Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror

by Dixon, Lorne; Cato, Nick

  She didn’t pass out, though for a terrible moment she thought she would, stomach queasy, head light, but the sensation passed. She thought of the horrible face she’d seen through the hole in the crate, the inhuman anger plastered over its decaying features. “I didn’t hide them.”

  “No?” the doctor asked in a sneering, condescending voice. “What should I believe? That they’re out for a stroll but will return momentarily? WHERE HAVE YOU HIDDEN THEM, MISS STUYVESANT?”

  She shook her head.

  “And the world wonders why Germany is winning the war,” Dr. Oelrich said, the anger in his voice vanishing, replaced by a cold sarcasm. “Not long ago, America was merely a string of trading colonies across the ocean, and it shows. Americans and the British, you share the same corrupted blood. So defiant when it matters the least, so stupid. And stubborn. You’ve seen what I’m willing to do to you, or your friends, or the little Jew girl with the broken arm, and still you persist. It would be perplexing if it weren’t so predictable.”

  He turned to Felix. “Shoot her in the head.”

  Felix slid his hand over his revolver. “What?”

  “Kill her.”

  Felix’s hand shook as he pulled the gun out from under his belt and held it to her head. The steel barrel tittered against her skull as if tapping out Morse code, but there was no hidden message here.

  “You killed the captain, did you not?” Dr. Oelrich asked, his face twisting into a shrew’s snarling face. “Why would you hesitate now?”

  Felix bit his bottom lip, released it, and said, “Hilliard was different, a dying old man, not a woman. I never hurt no women.”

  “I assure you she will die the same as a man.” The doctor’s hand disappeared down the side of his thigh to his side arm holster. Priscilla couldn’t decide who the action was meant to frighten, her or Felix. It succeeded no matter who was the intended target.

  Felix pulled the trigger.

  Metal clanged against metal, but no shot fired.

  He worked the trigger again and again with the same results. Stepping back, he freed the cylinder and ejected the rounds into his hands. “The firing pin’s busted, bent to the side. It barely dented the copper jacket.”

  Dr. Oelrich’s face, screwed up in a madman’s leer, exploded into laughter. “The old captain carried a humanitarian’s weapon.” He pulled his own handgun from the holster. “Unfortunately, Miss Stuyvesant, I do not.”

  With a steady hand—a surgeon’s hand—the doctor aimed the gun at the bridge of her nose. Staring it down, Priscilla almost went cross-eyed. It felt different to have Dr. Oelrich point his gun at her head than Felix. She’d had doubts, wrong as they might have been, that Felix would pull the trigger. No such questions lingered for the doctor.

  The youngest of the German soldiers bolted through the Hold’s doors, feet skidding, gulping for air like a suffocating fish. He gibbered in broken German, his words cutting in and out until he caught his breath.

  “Carll, I cannot understand you,” the doctor hissed. “And practice your English. Remember, we’ll not be able to pass for Spanish where we’re going, but the less we are recognized as German the better. Now, I ordered you to take control of the engine room. The men there—”

  “Are dead,” Carll said. “All … dead.”

  Felix swung the captain’s useless weapon to his side and asked, “What happened? What did you do?”

  “I do nothing,” the young soldier said, waving his arms. “They dead already. Before I come.”

  Priscilla eyes lost sight of Dr. Oelrich’s gun; the empty crates came into sharp focus instead. The bloodstain on the overturned lid looked more like symbols than ever—but different now: a beetle, a jackal, a hand holding a dagger. At that moment she noticed she hadn’t felt the vibrations under her feet since the Germans arrival. A thought blasted through her brain like a shotgun pellet: her perception of the vibration had been backward; they had not emanated out from the crate but instead ran to them. Something had been gathering power, and then, perhaps at the moment that Dr. Oelrich and his soldiers had stepped aboard, enough power had been infused.

  She thought of the bombing outside the museum and Tamir and the accident on the pier. All sources of harvested energy. She thought of the mummy’s awful face, so full of malignant, restless hatred, and shuddered to think what kind of creature could draw power from war—enough power to escape three thousand years of decay.

  Dr. Oelrich lowered his gun. “Mr. Lane, escort Miss Stuyvesant back to the cell. We’ll continue our conversation later. Carll, I hate to ask this of you, but please interrupt Horst. We’ll meet at the stairwell and head down to the engine room together.”

  She turned to Felix. “If you go down there, you’ll all die.”

  A flicker of fear flashed across his face.

  She enjoyed that.

  Chapter 18

  Felix, now holding Dr. Oelrich’s gun in his swinging hand, kept pace behind Priscilla, never prodding her to walk faster even when, as an experiment, she slowed her walk down to a ridiculous shuffle. She could tell he wasn’t eager to join the Germans in their exploration of the engine room. Beyond that, she noticed he was more comfortable with her—gun in hand, of course—than with Oelrich.

  “He’s scares you,” she said.

  “He should,” Felix mumbled. “He’s a scary man. You know why the Nazis imprisoned him? He was conducting experiments on prisoners of war, some kind research with genes and cells and stuff—”

  “Eugenics?”

  “I guess so,” he said, though the tone of his voice told her he didn’t know what the word meant. She suspected she would have gotten the same response had she said Equestrian science. “But horrible stuff, bleaching skin, dying eyes. Trying to make a perfect man, or something. He says there are other doctors doing the same thing, hundreds even, and the German government was okay with all that, but then he took a different approach. He started to experiment with German soldiers, doing tests to find out what made them pure. Even, whatchacallit? Vivo-ectonomy?”

  “Vivisection.” She’d heard professors speak of Eugenics at Princeton and Yale, but their work hadn’t gotten beyond racial data collection. Even that seemed a ghoulish census to take. The professors were all white men in business suits with medical pins on their lapels. It wasn’t hard to picture Dr. Oelrich standing among them in his military uniform decorated by shining service metals. But vivisection? It was murder, pure and simple, masquerading as a medical procedure. “And you made a deal with a man like that? A monster?”

  As they headed down the stairwell, he came up alongside her. For a moment it didn’t feel as if she was a hostage, even with the German’s gun aimed at her chest; they could have been anywhere, in any circumstance, two people walking and talking. Except that the majority of her fear hadn’t dissipated away; instead it had transformed into anger.

  “Something spooked you back there, but I was watching your eyes and I don’t think it was the doctor.” He lowered the gun until its aim was tipped down at her toes.

  “Oh, he scares me,” she said, and it wasn’t a lie. Oelrich was the most evil man she’d met in her life. Even her father seemed charitable in comparison, but Felix was right, the empty crates frightened her far worse. “But there’s something else on board with us. That’s what I’m really afraid of.”

  “What’re you talking about?” His voice was peppered with skepticism and distrust.

  She shook her head. “I’m not just trying to scare you to gain an upper hand, or anything like that. What do you think killed the engine room workers?”

  Felix fell silent until their feet hit the landing. When he finally spoke, his voice was so unsure that everything he said sounded like a question. “I figure maybe Mr. Martin done it? You know, revenge for what the others tried to do to you? I don’t … . Do you think maybe he could have done that?”

  “No,” she answered, flat, no room for more questions.

  They walked the hallway in silence. F
elix’s face furrowed, his consternation and worry growing inside the quiet, until he began to speak again. She suspected he spoke to distract himself from the thoughts festering in his head. “I heard about him back in Philadelphia, Dr. Oelrich that is, back before his troubles with the government. There’s a German-American group called the Bund, they have an office there, right out in the historic district. He wrote a paper on … well, I thought he could help me with a condition I got, something I picked up behind bars. So I got in touch with him, and then his problems began.

  “He needed to get out of Europe and I worked on this ship; just got word we’d be running a sail to England. It all seemed to fit perfect, y’know? But then he … found out about the cargo. And then plans changed. He’s already got a buyer set up in Brazil, some private collector gonna pay top dollar. And I get a piece of that. But I never knew that anyone was gonna get hurt. I thought it was all gonna go down … differently.”

  As she turned into the cabin that housed the makeshift prison cell, she tapped her fingertips against the doorframe. “Guess you were wrong about that, huh?”

  He brought the gun back up and took aim at the tip of her nose. “Yeah, well, everyone makes mistakes, right? And now that the die’s cast, I’ve no choice but to see it through. It’s too late for me to change sides, you see.”

  “All I see is a coward.” She stepped into the cell as soon as he opened it. Despite her defiant words and the anger burning in her chest, she had no reason to believe that Felix wouldn’t shoot her down. She forced herself to look past the gun’s barrel and stare into his eyes, not breaking away until the gate between them slammed shut and he lowered the gun to his thigh.

  Before he could lock the gate, Horst came through the door like a running bull, dragging Brigham behind him by a handful of hair. Naked and speckled with blood, it was unmistakable from Brigham’s appearance and scent that the man had been abused in every way a man could be violated. His face and chest were marked with fresh black welts and flowering purple bruises. Limp and unmoving, the rest of his body had paled, its color no different than that of a corpse. His eyes stared up at the ceiling, large black pupils unfocused, the white of his eyes gone, replaced by red orbs.

  Horst motioned for Felix to reopen the gate, then tossed Brigham inside. Face down, he slid across the floor before coming to a rest at Eli’s feet. Mason held Dara back until the cook bent down and took his pulse. Satisfied he was alive, Eli nodded. Mason released the girl. She ran to Brigham, weeping, and draped herself over his shoulders, wrapping an arm under and around his neck. “Briggy . . Briggy … be no hurt …”

  Working hard to find the right English words, Horst spoke with a slow, deliberate over-pronunciation. “First minute or so, he strong. After that, not so strong.”

  Mason’s expression took on a murderous fury, eyes glossy and beaming, brow furrowed into a sharp, downward arrow, lips quivering. “Before this is over, I’ll snap both your necks. You, for what you’ve done to this man. And you,” he said, finger aimed at Felix, “for getting us to this point.”

  “… Briggy … no hurt … be no hurt …”

  Pursing his lips, Horst blew Mason a kiss and let out a wicked, shrill laugh, the laugh so close to his ear Felix flinched from the sound, and took a step away from the madman. Horst, oblivious to Felix’s discomfort, clapped a hand onto his shoulder and let out a second burst of terrible laughter.

  Carll came in from the hallway, approached the bars, and tossed a large ball of wet cloth inside. Landing on Brigham’s bare back, it unfurled, revealing a pair of trousers. Brigham’s trousers, now streaked with blood. Turning to Horst, he relayed the orders from Dr. Oelrich, his German quick and lyrical, so different than his fumbling attempts at English. The three of them disappeared back into the hallway.

  “Help me,” Eli said to Priscilla as he unraveled the legs of Brigham’s pants. The thought of putting them back on him was appalling—the insides were soiled worse than the outside—but she knew they couldn’t leave him naked. Dropping down beside them, she helped wrestle his limp legs, all too aware of how rubbery his flesh felt, how pliable. She shuddered, thinking about his ordeal, the horrors that must have been performed on his body, and the break in his mind that had left him like this, a frail, empty shell.

  Dara sniffled. “… hurt … love you … Briggy …”

  Remembering Mason’s threat to snap Horst’s and Felix’s necks, she thought, That would be too fast, too kind. These monsters deserve worse, far worse.

  Then, realizing they were walking into the bowels of the ship to investigate the murders of the remaining engine room workers, she thought they might just find exactly the right sort of justice waiting for them. The things from the crates—the mummies, she had to force herself to use the word—were undoubtedly responsible for the deaths of the workers. Horst might still be laughing in his uneven, eardrum punishing way right up until the monsters tore him apart. It was a hope, anyway.

  But then, as she hooked the fly on Brigham’s trousers closed, her thoughts led her to another, darker revelation: they would still be locked away in Brigham’s makeshift jail cell, waiting for the beasts to come for them, utterly defenseless to fight back. She pushed up off the floor and wrapped her arms around her shoulders as her thoughts began to scramble, searching for a way out of the cell and off the ship to safety. But then, what about Buddy? There was no reason to assume he was still alive, but if there was even a small chance that he was, she couldn’t leave him. She needed to know.

  The situation seemed hopeless.

  “… no hurt … no …”

  Closing her eyes, she waited for an answer to come.

  But nothing did, at least, not then.

  Later, an answer came slinking into the cell.

  Chapter 19

  On the morning that Johann Hiester was born, his father Dedric and grandfather Jakob died in a trench line firefight with British troops on the riverbanks of Somme, France. The family name in peril—he was the last male heir—his mother pleaded with him throughout his childhood to avoid the military, going as far as bribing the family doctor to falsely diagnosis him with scoliosis to avoid service. When the second war came, the government hired physicians to evaluate exemption claims. Like all men in their twenties, Johnann was conscripted.

  His mother, wide-eyed and lonely even before he left for training, told him that if he went, he’d never see her again. She was right. Two days after graduating, fresh Obergrenadier decorations on his uniform, he received word that his mother had starved herself to death. There was no leave granted, not with the British gaining ground in Iraq, so he mourned her death from the battlefield.

  Still overcome with grief, he’d met Dr. Oelrich at a prisoner transfer depot. The older man was already under investigation, so it was only natural that they commiserated, sharing their stories of how the government had abandoned them. When the arrest warrant came, Dr. Oelrich told him he intended to flee and asked for help escaping. Johann shot the guards, opened his jail cell, and commandeered an Opel Blitz truck from the field.

  Dr. Oelrich had already enlisted Carll Strub, Erich Frauenheim, and Horst Gruen, all men held in the same military prison station. They were all criminals, dangerous men, probably psychotic. Johann never felt like one of them, even though he now had more in common with them than the average German soldier.

  So strange for a man with no home to be homesick.

  In the hallway outside the cell, Horst, Carll, and Felix stepped up to him, Horst winding down from one of his bouts of asthmatic laughter, Felix looking spooked. The American always looked that way, from what Johann could see, although all Yanks tended to share a stubborn duel expression: defiance and hurt, as if they were the same thing.

  They said nothing to him. He said nothing to them. Instead, they headed down the hallway and stairwell to the darker level below. Very few of the hanging bulbs functioned down here, perhaps in deference to the more subtle glow escaping under the engine room door.

/>   Dr. Oelrich stood in the hallway, wisps of coal smoke surrounding him like a coat, smoking a thin cigarette. His blue eyes shone even in the dark, as if gathering and reflecting the available light. The tall, postured doctor, eyes glowing, cut a simple but satanic image. “You’ve come at last.”

  Carll, face still haunted by whatever horror he’d seen inside the engine room, saluted the doctor. In German, he said, “I apologize, sir, but it took some time to … disengage Herr Gruen from his … activities.”

  Tossing the cigarette away, Dr. Oelrich smiled. “I’m quite sure it did.”

  Horst grinned. “I broke the Irishman.”

  “I have no doubt.” Cocking a thumb toward the door, Dr. Oelrich gestured for Carll and Johann to flank each side. “Pistols only, gentlemen. If you must use them, take your shots with care: there will be thick metal all around us and too many chances for bullets to ricochet.”

  The men in place, the doctor clicked his tongue against the top of his mouth, signaling Horst. The giant man lunged forward, hit the door with the heels of his hands, and swung it open. A roll of smoke greeted them, tumbling out into the hallway. Johann’s hand shot up to cover his mouth, but it was too late: the bitter taste of sulfur invaded, tickling the taste buds at the stem of his throat.

  “The engine’s burning unregulated,” Dr. Oelrich said, holding up the sleeve of his uniform to block the strong rotten vegetable odor emanating from the doorway. “The vents must be blocked by soot. Careful inside, the carbon dioxide in the air can make you lightheaded.”

  Lightheaded, Johann thought, and remembered the gas tests Dr. Oelrich oversaw in the basement of a captured Czech prison. They’d experimented on the inmates, meticulously recording the lethality of mustard gas, diesel fumes, and a new compound known as Zyklon-B. Commanded to help move the bodies, he’d never shaken the image of their contorted faces, snapshots of jaws stretched wide in violent screams even after the lining of their throats had melted.