The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: Operation Arm Breaker, Part 12 of 17

Rocked by another tragic loss, the officials must keep moving. All that stands in their way is an army of zealots, indescribable monsters, and old enemies with big grudges.

The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: Operation Arm Breaker is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

This is Part 12 of Operation Arm Breaker. If you haven’t read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, or 11 yet, check them out first.

Content Warnings: Death, Gore, Violence, Animal Violence, Gun Violence, Mild Swearing, Nazis

WEDNESDAY MORNING, JULY 14, 1943
NORTH OF DER KOBOLDHORST, EBERKOPF
BADEN-ELSAß, NAZI GERMANY

Lucky's hearing came back slowly, with shouting, gunshots, and explosions bleeding into the edges of his perception. Bullets pitted the bedrock around his feet. The Nazis were still coming.

Goldbrick led from the front, his roar muted. Red stained his right thigh from a wound he'd taken during the gremlin chaos. Grease shoved Lucky forward, shielding him from Nazi potshots with his own bloody back. They fell into the line of wounded officials, sprinting as well as they could toward a utilitarian three-story building.

Half-a-mile beyond that, the fortified chateau loomed. Its tower and spires seemed alive, serpentine, twisting and shimmering like a heat mirage was rising between them. That was the end goal. That was where the sparteführers had to be.

The officials in front of Lucky dropped to the ground. He followed suit and twisted around to see Neff yelling. A puff of white artillery smoke rose in the distance, back near the burning barracks. A subsonic shriek rattled Lucky's chest as an eighty-eight-millimeter shell sheared the air over his head. The same PaK 88 that had shot up the hangar had spotted them again.

The first shell went high, punching through the top floor of the building ahead of the desperate officials. Bricks rained through a geyser of fluttering papers. Black smoke boiled out of a hole wide enough to park a deuce-and-a-half in.

Neff put his head up long enough to bury it back down.

Another shell snapped high over them, pummeling the building again. Fires were raging inside now, and the smoke pouring out matched the barracks a mile south.

The Colonel yelled an order from the ground, and Neff wormed his way around, bringing his anti-tank rifle to bear. The puffs of artillery smoke were over a mile off, but the Frenchman zeroed in on them.

Lucky's hearing came back enough to hear the distant cannon roar again, only for it to be washed back out as its shell screamed overhead and the building swallowed another blast, belching smoke and flame.

Neff stared down his sights. Before, the PaK crew had been smart enough to fire on the hangar from behind cover. In the chaos, wheeling around to find their targets, they left their ammo box out in the open. The Frenchman bit his tongue, then squeezed the trigger.

Far away, the PaK 88 exploded.

A tower of flame and sparks erupted over and over again as round after armor-piercing round cooked off. Its crew was erased from Eberkopf with thunderous efficiency.

Next to the stuttering explosion, so far away, Lucky could see the insectarium, standing tall and windowless. Ground crews in bee keeper suits were cowering away from the flames. Closer, he spotted the Brotherhood freezer, long and squat and covered in poured concrete iconography. Eagles and swastikas haunted its thick walls, while massive blast chillers crowned its roof. They were still, their frigid output choked off so that inside the air would grow stale and warm and the embryonic Brothers would thaw their way free.

Screeches and scratching creaked the gremlin rookery’s door.

“That's not going to hold,” Goldbrick warned. Lucky could hear again. The horde of ravenous mutants was pressing hard against the steel hatch that sealed them in. There were thousands of them, and metal and concrete could only take so much.

“Contact, twelve o'clock!” Sinclair shouted.

There were screams coming from the building ahead. People were trapped inside with the flames, burning alive.

“What do we do?” Lucky asked. Before anyone could answer, the front door burst open. A score of Nazi officers and soldiers staggered forth, trailing smoke. Some were dressed in their SS blacks, others in hospital gowns or all-white surgical uniforms. Each was armed, but none had their hands on their weapons. Bucket raised his gun. All of the officials all did.

The stunned Nazis bunched up as they realized who stood before them. They started muttering, then arguing. Hands reached for holstered and dangling weapons.

“Don't do it!” Goldbrick roared.

“Nein!” Bucket tried. The Nazis shouted back at him. Lucky pushed his cheek into his Garand's stock and centered its sights on a white-coated technician, stained red to the elbow, who was reaching for the Luger on his belt.

“Wait, wait!” a voice called from the middle of the crowd in perfect American English. He switched to German and babbled away to his comrades in a soothing tone. Whatever he said, they kept their barrels pointed at the ground.

The Nazi sauntered through the crowd toward the officials, smarmy and confident, his arms held halfway up in mock surrender.

“Hold!” Goldbrick shouted at the strutting Nazi: “Come out, slow and alone, no funny business!”

Smoke trailed from the young man’s charred SS uniform. He already had bloody bandages wrapped around his head. He walked ten full paces under the watch of the officials' guns before he looked up and showed his face.

“You,” Lucky snarled.

Even wounded and surrendering, Werner von Werner was smirking. His cheek was a mess of puffy stitches and running soot, a patchwork of pink and black. He had a white bandage was taped over his right eye socket and he walked with a limp. Still, he was cocky and arrogant.

“The eye was a total loss, you know,” he told the waiting officials. “But I have picked out a better one. I always preferred green.”

“Shut your mouth 'til I tell you to talk, traitor,” Goldbrick snarled. He knew the infamous Nazi. The general marched up to Werner, never letting his double-barreled shotgun waver from the young fascist's face.

Werner von Werner the general's threat.

“Your ranks are looking sparse, Colonel,” he mocked over Goldbrick's shoulder, standing on his toes to do so.

Bile rose in Lucky's throat, burning and aching.

“What did I tell you?” Goldbrick warned him.

“Where is the Scotsman? He was a most helpful spy,” Werner mocked. He looked at Goldbrick and grinned.

The general sunk a wrecking ball fist into Werner's gut to shut him up. Every ounce of air whooshed out of the traitor's lungs and he dropped to the ground, doubled up.

“Do you know why we are here, Mister von Werner?” the Colonel asked. He walked up to the curled up man and squatted next to him.

Werner von Werner muttered something. Behind Lucky, the sounds of chaos dimmed. He was focused on this piece of trash cowering before them.

“I cannot understand a word you are saying, my boy,” the Colonel told him. “But the very fact you are breathing right now indicates to me that you lot do not know how we found this den of vileness.”

The Colonel stood and paced around von Werner, past the front row of the soot-blackened krauts, and said:

“Your superiors would surely have killed you, slowly, had they any idea of the amount of intelligence you turned over to us.”

Werner's head popped up, his good eye red-rimmed and wide. A rumble arose among the Germans, then a rush of whispers translating the Colonel's claim followed by a second, louder rumble.

“My clipboard,” Werner hissed, realizing what had happened. He clenched his fists and a low buzzing sound began to emanate from the ground. Goldbrick either ignored it or didn't hear it.

“Private Ford over there was kind enough to hold onto your fat stack of intel after he brained you,” the general continued. The Nazis muttered among themselves while Werner shot Lucky a one-eyed glare that was positively venomous.

“Gerhardt's plaything,” Werner hissed.

“I'll tell you what, Werner,” Goldbrick started. He rested his shotgun on the top of the Nazi's head as he mused: “I find myself in a bartering mood. You get us the rest of the way to your bosses, I'll let your head stay on. How does that sound?”

“General, what makes you think it's you who has captured me?” Werner asked from the ground.

“A couple reasons come to mind,” Stephens snarled. He ground his shotgun's dual-muzzles into Werner's scalp. “The first of which is that I don't have time for anything else.”

Lucky checked his watch with a start. It was already noon. They'd been marching and fighting and running all morning, since before dawn. That only left an hour to place the transmitters and get out before this place came tumbling down.

The central column with its chateau looked so far away. Werner von Werner interrupted Lucky’s thoughts.

“You are worried about your time table?” Werner sneered. “There are ten thousand men bearing down on you, the might of two Sparteführers and all the weapons and monsters they can muster. The Waldgeister and the Bartkauze want you dead, the Vargulf want to devour you, and Bruderchen Null wants to convert you. You have no way out.”

He didn't know of Null's power-hungry double-dealing.

“No way out but through,” Lucky heard himself say. Werner stared at him.

“Looks like your guys are as eager to get at you as they are to get at us,” Goldbrick observed, nodded at the smoked-out Nazis behind Werner.

He was right: those krauts were out for blood. They were all whispering to one another, pointing out their pet American who had betrayed his oaths again. All the death this day was his fault. Werner would be in the same boat the officials were when reinforcements arrived.

“You do not yet understand,” Werner sighed. “This is a center of learning and advancement. Old feuds and petty misunderstandings are nothing in Eberkopf. Wonders are born here every day.”

“Wonders?” Bucket objected. He was covered in crusting green blood and deep scratches.

“Wonders you cannot imagine, advancements that erase such insular foolishness,” Werner said, casually waving off the angry Nazis behind him. They were still fuming, but their voices were inaudible over the buzzing. It wasn't like the drone of the million-strong beehives in the insectarium, or any kind of mechanical whine. This sound was deep inside Lucky's head. He boxed his ear, but it didn't help.

Werner sat up on a knee, shakily, wary that the general would sucker punch him again. His hands were still clamped over his soft gut. Goldbrick backed off, but kept his shotgun aimed at the traitor's head.

Werner von Werner grinned and asked:

“Tell me, officials, what do you know of Terahertzstrahlung?” The Nazi's voice boomed and seemed to come from all directions at once.

“What?” Bucket snapped. He brought his captured StG 44 to his shoulder. His voice sounded hollow, like he was at the end of a long hallway.

“What is this?” Goldbrick demanded.

“A wonder,” Werner boomed. He stood and held his hands out from his gut. Goldbrick fired when he saw the silver device in Werner's grip. The shotgun's double-blast was muted, nearly silenced, and the traitor cowered away, covering his face. But even point blank, the buckshot didn't touch him. It was like it passed through him, impacting the front row of Nazi scientists behind him.

A handful of krauts fell, bleeding or dead. The rest ran, only to stop in their tracks, penned in by something Lucky couldn't see.

Werner twisted a dial on his device and Goldbrick flew back, hard, flung like a child's doll. Lucky dropped his rifle just as the big man crashed into him and Neff. Even with the two of them, Goldbrick had been launched with such violence that all three were bowled over. When they got him back to his feet, the general's nose was broken and blood was seeping from a old scar that had re-opened in his eyebrow.

Miller and Bucket opened up with their submachine guns, no louder than typewriters, only to have their bullets again ignore Werner and tear into the panicked men behind him. Sinclair lifted his own grease gun, still loaded with incendiary rounds, and let loose. Lucky's jaw dropped as he watched the tracers swerve around the grinning traitor and continue into the penned-in Nazis.

“There!” Bucket squeaked. His voice was high-pitched and distant. He was pointing past the burning building to one of the inverted arrays of scaffolding dangling from the concrete ceiling a hundred feet up. There were a half-dozen radar dishes mounted on every angle of it, all pointed their direction.

Lucky raised his Garand and squeezed off five rounds, along with every other official. None of their shots flew true. The lead slowed to a halt feet from their barrels before breaking down into fragments then powder as they watched. Their barrage drifted away in harmless puffs.

“Cease fire,” the Colonel piped. The officials complied, reloading and never letting their fingers off their triggers.

Werner von Werner puffed up before them and showed off the device in his hand, a chromed control studded with dials and knobs.

“Terahertzstahlung. Terahertz radiation. One of yours invented it, actually. We took it and perfected it. Its frequencies can make air as dense as concrete, denser than bullets are able to pass through. Or we can make it rise hundreds of degrees in seconds. It can even move with the force of a hurricane,” he gloated. “Or it can do all three at once.”

Behind his invisible shell, Werner manipulated his device. He turned to look at the muted Nazis he'd penned in, then smiled. One final twist of a dial sent something shivering through them. The air around them rippled. Their mouths mimed screams, but the radiation cut off all sound.

The Nazis’ skin turned red, wrinkled, then cracked and peeled away. Blinding plasma arcs jumped between their weapons and their bodies, shredding their crumbling clothes and flesh. Red turned to gray, solid turned to powder then fell away, leaving the affected krauts standing as petrified skeletons, twisted in pain.

“And now,” Werner boomed. He twisted another knob and the skeletons collapsed into the dirt, their bones shattering into dust to be pressed into the ground. Muzzle flashes erupted from the dead Nazis' guns as all their ammunition cooked off in silence, then they were still. Everything was, except the last Nazi standing.

“I have you restrained with those same energies, officials,” Werner gloated. Lucky's heart jumped into his throat. Static electricity jumped from his rifle to his fingers and he almost dropped it. The hairs on the back of his hands were all at strict attention.

Werner indicated the hanging silver dishes above, then pointed out that the whole ceiling that was gridded with them.

“These would have captured you earlier, the whole base is lousy with them,” Werner sneered. “But you stayed out of the open, scuttling through the sewers like rats. You thought you were being smart? No, just procrastinating.”

“You sure talk a lot,” Quint grunted, his voice distant as the grave.

“Damn,” Grease grunted at their six. He was leaning with all his weight into empty air. He stepped back then swung a mighty punch, only for his fist to slow to a halt. A spark snapped across his steel knuckles and he recoiled away, wincing. Werner had built his wall of irradiated air all the way around them.

“You are quite trapped. With one button I can cook you just like them,” Werner hissed. “Remember that when you choose which words to speak to the sparteführers.”

“Like mentioning it was your mistake that brought us here?” Sinclair asked.

“Not worth the breath,” Werner replied. “Not worth your lives.”

Werner began working at the soot-stained bandage on his face with his free hand. When he finally finished peeling back the surgical tape holding it down, he removed a thick cotton pad from his ruined eye and dropped it to the ground. Green light glowed out of the hole. They’d stitched a metal globe into the emptied socket, with wires running out and up through his scalp. He smiled wide and tapped the bare jade bulb glowing within the device.

“It's a radio transmitter,” Bucket said, instantly recognizing the implant. “That's how he's working the radiation projectors: they're controlled via wireless.”

“How does that help us?” Grease whispered.

“Cover me while I hotwire my transmission detector. It'll be perfect for this scumbag,” Bucket hissed. “I just got to jump in on his frequency.”

Bucket slipped the small device out of his pack and began ripping out the wires and rearranging them. It looked he was shuffling spaghetti, snipping and stripping red and white wires, then twisting them all back together. Lucky had no idea what Bucket was doing, so he did his best to puff up as big as Grease to block the sergeant's frantic work from Werner's view.

Werner von Werner ignored them; he was too busy hiding what he had done.

He pressed a button on his control and a radar dish high above rotated slightly and tightened its array like a closing flower. The disintegrated remains of his former colleagues whipped into a gray dust devil as radiation-agitated air blew across them, swirling away and mingling with the black smoke rising from the burning building. All evidence of his slaughter was gone.

“Guten tag, kameraden,” Werner called over the officials' heads, waving his hand warmly once the ashes were dispersed.

The officials turned around to see the might of Department Three closing in around them, muted and merciless: Waldgeist with their glowing swords, gnashing trench sharks, barely-restrained mannessers pulling at their leads, Bartkauze with machine guns at the ready, Brothers unnumbered and their cults, and a squadron of flying cars swooping in from above.

Werner called back to the officials:

“Here in Germany, a guest, welcome or otherwise, is greeted warmly by all.”

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 14, 1943
SOUTH OF SCHLOSS MITTELSÄULE, EBERKOPF
BADEN-ELSAß, NAZI GERMANY

Werner von Werner winked and twisted another dial. The force surrounding the officials drew in, bunching them together. Grease yelped as the irradiated air shoved him forward. Electricity snapped and an arc ran between the bare bolts sticking out of his scalp.

“Move him to the middle,” Bucket urged. “That radiation runs through metal like an antenna. All them staples and armor are going to fry you if you don't get away from the field. Quint, too.”

They squirmed around until Grease and Quint were in the center of the group, as far away from the enclosing wall of projected terahertz radiation as they could get. Lucky was at the back, with the dense air pushing him forward. He shuffled along, leaning into the strange force like it was a strong wind, hoping to find some hole in it.

“Careful,” Miller warned. He was shying away from the invisible boundary, wary of its effects on his environment suit and the strange rejuvenating energy running within his body. “Keep your weapons away from it. If our firearms or grenades cook off in here...”

Lucky inched forward; Miller needn't say more. The field was impenetrable, neither by him nor by bullets; he stopped testing it.

“What do they want?” Lucky asked. The assembled Nazis were waiting, and watching. Their zealots and monsters were eager for blood, but something held them back, though he could not tell what that was. Werner had adjusted the frequencies of the wall again, cutting off all sound, including his voice. They watched him chat away with the menacing host's officers. The officials around Lucky were anxious; none of them wanted to answer his question.

“Anyone read lips?” Grease asked.

“Yeah, but I don't speak a lick of jerry, mate,” John Grand replied. He scratched the thick scar on the back of his head while he watched Werner von Werner.

Miller was studying the krauts intently.

“I do not know how to read lips yet, but I will be able to translate this conversation for you when I learn how,” he said. Lucky shook his head. Miller's brain was a weird and wondrous thing.

“We cannot go with them,” Neff snarled. He spat on the ground, almost on Lucky’s boot.

“We have no choice but to accept such an eager invitation,” the Colonel answered. “The door of their chateau shall be opened for us. We haven't much firepower left, I have grave doubts that we could force it.”

“This makes two times I've been captured this week,” Grease sighed.

“I'm on three,” Lucky told him. “One was ‘cause of a tree.”

“No damsel to rescue you now,” Bucket piped.

“I don't know if Emilia could get us out of this one,” Lucky said. “But having her around wouldn't hurt.”

“Alright, Romeo,” Grease wheezed.

“It ain't some Iberian princess saving your hide today,” Bucket grunted. He made one last adjustment to his device then held his hand open. It was his cracked-open radio receiver, its fuses and coils exposed and re-arranged. “It's going to be one Black man from Brooklyn. Listen to this.”

Lucky leaned in and Bucket held the device up to his ear. It was humming, buzzing with the same tone as the terahertz radiation, and warm enough that Lucky could feel heat radiating against his cheek.

“What is that?” Lucky asked.

“I built it to detect anomalous radio transmissions because of the Naples ambush,” Bucket said. He had wanted to make sure the Nazis couldn’t blast a shrapnel listening device into any of us like they'd done to MacLeod. “I tinkered with it a bit at the Colonel's insistence to make it measure transmission interference, just to make sure Ivan’s shells could find those transmitters down here. Now, with a few more of its wires crossed, it can transmit, too. Point is, I isolated the kraut's signal, and we ain't trapped.”

“They might have something to say about that,” Lucky said, pointing over his shoulder at the army trailing them.

“They made this hole's security dependent on these terahertz radiation weapons. They just didn't know that I could piggyback their signal,” Bucket explained. “When we're ready, what's theirs is mine. Want 'em all swept up like a broom? We can manage that.”

“Let us keep our bulletproof walls up, for now,” the Colonel advised from the front. He was marching along at the head of the group, one hand on his gilded revolver, the other on his curved saber's hilt. He had the widest, goofiest, fakest parade smile Lucky'd ever seen. He hissed over his shoulder: “And wait for the enemy to open their doors to us.”

They marched along behind the sauntering traitor, under the watchful gaze of the terahertz projectors. Their path was simple, but the timing was hard. It was like Werner had placed a large glass over the officials and they had to walk beneath it without bumping into its walls as he scooted it forward. Every minute or so, someone at the front or back of the squad would yelp as exotic radiations zapped them through their weapons, either shuffling along a step too fast or too slow.

The chateau grew with every passing second, surging up out of the bedrock with malicious majesty. Seeing it from a mile off, hundreds of feet in the air, that was one thing. To approach its reinforced concrete walls and towers was another. Rising out of it, the base's main support column was even more impressive. Whereas the other structural elements in the facility were static, sterile towers molded smooth by human hands, this was another beast altogether.

The tower rising from the chateau was living bedrock, the ribs of the Earth. It was untouched granite, slithering with imperfections and impurities. The Nazis tried to tame it, but it could not broken. Instead, they constructed their cage around it. Pipes and cables wormed across its surface, and a single cargo lift connected it to a catwalk bolted to the smoke-choked 'sky' that led to the northern-most flying car hangar, hundreds of feet above and a half-mile away. Still, no Nazi excavation had pierced the titan monolith, and the krauts had been forced to build their castle around its base, humiliated and spiteful.

“Are you certain about Fergus?” Cheddarwright whispered to Lucky. It took him a second to realize she was asking about MacLeod.

“I'm sure,” Lucky told her.

“He's a scrapper,” she said, limping along with her one good hand pressed tight against the hole in her gut.

“He was,” Lucky replied. The rest of the officials were silent, listening. “The gremlins didn't get him, he went out on his own terms.”

For some reason Lucky thought that might be easier to hear. It was easier to say.

“I've seen great officials die from the smallest of things. General Stephens' predecessor died in his bunk. My own spotter slipped on wet leaves and fell down a ravine,” she replied. “Dead is dead. Honor and bravery is a currency spent only by the living.”

“I'm sorry,” was all Lucky managed to say.

“Are you in one piece?” she asked, pointing at his arm. Lucky held up his hand to find the remaining gunk had dried up and flaked away, leaving his skin and fingernails stained luminescent green.

“Nothing some soap and water can't fix,” Lucky told her. He pulled his cuff down a bit to cover the stain.

She nodded, relieved that another comrade wasn't about to be gone, then buttoned up and tucked herself away under her cape, her hand clenched over her side. Lucky may have been all right, but he couldn't tell her that a gremlin he'd barely dodged was the one that took MacLeod out. If Lucky'd taken an extra split-second to stab it or kick it, MacLeod would have made it out of there.

Loud MacLeod was dead, his body lost to Nazi abominations, and Lucky was still walking.

The invisible walls eventually shoved and dragged them up the crest of a small rise. Lucky could see glinting sniper scopes tracking their every step from the chateau's soaring towers. Machine gun slits dotted its walls every ten yards or so, and helmeted heads and rifle muzzles shuffled behind the crenelations topping its facade.

“Jesus,” Goldbrick grunted. He was seeing what Lucky was seeing: a solid reinforced concrete bunker with the kind of firepower that could turn back an army.

“Our Lord Jesus Christ, indeed. It is so garish,” the Colonel concurred.

“That's not what I...” Goldbrick retorted, then he sighed. “I guess we're lucky it's bare concrete.”

“If this was Castle Falkenstein, we'd all be purging our innards by now,” the Colonel said.

“So it could be worse,” Grease wheezed with a smirk.

“It has been,” the Colonel told him.

Beneath the chateau's forty-foot walls, an icy blue lake shimmered. It looked cold, and deep, and unnatural swells disturbed its surface. There was something moving beneath.

“What's the plan here?” Quint asked.

“This is not an infiltration mission any more,” Goldbrick said. He checked his watched and grunted. “We're cutting this one close. Soon as we get the chance, we rush the krauts, drop the beacons, and find that lift up there. Then we hightail it.”

Lucky gazed up at the single elevator servicing the chateau. Its cables dangled down the side of the column for a hundred yards. They'd have to dodge a Nazi army, fight through Department 3's elite, then take a ride up to the surface in an unarmored lift, all while the Russians bombed the whole place.

“Play this close to the chest,” Goldbrick said. “Can't have them getting wise to what is about to happen, whether we get out or not.”

“Be smart, folks. Terahertz radiation is one frequency shift away from an electromagnetic pulse. If that S-O-B gets an inkling before I light him up, he could blow out this little gadget in a second,” Bucket warned them.

“Or he could turn the whole system off and let them at us,” Quint warned. The army of monsters was matching them step for step, just beyond the shimmering wall of radiation.

“For all of the monsters in our escort, do you see who is not represented?” the Colonel asked Goldbrick. The general studied the trailing mob for a moment.

“No zeroes,” he replied.

“Indeed. It seems Brother Null is keeping his end of the bargain,” the Colonel said.

There were none of the bleached Nazi's 'little brothers' out there, Lucky realized. He saw individual Waldgeist and charred Bartkauze, both of their units leaderless thanks to the officials. There were mannesser hounds and trench sharks, flying cars above, and scores of conventional troops, but no one wearing a white zero in sight.

Werner von Werner strolled along ahead, not slowing his pace as he reached the edge of the lake. Something roiled beneath the surface, but he kept ambling along. His saunter was cocky and infuriating. The man was a traitor to America and a failure to and murderer of his adopted nation; still he carried himself with fascist surety.

The blue mirror twisted and parted as a bridge, rubberized steel and asphalt, rose from the depths. It was wide enough to accommodate a panzer. Torrents ran from its surface, further disturbing the waters. Werner stepped onto the wet bridge, then spun on his heel, grinning. He mouthed something, then pointed down at the settling water before shaking his head and drawing his finger across his throat.

“I guess a bath is out of the question,” Grease said, chuckling.

“I wouldn’t put it past the jerries to electrify their moat,” Grand mused.

Neff sniffed at the air.

“Acid,” he said. Lucky couldn’t catch a whiff of anything aside from the ozone stink of irradiated air. A sharp zap made everyone jump.

“Damn!” Sinclair cursed from the back of the group, rubbing his shoulder. He pushed forward. “The krauts are neither tolerating dillying nor dallying today.”

They shuffled forward, onto the bridge. The terahertz radiation nipped at their heels. A spark jumped from the invisible wall and bit at Lucky's ear lobe, making him wince. He bumped into Quint by mistake.

“Cool it, Okie,” Quint snapped. His metal arm was twisted into an immobile fist and clenched tight against his chest. The whole contraption was shaking and sputtering and it spat a gout of sour diesel exhaust right into Lucky's face. Lucky coughed up chemicals, phlegm, and stale blood onto the back of his stained hand.

“I’m a Hoosier,” he wheezed, trying not to think about where he could be bleeding from internally.

“Tighten up,” Goldbrick growled. They were halfway across the bridge. The water around them had settled back to absolute stillness.

“Ready your weapons,” the Colonel advised through a clenched jaw. The chateau loomed over them. There were machine guns in each slit, snipers in each window, and weapons Lucky couldn’t identify mounted between each crenelation. The silver dish of a radiation projector gleamed every dozen yards across the towers and soaring walls, sparkling as they made minute adjustments to their focus and frequency. Nazi eyes watched the officials' every step, from the sauntering Werner ahead, to the windows above, to the small army trailing them across the bridge.

“Here we go,” Goldbrick grated. Lucky peeked over his shoulder to see the massive doors of the chateau cracking open. Golden light flared through the widening gap. The heavy doors moved slow, both as gargantuan as the gate that guarded the Vesuvius base. The glow died down, and a line of silhouettes waited for them just inside, rendered minuscule by the massive doors.

“Hold steady,” the Colonel ordered. He continued shuffling forward, though he'd secretly reloaded his pistols while he walked. Lucky held his Garand tight. Its magazine was full, as was his Colt's and Benjamin's De Lisle's. The doors swung outward by inches and feet until they were open as wide as the bridge.

“Are you ready, sergeant?” the Colonel asked.

“Ready as I'm going to be,” Bucket answered. “I don't know what's going to happen when I press this button, so get set for anything.”

Lucky clenched his jaw and took a deep breath. Cheddarwright nocked an arrow despite her injured hand, Neff racked a round into his anti-tank rifle. Grease grunted and slid a red shell into his shotgun.

The silhouettes stood still and stared.

“On my count,” the Colonel said. Lucky out his breath. The Colonel stared ahead, then said. “Three, two...”

Bucket twisted one of the knobs on his radio transmitter.

On the count of one, the air thundered around them.

In front of them, Werner von Werner's glowing ocular implant pulsed as the signal from Bucket's transmitter overloaded its vacuum tubes. He spun around to face them just as it burst in his eye socket, sending sparks and blood fountaining from his head. The traitor went sprawling.

Another twist of a knob set the terahertz dishes above moving in sync. The invisible cage Werner had projected undulated and expanded, sending a wall of impenetrable force barreling along the bridge in both directions. The gunners in the chateau opened up, only for their bullets to burst into dust when they hit it.

Behind the officials, the Bartkauze, Waldgeist, and trench sharks were crowded onto the bridge. They had no room to avoid the oncoming storm of kinetic radiation. It hit them like a hurricane. Every weapon in contact with the terahertz waves cooked off, blowing grenades in their pouches and bullets in their magazines, sending a wave of explosions and soldiers rolling away from the chateau. Flying cars went careening, splashing into the lake. Bodies and monsters broke and flew like they were made of straw. Corpses and wounded men crashed into the lake.

“Run!” Goldbrick shouted.

He didn't have to say it twice. Lucky chased the general and advancing wall of radiation, its leading edge defined by the billowing cloud of lead powdered by its strange energies.

Werner's fallen body got swept up in the chaos. He was tossed away with enough to force to send his limp form skipping across the water. Lucky lost track of him as he ran.

“It won't hold up!” Bucket shouted. As if on cue, one of the shifting radiation dishes burst on its mount, showering the chateau with silvers splinters.

“Holy crap!” Grease shouted. He was looking at the chaos behind them. Men were thrashing in the water, its blue ribboning with red with each splash. The water rose on its own to crash down onto Nazis and sharks alike, then drag them beneath the surface to never taste air again.

“What was that?” Grease yelled. Unnatural waves cut between struggling victims as the lake devoured their men one by one.

“Ask me later!” Miller replied. “Stay on the bridge!”

“No kidding!” Grease shouted.

The krauts inside the chateau reacted to the officials' charge as well. The bridge shuddered beneath Lucky's feet. It was dropping back into the water. He ran even harder.

The wall of terahertz radiation reached the chateau itself. Concrete shook and cracked as the energies crashed into it. Every gunner and sniper was blasted back from his position. Their weapons exploded, cooking off together in a spectacular display of flame and searing metal. The silhouettes waiting in the open door were gone; retreated or tossed away, Lucky had no idea.

“They're onto us!” Bucket yelled. The radiation dishes were blowing out in twos and threes now, raining shards in a silver deluge. Ahead, the portal of yellow light was narrowing; they were closing the door. The whitecaps of Nazi-churned water were splashing across Lucky's boots. They were only a hundred yards away.

Shapes appeared in the shrinking doorway, kneeling commandos firing rifles. Muzzle flashes winked and rounds snapped over Lucky's head. Their hijacked shield was gone.

Lucky fired back, loosing wild shots as he sprinted. The punt gun thundered, sending a second wave at the door, this one hot buckshot instead of exotic energies. Two Nazis were swept up in it. The charging officials let their submachine guns, pistols, and rifles bark back at the yellow door. The zealous krauts withered away.

Fifty yards out the doors towered over the officials. Every enemy that got in their way was mowed down. Lucky's breath was ragged, his helmet clanged against his skull with every step. The water was up to his ankles and each desperate bootfall raised a white splash. Hard shapes raised waves on either side of the sinking bridge. The ravenous waters were greedy for another meal. Lucky was so close.

A trench shark roared behind him. The beast was barreling down the descending bridge, its six legs kicking up white rooster tails of water. Lucky's shins were submerged, but he surged forward. The shark was faster than him, already halfway down the bridge.

It roared again, a wet gurgling din that turned Lucky's stomach. Then the roar cut off. A column of water rose over the charging beast, a crystalline tentacle that swayed like a snake. The shark tried to turn back, but its momentum carried it forward. Armor and cartilage crunched as tons of water slammed down and flowed over it. One last mangled hiss escaped the shark's jaws before it was dragged off the bridge to disappear into the shadowy depths.

Lucky had no time to consider what had just happened.

One last stride brought Lucky inside the Nazi fortress-within-a-fortress. Grease, Grand, Miller, and Quint were firing at the few commandos able to mount any resistance.

The great doors groaned as they slammed shut behind them.

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Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres.