by Mack Maloney
But now, they were here in this dizzylando, this very weird place. The question was, why?
He lay on the stretcher for about ten minutes. In that time, he came to realize his wounds were actually superficial and in no way serious. He was still very, very high, though, and even when he saw another wave of huge bombers go overhead, and saw them drop their bombs, and heard those bombs falling, and felt the ground shake when they hit, it didn't faze him. Just another selection from the symphony.
Strangely, though, he believed in his opiate state that his eyes had become telescopic, that he could zoom in on the wings of these bombers, and what he saw were more swastikas. But that made no sense.
Few things did on morphine.
He was finally retrieved by two more litter bearers and brought into the dugout. No surprise, the field hospital was well-equipped, well-organized, and spotless — in that Nazi kind of way.
There were several dozen operating tables, several dozen recovery beds. The place looked way too big on the inside, considering what it looked like without, but again, Hunter knew morphine did strange things to a person's perception and that the medic had given him an overly generous charge.
Hanging on the wall above the operating tables were two signs. One read, Merciless and Moral, an old saying of the original Nazis back in his time, on his Earth. The other read, It Is the Curse of Greatness That It Must Step Over Dead Bodies. An odd saying, Hunter thought, especially for a hospital.
The place was hustling and bustling. Many wounded were being attended to. But luckily for them, there were just as many doctors and three times as many nurses charged with their care. Hunter's stretcher was placed next to an operating table. He lay here for a few minutes, staring up at the lights on the ceiling and getting the distinct impression that someone was hiding up there, staring down at him. Finally, a doctor and two nurses came over to him. All three were wearing long white gowns and surgical masks.
One of the nurses gently removed the bandage near his ear, by far his deepest wound, and still it was little more than a minor abrasion. The other nurse checked under the bandages on his knees.
The doctor meanwhile stared righ't into his eyes.
Suddenly the doctor bellowed, "Who is this man?"
The controlled chaos inside the field hospital came to a halt instantly. Just like that, it was completely silent. All eyes had turned on Hunter and the three people standing over him. Suddenly, he wasn't feeling so high anymore.
The doctor screamed once again, "This man — who is he? What is he doing in here?"
One of the nurses tried to reply, "He is wounded, Doctor…"
She pointed to his numerous minor wounds.
"But he is not a soldier!" the doctor bit back. "This place is for our fighting men, not hangers-on!"
At that, the other nurse reached down and started scraping the mud away from Hunter's clothes.
Indeed, he was not wearing a Nazi uniform — thank God! Instead, he was dressed in a one-piece black survival suit with no place to hang weapons or ammunition. He did have a number of pens in his upper left-hand pocket and a small notebook tucked inside his undershirt.
"He is a spy!" the doctor roared. "Bring him out to be shot!"
Hunter was definitely back down now. Spy? Shot? Him?
Why?
But then one of the nurses saved his life — such as it was. She scraped away the dirt and mud from his left arm and revealed a patch that ran nearly from his elbow to the top of his shoulder. It featured a series of yellow stripes with one word in the middle: Scribe.
"He is not a spy," the nurse said, pointing to the arm patch. "He is a reporter. A war correspondent."
The doctor hesitated only for a moment. "Bah!" he declared. "That is just as bad."
With that, he took off his rubber gloves, quickly, but one finger at a time, and slammed them down hard on Hunter's face.
Then he stormed away in disgust.
"This place is for our brave soldiers!" he said on leaving. "And not for the impure blood of his ilk."
The two nurses were a bit more sympathetic, though a badly wounded Nazi solider had arrived on a stretcher beside him. They quickly put fresh bandages on his wounds, stuck a vitamin pill in his mouth, and called for two orderlies to get him out of there.
As he was leaving, one of the nurses drew out a syringe and gave him another gigantic shot of morphine. Hunter closed his eyes, but instantly, he felt like he was back on the ceiling. He really wished she hadn't done that.
She patted him twice on the head. He opened his eyes just as she was pulling down her mask. Hunter's bleary pupils could barely make her out.
Is that Annie? he thought.
Before he could cry out, the orderlies carried his stretcher back outside, setting him down in almost in the exact spot from where he'd been picked up.
Once again, artillery shells were exploding close by, and the steady drone of bombers going overhead never really stopped. His mind drifted away again. Now in his most elevated moment, Hunter thought that he could actually see the outline of Saturn up there, past the bombers, past the wispy clouds, past the false blue sky. But at the same time, he knew, the way things were working here, that was probably impossible.
He lay there for a very long time, floating along in his own little world and watching this very strange one pass him by. He saw many, many soldiers being carried in and out of the field hospital. Many more were moving up and down the trench. They seemed oblivious, or unconcerned, about the explosions going off all around them.
Maybe they're all full of morphine, too, Hunter thought. How well could an army fight if it was totally doped up? Not very well, he concluded.
At some point, he reached into his undershirt and pulled out the notebook that the nurses had found. It, too, had the word Scribe on it. Somehow, though in slow motion, he was able to flip through it. It was filled with not only pages of notes but also rudimentary sketches of the battlefield around him. The writing, of course, was not his own, and the artist was a better illustrator than he could ever be, opium-induced or not.
It took him a while to thumb through the notes, lying on his back, higher than high, with the sounds of war going on all around him. But together the notes and drawings gave him a startling portrait of what was going on here. This world, artificial as it was, was engulfed in a war. A total war. From its equator to its poles and everywhere in between. The notes described the movements of enormous armies of men, numbering in the millions if the owner of the notebook was to be believed, and weapons of unimaginable, if conventional, destructive power. This was a "gun powder war," those were the words of the unknown scribe. A conflict in which the idea of a superbomb was for someone to collect, deliver, and detonate several thousand pounds of gunpowder on the enemy.
Bombers filled with gunpowder intentionally crashed into targets. Massive oceangoing ships, similarly loaded, were used to ram into enemy coastal fortifications. Monstrous artillery pieces lobbing five- and ten-ton shells filled with… what else? Gunpowder.
What a strange way to fight a war, Hunter thought.
But who was this war against? And what was its ultimate goal?
The scribe gave no clues on that first question. His writings were such that it was implied the reader knew just who the enemy was.
As to its goal? At least on that he'd been very clean this war was being fought over a single piece of land, in fact a mountain, with a castle on top of it. The mountain, referred to many times in the scribblings, was called Valhalla.
And where was it? As it turned out, very, very close to Hunter's present location. He knew this because on the last full page of the notebook there was a magnificent sketch of the mountain and the castle, and if Hunter lowered the notebook at just the right angle, he could see that very mountain and that very castle off in the distance, not twenty miles away.
Just his luck to wind up near ground zero in this very messy conflict.
He finally put the notebook back into h
is undershirt and laid his head down again.
How was he ever going to find the Mad Russian in this mess?
He drifted off into an opium sleep, waking only when an extra large explosion went off close by.
He rolled off the stretcher, and with the last of the morphine draining out of him, found himself back in pain and sucking mud in the trench again.
Two more explosions came and went, the second one raining down a small storm of rocks and debris that covered him head to toe. When he emerged from the rubble, he discovered a column of Nazi soldiers trooping by him, unaffected by the most recent artillery barrage. They appeared to be fresh legs: new uniforms, shiny helmets, huge hand weapons. A certain elan. And where were they headed? There was only one answer to that: the nose of this column was pointing directly to the mountain of Valhalla.
Hunter knew he could not lie there forever. At the very least, the bitchy doctor might spot him again, decide that he was indeed a spy of some sort, and carry through his threat to have him executed. And instinct told him his quest might be the same as these Nazi soldiers.
He managed to pull his quadtrol from his leg pocket and bring it up to his mouth. He asked it a simple question this time: "Has the Mad Russian been here lately?" The answer was yes. (So the guru had been right.) "When was he here?" was his second question. The quadtrol replied, "Not enough information."
"OK then, where was he, the last time he was here?" The quadtrol directed him to a point just off his nose. The mountain called Valhalla. What more proof did he need?
If you found yourself on this House of Mirrors ride, the whole idea was to get to Valhalla.
So Hunter waited until he saw the end of the long column of soldiers. When it finally passed him, he painfully got to his feet and fell in behind them.
They marched for hours.
Down through the nightmarish battlefield, following avenues of trench works mat stretched off in all directions. They came under artillery attack several times, and were bombed several more. These attacks were unsuccessful, though, because the column leaders, for reasons unknown, seemed to know minutes before that the assaults were coming and made sure their men were under cover before they arrived.
Good intelligence, Hunter thought.
No one questioned his tagging along. To the contrary, the soldiers kept him down when he had to be down, and got him moving when he had to be moving. They might have even saved his life a few times. But there was no such thing as a good Nazi. Hunter knew these guys were only helping him because they thought he was one of them.
They reached a shallow hill that divided the churned-up battlefield neatly in two. The long column of soldiers, weary now from the march, trudged over its summit. At about the same time, Hunter could hear the booming of large guns again. These were not the reports of the artillery pieces he'd become used to hearing, though. These represented guns of very high caliber, and the resulting explosions again told the tale of the gunpowder fetish that somehow ruled this world.
It took nearly an hour for Hunter and the tail end of the column to reach the top of this hill. What he saw on the other side was another scene right out of a fever dream. For as far as he could see, horizon to horizon, a titanic battle was in progress. Easily hundreds of thousands of soldiers were involved, maybe even a million — it was hard to tell with all the smoke and fire and utter confusion.
Most of the fighting was being done hand-to-hand, in very close quarters, among a crazy patchwork of trenches and dugouts and natural fortifications. The big guns were set up about a mile to the right of Hunter's position. There were six of them, on high stilts and treads, and indeed, their barrels seemed a mile long or more. Each time one of them fired, the muzzle flash was so bright and the shell discharge so violent, Hunter imagined he could actually see the round cut through the fabric of time and space, a tear in this false reality, a very subtle, almost hidden reminder that he still was in a very different place.
Beyond this hellish battlefield, ten miles away at least,
Hunter could see the approaches to the tall mountain, at the top of which sat the castle of Valhalla. It was all too obvious now that the capture of this castle was why this war was being fought. In the meat grinder of the battle below him, he could clearly see half of the troops fiercely defending the roads leading to the castle. The others were trying very hard to overwhelm them.
At the same time, the massive guns were pounding the mountain where the castle was located. With each shell hit, a small piece of Hell would rise up, spilling flames and the strange screech of hundreds being killed instantaneously. The column of soldiers in front of him did not hesitate, though. They double-timed it down the hill, right into the action, disappearing into the chaos, the smoke, and noise.
As the last of them started down the hill, one gave Hunter a hearty pat on the back and said, "You are here to write, aren't you, scribe? Then I suggest you start here."
Hunter waited for the entire column to march into the meat grinder, then he proceeded down the road to doom. It was obvious the fighting had been going on here for quite some time. There were bodies everywhere, but many were already skeletons. Some of these were locked in grotesque positions, a sick testament of the brutality that had been going on here. But then, strangely, Hunter saw something that did not compute. He was staring down at a trench full of skeletons, combat passing them by long ago. Two were locked in an embrace of death, both had plunged a long saber into the other apparently at the exact same moment. They'd died together.
But strangely, both were wearing Nazi badges on their uniforms. The uniforms themselves were different. One was blue like the soldiers in the column he'd followed wore. But the other was jet black. Yet both had Nazi regalia on them.
This didn't make any sense.
Hunter resisted the urge to get right down into the trench with the dead; he was curious, but not morbidly so. He continued down the road instead, heading slowly for the thick of the battle. Exactly what he was going to do once he got close to the action, he didn't have a clue. He noticed, though, there were no soldiers coming back up the road. He'd been in combat before. He'd been on battlefields not unlike this one. Always there were wounded and deserters heading in the opposite direction from the fighting. But not now. The road was empty but for him.
Whoever was fighting down here, it was a fight to the death. He was soon within a half mile of the front line. The stink of cordite was almost overwhelming. He came upon many more examples of two Nazi soldiers locked in a death embrace; each one was more baffling than the next. What was going on here? Were the Nazis in the blue uniforms battling impostors, enemy soldiers who were dressed in black Nazi uniforms? That didn't make sense, either, not with a battle of this gargantuan scale. But what could be another explanation?
Suddenly his ears were pierced right down to the drums. The noise was so intense, and came so quickly, Hunter found his hands on the side of his head, trying to keep the sonic blast out. He dropped to his knees as an enormous shadow went over him an instant later.
It was one of the bombers. The ones he'd seen flying overhead at very high altitude. But this monster was coming in no more than one hundred feet off the ground. It was decorated with many swastikas, and it had bombs attached all along its belly and wings. In a world of disturbing visions, this one was especially so. The soldiers all over the battlefield had turned their weapons up toward it and were firing at it. Suddenly the air itself seemed full of lead.
But something else was wrong here. This huge aircraft — its wingspan had to be at least 500 feet long — was on fire. Its fuselage, its tail section, and more than half its dozen propeller engines were all in flames. It wasn't swooping low to bomb the troops in front of him, though. It was in the process of crashing.
And the reason for this was soon evident. Trailing the plane down was a small squadron of fighter aircraft, weird designs with weird engines propped atop their fuselages and racks of missiles and machine guns taking up the entire underside of
their wings. These aircraft were still firing into the bomber, even though the plane was about to impact at any second. But again, despite the impending doom, Hunter could see the insignia on these attacking planes… and incredible as it seemed, yes, they, too, were marked with swastikas.
He dove into the nearest trench, knocking the dead away so he might hang on to one more moment of life. The big airplane hit a second later, not 500 feet down the road from him. He saw the tail section break off and cartwheel backward right over his head. A string of crewmen, all of them engulfed in flames, came tumbling out of the resulting hole.
The impact of the airplane shook the ground so much, many of the skeletons around Hunter fell to pieces. But then, a heartbeat later, there was another, even fiercer explosion. This one even more powerful.
Hunter looked up through the bones and saw a sea of red flame go over the trench. The heat was so intense, it sucked up some of those skeletons that had not turned to dust and took them away with it. It was all Hunter could do to stay down, hug the ground, for to be caught up in that firestorm would have surely been the end of him, fantasy world or not. The noise was almost as horrible. His ears were bleeding again. And it went on for what seemed like forever. It felt like his skin was peeling away, the heat was so intense. His battered eardrums were ready to burst. Where the hell was sister morphine now that he really needed her?
Then, just like that, it was over. No more sound. No more fire. No more skeletons getting one last free ride into the heavens. Hunter stayed down low. One minute. Two minutes. Three.
Finally, he got the gumption to lift his head, to look out over the top of the trench.
But he was met with a cloud of cordite before he was halfway to the edge. He fell back down to the bottom of the trench, near suffocation, the stink was so thick. He held his breath another minute, two, three. Until he could hold it no more. If the next deep breath had been more cordite, he would die on the spot.