The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: Operation Arm Breaker, Part 13 of 17

The officials have entered the belly of the beast, the castle at the heart of Eberkopf. With the worst Department Three has to offer within arm’s reach, each official must decide for themself what completing their mission is worth to them.

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 13 of Operation Arm Breaker. If you haven’t read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12 yet, check them out first. This chapter also contains references to and spoilers for Operation Gumtree, but Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 are quick reads if you haven’t gotten after them yet.

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

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

“Hold fire!” the Colonel yelled. The only other people on their feet in the chateau’s front hall were medics scampering around, dragging wounded Nazis away and ignoring the officials. Blood trails intersected like highways.

“Let 'em work,” Goldbrick ordered.

None of the medics was armed. Lucky lowered his rifle and scanned the area while they scampered past, tending to the defenders who’d been shredded by radiation-detonated weaponry.

The chateau opened up into a large hall. Gilded columns towered over Lucky's head, holding a painted ceiling high above the marble floor. Dozens of frescoes depicted infamous moments in Nazi history, translated through their perverse mythology. Gold leaf gleamed from every possible piece of molding and detail. Red banners hung from the walls and columns.

“Gaudy,” Sinclair huffed.

“Ostentatious,” the Colonel said.

“Foul,” Goldbrick added, spitting crimosn on the marble floor.

Symbols of Nazism adorned the far wall, wrought in black and gold: the double lightning bolt runes of the SS, a swastika, Department 3's eleven-armed emblem, an Iron Cross, and one Lucky didn't recognize: something like a 'Z' with barbs on both ends.

“This place is a monument to atrocity,” Miller said. Lucky had never heard awe in Miller’s voice before.

“It was,” Neff grunted. The hanging tapestries smoldered, their depictions of blonde men carrying eagles and riding aurochs over mountaintops while leading waves of panzers into battle were turning to ash. Their smoke was staining the triumphant oil paintings Michelango'ed across the ceiling. This was all the same propaganda that Zwanzig had carried on his chest and it was going to end up the same way he did.

“You ruined our welcome, officials,” a man said from the far end of the hall. His English was good, with an almost-British accent. The scurrying medics gave him a wide berth, revealing a lone figure wearing a strong-man's singlet. He looked absurd, standing in gray tights among the blood and smoke. The eleven-armed swastika adorned his chest, leaving no doubt as to where he'd come from.

“Hey pal, looks like you're a couple years late for the Olympics,” Grease taunted.

The man was near six-foot-five, with chiseled features and a full head of sculpted blonde hair. His body was like a Greek statue, lithe as a gymnast's but muscled like a weightlifter's. He was Hitler's mythical ideal Aryan.

“Here's a clue, Jesse Owens swept you,” Bucket added. The kraut's smile snapped shut and a vein rose in his neck.

“I am not for some foolish sport,” he snapped.

“You shooting a calendar then?” Grease wondered.

The Nazi ignored the jibe, but his muscles were his tell. Twitches ran through his body, calves to chest to neck. Grease snorted; he knew he'd gotten the kraut's goat.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked. “I know you.”

“Should we?” Goldbrick grunted. He raised his shotgun and leveled it at the lone man.

“Perhaps not,” the stranger answered. He smiled, a smile full of perfectly straight, ivory-white teeth and empty of joy. “You may call me Marius.”

“Where are the sparteführers?” Goldbrick demanded.

“The sparteführers were planning to greet you at the door, Brigadier,” Marius answered. “But I fear your trick with the terahertz radiation gave our hostess quite a shock. I did warn her not to entrust this facility’s security to the exoticisms of the Tenth Arm, but alas.”

“There’s more where that came from,” Grease wheezed. He was leaning heavily on Quint. His bandages were oozed through with red.

“You seem to have an ample supply of hot air,” Marius told him.

The Nazi athlete stretched, reaching high then bending over to place his palms flat on the marble. He groaned, then stood and began bending his waist to the right and left, advising the officials as he did so:

“You should put your guns away. They will not help.”

“We'll hold onto them,” Goldbrick said. “What's stopping me from putting two barrels' worth of buckshot through you right now?”

“Curiosity?” Marius suggested before his voice lowered to a hiss, “Or is it fear?”

The officials' blood dripped onto the marble. They'd been through more than Lucky could have imagined in the last eighteen hours, even after Spain, even after Vesuvius. He wasn't afraid of some Nazi in tights, and neither was anyone else. Marius spoke through their grim silence:

“Where is your countryman? Werner sounded eager to deliver you.”

Marius stood on his toes to look for the traitor over their heads, as if he needed the extra height.

“Your moat got him,” Bucket replied. “After that crappy metal eye blew out of his head.”

“A shame, even rats have their uses,” Marius intoned. “If you would put down your weapons, I might take you to our hostess.”

“You krauts love to negotiate,” Goldbrick grunted. He squeezed to the front of the squad, shotgun in hand, his preferred means for negotiation, then said: “Even when your hands are empty.”

“General Stephens, even if you could kill me, I have others to do my fighting now,” Marius replied.

“Even if I could? A bird in the hand,” Goldbrick said, his golden grin wide and confident before the gall of a man standing at the business end of his shotgun. He made a show of looking around the smoldering great hall for Marius' men, at the scrambling medics and blood-stained, cracked marble floors. Then he turned, his arms wide, presenting his battered, weary, heavily-armed squad to the lone Nazi.

Marius smiled a shark's smile then twisted and spun like a liquid ballerina, faster even than the waldgeist. He moved beneath and around the shotgun, then snatched it and bent it back, wrenching it in the general's grasp. Goldbrick snarled but the weapon was out of his grip. The Nazi moved with conscious control of his every muscle and joint to manipulate his body with avian efficiency.

Marius had the gun, but he kept the general between the officials' rifles and himself. He cracked the shotgun open and dumped its pair of red shells to the floor, then shoved the empty weapon back into Goldbrick's hands. The general grunted, and fresh blood ran out of his re-crushed nose. Lucky hadn't seen the hit.

“Easy, general,” Sinclair said. The BWEA's second-in-command put a hand on his seething superior's broad shoulder and pulled him away from the arrogant kraut, opening up everyone else's line of fire on the lithe Nazi.

“I am sure you do not wish die now,” Marius told them. “Set down your weapons.”

“That ain't happening,” Quint told him. His arm was fully open, with half-a-dozen gun barrels and blades trained on the kraut.

“My apologies, Sergeant Castaño. I meant that those of you who are able to, set them down,” Marius said, a glint of mischievousness shining in his predatory eyes.

“You aren't giving orders here,” Goldbrick told him. His pulled two fresh shells out of his pocket and stuffed them into the shotgun. Blood was dripping off his chin.

“True, I am also a guest here. But our hosts are coming,” Marius said. “Can you hear them?”

A deep snarl sounded through the hall, one that reverberated in Lucky's marrow. The bustling krauts stopped in their tracks. Medics dropped their patients where they lay and ran. The wounded whimpered and tried to drag themselves across the floor.

“Was that...?” Grease started. He'd heard that sound before, too.

“It was,” Lucky confirmed. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

“Silver!” the Colonel ordered. He retrieved his silver-inlaid revolver from his triple holster while Lucky fumbled at his ammo pouch. He had a magazine of silver rounds for his rifle stashed in there. Before he could undo the buttons, a dozen black shapes bounded into the hall from every direction. Lucky gave up on the bullets and pulled his knife; its silver edge could kill as surely as a bullet.

The Vargulf moved as blurs, appearing from hidden doorways and blind corners to form a snarling circle around the officials. The beasts stayed out of arms' reach, but were close enough to pounce and tear.

Alien muscles rippled under their bristling black fur. Their unnatural pelts grew so thick that the wiry mats could absorb bullets and shrapnel. Chemically-warped bones changed their frames into something familiar but alien. Their shredded clothes dangled off of them in ragged strips. They loomed over everyone but Grease, though the big man shied away. He'd had his fill of Vargulf.

The mutants inched forward.

“No silver, Colonel,” Neff reported. He kept his anti-tank rifle leveled at one Vargulf. Lucky'd seen him vaporize a pair of the monsters with silver rounds from that cannon before, but he wasn't certain a conventional bullet, even an anti-tank round, would be able to knock one down. Between their bullet-proof pelts and their ability to heal from even mutilating wounds, silver and the explosive chemical reaction it caused in them was the only reliable weapon against a Vargulf.

“Do you surrender?” Marius taunted. He squeezed past the slavering Vargulf and leered inches in front of Goldbrick's shotgun muzzle.

“Not a chance,” Grease snarled at him. A pair of Vargulf barked at him. The giant I-soldier was barely standing; one rush could take him down. The only question was whether he was fast enough with his punt gun, which he had loaded for bear.

“That is your choice,” Marius sighed. He stepped back and the Vargulf leaned in. Lucky could smell blood on their breath. Whose, he did not know. Marius warned: “The Vargulf do not listen to me. Please do not startle them.”

The Nazi slipped back between the Vargulf to lean against a golden column, watching.

“What do we - !” Bucket started, but he was cut off by a sharp bark. He brought his Thompson to his shoulder, but held his fire. He knew what would happen if he set them off.

“Eyes and mouths,” Cheddarwright hissed. “They're vulnerable where they are hairless.”

Her bowstring was taut, and she was glaring down the shaft of a silver-barbed arrow, right into one creature's yellowed eye, but her aim trembled. Blood was oozing out of her wounded hand and it didn't look like she could hold her shot for much longer.

“Any spinnennetz?” Bucket wondered.

“At this range, we'd web ourselves, too,” Quint said.

“Better than getting eaten,” Bucket muttered.

“I got one drum shell still,” Quint said. “But these columns...”

Lucky risked taking his eyes off of the Vargulf menacing him. Quint was right; the wall of terahertz radiation had shaken the fortress to its foundations. Beneath the gilding, cracks had blossomed across the towering columns. A drum grenade shockwave would pulverize them and bring the mission crashing to an end.

“Burn them,” Lucky said. Their fur was as flammable as any.

“Tank's dry,” Quint reminded him. He'd used that last of his petrol jelly to burn the Bartkauze out of the sewers.

“Still, an excellent idea, Lucky,” the Colonel said. He slowly stepped over to Goldbrick, who had no silver weapons at the ready and nodded at the ruby-encrusted Webley Mk. VI revolver on his hip, the one he kept loaded with incendiary rounds. The general nodded and gently slid it out of its holster.

“Please, continue your scheming,” Marius taunted from behind the snarling circle. “It will make what happens next that much more amusing.”

“Yeah, well what are you waiting for?” Goldbrick snapped. His aim with the incendiary pistol bounced from one Vargulf to another. No single target was less dangerous than any other.

“They are waiting for my command,” a voice replied. The Vargulf took a step back. Their snarls subsided into deep growls reverberating inside their barrel chests.

The Colonel leveled his silver-inlaid revolver at the approaching man. An SS officer in full dress uniform was limping toward the encircled officials. The wolf-skull and crossbones insignia on his collar glinted. Wounded Nazis silenced their moans and hauled themselves out of his way, leaving only fresh blood for him to plant jackboot prints in. The man's jet black hair was slicked back and graying at the temples, while a thick stubble scoured his gaunt face. The Colonel adjusted his aim, settling his sights on the cross burned deep into the man's cheek: it made a perfect bull's eye.

Isaak Gerhardt ignored the gun barrel as he approached. He didn't care that his mortal enemy was a trigger-pull away from ending his miserable life. He never took his bloodshot eyes off of Lucky.

“You Allies certainly love a stand-off,” Marius said. “It is quite cinematic. Himmler would be impressed. I shall include this misguided last stand in my report.”

“You have your trinkets, I see,” Gerhardt said. He noted the Colonel's pistol and Lucky's knife. Lucky looked around. Quint had clamped an electro-plated set of brass knuckles over his pneumatic fist. Cheddarwright had one shining arrow nocked and another clenched in her bow hand. Miller and Sinclair's knives matched Lucky's. They would put up a fight.

“Anyone else have their silver?” Gerhardt asked. “I remember rending your comrades so simply in Greece, and they were prepared for us, the traitor Geiger saw to that. But you are… diminished. I did not train these Vargulf to simply butcher, I taught them to fight. Sometimes, however, butchery is the best option.”

“You sure you want a fight?” Goldbrick asked him. He tapped a finger on his own cheek, mirroring where the Nazi's cross scar was. “And with that hitch in your step... it looks like our boys tuned you up a bit last time. Why don’t you just throw in the towel and call it a day?”

“Herr Ford lashed out like a cornered dog,” Gerhardt snapped. “But I have rolled up a newspaper.”

Gerhardt huffed and stood straighter, wincing as he put his full weight on his left leg. Silver shrapnel had pierced his thigh back in Vesuvius, courtesy of Neff's rifle. He turned the grimace into a sneer, then snapped his fingers. The Vargulf around him howled in unison. The sound cut Lucky to the bone. Gerhardt snapped again, and they went silent.

Lucky reached under his collar and pulled the sheriff's cross over his head, spinning it on its sterling chain until it was wrapped around his green-stained knuckles. He'd give Gerhardt's other cheek a turn before he got a taste of any of them. A flutter of amusement danced across the Nazi's maimed face.

“Do you know what happened to Sonderführer Geiger after your Operation Gumtree?” Gerhardt asked. “Once his part was played, the dangling worm, I ate him. Your ally died screaming.”

“The last good German,” Goldbrick grunted. “Geiger was disgusted by what you are. That's why he told us everything. He's why MacLeod chased you animals across the Balkans and through the entire Middle East.”

“Geiger had a hand in our creation, General Stephens. What he did not have was the dedication to see his work through. And even with the bread crumbs I left, still you could not save him. Nor could any of officials we devoured when we finally tired of the chase.” Gerhardt sighed and patted one of his Vargulf on its furry head. “You had to call Colonel Halistone to rescue what remained of your men. And who was left? One bleeding Scotsman, carrying my spy into the mighty Office.”

“Don't you even put his name in your mouth,” Quint said.

“Who, Feargus MacLeod?” Gerhardt asked. Quint bristled and the pistons in his arms hissed with fury. The kraut continued: “Carrying a sword and wearing a dress, lost in an age long passed?”

“Ham,” Goldbrick said. Sinclair stepped between Gerhardt and the seething Quint. It only took a whisper for him to calm the sergeant.

“You bionic man would make a good Vargulf, general. He is easy to make heel,” Gerhardt taunted. He stepped outside the circle of monsters and began pacing around them. He clapped one of his Vargulf on the back, peeled the shredded remains of a jacket off another. The mutants stood still while he meandered, crouched and staring, growling low, eager for the order to feed.

“What are you waiting for?” the Colonel asked him. An uncharacteristic tinge of exasperation had leeched into his voice.

“Orders, colonel, we all have them,” Gerhardt replied.

“Yes, it is time to stop playing with them, sturmbannführer,” Marius told him.

“You are not the sparteführer I answer to,” Gerhardt purred back at him. The Aryan man said nothing, though all of the officials' mouths dropped open. A sparteführer? Their reaction did not go unnoticed.

Miller put it together from the infinite volumes in his mind:

“Marius Reto Volgers, former associate professor of tactical theory at the Allgemeine Kriegsschule, denied tenure in 1925,” he recited from his encyclopedic memory.

“My denial was political,” Marius clarified.

“I understand you were denied for taking liberties with students,” Miller said.

“Encouraging and betting on student duels was never expressly forbidden,” Marius replied.

“I understand one of your students left the schmiss on Otto Skorzeny's cheek,” Miller said. Rochus Skorzeny's elder brother was an SS officer known for his devious mind as much as his disfiguring saber scar.

“And one of you left poor Rochus a bullet,” Marius snapped. He knew the Bartkauze leader was dead. The sparteführer changed the subject:

“Sturmbannführer Gerhardt, you have removed the cat from the bag,” Marius chuckled. “These officials had not recognized me. That is the only reason they did not shoot me the second they - !”

Neff did not let him finish. He brought his anti-tank rifle up faster than Lucky thought possible and squeezed the trigger. The monstrous blast that erupted forth shook the hall.

The Vargulf were just as fast. One lunged in front of the muzzle, taking the fifty-caliber shell straight to its chest. The bullet caved in its mutated ribcage, wrapping up the bullet in impenetrable fur and skin and grinding it to a halt inside pulverized guts. The monster fell, dead. The sparteführer was unharmed.

Marius smiled.

“Ruprecht, bitte!” Gerhardt ordered, and before Neff could rack a fresh round another Vargulf was on him. The Frenchman yelled, and his blood misted the air.

A dozen guns roared at once.

Vargulf to Lucky's left and right erupted in white and crimson. The Colonel's silver rounds struck true, igniting the alien chemicals within them. Goldbrick's bullets found their marks as well, bursting into ravenous, riotous magnesium blazes spreading scarlet flames into their fur.

A wounded Vargulf stumbled into Lucky's reach, tugging at an arrow quivering in its pulped eye socket. The silver edge of Lucky's knife left a wound across its chest that sputtered white fire from the edges and sprayed black fluids from within.

Neff was on the ground, hands clamped over his throat. The Vargulf had raked its claws across his neck, and hot blood was pumping into the air in spurts, splattering over his face. He looked up at Lucky, his eyes wide and panicked. His aviator sunglasses had fallen next to him and shattered. Mirrored shards reflected the chaos around them. Lucky saw himself standing over Neff, and the Vargulf lunging at his back.

Lucky spun to see the creature's head explode like a white phosphorus bomb, smoke and falling stars. Quint's piston fist had struck like a jackhammer, driving his silver knuckles through the cannibal's skull. The Vargulf’s body fell to the floor, steaming and kicking.

“Dritte, vierte Trupps!” Gerhardt was yelling. A cacophony of howls rose above the gunshots and melee.

Two dozen more Vargulf piled into the brawl.

“Get offa me!” Grease shouted. He was on his knees, two Vargulf holding each arm, and a fifth with Grease's throat clenched in its claws. Another had Cheddarwright in a headlock, its free hand digging into her wounded side. She writhed in pain, but kept her jaw clenched. Miller was on the ground, his hands clamped over several of a dozen hissing slashes in his suit. Quint held a struggling Vargulf's neck at metal arm's length, his silver knuckles sizzling against its fur. The rest of the officials were bunched into a knot, Nazi monsters on all sides.

“Officials!” Gerhardt yelled. His second wave of Vargulf had them surrounded. Lucky held his knife out, but the onslaught had stopped. Gerhardt's pack pulled back, waiting for more orders.

The Colonel's pistol was empty, as was Goldbrick's. A trio of Vargulf loomed over them. The Colonel's hand was on his saber hilt and he was weighing his options.

“I would not, Colonel Halistone,” Gerhardt advised. “Unless you would like me to collect your officials' hearts in a bag.”

“I would die fighting, blade in hand,” the Colonel replied.

“That is not how assassins of sparteführers die,” Marius snickered from behind the gilded column.

“Then show me,” the Colonel grunted. He whipped his sword from its scabbard and slashed a blazing line across two Vargulf in one swing, then chopped the third at the elbow, leaving the beast a stump that shot flame like a rocket engine.

Sinclair lashed out with his silver knife, carving through another beast before being thrown to the ground, disarmed and bleeding from his shoulder. Quint crushed his captive Vargulf's windpipe then sunk his fist through the wheezing monster's rib cage, lighting up its chest cavity like the Fourth of July. His ballistic shield popped out with a clang and he charged through the ringed pack, slamming the creatures out of his way. He was making a bee-line straight for the cowering sparteführer.

“Get him!” Goldbrick shouted, only for a hairy fist to clobber his twice-broken nose. The old boxer dropped to the ground, cupping his shattered face.

Marius watched Quint come, then kicked off the ground, leaping ten feet straight up before grabbing the pillar and kicking off again. He bounded upward and was at the cathedral ceiling in four leaps, arms wrapped around the column’s apex. Lucky stared for an instant too long: he let an enemy get past his guard.

“I owe you much, Herr Ford,” Gerhardt hissed in his ear. Lucky slashed around with his knife, but, even limping, the Nazi was quicker. A quick punch to his inner elbow numbed Lucky’s hand, and his knife clattered to the floor. A second blow left him wheezing, hacking up blood and ash. Gerhardt smirked, then said: “Here is a taste.”

His punch landed on Lucky's right cheekbone, whipping his head around so hard it took his body a second to decide to follow it. His boots left the ground and he flopped ass-over-elbows, landing on something soft and wet. It was a body, a moving body. Neff.

“Lucky!” the Frenchman sputtered through his ragged throat. His red-stained hands grasped at him, pulling at his gear. With his horrible wounds uncovered, blood spurted freely. Lucky pushed himself off of him, but still Neff tugged at his pockets and webbing. Lucky wanted to help, but he couldn't help anyone if they were both dead.

A gleaming jackboot banged hard against Lucky's helmet, rolling him off of Neff and leaving him sprawling. The steel pot rang with the blow.

“I will have the doctor cut into you, you know,” Gerhardt promised. “Metzger is here, in the basement of this very building. He will make you Brotherhood, then you will demand to become Vargulf. I will make you my perfect killer and slave. My pet.”

Lucky looked up, only to be kicked again, this time in his soft ribs. The Osteo-Bond oozed beneath his skin, displaced by the blow. Lucky wheezed, dragging air into his emptied lungs. Gerhardt smirked, a menacing expression warped further by the waxy scar. A colossal boom shook the great hall, sending him lurching away.

Concrete dust rained down from the ceiling. Lucky rolled onto his back to see Quint punch another chunk out of the golden column that Marius clinging to the top of. It was like he had chopped into it with an ax. He reeled his metal arm back again and blasted a third bite out of the column, revealing raw, ugly concrete beneath its gilded skin.

“Stop him!” the sparteführer yelled from his perch among the smoke-charred ceiling murals. Vargulf left their prey and charged the bionic sergeant, only to catch piston-powered silver knuckles to the teeth. Two fell dead, sputtering white sparks from caved-in muzzles.

Another hesitated, only to find the searing tip of the Colonel's cavalry sword emerging from his barrel chest: the old man did not appreciate being ignored. His Vargulf tried to twist around but the Colonel danced with it, only removing his blade from its back to blast a silver slug from his reloaded Webley revolver into the back of its head.

To Lucky's right, Sinclair, Miller, Bucket, Goldbrick, and Grand had formed a tight knot around Cheddarwright, whose hands were clamped over her oozing abdominal wound.

Grease was separated, exhausted and mindlessly swinging his fists, landing one out of every dozen punches. Snarling Vargulf danced under his blows, dying when they connected only to be replaced by two more monsters for every one he demolished.

The Vargulf hounding him were slick with his blood.

The Colonel turned his attention to Marius and drew his third revolver, with the gold inlay. Its dum-dum bullets could pop a hole the size of a pancake through the spartefürer's back.

Before he could settle his sights on the Aryan an animal roar silenced the brawl. A black shape, larger even than the Vargulf, pounced into their midst.

It struck Grease first, knocking him into a column hard enough that the steel plating under his scalp clanged against the concrete. A fist the size of a log rocked the Colonel and sent him ass over elbows into the officials surrounding Cheddarwright, bowling the lot of them over. The thing moved in a blur and was upon Quint before he could react, wrapping his steel wrist up with a leathery hand large enough to crush a bowling ball.

“A monkey?” Quint managed to say. The thing stood still long enough for Lucky clock it. It was a gorilla, towering and muscular, covered in leather harnesses and long wires. It carried a squirming bundle on its back.

Metal squealed as it broke. The gorilla twisted and pulled, splintering Quint's prosthesis into a thousand glimmering pieces. Quint screamed, but his cry was muted beneath the sound of the miniature diesel engine he'd carried in his bicep overheating and seizing when its frame twisted around it. The steel arm sheared, ripping out of his artificial shoulder.

The ape lifted the sputtering limb over its head and smashed it into into the floor, destroying it completely. Chrome scattered, and Quint fell to the ground, crying and clutching at the jagged stump that remained. Hot black oil ran between his fingers.

The gorilla huffed at the broken, shaking man and held up the hand it had just taken from him. It sniffed the artificial thing, shook it, chiming the limp fingers together. The sound brought a wide grin to the animal's face, showing off its yellow teeth. The top of the ape's head was shaved bald, with wires running into sockets straight inset into its skull.

Suddenly the gorilla snapped rigid, its spine straight up and down, its eyes wide and dilated. Its arms and legs trembled for a just a second before whatever force gripped it let go. It threw the hand away, sending it banging into a scorched stone wall, then dropped down to its knuckles. It palmed Quint's head and dragged him across the floor, kicking. A raspy voice emanated from its back:

“I will crush this man's head like a melon,” the voice said. The officials were all disarmed, sprawled and beaten, broken and bloody. No one moved.

The bundle on the gorilla's back shifted and uncurled, revealing a shriveled old woman, her papery skin dark, dry, and chasmed with wrinkles. Her wispy hair, thin and brittle and yellow as rotten bone, was tied tight in a bun above her leering, skull-like face. Her arms were spindly, like a spider's legs, nearly lost inside her black SS uniform's sleeves. She seemed to be strapped down belly-first on the gorilla's back.

The woman's gnarled fingers tapped at what looked like a typewriter wired into the beast's head. At her keyed command the animal paced her over to Gerhardt's side. The beast glared down at Lucky, but its eyes were glazed over, lobotomized and soulless. She called up to the ceiling:

“Get down here, Sparteführer Volgers. No Aryan man, much less a man of Department Three, should behave as a clown.”

Marius slid down from the top of the column and brushed cement dust off his unitard.

“Thank you for the assistance, Sparteführer,” he said to her. He stood up straight and smoothed his blonde hair down. The old woman's neck whipped around, bird-like, surveying the scene. Satisfied her enemies were cowed, she tapped another sequence into her keyboard and the gorilla dropped Quint. He whimpered and curled into a ball, protecting his torn shoulder. The woman pressed one more key and the gorilla sat down and closed its eyes, instantly asleep.

“Katrin Abendroth,” Miller whispered. Lucky recognized the name: she was the sparteführer of the Seventh Arm. Miller gazed at the gorilla-riding woman in awe through cracked gas mask lenses.

“You have heard of me?” she wondered. Her beady, gummy eyes focused on him. “I have heard of you: the man who cannot find death.”

“I have only heard of one Abendroth, and he died one-hundred-forty-seven years ago,” Miller replied.

“My father, the victim of ignorance and hysteria. Our legacy was erased, even though it would have changed the medicinal arts for ever,” she replied. Her voice was dry as sand.

“He sought to unleash a second Black Death,” Miller objected.

“An examining of blood,” she snapped. Her gorilla growled in response to her agitation. “He thought it a test, but now I know its true purpose. Those who would have fallen prey to the plague are but anchors against the future, allies of Finality.”

“Finality,” the Colonel grunted. He knew the term, it was a mantra he had heard before. He gathered himself up, struggling to shove his bent saber back into its scabbard.

“Yes, Colonel, it seems you know the Father's words. Finality comes for us all in many ways. It comes for one's skin, which must be tanned. It comes for the eyes, which must be scalded and scraped. It comes for the organs, which must be cast aside and compounded.”

As she spoke she stretched upward and lifted her uniform top revealing her bare stomach. Sinclair retched. Abendroth's body ended at the waist. She'd been sawed in half, then sewn into the gorilla's back. Her organs were parasites upon the beast's own healthy system. The witch and the animal were one, a circus freak centaur. Lucky's stomach turned.

“I am revolution,” she declared as she pulled her uniform back down, concealing the melding.

“I would remember revolution,” Miller said.

“Yes, I understand that you retain everything you see,” she rasped. “Your brain will be an interesting one to dig through.”

“I contain volumes, Sparteführer Abendroth, and not one of them saw fit to include... this,” Miller replied.

“Then it would seem you do not carry the key to the pope's forbidden libraries, where my name is recorded and cursed a thousand times over,” she told him. “The seventh Pius tried to burn me at the stake for heresy. I lived, so he locked me in the Vatican's dungeons and expected me to rot.”

“Vermin always survive,” the Colonel spat.

“Truer words have never been spoken,” she replied. “It was not the sterile laboratories or crowing universities that saw my breakthroughs. It was the filth and the rust, the feces and the oozing pus that inspired my studies. It was the eternal minerals and toxic fungi of the black, dank earth that kept me alive while everyone who remembered me died in the sunlight above.”

“They should have left you down there,” Goldbrick said.

“As was the church's intent. It was these Nazis who remembered me. It was they who taught me of the truth, of the words of the frozen cosmic forgotten. The Nazis bartered for my freedom, only seeking my help in the struggle against Finality. They knew of my cure for death, and they have no choking mythologies or blinding moralities to hinder my research. I have conquered the universal enemy, and I am the proof: I am one hundred and fifty-seven years old. If you are my enemy then you are an ally of death.”

“Lady, you are as crazy as you look,” Goldbrick grunted. “Between you and Captain Kraut, I've had about my fill of Aryan assholes for the day.”

“Do you enjoy Marius?” she asked. “My scalpel was in his face for days creating Herr Himmler's idol, his interpretation of the übermensch. The sparteführer was crafted as much as an aspirational symbol for the Nazis as he is a leader of their soldiers.”

Marius put his hands on his hips and puffed his chest out, as if he had not just shimmied up to the ceiling in terror.

“Achieving the ideal form is a trial that many cannot overcome,” he said. He stretched again, then strolled to the wall and picked up Quint's discarded chrome hand by its thumb. It hung between his fingers like a dead crab. He shook it in the the fallen soldier's face before he tossed it aside, saying: “Shortcuts are unacceptable.”

Marius strolled through the halted brawl, dancing between seething officials and stepping over smoking Vargulf corpses. The great entrance loomed above him, and he punched its control panel, starting the doors to opening. They groaned as they swung outward; the impact of the terahertz radiation wave had warped them in their frames.

“My men will be much kinder to you than these Vargulf,” he told the officials over his shoulder. “The Brotherhood process is quite painless. In fact, you will not feel anything at all.”

His forces had recovered and were waiting on the far side of the moat. Several trench sharks were still alive, and a half-dozen flying cars buzzed in angry circles over the churning water. A gaggle of Nazis had dragged themselves from the water before whatever lurked below could kill them, and they watched the doors open, struggling against the leads of furious mannessers.

Marius popped open a second panel and pressed a red button. A deep rumble coursed through the marble floor. The bridge was coming back up. He was letting his men into the chateau. Abendroth watched the small army approach.

“These specimens were captured inside Eberkopf, Marius,” Abendroth told him. “They are mine to do with as I please. Perhaps my sharks are hungry.”

“These prisoners will not be all yours, Katrin,” he chided her. “I will pick some of them. Some will make interesting Brothers. Others, remarkable trophies.”

“Your appeasement of Himmler distracts you, Marius,” the old woman hissed. She patted her lobotomized ape's head and told the other sparteführer: “Your Nazi party aspires to too worldly a goal, they have forgotten the words of the Father who started your crusade. The übermensch does exist, but compromising with politicians will not help us find it.”

“Our goals are to become wards of this entire planet, and to make it safe for the future, and our children,” Marius argued.

“Exactly as your master would put it. Tell me, do you enjoy his leash?” Abendroth mocked.

“He is your leader, as well,” Marius countered.

“Himmler dares not question my Arm,” Abendroth claimed. “So long as the trinkets I send him fulfill his small goals and distract your führer.”

“Our Führer,” Marius corrected, uneasy with her breaking with the ranks.

Lucky coughed. He couldn't help it: the gorilla stank. Its musk was powerful, a mix of rot and chemicals and shit. The sound knocked Abendroth out of her trance. The old witch leaned over and looked at Lucky over her ride's shoulder. A bundle of aromatic herbs dangled from a length of twine hanging around her neck. Their cloying scent did little to cover the stench. She studied Lucky for a minute then turned to Gerhardt. She traced his scarred cheek with a mummified finger.

“Is this the one who marred you?” she asked him, distracted from her argument with Marius.

“It was a freak occurrence,” Gerhardt huffed, pulling away from her touch.

“Stand him up,” she ordered. Gerhardt clicked his tongue and a Vargulf responded, wrenching Lucky to his feet by his collar. The scarred killer pulled the De Lisle out of Lucky's hands and racked the bolt back and forth until its magazine was empty, then shoved the neutered carbine back into Lucky's grasp. Gerhardt repeated the act with Lucky's Colt, then rifled through his pockets, only finding the wide-bore Osteo-Bond syringe.

“Is the boy broken?” he hissed. He pulled the cap off the long needle and pointed it at Lucky's face. Its sharp tip gleamed. He inched it closer and closer, then flipped it around, capped it, and placed back in Lucky's breast pocket, saying: “Use that, Lloyd. You will need all your strength for what comes next.”

Gerhardt stood with his leader while Abendroth's gorilla sniffed Lucky, catching the scents of sweat, blood, and gunsmoke. It grunted and shifted anxiously. The woman sewed onto its back patted it on its shaved head to calm it down.

“I can fix your face with my scalpel, Isaak,” Abendroth assured Gerhardt. She studied Lucky intently, dissecting him with her amber eyes. “But how shall I cut this American?”

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin.