Memory Hunter

by Frank Morin

  “Not as annoying as my enemies.”

  “Don’t try my patience,” Mai Luan snapped.

  Gunfire sounded from inside the building behind Mai Luan. She cocked an ear to listen. “My destiny awaits. Prove your loyalty and remain here, and you’ll be richly rewarded.”

  Sarah opened her mouth to reply, but Mai Luan silenced her with a raised finger. “Only once do I make the offer, Sarah. If you choose to enter the building, I will destroy you and everyone you’ve ever loved.”

  Mai Luan turned and rushed into the building.

  Sarah watched her go, terrified to follow, but horrified to think what might become of her if she chose to obey.

  “Sarah, are you all right?”

  Alter jogged around the sentry pillbox, looking battered but determined. He stumbled once and winced, clutching at his ribs.

  “You’re one to talk,” Sarah said, running to his side to offer support. “That hit would’ve killed most people.”

  “It hurt,” he admitted. “But I’ll be fine in a few minutes. Where’d she go?”

  “Inside after Gregorios.”

  “We have to hurry.” He scooped up his machine gun and Sarah retrieved her shotgun.

  Together, they entered the building and started down the stairs into darkness.

  Learning the truth of the facetakers was the pivotal moment of my life. To think I can not only carve out the perfect society, and purge lower forms of human life, but live again as the perfect man and enjoy the fruits of my conquest. This is the truth all great men have learned. It is not enough to take the world, one must have a plan to keep it.

  ~Adolf Hitler

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Gregorios stepped through the concealed door and carefully closed it behind him. Asoka knew how to find it, but Gregorios didn’t have to make it easy for the man. He descended a long concrete stairway into darkness. At the bottom he faced a blank iron door illuminated only by the tiny bit of light that leaked under the bottom edge. This was the most secret part of the bunker, the area that the allies never discovered in the long years after the war. It was where the real work was done.

  The door opened to reveal a long, low-ceilinged room completely sheathed in gleaming stainless steel and brightly lit by thirty-seven naked Mazda bulbs. Gregorios marched through the room without glancing at the medical beds lining both sides of the central aisle. He had seen enough of the swollen, mutilated corpses to last several lifetimes. He had witnessed many atrocities over the centuries, but nothing compared to the cold brutality of the Nazis. The clinical approach they took to exploring the human body and to experimenting on both the living and the dead was unique. They tested the limits of human endurance through various forms of torture that took brutality to an entirely new level.

  The room smelled like a charnel house and he gagged on the stale air. The approaching Russian troops had finally forced a termination to the work performed in the chamber. Racks of knives, picks, hooks, and electric prods stood in gleaming rows in their custom-built toolboxes that loomed near each of the beds, waiting for fresh victims. With a thought, he removed the bodies. The room needed to be hosed down or, better yet, fire-bombed. Sometimes the only answer was cleansing by fire.

  On the far side of the room, he pushed aside a tall rolling cabinet. The vials of carefully labeled blood and other fluids clinked together but he was careful not to knock them off the shelves. Behind the cabinet was a simple wooden door.

  He pushed it open and stepped into a small room paneled in unfinished wood and paved with ancient stone. In the center of the floor gaped a hole nearly five feet in diameter covered with a heavy, iron grate.

  Gregorios heaved the grate aside. It squealed on rusted hinges before falling aside with a boom that reverberated through the small room. The ancient pit fell away into blackness. He had dropped a stone down it once and listened for five long seconds before the echoes of it splashing into water reached back up.

  He figured the hole had to extend at least four to five hundred feet down. The Germans had rediscovered the pit during excavation of the bunker. Hitler’s chief medical researcher, who headed up the torture division, had been thrilled with the find. So many possibilities.

  Against the back wall rested several old-style soul coffins. Gregorios appropriated one and flipped open the lid to reveal a simple, lead-lined interior. He lifted the psychopathic dictator’s soulmask, and for the first time listened to the indignant prattle and useless commands spouting in a constant stream from that whisper-voice. Sometimes not being able to run out of breath could be simply annoying.

  “You will do my bidding,” the whisper-voice shrieked.

  “No, your bidding has done enough damage. Now you pay the price.”

  He shoved the soulmask into the coffin, latched it, and turned toward the grate. In the true memory, he didn’t bother with the coffin. He had re-lived the memory many many times, although he usually tried to wake up before reaching this point. Even so, he had stood above the hole and dropped that soulmask enough times for the moment to forever burn into his mind. Floating on its rainbow mist, the soulmask fell more slowly, forcing him to wait more than a full minute before the soft echoes of the eventual splashdown climbed back out of the hole.

  Hitler had stood in that very spot on quite a few occasions and watched as personal enemies requiring special deaths were pushed into the hole. The sides were mostly smooth, with just enough jagged points to guarantee hands and feet were shredded to the bone. The condemned always scrambled to halt or at least slow their fall, and their screams were particularly pathetic. Several of them survived the splashdown only to suffer a lingering death.

  Apparently the water was pretty deep, but there must have been at least one spot on the rock wall to cling to. A couple of those poor souls had lingered for days treading water and clinging to the side, bleeding out slowly into the uncaring waters. Eventually exhaustion beat them down and dragged them under.

  Gregorios had disposed of countless enemies through the years, but dropping that fractured soul down that hole might just be the most perfect condemnation he had ever devised. He hated Berlin, the lingering sense of responsibility for not having acted sooner, and all the associated memories, but the moment he dropped the soulmask atoned for much of what he’d allowed to happen through those years.

  The dispossessed soul didn’t breathe so it couldn’t drown. Hitler would languish among his victims for many many years, driven mad-well, more completely mad-by the solitude of dispossession. Eventually his soul force would dissipate and he would die, but it would take a very long time.

  A fitting end for that monster.

  Gregorios fought the current of the memory that drove him to complete his task. He knew deep down that it was that moment that would reveal the master rune. Instead, he turned from the pit and shoved the coffin against the far wall, piling the other empty coffins around it.

  The lead casing inside the tiny coffin would make it harder for Mai Luan to sense the location of the soulmask. She’d expect him to hide it as far from the hole as possible, so that too should buy them some time until he defeated Asoka.

  With his task completed, he turned to leave, planning to ambush Asoka in the warren of rooms above. Before he could reach the door leading back into the torture chamber, the wall in front of him rippled and dissolved into smoke. Another will assaulted his control over the scene and he clutched his head against a stabbing headache.

  Mai Luan and Asoka stood in the center of the torture room, barely forty feet away. Asoka had already forced a different reality upon the large room. People hung on racks or bled out on the many tables, although no staff worked those moaning victims. They were just window dressing for the deranged mind that had wrested control. Either Asoka or Mai Luan appeared to want to twist the reality of the memory into something darker, even more evil than he remembered. He wasn’t sure if that would affect the master rune by seeking a darker truth, but he didn’t know it wasn’t possible
either.

  He wouldn’t allow it.

  Mai Luan could drive Asoka’s memories, but it was Asoka’s will that held sway over their connection to this historical moment. His was the mind that Gregorios had to fight.

  Gregorios had beaten him before. He would do it again.

  As he bent his will to fighting Asoka for control, his old friend-turned-enemy staggered and his face paled with the strain. The bleeding bodies flickered and disappeared.

  Gregorios snarled with the effort as he battered aside Asoka’s will. He could feel the memory firming around him, linking more and more to his will alone.

  Then his control slipped.

  Asoka fought back with far more strength of will than before. It felt like Mai Luan was somehow fortifying Asoka’s mind. She approached several steps, a smile of victory on her face. She wore the same German uniform she had the first time he saw her here, but also sported a bluetooth earpiece.

  “Where’s the soulmask,” Gregorios, she asked.

  “Where you’ll never find it,” he lied.

  “I’m glad you decided to join us,” she said. “My research suggested your memories would prove the most accurate and the best source to find the master rune.”

  Gregorios had no idea where Alter and Sarah had ended up. He hoped they weren’t dead. He’d never fight off both Asoka and Mai Luan alone.

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” he said with false confidence. “You’ve worked so long to get here, seeing you fail means so much more.”

  “Finish it,” she snarled.

  The force of her will, driven by that command and buttressed by the natural current of the dream forced him to turn toward the pile of soul coffins. He took one halting step in that direction before he could stop himself. Gregorios stood there, every muscle quivering with the strain of not moving. It was like trying to stand against an avalanche.

  In a direct nevron confrontation in the real world, Mai Luan would sweep aside the strength of his soul as easy as brushing away a fly, but Gregorios actually managed to hold his ground. It required every ounce of will power, honed over thousands of years, but he managed it.

  It took a second for him to realize how he did it. This was his memory. Mai Luan could apply her will upon it only through the umbilical rune link to Asoka. Her connection was far more tenuous than his, and it must limit her influence over the memoryscape.

  She was a passenger here. He was the driver.

  Gregorios snarled and ever so slowly twisted away from the rear wall.

  Mai Luan charged, her expression a mask of seething fury.

  She closed with terrifying speed while he turned to meet her with the reflexes of a frozen slug.

  This was going to hurt.

  First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you with sword or rune or nevra core. And then you win.

  ~Mahatma Gandhi

  Chapter Sixty

  “Captain, Anaru and his team are approaching the fourth floor landing.” Domenico spoke softly from his position in the stairwell below the third floor landing. He carried a portable video camera with a wireless connection that fed the tablet in Tomas’ hands.

  Tomas watched from Quentin’s workshop where the two of them were preparing the equipment he’d need to initiate his backup plan if Anaru’s insertion failed. He silently urged his men to succeed, wishing he could lead them. No doubt Behram and his enforcers would recognize him, so he was forced to watch while his men walked into danger.

  “Halt.” Behram stepped into the fourth floor doorway when Anaru began ascending the last flight. “No unauthorized personnel are allowed up here.”

  “I know my orders,” Anaru responded. “But we’ve received word of an increased threat level. My men and I will supplement your forces.”

  “Negative,” Behram said. “This level is secure. Distribute your men throughout the rest of the building, but leave this area to us.”

  Anaru continued his slow approach. He was tantalizingly close. A quick rush, and he could reach Behram. “The rest of the command is already deployed. The Tenth has always protected the council. I mean to do so today too.”

  Behram raised his rifle and Tomas clearly heard the click when he switched off the safety. “Take one more step, and I will shoot you down, Captain.”

  “You don’t want me for an enemy,” Anaru growled.

  “My orders are clear,” Behram said, looking unaffected by the giant angry Maori ten steps below him. “No one passes.”

  Another enforcer stepped into the doorway beside Behram and spoke quickly, but so soft Tomas couldn’t hear.

  He tapped his earpiece to activate it. “Anaru, hold position until we hear what they’re talking about.”

  Behram nodded once and the second enforcer disappeared. “You can do something useful for me after all. We need a medical team up here ASAP.”

  “Are council members in danger?” Anaru asked.

  “Negative. Send the team now. We’ll free up an elevator for them. Have them bring a full trauma treatment package.”

  “Do it,” Tomas ordered.

  Anaru nodded and retreated down the steps. Only when he reached the third floor hallway did he speak into his tactical throat mike. “I could’ve taken him, sir.”

  “Perhaps, but he offered us a chance. Order up the medical team, and find me a pair of enforcers that Behram and his men haven’t met.”

  “Good idea,” Domenico said. “We’ll slip them in with the medical team.”

  “The council will recognize them,” Anaru said.

  “It’s possible,” Tomas admitted. “But order them to wear surgical masks and keep their heads down.”

  “I volunteer,” Domenico said.

  “No,” Anaru countered. “You’re too well known to them.”

  “Anaru’s right,” Tomas said. “Get a couple of volunteers they won’t recognize. Get them into that medical team.”

  Quentin added, “I’ll send up a few miniature video cameras to attach to the gear. That’ll get us a live feed from the council room.”

  “Good idea.”

  Tomas passed the information along and left his men to organize the insertion team. He guessed Mai Luan or Asoka were the ones requiring medical assistance. That meant the memory battle had commenced. He needed to stack the situation even more in his favor.

  “Anaru, position a team on the roof of that elevator when it comes down for the medical team.”

  “Already thought of that,” Anaru said. “I’ve got two more squads preparing to scale the other elevator shafts. They can blow sections of the floors and get inside fast when we make our move.”

  “Good thinking,” Tomas said. “Domenico, I want you and five men down here on the double. We’re going to initiate plan B at the same time and hit them from as many directions as possible.”

  Quentin handed him a black helmet with the letters SWAT stenciled in white letters across the back. “This will keep the population in line.”

  “Excellent. Once we get the teams outfitted, I need you back at the mansion.”

  “My place is here,” Quentin insisted.

  “I know, but the memory fighting’s started and they’re a man short.”

  “I’ll take the helicopter,” Quentin said.

  Tomas turned back to the contraption on the table. “First, show me how this thing makes me Spider Man.”

  Modern weapons are a marvel. The Tenth, fully armed, could defeat any historical army. And yet, sometimes I worry that it’s too easy to kill now. It takes a strength of character lacking in many first-life soldiers to value the soul of an enemy even when forced to take their lives.

  ~Tomas

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Gregorios refused to die at Mai Luan’s hand, frozen in place, a helpless victim. He threw himself against the restraint of her will and took a single step.

  The movement broke her hold over his actions and he stumbled forward with the abrupt lack of resistance. She slowed, one hand pressed
against her head, distracted for a precious second by the mental defeat.

  His hand flashed down to his hip and he drew his pistol and shot her in the head just as she focused on him again.

  Mai Luan cursed and clutched at the bloody wound.

  So he shot her seven more times in the head.

  The moment Gregorios’ pistol ran dry, Asoka charged.

  “This time, you die!” he shouted as he tackled Gregorios.

  The two of them tumbled across the small room, barely avoiding the deep pit as they beat on each other. Gregorios could have reloaded the pistol, but he preferred beating Asoka senseless with his fists.

  Mai Luan’s wounds healed almost instantly, but instead of ripping Gregorios’ arms off, she paused to watch the fight, a little smile on her lips.

  That was fine with Gregorios. He’d deal with her next.

  In the memory world, Asoka was again young, and as head of the enforcers he was fit and well trained. Gregorios had worked with him for centuries and they had known each other’s fighting styles intimately.

  The two traded fast blows and hammered at each other with hands, feet, elbows and knees. Asoka howled his hatred with every blow, but Gregorios withstood the barrage. He released his own long-simmering anger and embraced his fury. During the past decades while Asoka aged and his mind faltered, Gregorios had continued to train and add to his skills.

  The life of a rogue had some advantages.

  With a blinding combination of moves adopted from twelve different fighting schools that he had merged into his own unique style, he drove Asoka back across the small room. As Asoka’s confidence faltered, Gregorios wrested control of the memory.

  He re-formed the wall between the two rooms just in time to drive Asoka’s face right through it.

  The wall wavered, then disappeared. Mai Luan was helping Asoka again.

  Gregorios’ headache flared again, so fiercely he stumbled and nearly fell. He fought against the crushing weight of the two wills trying to break him and managed to hold his own. The wall between the rooms did not reappear but the screaming, bloody bodies did not return to the tables.