Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch

by Lawston Pettymore

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright 2021 by Lawston A. Pettymore

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For more information on this book, the author, the editors, or the screenplay, contact lawstonpettymore@gmail.com

  Jacket design by Damonza

  Revelation 8:10 King James Version

  And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;

  And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.

  Amerika Rakete

  A stack and cluster configuration of advanced versions of Germany’s Aggregat 4 rocket, known in the West as the V2, resulting in two boost stages and two final stages believed capable of placing payloads in Earth orbit.

  Numbers Station

  A shortwave radio station, many located in Czechoslovakia, reciting a sequence of numbers on a set time schedule, often in a female voice, most prolific during the Cold War era, thought to be a means of communication between intelligence agencies and operatives in the field.

  CONTENTS

  Aggregat 1: Normalization of Deviance

  Aggregat 2: The Amerika Rackete

  Aggregat 3: Sequelae

  Aggregat 4: Dead Man Switch

  About the Author

  Almost none of the events in this story actually happened. Almost all of them could have.

  Lawston A. Pettymore

  To my siblings

  AGGREGAT 1

  NORMALIZATION OF DEVIANCE

  April 30th, 19451

  Sister Kathe, of the 35th Teutonic Order of Olaf, dispatched by the Vatican for the management of undesirable children, and subsequently weaponized by the Reich, as the Reich had weaponized everything else, came for my twin brother, Pyotr, during what should have been our period of Schlaf und Ruhe2, though the assault by the battalion of Soviet soldiers above made any Schlaf impossible, and Ruhe pointless.

  Pyotr, with the rest of her brood of 9-year old’s pressed ourselves into the smallest possible a pile of interlocking elbows, knees, and leg braces forming a scrum of cripples, using one another as shields against the spray of concrete shrapnel bursting from the far wall in our dormitory, now bare, their posters and plaques of party slogans and propaganda having been stripped and burned days ago for heat.

  The Soviets were depth-charging us from above with some unholy explosive, determined to break into the four-thousand square meter, four-pointed star-shaped underground concrete city, called Die Kuppel3, with its distinctive dome-shaped structure at the center, itself the size of a factory, our home for the last three years, and which we usually just called “the Bunker.”

  I saw, rather than heard Sister Kathe’s lips mutter “Pyotr, Pyotr,” over the crash of sinks knocked off their mountings, doors twisting off their hinges, lightbulbs bursting with each detonation, as she sorted through what resembled in the browning light more a tangle of sweaty leather straps, bridles, and other sundry tack of a horse stable than a tangle of boys seeking shelter.

  Without waiting for Pyotr to declare himself, or for one of us to surrender him, she jerked forearms free to expose the tattooed serial number inscribed on them, comparing it to one written in pen on her left hand. She would have recognized Pyotr easily under normal circumstances, him being the star of the training sessions over the last three years, but in this light and with our malnutrition, no one looked the same anymore.

  Her order’s habit was darkened at the hems from the puddles of various fluids seeping onto the concrete floor. The Eagle and Swastika embroidery, unique to the Daughters of Olaf, were barely recognizable on her guimpe and wimple4, the guimpe looking more like a rag on the floor of a tractor repair shed than a holy vestment, but of course no one in Die Kuppel had seen soap nor fresh water since the Soviet siege began ten days ago.

  At the time, none of the children knew what the Soviets prized as trophies inside the Bunker. After their first demand for us to surrender, Sister Kathe was overheard saying that the prize was “her vagina,” though this was not much of a trophy in our minds as she shared it regularly with the SS guards, and even some of the scientists, for various favors. Her battlement could be breached with a mere sip of wine, a brick of real chocolate, wurst of any type, even the occasional kielbasa for which she and her trophy vagina would entertain Die Kuppel staff, and afterwards eat. We heard that the Russians would take anything that was not nailed down, blow up anything that was, and fuck both either way. Were we the trophies today? Was that her mission, to trade Pyotr for fresh air, water, and kielbasa?

  When she finally found Pyotr’s matching tattoo, she extracted his entire bony self from the tangle assisted by the rod always hanging from her Gürtel5, swat wrists and cheeks when we made mistakes in our therapy training - too slow to close a switch – smack! Rotate the wrong knob or the right knob in the wrong direction – jab between the ribs!

  Except for Pyotr. He never once felt the business end of that damn stick. He was the star. He learned the sequences of responses to the shapes on the view screens with just one demonstration from the scientists. He was better than me at everything. Surely, he would be cured of polio, even though neither of us had any polio symptoms. We were never certain why we were separated from our parents on that train platform three years ago and brought here. Some doctor was convinced we shared some congenital or genetic flaw, and the Sisters explained that this “flaw” was polio.

  My dorm mates were all too happy not to be chosen for whatever Sister Kathe’s unannounced purposes were, and they had no desire to attract her attention. What this bitch had in mind could never be good, even in the best of times when we had plenty of food and fresh water.

  I climbed out of the pile, willingly relinquishing us both to her. I got to my feet, made difficult by the growing detritus of metal and glass shards on the floor, the remains of the highest form of technology by the most advanced civilization on the planet.

  Except for the occasional swat with her rod, Sister Kathe ignored me, focusing instead on dragging my twin brother by the wrist, who limped, and sometimes hopped to keep up, out of boy’s dorm into the hallway, turning left, past the apparently empty Mädchenwohnheim6, past the group showers where the SS guards helped soap up the little glistening white and brown bodies of the children, boys and girls together, lingering at the fleshy parts, back when soap and hot water were plentiful, and the children still had fleshy parts.

  Grasping Pyotr’s wrist in white, bloodless knuckles, she dragged him, with me stumbling behind, over debris hiding in the shadows that were cast with each flash of the remaining lights. We weaved through the broken overturned furniture, not worth looting, and over a corpse, an SS guard who held an empty vodka bottle in one hand and used the other to shoot himself in the mouth using what must have been his pistol, but which had since been looted, along with everything in his hastily ripped pockets.

  I recognized the dead man as the SS guard Boltoff, but the children knew him as Flasche Mann7, because he showed off his strength to the Die Kuppel residents by wrapping an empty vodka bottle in a towel, crushing it in the left fist, reminding with a boast to the startled audience, that he was right-handed. We also knew him to be fond of bedding with the polio girls and even with the Schwesterkriegerine, according to one boy whose name I forget.


  “Power does what it wants,” he would say, as he leered at the staff, or us.

  With a bit of irony, I noted that Boltoff had met his demise before his vodka bottle had. The numerous remaining empty vodka bottles of Die Kuppel were a bit safer now, even as his former audience, now desperately trying to escape, certainly was not.

  I did not linger on the damage the 9 mm bullet had rent to the back of his head, and had to catch up to Sister Kathe, still dragging Pyotr down the corridor, herself not pausing to mourn the corpse of her former tryst partner. Pyotr’s resistance was noticeably waning; Sister Kathe was winning this battle. I turned a corner in the corridor just in time to see the pair enter the Iron Lung Training Lab, where the nine-year-old cohorts spent most of our waking time.

  The white and black enameled steel training cylinders were standing on end, laced like corsets with electrical and hydraulic cables, and studded with controls and instruments used by the scientists to test us, the patients, inside them. The entrance was a round lid, like a manhole cover, but with robust moving deadbolts of the type found on lids of a pressure cooker, or hatch on a submarine, with the diameter of a wheel of gouda that Pyotr and I, along with our mother, would make on the farm, a diameter only a thin nine-year-old could wiggle through. There were several of these cylinders in the room, each looted for anything of value that could be traded on the outside by the fleeing SS guards and scientists, which was the penultimate act of abandoning Die Kuppel. Stripped bare for purposes of possible barter, these enameled training machines, allegedly there to save our lives, were not even able to save their own.

  The final rite performed by the guards and scientists was to replace their uniforms and lab coats with the apolitical vestments of office workers, tradesmen, even farmers. I remember one bulky guard seeking to join the sisterhood, cock swinging as he slipped a nun’s habit over his head. I did not know or particularly care where the Schwesterkriegerine who previously owned it might have been. I took note of his being careful to rip off the Eagle and Swastika before wading through the muck on the floor, still wearing very un-nun-like jackboots, seeking the nearest egress whose locations were closely guarded, and knowing on the other side were Russian soldiers in terrible humor.

  I tripped over the cables and broken glass, falling to the floor as another blast shook it from underneath my feet, and was not able to reach Sister Kathe or Pyotr before the pair disappeared behind a steel door, being held open by one of the scientists whom I recognized as Herr Dr. Todtenhausen. I lurched forward thinking to squeeze through the slight gap, but he promptly slammed the door shut, nearly on my fingers. This was the last I would ever see of Pyotr, and the first time we had ever been separated in all our nine years of life.

  This was not, however, my last encounter with Sister Kathe, nor was it the last the world would know of Pyotr.

  Nicolaus: May 1st, 1945

  I slumped down on my side of the iron door, while calling Pyotr’s name in a quiet whimper. The few remaining intact lightbulbs pulsed as dying embers through a spectrum of browns, then yellow, then out, then a burst of unnaturally bright white a few seconds later. I imagined them gasping for electricity as a drowning man would for oxygen.

  Listening against the door, I could hear sounds of metal against metal—gears grinding, doors clanging shut, and motors spinning up to speed then slowing down. I could hear muffled voices, picking out some of the words yelled above the machine noises, such as “surgery,” and “Sequenzer8.” I sat up as I realized that the fluids on the floor, smelling of turpentine, sewage, ammonia, with overtones of black treacle, taking on a pus-yellow color, coating me entirely and stinging my skin. I would have recognized Pyotr’s voice immediately, but I never once heard it. If he were conscious, he would have called out to me. We have never been this separated in our entire lives.

  Except for the commotion on the other side of the door, the explosions had subsided, and I did not see nor hear anyone in at least an hour. Perhaps the escaping staff had convinced the Russians that nothing of value remained inside? Or perhaps everyone outside was dead, leaving me on this side of the door, and Pyotr, Kathe, and Dr. Todtenhausen on the other side as the only survivors on the planet?

  My adrenal glands exhausted and dry, I slumped, exhausted, the hum of machinery lulling me into a deep, but troubled sleep, and I dreamed about hopeless and irrational flight narratives that one dreamed when under stress. A klaxon sputtered erratically, bringing me back to life to see corridors and this anteroom entirely lit by the red light of battery powered torches, the overhead lights completely exhausted. The Bunker was signaling to the remaining occupants that it was dying, just as my own body was signaling the same – tunneled vision, blood pounding skull pain, thirst beyond all reason.

  I sat cross-legged on the asbestos tiles covering the concrete floor, the level of the fluids reached my knees. I tasted the fluid still rising on the floor, hoping some of it might be potable. It had a metallic taste, pungent and acidic, with a viscosity approaching that of custard. My stomach tried to vomit, but there was nothing but dryness to heave. I used what voice I had left to call out for Pyotr. Perhaps he could still be spared from whatever Dr. Todtenhausen and Sister Kathe were doing to him, and almost instantly regretted doing so.

  My cry for Pyotr attracted an adult from the hallway. It was one of the scientists working at Die Kuppel on whatever it was that scientists worked on behind those closed doors, already having discarded his lab coat. “Zerrissen, Raynor,” was readable under the Eagle and Swastika of his ID badge still hanging on a lanyard around his neck.

  On his shoulders was a young girl, her left leg in a brace—one of the polio trainees. Thus began my long acquaintance with this man, who, after the loss of my twin brother, procured for me a peculiar little sister, Halina, in his place.

  AGGREGAT 2

  THE AMERIKA RACKETE9

  Dead Men Switch: May 1st, 1945

  Little Halina wrapped herself around Zerrissen’ s head and shoulders like a balaclava while he prodded and poked at handles and doors, producing keys from his ill-fitting, ill-gotten, wool jacket. Halina, silent with the fearless innocence of a child, reached up to catch the cascade of bright sparks that occasionally erupted from the ceiling light fixtures - harmless as fireflies in her mind.

  With one hand, Zerrissen managed to open a padlock on a steel door and swing the door open, motioning me through. He ducked slightly to clear little Halina’s head through the oval threshold above and did not bother to close the door—what was the point anymore? We had entered a portion of Die Kuppel that I had never seen before. The floor here was not yet covered by the fluid seepage, and the air was a bit easier to breath, though the detonations, which had resumed, sounded much closer. We must have been near the surface.

  Zerrissen stopped and pulled me back at the sight of dimly lit figures ahead of us, moving jerkily in the flashing ceiling lights like an old silent movie. I recognized one of the shapes as a dog. A German shepherd. It was Geronimo, Todtenhausen’s constant companion, but whose condition was no better than Die Kuppel itself. It had open sores, matted fur, parasites, and bleeding gums; all manner of grief that descend on a malnourished canine. The impression of his ruined coat would return to me, years later when patronizing a pornographic movie house and the house lights were suddenly turned on by the local police, stripping me of my anonymity, being arrested for crimes against the State. Seeing the infirmed carpet on the theater floor for the first time, I could not avoid thinking it a statement of my condition, as it was Geronimo’s now. But that is getting ahead of the story by half.

  Despite what must have been chronic pain, thirst, and hunger, Geronimo was completely prepared to defend his master, baring the two or three incisors that had not yet fallen out. Standing beside it was Sister Kathe, draped in fresh vestments, a set she must have been saving for a special occasion, minus the swastikas.

  Zerrissen took in the scene but reached the same conclusion as I did. If Geronimo were here, Tod
tenhausen could not be more than a few meters away. Lights from the ceiling remained on long enough for us to take in the scene. There was a corpse on the floor, its clothes mostly removed, with an adult male hovering over it, going through it pockets with urgency.

  “Todtenhausen,” whispered Zerrissen.

  Hearing his name, Todtenhausen stood up, tossed a now empty wallet on the corpse, smiled thinly, and nodded. In a flicker of the light, I recognized the corpse on the floor. It was Herr Arzt 10Gorgass, one of the few actual medical doctors on staff in the Bunker, a pediatrician, and rather kindly. He would tend to us when we needed dental work, or a pill, or a shot. He was gentle. He would give us candy.

  Glancing at Halina and me, Todtenhausen seemed amused. “Zerrissen,” he said, his gaze taking in Zerrissen’s attire. “I see civilian clothes are all the fashion this season. Are you a shopkeeper now?”

  “I see Swastikas are out of fashion this season,” Zerrissen retorted, referring to Kathe’s clean clothing, never taking his eyes off Geronimo, whom he knew would attack upon a single command from his master, especially when it meant fresh meat for the first time in days.

  “Let us pass.”

  Todtenhausen looked towards the exit that he surmised Zerrissen intended to egress from, then he thought a moment, “What are your intentions with the children, Herr Zerrissen?”

  Zerrissen ignored the question, taking us all a step forward. Geronimo growled softly, but with unmistakable menace.

  “Do you hope to trade them to the Russians for safe passage? They’re just outside you know. They probably even hear us if their microphones are still attached. I understand they like little children even more than their vodka or whale blubber.”