by G. Zotov
The Schwarzkopfs seem to have problems, too. From what I've managed to glean from snippets of their conversations, whole guerrilla camps disappear complete with hundreds of fighters. In their place, ghostly mass graves appear out of thin air. The Schwarzkopfs don't like it! Nobody wants to know the truth about themselves.
In these last couple of days, we've had dozens of visits from all sorts of dissidents: from Shogunet nerds to Wehrmacht officers and from spoiled nutcase bitches — the type I can't stand anyway — to school teachers unhappy with their wages. It's amazing how the Schwarzkopfs have managed to permeate the Reich's entire system, like termites permeate an old house.
Olga is up to her eyeballs in Resistance affairs. She seems to have forgotten all about me. Her time has come. She's a heroine, the uprising's living banner: the epitome of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People if you remember the painting. She just told me she had to check her email (she's been away from the Shogunet for a good couple of months), opened her Buch and planted herself in the kitchen. It's night already but she's not done yet. Shogunet addiction, is that what they call it?
We still share the bed, by the way. It's becoming a tradition.
OLGA ENTERS THE ROOM just as the mandatory TV kicks in. She seems out of sorts. She's pale as a sheet, her lips pursed, her eyes dead and irresponsive. She slaps blindly around the coffee table for a pack of bootleg Japanese cigarettes. Apparently, Comrades Schwarzkopfs are in some serious shit.
I'm just about to offer a sarcastic comment about her freedom of choosing her own death — radiation or lung cancer — but she beats me to it,
"Fancy a coffee? We need to talk."
Oh, no. What's that now? A coffee. She must be really desperate to get on my good side. Before, she wouldn't touch the stuff with a barge pole. All good Schwarzkopfs only drink tea, dismissing coffee as "Kraut brew".
"Absolutely," I lean back on the couch. "With a splash of cream, please."
She goes back into the kitchen and soon returns with a trayful of Japanese china cups, a coffee pot, some biscuits and sugar lumps in a bowl. Like an exemplary Reich's housewife. Aww... the coffee smells awesome.
"I'm all ears," the coffee cup burns my fingers. "What is it?"
She falters. The sugar bowl shakes in her hands. I take a sip of my coffee, enjoying the taste.
"It's about... the Reichskommissars."
I take another sip and heave a sigh. Meeting her brothers in arms has pulled the girl back into the boundless sea of Revolution. Now she'll say that the denunciation of the Nazi regime obliges me to take their side. Very well, I'm ready to stand my ground no matter how much it's gonna hurt. Unlike Olga's interactions with the rest of the world which normally result in its disappearance, her effect on me produces the mother of all splitting headaches.
I open my mouth to speak — and can't.
Her face blurs. It turns cotton-wool white... or cloud-white, rather. Uncomprehending, I reach out to her, consumed by a swirl of snowflakes.
I choke on the white, drowning. I-
OLGA SPENT A FEW MORE MINUTES, finishing her cigarette and watching the sleeping priest. The sedative was indeed good. It had worked instantly, just as she'd been told.
She walked back into the kitchen. She washed the cups mechanically while thinking her own thoughts.
The phone rang an hour later just as she began to think their plan had failed.
"How did you do it?" a dry voice inquired in the receiver.
"Does it really matter?" she said wearily. "I need to see you. It's that what you want, isn't it? I have something that might surprise you. Really surprise you. And I suggest you refrain from calling your Gestapo friends. Trust me. You know what I'm capable of, don't you?"
The voice sighed in the affirmative. "Right. What's the best place we can meet?"
"I'll grab a taxi and come to your place. Just tell me how to find it."
She jotted the address down on a scrap of paper and switched off her phone.
At the other end of Moskau, Pavel Loktev did the same.
Vision #4. The White Haze
I CAN SEE FUCK ALL. The whirling storm is thick as a brick wall. You can't even punch through it. No idea what I'm supposed to do here. Where can I go? Why is everything so white?
I can barely breathe. I struggle to gulp some air but there's just not enough of it. I'm floating inside a weird world made of a viscous white substance which envelops me, soft and hugging. I feel like the proverbial frog that fell in the bucket of cream: I want to kick and struggle until it turns into butter.
The white mass pours down my lungs; I swallow it as it forces its way down my throat, filling my mouth. Still, I'm alive. It doesn't kill me. I keep floundering in it, looking around me.
How am I supposed to react? Where do I move to?
For want of a better solution, I try to struggle my way forward. The mass is devoid of any taste or odor. It's something sterile. Other smells abound though: they're strong, some bitter, others sweet. I seem to be surrounded by the tiniest specks of light. Like lightbugs they float around me as I push my way toward them, trying to work out what they are. The longer I walk, the farther away they seem. I'm exhausted.
A soft clinking sound approaches, a light clink clank of a wind charm.
Clink clank. Clinkety-clink. The white mass enveloping me seems to be alive. It's some sort of biological substance, like a sea of sentient plankton that somehow sucked me in. Now it bubbles and hums as if trying to talk to me. I can't make out the words though. My goal is to keep moving forward defeating this viscous goo until I get to the glowing little lights.
I soldier on, stubborn like a snowmobile plowing through a snowstorm, even though every next step is harder than the one before it. I set one foot down and pull the other one toward it, gasping with the effort.
A sharp pain pierces my left hand — the hand! Blood begins to seep from the palm, forming fancy spiral patterns in the creamlike environment, then dissolves in dancing motions. The clinkety-clanking. The humming in my ears. Wait a sec. How on earth have I ended up here?
According to Olga, her world occasionally sucks me in.
Still, this is different. Normally, I can see everything that happens in her world. I see it through her eyes, I can hear and feel it. And this is something foreign. Her world may be different from ours in the sheer scope of its military disaster but it's similar to us in many other ways, with similar people, weapons and methods. And this looks like a different planet entirely.
What's especially scary is that this thick goo is sentient. It governs this world; it knows right from wrong, it metes out punishment and acquittal, it can grant life or take it.
I can't move anymore. I give up. I stand with my arms sprawled, surrendering to the substance's judgment. It creeps into my nose and mouth, still tasteless. The clinking sound grows stronger, not so cute anymore. It begins to hurt my ears.
Olga could never understand why she only ever got transported between our two parallel realities while there must be hundreds more. I seem to have found the answer. She probably gets sucked into other worlds as well, only she doesn't remember it. Alternatively, she might believe it to be a dream. I can't blame her. Imagine me telling someone I was transported to a world ruled by sentient cream!
My mind fades. I try to remember what I was about to think of — but I can't. My brain is being brought under control, slowly occupied by an unrelenting exterior force. The white space thickens. I can't see the little lights anymore: nothing, not a glimpse. Only the screaming, ear-shattering wail filled with either fear or agony, I can't tell which.
A screeching noise rips the air right over my ear. I'm too weak to even turn my head. I close my eyes; I can't see anything anyway. Whether I like it or not, I've lost my battle against the substance. It controls me.
Great Gods of Asgard, why can't you cut my hand for me?
Chapter Three
The Carnival of Phantoms
Heinkel Street in the North of M
oskau
THE TWO STAYED SILENT for a long time. He was mulling over what he'd just heard, replaying the voices in his head while suppressing the desire to go back to the computer and double-check. She was on her tenth cigarette, drawing deeply as she studied his profile. Now she knew everything about him. He, however, knew nothing about her.
Half an hour later, she tentatively broke the silence. "I take it you knew each other?"
"We did," Pavel replied in a stiff monotone. "He was my friend. We knew each other since childhood. We were at Lebensborn together. He died three days ago. As I was told in the Office, he was shot by a Schwarzkopf terrorist using a Mosin rifle. The assassin used armor-piercing bullets. I saw my friend's body in the Gestapo morgue."
"So you see," Olga said, impassive. "Proves I was right then, does it? What more do you need? You should be able to understand now who killed him. And most importantly, why."
Pavel nodded, silent. He had nothing to say to that. Soon after his phone call, Olga had brought him the encrypted file with Jean-Pierre's research. She'd discovered it in her old inbox while checking the emails.
Actually, that had been a clever move on Jean-Pierre's part. He'd uploaded the data where no one would have thought of looking for it. Olga's old inbox had long been hacked by the Gestapo. Why would they bother keeping tabs on an already-compromised address they'd checked a million times? Olga would never risk using it again, would she? Wouldn't she just create a new email address, rightfully believing they must have changed the access code or bugged the inbox with an IP tracker capable of detecting her current location?
Wrong, wrong and wrong. A highly intelligent woman makes few mistakes. But when she does... So yes, she had unthinkingly opened her old inbox. Or should he say Pandora's box?
Decrypting the file hadn't been a problem with a little help from Schwarzkopf Gestapo moles. If you think about it, planning doesn't really work in this world. It's ruled by chance. If you took Klara, the Great Führer's Blessed Mother, all her newborn children had died in rapid succession one after the other. But the one destined to suck the blood of millions, he'd been the one who'd survived. Crazy. As if by some voodoo magic.
Enough to knock the guy off his trolley.
By using some simple voice recognition freeware, Jean-Pierre had stumbled across something truly incredible. He'd run the Triumvirate leaders' voices through the program until he had 100% matches. His discovery had rendered him speechless. The Triumvirate leaders spoke to their visitors in the meticulously re-engineered voices of long dead 1940s German movie stars: the likes of Marika Rökk, Lil Dagover and Anny Ondra.
Now that definitely was overkill. As Jean-Pierre had suspected from the start, this had nothing to do with the leaders' anonymity. No hardened paranoiac could be that deluded.
It had to be something else.
Jean-Pierre had located the online memoirs of those who'd met the Triumvirate leaders in Wewelsburg's bunkers. Equally ecstatic, they all had something else in common. Each Wewelsburg visitor remembered something that struck a familiar chord. Some voices were male, velvety and laidback, others female, sweet and melodious. The male voices too belonged to the 1940s film stars, the likes of Werner Krauss. The speaker addressed his or her visitors through a voice synthesizer, adding the lilt of long-dead sex symbols to the script.
His findings allowed Jean-Pierre to conclude,
No amount of Resistance agents and Schwarzkopf moles, not even the current martial law would have justified such complex multi-level security. Even the most cautious and paranoid dictators of their time, the likes of Stalin and Mussolini whose lives had been under daily threat from thousands of enemies, had never done anything like this. Yes, they'd been protected by a human shield of bodyguards; yes, they'd traveled in corteges of identical cars and had special food testers to make sure no one had messed with their meals. But if you summed it all up — the absolute anonymity, the blindfolds, the visual non-exposure, the synthesized voices — it all suggested one possible answer. You only did things like that when you had to conceal from the population that there was no Triumvirate.
Had probably never been. Who needed it, anyway? If the boss fails to show up at the office, it doesn't mean his staff will do the same. They'll keep pushing pencils and stare at computer screens — at least as long as they're getting paid. That's the way these things are done. They really couldn't care less about what happened to their boss. As far as they're concerned, he might be on sick leave or a business trip, unless he's gone off on an Alpine holiday. No one really gives a shit.
Now, what works for one office should theoretically work for an entire country. What a brilliant idea: the Reich, ruled by a bunch of non-existent dictators who are however perfectly real as long as the population believes they exist. A veritable carnival of phantoms: the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, the Reichstag, all the Ober Kommandaturs and the Labor Front still working, convinced they're being run by someone else. By whom? — doesn't matter, really, as long as they exist, those mysterious righteous rulers.
What now, then? The Triumvirate was but a sterile imitation, a dummy to keep the population happy, a fake movie-like version of a non-existent regime. All this was so fucking sick. It was true that Pavel used to sneer at the system; both he and Jean-Pierre had made fun of the Triumvirate, but still they'd served it, honestly and loyally.
Served what, a bunch of ghostly fakes?
The main question remained, whose idea had it been?
Who was the puppeteer lurking in the wings and pulling the strings? Jean-Pierre had found the answer to this one too. He'd saved it on a separate file but Pavel hadn't gotten to it yet. He was trying to digest the news, oblivious of his surroundings.
"Did you do expose yourself on purpose?" he asked Olga.
She nodded. "I did. I knew you practiced Tummo meditation. So I opened my mind to you. I kept repeating the phone number, digit after digit, hoping you'd hear me. I wasn't sure though. But now it's over. I've won our little joust. The priest is mine. I'm afraid you've lost. You probably realize it yourself."
Pavel's mouth twitched. "You're right. I can see what's happening. I don't think I can change anything even if I take him away from you. Too late. The world seems to be ending. I've spent my whole life working on the system and now it turns out it didn't even exist? You can't imagine how pissed off I am. I knew my bosses were scumbags... but I had no idea they were a figment of my imagination."
Gracefully Olga alighted from her chair. She had nothing left to do here. She'd squashed her arch enemy and sucked him dry, leaving him weak and impotent. His life force was hers now.
"I need to go," she said, avoiding his eyes. "You know both you and your world are dying, don't you? I suggest you do the right thing for a change. Not for money. Not for the regime. Just make your own choice, provided they haven't fucked you up completely in Lebensborn. The fact that you've been lied to is irrelevant. It's up to you to decide whether you're a man or a waste of space."
She stubbed out her cigarette and turned to the door. Pavel's lifeless stare focused on her. He was biting his lips. His hands shook. He didn't look superhuman at all now.
"Before you go... tell me... who the hell are you?"
She brought her lips to his ear. When she stood back up, Pavel's hair was gray.
She curved her mouth in a grin. How funny. A young man, his head gray and shaky with old age. And she was the one who'd done it.
"I should have guessed," Pavel whispered. "The moment Jean-Pierre sent me the DNA results. He couldn't work out where you were from. But this explains everything. After our researchers died in the Novgorod incident... The mind boggles. I might just think I've gone mad. Okay? Much easier this way."
She shrugged. "Be my guest. Sorry about your hair. You can always change it, anyway, when you grow yourself a new face."
Pavel didn't try to stop her. The door slammed shut.
An hour later he opened the last file. He spent some time staring at the words and numbers. Rel
uctantly he rose and reached for the desk drawer.
He took out both his Browning handguns: generous 13-rounders. After some thought, he added two extra magazines, then tilted his head to one side, staring curiously at the remaining thermal grenade at the bottom of the drawer.
He already knew what he was going to do.
Chapter Four
The Semitic Hamster's Wheel
Meistersinger Forest. The next morning.
I PRIZE OPEN MY UNYIELDING EYELIDS, seemingly stuck together with Henkel super glue. I can't see anything. A layer of murky white substance clings to my skin. Demons of Helheim, am I still here?
I grab at my face. I'm blindfolded. I pull the fabric off... glory be to Asgard! I'm home!
A woman laughs.
"I'm sorry!" Olga manages through her laughter, tightening her grip on the steering wheel. "I took the liberty of tying a towel over your face to protect it from the sun. It's so hot today, you can't imagine."
Her black hair flaps in the breeze like a pirate flag. I look around me. We're speeding along an autobahn in an old brown Horch cabriolet, the forgotten child of the German car industry. The Horch rattles its parts, spews clouds of black smoke but soldiers on.
I yawn. My joints crack as I stretch. "I really hope it's gonna end soon. I'm fed up with going in and out of your world like a yo-yo."
She keeps her eyes on the road, ignoring both mine and the car's complaints. "I hope so too. I frankly can't wait."
I don't get the chance to ask her what she means by this. Olga slows up as we approach a pile of concrete blocks: a makeshift security checkpoint. A scrap of red fabric flies over the barricade. It actually looks like part of the flag of the Reichskommissariat Moskau with the eagle cut out (or ripped out?) of it.