My Immortal: The Vampires of Berlin

by Lee Rudnicki

  Ruslan tried catcalls and whistles to wake the men who were sleeping around their beloved Katyusha to no avail. He wondered if even gunfire or explosions would wake them. In desperation, he took a bullet from his belt and threw it. His first throw missed and rolled into the gutter. His aim was better with the second; it bounced off of a helmet and hit Boris right on the nose.

  Boris swatted at the air and opened his eye. The one-eyed soldier was wide-awake the instant that he saw the look on Ruslan’s face. It told him everything he needed to know—they found the sons-of-bitches who had annihilated his patrol. Boris jumped to his feet and kicked his men awake. Revenge would not wait for first light. It was time to fight.

  A few minutes later, the soldiers quietly pushed the truck-mounted Katyusha into the street in front of the Hotel Neptune. Boris almost had a heart attack when a new conscript sneezed. He would have shot him right then and there if it could have made their chance of detection any lower. They cringed and spent the next thirty seconds waiting for the machine gun burst. When that didn’t happen, the men breathed a sigh of relief and maneuvered the rocket launcher into position.

  The battle plan, as Boris had explained it, was simple. Step 1. Launch the Katyusha point blank at the Hotel Neptune. Step 2. Go inside and kill any of those rat fucks that survived the blast.

  The men worked quickly. Once they got the Katyusha in place, they could make it a very bad day for the Germans who were holed up in that little hotel. However, if they got spotted before the Katyusha was ready to fire, their odds of survival against an MG-42 were slim to none. After all, they were breaking the time-honored Rule #1 of Soviet Red Army street-fighting doctrine—get the hell out of the street.

  23

  Blindness

  Things went downhill fast for Wolf and Sebastian. With three drunk and crazy armed SS soldiers on the loose, the Hotel Neptune had become just as dangerous for them as Berlin Cathedral. Only this time, the threat was from within.

  Pig Face was done waiting. He pointed his bayonet at Eva. “Before we leave, we’re going to send this Slavic bitch out with a bang. Let’s go.”

  Otto the Jackal stood up and unbuttoned his pants. “The party begins...”

  Wolf froze, but Sebastian jumped up in front of Otto with his fists clenched. “Back off Jackal—this is not a goddamn party!” he shouted.

  Otto shoved Sebastian to the floor and Pig Face grabbed Eva. She didn’t resist his advances; she just stared into his eyes. “They are coming for me,” she whispered.

  Pig Face laughed loudly and pulled at her nightgown. “So am I, missy, so am I!”

  “Leave her alone!” Sebastian shouted as he landed a desperate right hook that sent Otto reeling backwards. Then he grabbed Pig Face from behind, but the hand-to-hand combat expert threw him over his shoulder and sent him crashing into Eva; she instinctively bit down on his hand when it hit her in the face.

  Sebastian went ballistic when he saw the blood. “Goddamnit!” he yelled. “Stop this shit! Stop it! Right now! We don’t need this!”

  “Screw you,” Pig Face replied, pushing him aside.

  Sebastian pulled out his Mauser and pointed it at him. The stakes were suddenly raised and all of his cards were on the table. “Leave her alone, you fucking animal! I’m serious! I told you to stop!”

  Pig Face didn’t flinch. “Go ahead. Shoot me if you got the balls. I’m not afraid to die tonight.”

  “I will shoot you, so help me! “I will kill you!” Sebastian’s hands shook like a leaf—he hadn’t expected defiance in the face of overwhelming force.

  “Then kill me already,” Pig Face replied. “Get it over with. But before you do, there’s one thing you should know.”

  “What?”

  Bang! Sebastian slumped to the floor, blood flowing from the back of his head.

  “His friends are deadly.” Varik chuckled as the acrid smell of gunpowder permeated the room. He wasn’t keen on killing Germans, but first and foremost, he would protect his men. He didn’t regret taking the shot.

  “Auf Wiedersehen, asshole,” Pig Face said. Then he spit on Sebastian’s body.

  Wolf angrily reached for his pistol, but Varik turned the rifle on him. “Go ahead, Major. Be a hero. Pretend this little bitch and your dead friend matters more to you than your life does right now. We will help you prove your point.”

  “Berlin is a dead man’s party,” Otto cackled in the background. “Do you want an invitation?”

  Wolf couldn’t take his eyes off of the rifle. His heart told him to fight but his brain told him that the battle was over before it started. His only hope for survival was to convince the SS that he wasn’t a threat and accompany them to the airfield. “Put the rifle down,” he said calmly. “No one else needs to die here tonight. There is still time for us to get out. Maybe we can get to Argentina or Brazil. I heard they are providing a refuge.”

  “South America sounds nice, I hear the beaches are to die for. But you’re not coming with us,” Varik retorted.

  “I’m a decorated officer. I can get you onto a plane.”

  “We don’t need your help, we have transport papers signed by Himmler himself. But let me give you a piece of advice—hide that Iron Cross that you have so proudly pinned to your uniform before the Russians ship you to Siberia in a fucking cage.”

  The SS men laughed hysterically. Wolf sighed and sat down on the floor. He covered his eyes from a repulsive scene that he was powerless to stop.

  Pig Face looked Eva over from head to toe and continued his sick advances. Forcing women to submit to him was a pleasure that the evil beast had enjoyed many times as the SS marauded its way across Eastern Europe.

  “Give us a show, Pig Face,” Otto said.

  Pig Face put his hand on her shoulder but Eva slapped it away. He laughed at her feeble attempt at resistance. Point of fact, Pig Face enjoyed the challenge—she could scream, she could cry, or she could remain quiet. In the end, it didn’t matter to him. He would have her, just as he had all of those who came before her. “How do you like it, Princess?” the swine asked, moving in for the kill. “Hard or soft? Actually, it doesn’t matter, because you’re going to get it all tonight.”

  Eva smiled, silently daring him to do something.

  “It’s a standoff,” Otto laughed.

  “She’s not afraid of you,” Varik said, keeping his rifle trained on Wolf. He didn’t have the stomach for assaulting women, but he had even less of an appetite for getting shot by his own men for trying to stop them.

  Pig Face pulled Eva close. “Hey bitch. Varik thinks you’re not afraid of me. Say something. Are you in there?”

  “They are coming for me,” she whispered. “And you’re going to bleed tonight.”

  “Whoa. Tough as nails!” Otto exclaimed. “The Piglet finally met his match.”

  That snide comment put Pig Face into a rage. He pulled her hair, harder. “Stop staring at me you fucking whore or you’ll get the same medicine that your boyfriend did—a bullet in the brain!”

  Eva’s hand moved incredibly fast, like a cobra strike. Pig Face didn’t even have time to blink before five bloody lines appeared across his cheek.

  Eva smiled and licked his blood from her fingers.

  Pig Face went ballistic. “You bitch! You cut my face!” he screamed. He pushed her against the mirror with a bayonet at her throat. “Look at your pretty face for the last time, whore! When I’m done with you, the—”

  Pig Face stopped talking the moment he realized that the girl’s image wasn’t reflected in the mirror. He held her in his hands, but in the mirror, it looked like he was holding air. What kind of fuckery is this?

  Eva’s eyes narrowed and a crack appeared in the mirror. The men curiously watched it spider-web through the glass. A split second later, the mirror exploded, sending shards of glass flying throughout the room.

  Pig Face instinctively grabbed his face and screamed in agony. He was blind.

  24

  Love and Rockets


  Boris heard the scream. He didn’t know what the Germans were doing in the hotel, but it was time to launch the attack before they were spotted. He raised his arm and slammed it down. “Fire!”

  Boris dove for cover as the salvo of Katyusha rockets screamed through the air and slammed into the Hotel Neptune. The explosive impact sent pieces of white-hot shrapnel flying throughout the hotel, including a large piece that blew the back of Varik’s skull off, exposing his brain as he fell to the floor and died.

  Wolf dove into the corner and covered his head as the gunfire erupted, intermixed with screams and curses in Russian and German.

  “Onward, comrades!” Boris yelled as he led the charge across no-man’s land towards the Neptune. He didn’t exactly enjoy combat, but he was addicted to the adrenalin-rush; he wondered if he ever could go back to the tractor factory in Kiev.

  Inside the Neptune, Otto scrambled to repulse the attack. He pushed Varik’s body aside and fired the MG-42 wildly out the window. The murderous sound that the machine gun made was deafening. He screamed as brass bullet casings littered the floor. “Die! Die! Die!”

  As the battle raged, Pig Face crawled around the room and blindly felt around for a weapon. The pain from the injuries to his eyes was excruciating, but he was desperate to stay conscious and defend himself.

  In stark contrast to the havoc that was erupting all around her, Eva calmly watched the Russian soldiers storm through the door. With guns blazing, each man covered a different firing lane.

  Otto grabbed a rifle and fired back at the intruders, but there were too many to stop. After taking two Russians down, he took a bullet himself. The impact spun him around and he fell to the floor with a gaping hole in his shoulder. He had once vowed to never surrender. However, sticking to that plan when he was bleeding to death turned out to be a different proposition entirely.

  Enter Boris. When he saw two of his men dead on the floor, he went berserk. “Damn stinking Germans! I will kill all of them!” he screamed.

  Otto staggered to his feet and put his hands up as the angry Russian officer screamed at him in a language that he could not understand. “Please, I surrender.”

  “You fat fuck!” Boris yelled. Then he shot Otto in the face. Otto was dead before he hit the ground, but that didn’t matter. Boris shot him over and over and over and over and over and over again until he ran out of bullets. Then he reloaded and shot him in the face again. And again and again and again and again and again.

  When the gunfire stopped, Boris had successfully released a great deal of pent up anger and frustration. Otto the Jackal, on the other hand, was unrecognizable as a human being from the neck up. The other soldiers watched the macabre scene unfold with wide-eyed amazement; they wondered if their commander hadn’t lost his mind in the days leading up to the Battle of Berlin.

  Then Boris saw Pig Face cowering in the corner. The pathetic German was trembling and bleeding profusely from the holes that had once contained his eyes.

  “Please ... please don’t hurt me ... I surrender,” Pig Face stammered. “I need a doctor.” The moment that he had feared most had arrived. And he couldn’t see it.

  Boris laughed. “Don’t worry,” he replied in fluent German. “I do not discriminate against the handicapped. I myself know what it is like to lose an eye to the enemy.”

  When he heard Boris speak German, Pig Face took it as a glimmer of hope. He supported himself against the wall and put his arm into the air. “Hitler Kaput! Hitler Kaput!” he cried. “I surrender.”

  “You are blind,” Boris replied. “That is such a shame. Do you know why it’s a shame?”

  “No,” Pig Face sobbed.

  “Because I specialize in teaching eye loss to German soldiers through a special technique that I call extreme eye-poke. It usually involves a bayonet, although it could also involve a fork or other sharp object. Unfortunately, the Katyusha did my work for me today. Instead, I’ll just have to shoot you.”

  Pig Face nearly passed out. He dropped to his knees and begged for his life. “No, please ... listen to me ... listen...”

  Boris put the pistol against his right temple.

  Pig Face cringed.

  Boris pulled the trigger. Click.

  “Ah, that’s too bad,” he said. “I used all of my bullets on your fat fucking friend. Maybe it’s your lucky day, scratchy-face blind guy.”

  Pig Face smiled nervously. His friends were dead, but he thought that maybe fate had intervened to save him. Maybe he would survive this awful war.

  He couldn’t have been more wrong. Pig Face had no way of knowing it, of course, but Boris had a nickname among his troops, The Janitor. Over five years in the Red Army, The Janitor had developed his own ultra-vicious methods of street fighting. Since his lack of peripheral vision prevented him from leading the assault once they were inside the building, his modus operandi was to send new conscripts through the door first—brave men whom he had given an extra ration of vodka before the battle. After the initial shoot out, The Janitor would clean the room of enemy survivors. The caveat to the strategy was that the first men to charge into dark confined spaces where the effects of automatic weapons and grenades were multiplied usually didn’t live long. Luckily, Stalin ensured that Boris had no shortage of cannon fodder to lead the way.

  On that day, The Janitor wasn’t about to let a lack of ammo prevent him from doing his job, especially with two of his men dead. He ripped Pig Face’s helmet off and threw it across the room. The blind soldier frantically tried to feel his way to the door, but Boris pushed him down and pinned him underneath his boot.

  The angry Russian bear finalized the dance of death by pounding Pig Face in the head with a rifle, yelling in a rage with each successive hit. After the third blow, pink brain matter squirted out of his cracked skull. The Janitor didn’t just kill Germans—he pulverized them; a method of fighting that he adopted after a supposedly unarmed German POW took out his eye one awful winter day. Boris occasionally kept an officer alive for intelligence purposes, but there were rarely survivors when The Janitor was done with his work.

  Mikhail, a tall soldier with a dark ruddy complexion, noticed that Wolf was still breathing. He kicked him hard in the kidneys. “This one is still alive!” he shouted. Then he put his rifle to Wolf’s head and prepared to put him out of his misery.

  “Hold your fire,” Boris ordered.

  “You had your fun,” Mikhail said. “Let me kill this German pig.”

  “Stand down, Mikhail. This one is an officer. We’ll get something for him. Maybe some more Czech wine,” Boris replied.

  Wolf groaned as the enemy soldiers debated his fate in a language that he couldn’t understand.

  Finally, Mikhail relented. “Schnell! Schnell! Get up, you swine!” he shouted.

  Wolf got up. So this is how it ends, he thought. He said a silent prayer and wondered how painful his death at the hands of the Russians was going to be.

  Mikhail’s eyes widened when he saw the Iron Cross. He ripped it from Wolf’s jacket and threw it onto the floor. Then he hit his new prisoner over the head with his rifle.

  Fade to black...

  25

  The Death of Lyudmila

  The gunfire and screaming in the Hotel Neptune stopped. Lyudmila peered through the scope and smiled when she saw Boris through what had been a window prior to the Katyusha strike. The doomed patrol had been avenged.

  Lyudmila got her chance to fight after Stalin threw thousands of poorly trained and pitifully armed men into battle to stem the Nazi invasion and the casualty numbers soared. She learned her craft quickly and became one of the most feared and celebrated snipers in the Soviet Red Army, with over 200 kills to her name. A sniper sheds no tears for her victims, of course, especially Nazis. However, Lyudmila often wondered if it was true that her victims never actually heard the gunshot.

  She adjusted the scope and peered down below. The position had been chosen carefully; it concealed her and provided an unobstruct
ed view of the street. If any Germans were stupid enough to try to retake the Neptune, she would rain death down upon them, one hot piece of lead at a time.

  As if on cue, a young kid with an oversized helmet ran down the street with a Panzerfaust. Lyudmila smiled and put little Dieter Hübner in the crosshairs. She whispered the words that she uttered before every kill. “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”

  As her finger tightened around the trigger, an icy breeze swept across the rooftop. Lyudmila shivered as she pulled the trigger. The round missed the boy and struck a cement column. Dieter scurried for cover behind a burned-out halftrack before she could get another shot off.

  Goddamn it, she thought. Where the hell is Ruslan? How long does it take to piss off a roof?

  Behind her, and entirely unnoticed, two dark fast-moving shapes darted across the rooftops.

  As Lyudmila scoured the street to relocate her target, another icy breeze rushed across the roof. She looked back as the cold wind swirled around her.

  Suddenly, Lyudmila was gone. Only her rifle, bouncing on the roof, remained.

  26

  Sympathy for the Devil

  The Russian soldiers gathered around Eva. The outcome was certain; the only question was who was going to go first.

  The young vampire wasn’t afraid of the dirty men who were pressing in on her. “They are coming for me,” she whispered.

  “This stupid girl thinks that the garbage German army is going to rescue her,” Mikhail chuckled.

  “She’ll be waiting for 500 years,” Boris replied as he shouldered his rifle. “It’s all over but the crying—there won’t be anything left of the Wehrmacht when we’re done with it.”

  “They are coming for me,” she whispered again, looking the Russian officer right in the eye.