by James Somers
Symptomatic
For a short while it had seemed like nothing at all had been administered to the Jew lying upon Josef Mengele’s operating table. Adolf had watched as the doctor opened the IV tubing valve, allowing the blood to flow into and throughout the man’s emaciated form. One half hour later, nothing of consequence had occurred.
But then the man grew fevered. Adolf sat at a small table with Mengele, drinking coffee. The room grew noticeably warmer. The doctor had noticed this also. Adolf turned to look at the patient.
Josef was grinning like the cat that ate the canary. “It’s beginning,” he said.
The Jew was flush now and trembling. His arms and legs were bound to the table with thick leather straps. Presumably, the man would thrash about as the serum overcame him. Josef stood expectantly. Adolf unconsciously did likewise.
He wasn’t fearful of what might happen. After all, Adolf had faced far worse things—creatures whose unbridled fury would cause an entire platoon of hardened soldiers to run screaming in terror. These he had killed with his bare hands in his younger days.
The patient’s trembling now turned to full blown tetanus, his muscles straining and pulling his quivering form rigid. He cried out then, bloody slobber spraying as his jaw clenched down tight upon his tongue. The end of the appendage fell onto his bare chest as the Jew’s head thrashed back and forth, his eyes wide and wild with rage.
Adolf backed away, remembering Josef’s words about the transmission of this disease through contact with bodily fluids. He knew he should have been immune—the serum had been derived from his own blood—but that knowledge was little comfort while watching the man transform into an enraged beast.
“Stop this,” Adolf said suddenly.
Mengele looked queerly at him. “Sir?”
“Stop this at once,” Adolf said more forcefully.
The doctor seemed not to know what to make of his Fuhrer’s reaction to the experiment. Everything was going according to plan.
“Please do not be distressed,” Mengele said. “He’s only a Jew.”
Adolf gave Josef an incredulous look. “I’m not worried about him,” he bellowed over the growing din. “I just don’t want it loose.”
As if to punctuate this concern, the right wrist strap came loose from its mount on the operating table. One hand was now free. The Jew came up off of the table as much as was possible. His legs were still bound at the ankles and his left wrist also.
Adolf and Mengele both backed away now.
“I thought you said those straps would hold it,” Adolf said accusingly. “Put him down now.”
The doctor turned to one of his work tables, fiddling with a vial of some drug that Adolf did not recognize. Josef inserted a syringe and needle combination through the stopper on the bottle and withdrew a small amount of fluid. He put down the vial again and held the needle out before him.
Looking at Adolf he said, “This is cyanide.”
The ravening Jew was reaching frantically for them, scrabbling on the table top, trying desperately to get to them. Bloody mucus spilled over his lower lip, down across its chin and onto the emaciated bare chest. Behind the blood-washed teeth, the stump of the gnawed tongue waved back and forth at them like a severed tentacle.
“Do it,” Adolf hissed.
Josef hesitated. He wasn’t sure where he might get hold of the man without coming into reach of his free arm. The man was flailing hard to be free of the restraints.
Adolf noticed the doctor’s hesitation. “You’ve inoculated yourself, haven’t you?”
“Of course,” Josef said. “I just don’t want to have my hand taken off in the process.”
Adolf rolled his eyes. He reached for the syringe and took it carefully from Mengele’s hand. “I’ll do it then,” he said.
Coming to the foot of the bed, Adolf shoved the needle straight through the bottom of the struggling man’s foot. He held it there for a moment, puzzled. Mengele’s patient had not reacted to a piece of metal nearly the size of a nail being shoved into the arch of his foot. He was still thrashing, but nothing had changed.
Josef was watching this also. He had seen similar results in the rats he had given the serum to. They ignored pain. Almost as if the brain could not comprehend the sensation any longer. He also knew what would happen when the cyanide was injected.
Adolf depressed the syringe plunger, forcing the cyanide into the man’s body. He withdrew the needle and tossed it back onto the table, waiting. They watched the writhing, thrashing Jew. After minutes, nothing had happened.
“Are you sure you drew up cyanide?” Adolf asked when there was no change in the man. “He should have been dead in under a minute.”
“Seconds,” Josef said, grinning at his patient.
Adolf glanced over at him. “You knew?”
Mengele nodded. “Medications have very little effect. Poisons are the same. The rats could not be killed apart from catastrophic physical damage.”
A dull cracking of bone and tearing of sinew resounded throughout the room. The raving maniac on the table had torn his shoulder out of joint completely in his attempt to free himself. The wrist strap still held firm. Now the arm dangled stiffly from skin pulled taut at the shoulder. The joint had been severed, but the elastic skin was still intact, giving the beastly man more maneuverability without freeing him.
Josef nodded thoughtfully. “Amazing isn’t it?” he asked. “Even then he didn’t notice the pain. An entire shoulder joint pulled apart and he doesn’t care a thing for it.”
The Fuhrer was not as amused as Mengele.
“Enough,” Adolf said. He removed a long black-bladed dagger from his belt beneath the lab coat. He strode quickly to the man, fainted with his outstretched left hand to draw the maniac’s attention, and then struck down into the chest with his knife. Blood boiled from the terrible wound, but the man kept fighting, trying to get his teeth into Adolf’s arm.
He had stabbed directly into the man’s heart, but the man kept fighting. Slowly, and only after a great deal of blood had poured out of his chest, did the crazed Jew begin to lose his momentum. His body spasmed finally and then went slack. Until that final moment, his teeth had continued gnashing, his hands reaching, wanting to get at them until his last breath expired.
Adolf stood with the dagger in his bloody gloved hands for a long moment. Josef stood with him as they stared at the corpse on the operating table. The eyes were open wide but now still. The one arm was disjointed at the shoulder, the head of the humerus pushing hard at the skin as the body had collapsed in a twisted state. The ankles were bloody also, the skin sheared away on the leather straps.
“Sir?” Josef finally asked. “Are you all right?”
Adolf started, seeming to wake from a dream. He held up the dagger, looked at it and then let it fall to the floor where it clattered against the tiles, splattering them with drops of coagulating blood. He wasn’t breathless, or terrified, only very still.
When he spoke finally, he said, “What happens to the world, if this cannot be contained?”
“We will only use it on the Allies,” Josef stated. “We can keep it contained. In fact, we can contain it geographically by unleashing it in North America first. The Allies cannot stand against us without the involvement of the Americans. They’ll have to recall their troops immediately in order to deal with the growing outbreak.”
“Matters at home would take precedent over Europe,” Adolf said, furthering the thought. “But then what? Leave North America as a plague continent?”
“The vaccine can be synthesized from your blood, my Fuhrer,” Josef said. “While you live, the effects can be reversed.”
Adolf smiled at this. “But by then their governments will have collapsed and their cities will be in ruins. All the better a state for my army to come across the sea and take over once I’ve conquered Europe.”
“Exactly,” Josef said confidently.
Adolf looked back at the dead patient. There was
still one roadblock to implementing this plan. He could still be overruled by the Fallen. It was time to speak with his father’s father. He only hoped the angel would listen to reason.