by G. Zotov
Kalinka, kalinka, kalinka mayaaaa!
Ah malinka, malinka, kalinka mayaaaaa! Yeeh!
I gulp the warm air. The night is so beautiful. Still, there’s only one question on my mind. “Mind telling us what you need us for?”
‘It’s for your own safety,” Major Onoda isn’t smiling anymore. “You’re in big trouble, I assure you. I’ll tell you everything, I’m not going to keep anything from you. I’m your friend. Do get in the car, please. I’m asking you nicely but I don’t have to. You understand that, don’t you?”
I cast Olga a meaningful look but she just won’t dematerialize. Oh, well. Back in the Lebensborn we had excellent PT classes. All would-be priests had to practice close combat. Even between the two of us, we don’t have much chance against eleven Japs. But at least we’re out in the open — plenty of places in this street to take cover in.
I cast a look around, taking in the scene. Now…
An ear-shattering buzz rips through the air.
A soldier by the Lexus turns in surprise, unsuccessfully trying to pull a short throwing knife out of his neck. Blood gushes to the ground. He collapses onto the cobblestones. His Arisaka rifle clatters down next to him.
With more buzzing noise, two more knives land into a second soldier’s chest. Major Onoda disappears behind the Lexus with remarkable agility. The remaining “toy crocs” throw their rifles in the air, peering desperately through the dark. Pointless.
The night fills with the buzzing of more steel bees. In less than a minute, the Major’s men cease to exist. The sidewalk is lined with dead bodies. Finally, the last soldier makes a squelching sound with his throat and falls silent.
I’m calm and reserved. I’ve seen too much in these last three days.
“Onoda-san,” a voice calls out of the dark. “Where are you? I’d love to say hello to you.”
Now I’m next to hysterics. They’re always so polite!
Not a sound emerges from behind the Lexus. It’s perfectly possible that Major Onoda too has received a steely blade as a welcome gift, rendering him somewhat indisposed to reply. It takes me some time to realize that the darkness shifts, moving, rippling, losing parts of itself which float toward us. Unmoving, I watch this psychedelic scene. How is it…
Ah. Now I know. I couldn’t see it at first.
These are men: special forces, clad in black uniforms, their faces concealed by masks. They scale down the buildings’ walls like human spiders. No idea who they are but they’re probably Asian: short and agile. There’re only four of them. They’ve done a nice job on ten opponents without even getting close. I might find them a problem.
“Oh well,” the voice mocks regret in the dark. “If you’re not coming, I might just as well come to you myself.”
I have a funny feeling I already know who that might be. It just has to be that Lebensborn guy.
The owner of the voice walks out into the light of the round red streetlamp. He’s wrapped in a gray cloak. A matching hat sits on his head.
My reserve is shattered. I bring my hands to my face and rub my eyes. Impossible. It can’t be.
I cast a look at the girl. She looks at him, then at me. Her lips shake. “What is this?”
That is something I’d like to know too!
He walks over to me. I freeze like a rabbit under a python’s stare.
Great gods, Thor, Odin and Loki!
The man has my face.
Chapter Nine
Change of Face
Spring Abundance Lane, next to Ryokan ‘Kyushu’.
HE STARES AT ME, impassive. We’re twins. Deep inside, he’s probably enjoying my reaction. But… how did he do it? Plastic surgery? So quickly? I could swear by Odin’s guts, this is the man from the video tape.
“I expected Major Onoda to have come to greet me,” he says, looking at me with my eyes. “I made sure to get caught on CCTV next to another ryokan in the city center. But apparently, once the system determined your address, it didn’t bother to dig any deeper and simply switched off. Which is why I had to come back here ASAP. Sorry I was late.”
“But you… Sir… eh…” I shut up. How do you talk to yourself? On one hand, the guy is a perfect stranger. On the other, calling yourself “Sir” is the ultimate in snobbery, isn’t it? Who the hell is he — my custom-made clone from some secret Gestapo lab?
He snickers. “No, I’m not a clone. I can’t read your thoughts, either. It’s just that I’m used to this being the first thing people think when they see me. Don’t worry about Olga. She’ll be all right. I need you.”
Suddenly I understand. He’s right: he’s not a clone in any shape or form. This man simply has my face on, the way a Druid wears a wolf skull during the Samhain carnival. A clone would have had my voice — but the man speaks in a cracked, weary baritone. Which means he can’t copy sounds.
“Come with me,” he reaches out his hand. “It’s better if you stay with me, I assure you.”
The midgets in black fatigues surround me, apparently to influence my decision.
“Thanks,” I barely refrain from making a Major Onoda-style bow. “It’s the second such offer I’ve received this evening. My reasoning urges me to wait and see if any more are forthcoming. You understand, don’t you? I need to compare the price.”
He doesn’t smile. He just stands there studying me. There’s a certain dose of curiosity in his stare. “This isn’t an offer, Priest,” he says roughly. “This is an order.”
He shouldn’t have said that. Now I’ll turn violent, I can see that. What kind of day is this? Everyone wants a piece of me!
Shots ring through the air, one after another. Four in total.
Four crimson spots spread over the gray fabric of his cloak. Still, the stranger doesn’t collapse. Smirking, he touches the brim of his hat like some old-fashioned British colonialist from an old movie. His mouth curves; he struggles to stay on his feet. Still, he’s not dying even though the blood on his chest is evidence he’s not wearing a bulletproof vest.
The midgets leave me alone and hurry to pull Major Onoda from under the car. He doesn’t look surprised. Apparently, he knows the stranger.
My lookalike gives his henchmen a nod, “Search him.”
They promptly turn out Onoda’s pockets, shaking him like a tree. A wallet drops to the ground, followed by a fountain pen. A handful of loose change also clatters to the tarmac.
“Did you plant the old boy on that plane, Major?” the stranger asks. “In which case you’ve lost me. You know bullets can’t kill me. I’ll be as right as rain in an hour.”
Major Onoda looks up at him. There’s a certain sympathy in his gaze. “Of course I do. My objectives are slightly different, Mr. Loktev. My job is to bide time.”
I have the impression that even if someone sliced his belly open and ripped out his guts, Major Onoda would continue speaking nicely, bowing and apologizing. Crazy nation. At least, thanks to his niceties, now I knew my lookalike’s name.
My legs sense vibrations underfoot.
The sky overhead fills with the rattling and screaming of helicopter motors. Their blades slice the air. At a distance, army vehicles rev their engines. Major Onoda must have called for reinforcements. The noise is such you’d think half the Japanese army is descending upon us.
Did I say there would be more offers forthcoming?
Olga finds my hand in the dark and squeezes it tight. From the moment she saw my lookalike’s face, she hasn’t said one word. Her nails dig into my skin — but I don’t feel the pain.
My lookalike kicks Major Onoda in the face, sending blood flying as he knocks out at least half a dozen teeth. Can’t say I’m upset.
Two of the midgets grab at my shirt sleeves, preventing me from making any effort to move.
“Priest, none of this is your business,” my gray lookalike raises his voice. “She is bad news!”
Olga wakes up. “You monster,” she drops impassively. “Go fuck yourself! He saved my life!”
&
nbsp; My clone stares at her. His eyes are dead. His hand froze in the air halfway to me. “You are a monster. Go ahead, tell him who you really are. I’m quite curious too. It’s time to quit your game, Olga. He’s going with me whether you like it or not.”
The air around me explodes with unbearable heat. Have I just dropped onto the Sun? Or have some Forest Brothers thrown me into a giant furnace?
The air turns red with a smattering of black dots laced with orange flashes. Olga’s hair stands on end, hovering around her head like that of a drowned woman. Her eyes are two glowing coals. She parts her lips, disgorging jets of fire like some mythical dragon. Everything and everyone screams. I watch as the Sony Hayes choppers break apart in mid-air, enveloped in flames. Police armored vehicles burn like cardboard toys.
The roaring wall of fire crumples my lookalike and hurls him through the air together with a dozen Japanese policemen in their neat white little tunics. The copters’ charred cabs drop into the ocean and sink with an unpleasant hissing sound.
The fire has ripped the sky apart. The clouds are tinged with blood. As I soar above Uradziosutoku, I can see a pale rose glow creep over the city.
The twister swirls us, pressing us tight to each other. We break into gazillions of particles which mix, uniting us. My inert body is ripping at the seams, baring my bones. She too slides out of her skin, flirtatiously as if shedding a swimsuit. I can see her heart beating, splashing blood everywhere. She and I, we’re both burning. We are fire, we’re part of its flames, we breathe it like we used to breathe air. It feels so good… too good.
The fire expires as if snuffed out by a TV remote.
I don’t exist. I’m gone. Evaporated. I’m nowhere. I’m nothing. I can’t see.
…PAVEL OPENED HIS EYES. His skin was still smoking. This amazing sensation of the first seconds after: you’ve survived; you’re reborn. An explosion of this magnitude would have pulverized a normal human being. He’d been lucky with the shock wave. Had he stayed put, he’d have melted away like an ice-cream.
He listened closely. Nothing. Not a single scream or groan. This kind of silence is normally called deadly. The Tibetan ninjas that Lansang had kindly rented out to him must have turned to ashes. This time it had been even more impressive than back in Novgorod. They might not be able to hush-hush the event this time. Naturally, the city’s Mayor would make sure he kept TV crews out, but by the morning the Shogunet would be completely flooded by all sorts of pics and videos.
Pavel slid his tongue around his mouth, feeling for a left-side crown, and crunched hard.
The bitter medication made his tongue numb. Never mind. He’d feel better soon. The pain was mind-boggling. If he only could, he’d be rolling and squirming on the tarmac now, convulsing in agony.
Problem was, there was no tarmac to squirm on.
A vitrified pavement was littered with the fragments of boulders split by the heat. Trees had exploded, disintegrating. Square black spots on the ground marked places where houses had previously stood.
His burned skin had been carbonized in the corners of his cheeks. Was this what they called a fourth-degree burn?
The medication was about to work. He tried to move and screamed out in agony. What was the name of that old Japanese movie? The Samurai, yes. In it, some Bolshevik terrorists invented a time machine and used it to send a robot back to 1889, to the Austrian town of Braunau with orders to kill Klara Pölzl who was pregnant with the Führer. He’d remembered the catchphrase uttered by the protagonist, an SS officer born of a German (naturally) father and a Japanese mother,
“Come with me if you want to live.”
Well, in the Priest’s case the good old phrase apparently hadn’t worked.
Next time Pavel would just pull him out unannounced. Failing that, there were also other ways. An ambush, a trap, a tranquilizing shot. Still, this scenario would imply engaging Olga in combat. The girl was tough.
Then again, so was he.
His e-funk rang loud and clear, dissolving in the tinny old-fashioned melody of Oh du lieber Augustin. Unbelievable. It was still in one piece and without signs of fire damage. This was a Wehrmacht HQ frontline model protected by wafer-thin layers of tank armor. A Tiger e-funk. No wonder they cost two thousand yen in luxury stores on Aryan Street.
Crying out in pain, he strained his every muscle to pull the e-funk closer to his ear.
“Hi man,” Jean-Pierre’s voice reached through the crackling and hissing of interference, “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” Pavel said cheerfully. “Whassup?”
“Bad news,” the receiver crackled. “I want you to listen very carefully…”
Pavel fell silent. As he lay there staring up into the night sky ablaze with fires, his face started to change. His skin fibers began twisting and braiding together like strips of dough in the hands of a deft patissier. His cheeks grew swollen, turning into a thick and viscous mass. Then the “dough” began to melt his charred flesh, devouring it, while new tissues emerged in its place, pink as a baby’s bum. An onlooker might have thought that Pavel’s face was crawling with little snakes.
His eyes stretched into slits. His gaze grew dark, changing color from blue to dark brown. His scalp was rapidly covering with a new growth of jet-black hair.
He had a totally different face now.
Part Three
Gjallarhorn Thunders
Moscow,
Your golden towers glow
Even through ice and snow,
Sparkling their shine.
Moscow,
There is a burning fire
That never will expire
Deep in your soul.
Genghis Khan, Moskau
Chapter One
Brain Revolution
Los Angeles, Liberation Boulevard
From a classified audio transcript,
THE SOUNDS OF AN AIRCON WORKING, drinks being poured out and the clinking of glasses.
“Here, Herr Polizeiführer. This is Jack Daniels, pre-war vintage. My father saved it in the cellar of his Kentucky home. Go ahead, swill it around for a bit. The bouquet is something else, isn’t it? I wish I could breathe it instead of air. These days people get killed for whiskey like this.”
“This is excellent, Herr Gauleiter,” the other man smacked his lips. “I’m speechless. It’s only thanks to the old cellars like your father’s that we can still remember what real American whiskey used to be like. Now that Tennessee distilleries have been burned down and their equipment looted… Do you remember that story on TV about the Nashville unrest over two kegs of Jack Daniels? Street fights, forty dead! The robbers even managed to engage anti-aircraft defenses. Please don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I was born too late. I find sake too weak and schnapps too basic.”
“You mustn’t forget, Herr Polizeiführer, that this is the price we have to pay for our liberation from Bolshevism,” the other voice said weightily. “Politicians were too soft in the old days. I’d rather we do without whiskey than worship a clique of Negroes and Semitic sorcerers. Putting it bluntly, Negroes are the much more dangerous of the two. Had it not been for Liberation, we might have had a black President one day… Before I forget, what about that Liberation monument cleanup? The Moskau ambassador arrived yesterday; he laid some flowers on the Remembrance Wall for the SS Division Russland. And we have all this shit to contend with! Did you manage to find out who’d poured black paint over the monument?”
The other voice sighed. “Not yet, Sir, unfortunately. We’re now busy studying the CCTV footage.”
More sounds of whiskey being poured out, followed by the rustling of roasted peanuts.
“I see. If the truth were known, we don’t really need it, do we? It’s only there to humor our German allies. A Liberation monument in Los Angeles, of all places! When it’s been proven historically that it was America – or rather, California – that won the war on Bolshevism to begin with. While Wehrmacht soldiers drank vodka and courted Russlandish girls,
the American Resistance had to single-handedly fight against British plutocracy and Semitic moneybags. Have you been to Professor Brzezinski’s recent lecture?”
The other man heaved a sigh. “No. I decided against it. I was a bit concerned about his non-Aryan origin.”
“Unfortunately, you’re right,” the other man sounded somewhat regretfully. “The Governorate of Poland has submitted forty applications to the Reich’s Racial Department but they still refuse to recognize the Poles as an Aryan nation. Still, as a freed slave, Professor Brzezinski enjoys the Hiwi status of a volunteer collaborator. And being a personal ex-slave of Dictator McCain’s, he’s been granted freedom of movement within California. Naturally, he can’t appear in high society or eat in Aryan-only restaurants, but the Dictator has a very high opinion of his published works. Professor Brzezinski managed to prove that 80% of the whole American population did their utmost best to resist the joint dictatorship of Negroes and Semites as well as their puppet rulers Roosevelt and Truman. It was their powerful albeit silent protests, dubbed as “the brain revolution” by our schoolteachers, which ensured the Great Battle victory of the allied forces of Japan and Greater Germany. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not questioning the role Russland played in that victory, insignificant as their input was. Don’t forget that the SS Division Russland only took Los Angeles at the very end of the war by drowning the US army’s defenses in their own blood. But was the storming of the city really that necessary? It resulted in uncalled-for losses. And now we’re obliged to visit their monument to hold boring ceremonies, lay wreaths and generally maintain it. It’s as if we owe them, you know.”
The other man chuckled. “May Odin shower you with his mercies, Herr Gauleiter. It’s been a long time… luckily. You won’t find many babies in this country who still believe that either Russland or Moskau made any significant contribution to V-Day.”
“May the gods in their eternal kindness send you a sacrificial goat! Unfortunately, we’re obliged to shake hands with the Slavs and call them our allies. Don’t forget that the Third Reich described them as an inferior race only some seventy years ago. But no one seems to remember it now! There are forty doctored editions of Mein Kampf, one for each nation. Did you read the Ukrainian edition? I suggest you look it up on the Shogunet. It says in as many words that racially, the Ukrainians are the second purest nation after the Germans.”