyes, their enhanced optics aiding his vision in the fading light of day. He’d never seen anyone actually walking on the grave road before simply because it was out in the middle of nowhere. The morgue trucks came and went, as did the guards’ vehicles. But everyone rode to the cemetery—no one walked.

  Yet here was a man, dressed in ragged shorts and wearing a part of a white sheet around his head like a turban, half-jogging, half-stumbling toward him.

  He knew it could simply be another sputnik, wandering free on the edge of the glowing Nazi High City, simply biding his time until the security forces picked him up and turned him over to a slave farm.

  Yet, upon closer inspection, this man just did not look like a refugee.

  Kurjan watched and waited until the figure reached the crumbling wooden gate to the graveyard. At that point, he collapsed, first going to his knees and then flat-out, facedown.

  Kurjan bit his lip. His first instinct was to slip out of his hiding place and go down and examine the man. But his training told him better.

  Whoever the guy was, he would have to stay unattended.

  Until dark.

  When Frost woke up, he found that he’d been lying in a putrid mudhole, one that was both oily and stagnant.

  He rolled over, every bone, muscle and organ in his body, screaming out in pain, protesting that they had been assaulted.

  He had nothing to calm them down; nothing to take away the ache that was pounding away at his cranium with the intensity of a fractured skull. Had he really died and this was Hell? For a few uncertain moments, he wasn’t quite sure.

  Then it started to come back to him. Ingesting the OD of myx; Jones helping him into his death shroud; the long, incredibly erotic and realistic dream he’d slipped into immediately after going under.

  And then, just as he was about to ravage the most beautiful women he’d ever dreamed, the bubble burst. His shroud was lifted and he found himself looking up into the face of his old friend, Mike Fitzgerald.

  It was at that point, Frost thought he was dead for sure.

  First of all, he was certain that Fitz was dead. Secondly, his departed friend was wearing clothes stolen from the pope. Though the garb was ill-fitting, in that befuddled instant, it was definitely heavenly looking.

  What happened next was equally otherworldly.

  A top Nazi officer came forth and literally yanked him out of the coffin, admonishing him to stand up straight and be properly amazed that he’d just been raised from the dead. The crowd of troops gathered around him looked damned convinced. Some were simply pale with fear; others were openly weeping. Through it all, a teenage girl in a frilly white dress was using a thin piece of charcoal to draw his face on a large piece of yellow paper.

  Frost endured bouts of tremors at that point—a side effect he’d been warned against should he be aroused from the myx-induced coma too soon. During this spell, he was led to a medical van to be pinched and probed by a squad of absolutely astounded Nazi doctors, one of whom was openly drinking a bottle of either gin or more likely vodka.

  More NS officers arrived. It seemed like half of them wanted to touch or poke Frost in some way. The other half stayed as far away from him as possible. Through it all Frost simply kept his mouth shut.

  He was finally rescued from the touchy-feely session by the top Nazi officer on the scene, the man who he’d gathered by now was none other than the high commander of Bummer Four, the huge occupied military district to the north.

  Fitzgerald had been whisked away in another limo by this time, the security forces almost genuflecting to him as he walked past. Only a brief look back at Frost told him that his old friend appeared to be as astounded as he at what had just transpired.

  The Bummer Four commander then did what might have been the oddest thing of all. After first declaring that Frost was “one of many,” he laid his hand on Frost’s head and pronounced him “a clean and free man.”

  Then he informed Frost that he was free to go. After a few moments of indecision, Frost decided that he’d best take advantage of the situation and started walking. Down the deserted street, and up and around the highway overpass, eyes straight ahead, never looking back.

  It took him almost ten hours in the hot sun to find the place called Mass Grave #1.

  Now as he lolled in the mud on his stomach, he felt a sudden nudge on his shoulder. He froze, his confused synapses telling him to play dead. Suddenly a hand was thrust up onto his face, and two fingers squeezed his nose like a vise.

  He immediately half coughed, half sneezed and then jerked the int
ruding hand away.

  That was when he turned over and saw a man wearing a large bush and a black painted face smiling down at him.

  “Don’t worry,” this man said. “You’re back from the dead.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE AIR PIRATE NAMED Itchy wasn’t sure where he was.

  Not exactly anyway.

  The large body of water to his right was Lake Erie, the dozens of abandoned rusting buildings to his left probably the old Gary, Indiana USX steel works. Behind him were thirty or so miles of the railroad tracks he’d been walking alongside for what seemed to be forever. In front of him, many more miles of tracks before he reached his destination. Something from his childhood made him think that when lost following a railroad track was a good idea. Eventually you’ll wind up somewhere.

  Still he was uncomfortable not knowing his exact position. Spending the past few years in the cockpit of his long-gone fighter had spoiled him. He was no longer a land animal. If he’d been looking at this same piece of ground from the air, he was confident that he’d know exactly where he was.

  Still, he knew that eventually he’d wind up in New Chicago, his ultimate destination. All rail beds in this area wound up in New Chicago eventually. All he had to do was keep walking west.

  It had been six days since his frightening experience with the mysterious commandos, but the incident was still burning in his mind, especially the vision of the W’s written across the sky. Itchy knew he was lucky. He just didn’t know why. Who were those guys who captured him, drugged him, and then let him go? What kind of soldiers these days would do that? A bullet in the head was a much simpler solution, humane even, when compared to what he and his fellow air pirates had done to some of their unlucky victims in the past.

  He had to laugh when he thought of those soldiers. They had no qualms about directing an air strike against some big city, but when it came to offing someone like him, they just wouldn’t—or couldn’t—do it. Did they really think that by sparing his life the world would be a little less evil? If so, the joke was on them. If anything, he knew his salvation would make the world that much worse.