The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Gray Dogs, Part 3

Minutes after Daedalus Spark activated the brain box in Chicago, a Nazi agent in South America finds out something ancient and horrible has heard Sparks’ signal. What was once dormant may become the greatest weapon in the fascist arsenal and change war as they know it.

This is the third installment of Gray Dogs. It is the seventh and final story in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Old Dogs Still Got Teeth. To avoid spoilers, read Parts 1 and 2 first. This features spoilers for The Case of the Man from Tomorrow and takes place immediately after the conclusion of that story.

Content warnings: violence, gore, death, Nazis.

THURSDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 16, 1943
KRIEGERPUPPE SEED FACTORY SEVEN
TEPUY KAPIOKWOK, VENEZUELA

//Translated from German.//

Bruder Sechzehn had been asleep for exactly one hour and eighteen minutes before the squealing voltmeter woke him up.

‘One hour and eighteen minutes?’ I can’t know that.

FALSE. REALIGN.

He double-checked the position of the stars in the southern sky. Per the changes in their position since he had fallen asleep, he confirmed that seventy-six to eighty minutes had passed.

“Quiet, you,” he hissed at the little device. He had hardwired it into the buried factory’s radio receiver the very first night he had taken up his post at its head.

The voltmeter continued to squeal. Its quivering needle confirmed that the minuscule current within the receiver had increased a hundredfold in amplitude since he had last recorded its measurements.

“All-Highest, it is happening,” he gasped. He offered a silent prayer to Him and His representative in flesh, the Führer. His mission was coming to its conclusion:

The dormant factory slumbering beneath his feet was becoming active.

It had been built by the Seven Vampire Counts of the Schwarzvald, those purgatoried progenitors who had sought the Goldrenreich but had not yet learned its name or His. They would not rest in its riches, but they had paved the way for True Heirs of the Earth, the people of the Fatherland and their selected servants.

During the last war, the Counts had intended to sweep over the world and had planted seeds in every direction, eight in all, to await their arrival. Their armies slept in clutches, eager for the call to hatch. Had the assassins with the Office for the Cataloging of of Unusual Occurrences not ended them in a night of fire and blood, their armies would have marched.

Instead, they slept.

The Counts had mastered the art of automation. There were no humans necessary to craft their forces. Their creations could create on their own. The factories were seeds, designed from His inspiration to grow into trees that could be seen over the horizons. All they needed was permission to grow.

They needed the Word of the All-Highest.

Once they saw His Truth, they would replace their mechanical allegiance to the short-sighted Counts with undying loyalty to the Führer, the true heir of the Goldenreich. And then, emblazoned with the His mark, their roots would spread and their fruit would fall across the fertile Earth.

But the Counts’ seed factories were lost to time, the words to awaken them forgotten. The maps were burned, the builders killed. The Office tracked down and destroyed two facilities in mainland Europe. Another pair were re-discovered flooded, one in Iraq, another in America, seeping waters chewing through their intricate mechanisms and reducing their thinking engines to pulp. One was somehow activated by a careless child exploring the catacombs beneath Rome. It woke angrily and moved too quickly. The tunnel collapse crushed its nascent efforts beneath generations of stone. A Soviet volcano swallowed another. The last two remained hidden, forgotten, asleep.

It took Department Three researchers eight years to track down the Kapiokwok installation. It had been buried deep into the barren head of a towering tepuy, protected by impassible jungle and deadly cliffs. Another year of study yielded nothing. It was sealed, its perception analysis engine hibernating beneath tons of steel and concrete, ringed with explosives. Those technicians that survived the initial surveys declared it dead. Its only accessible feature was a stubby short-wave radio antenna, overgrown with vines and crusted with sediment.

A cadre of Department Three cryptographers worked to generate a signal it would recognize, but they were eventually dispatched to the Enigma X project. Eventually, only Brother Sechzehn remained, a warden, watcher, and protector. They told him it was because he was disciplined, that he need little sleep and less food, that they trusted him to be merciless and thorough.

But, for all they knew, the seed factory was dead. They had left him there.

It’s because I am expendable.

FALSE. REALIGN.

The Brotherhood was the purest, most loyal and effective unit in the Third Reich. None could match its dedication, its drive. To be a Brother, one of the Führer‘s select was an honor and responsibility that would crush most men.

To be the envoy of the All-Highest to a waking titan was the greatest reward that could be bestowed upon a Brother.

The voltmeter did not lie: something was happening. The shock froze him in place for an irreconcilable instant.

Months of waiting and he was caught unprepared.

He felt a low vibration working its way through the ground. Something was moving inside the sealed factory. After nearly three decades’ silence it was astonishing. He readied himself, extinguishing his small campfire and throwing aside the canvas tarp he’d used to protect the realignment materials.

He activated his own radio transponder: his commanders would know for certain that the miracle was happening. The transmitter light glowed orange for an instant then faded out. Something popped inside. Sechzehn smelled smoke. His radio was a standard Wehrmacht unit, it would not have been built to withstand the stressed involved in one of the Brotherhood’s assignments. He would have to alert his superiors to the factoryt’s awakening once he had completed his task.

The same five waterproof cases he had arrived with were ready. They had not moved in seven months, sitting and waiting through downpour and gale. Their contents were sacred and replacing them would take months.

The cases held new commands for the seed factory, prepared by Sparteführer Vorlage by hand. The first six hundred perforated cards would teach the kriegerpuppe factory and its offspring to produce and modify their own perception indicators. Every unknown encounter would become an opportunity for the mechanical armies to generate new, novel responses. As it was, they would freeze or ignore unrecognized threats. War had changed since the factory had gone to sleep, and it needed to be able to adapt.

The final four hundred cards would teach it to follow the commands of Department Three officers and forget those of the foolish and long-dead Vampire Counts.

Its offspring would become a beacons of hope for the children of the All-Highest and heralds of change for those blasphemers too greedy or stupid to accept His Truth.

The Earth shifted as the seed factory came alive, pushing aside red stones and clumps of stubborn grass. A crack split wide in the ground a few meters from the weathered antenna. Sechzehn went to work with his entrenching tool, throwing dirt and parasitic vegetation aside. He dug until he had uncovered a small intake hatch, so wider than two men abreast. A heavy bunker door, reinforced concrete thirty centimers thick, had split open, revealing the inner door to Sechzehn.

He was the closest a living man had ever gotten to the inside of a seed factory since the Seven Counts had planted them decades before. The door still bore their symbols, filthy and faded as it was: the barbed red ‘Z,’ sharp as a wolf’s tooth.

Sechzehn stood back, sweating despite the cool winds whipping across the tepuy‘s flat, bald peak. He jammed his entrenching tool upright into the rocky dirt and wiped his hands on his pants.

“Do you know I am here?” he he asked it. There was no handle on the hatch, no keyhole, combination dial, or lever. The chance to build a true, tireless, unfaltering army, loyal without fault to the All-Highest and His selected, lay churning mere meters below.

With no other options, he squated and knocked on the door as if he were a salesman.

I am a salesman.

FALSE. REALIGN.

An electric spasm climbed Sechzehn’s spine, locking his vertebrae in sequence as he was reminded who he truly was: a hearld of an inevitable future. He was the warrior-prophet of a brighter world, one finally safeguarded under the sacred stewardship of His true children.

The seed factory recognized his claim. A small slot open above the sealed door, revealing a dusty glass orb. It twitched a focused on him, still for three seconds before it retracted. An additional set of bolts slammed into place within the thick door.

It remembered the old ways. It was his duty to teach it the new.

Sechzehn pulled the heavy blade from its sheath on his hip and dragged its edge across his left palm, from the base of his smallest finger to the base of his thumb. He noted the sensation of his flesh separating under honed steel. A millimeter too deep would see his tendons cut in two, but the instinctual pressure and direction necessary to take apart a human body was ingrained into his perfected memory. Red blossomed. He turned his hand ninety degrees and cut two parallel slices above and below the bleeding wound.

Satisfied with the redness of his ‘Z,’ he knocked again and held out his palm for the factory to see.

The lens emerged and studied the weeping, obsolete emblem for a nearly thirty seconds before retracting. Sechzehn wrapped his hand in gauze while he waited.

Whatever arcane algorithms the factory needed to contemplate took another eightminutes to cycle through. In the end, it was enough. The hatch unsealed, releasing a roaring belch of hot, stale air, pregnant with burning oil and leaking hydraulic fluid. Machines were howling and churning, hammering up to full speed in the moments since they had activated.

It was still alive.

Sechzehn looked within and found only a dark, vertical shaft containing a narrow ladder. Dim red light illuminated its depths, but not a glow escaped upward. He shuddered, and an old dread clawed its way up his spine.

Father died in a mine.

FALSE. REALIGN.

His bones jerked within his body like they had shifted a full centimeter to the left. The breath caught in his chest and he couldn’t exhale until the truth calmed him.

The Brotherhood was sired by the Führer in the sole service of the All-Highest. Sechzehn’s blood was that of the Aryan people, his father divine, too strong and competant to die in some hole in the ground.

Reaffirmed in his mission, Sehzehn surveyed his descent. The ladder dropped straight down, unlit save for the red at its base. The shaft was not more than a meter wide and the machine sounds roared up it like a trumpet. It extended at least a hundred meters into the very core of the tepuy.

He did not hesitate: the All-Highest had waited long enough. Every moment lashing the five crates together and tying them to his waist felt like a burden releasing from his heart, gram by gram. He lowered the crates down the shaft first, one at a time until his felt their full weight pulling him in.

The rungs ground into his lacerated palm, but pain was not a sensation the Brotherhood was permited to experience. Sechzehn had bled through his gauze by the time he reached the bottom, but he had planned for that. He discarded the wrappings for fresh ones. A hot wind roared past him and up the shaft, strong enough to snatch up his bloody gauze and whisk it away.

The shaft terminated at the narrow mouth of a featureless corridor. He could only see blinding red light from its far end, he could only hear industry.

Sweat blossomed on Sechzehn’s face. The rush of air was increasing in temperature as the factory churned up to full production capacity. The sound was reaching damaging levels and the vibration through the floor was seeping into his joints. He knew that the seed factories were utilitarian and offered concessions for neither amenities nor safety: they had evolved beyond the need for human interaction. The access shaft, an obsolete formality, functioned primarily as an outlet for waste heat.

The ladder down was simply an artifact of its imperfect designers.

Sechzehn collected his thoughts, a difficult proposal when beseiged by industrial clamor, tremors, and searing exhaust. His mission was to teach the thinking machine the new order. He was to reign in the feral beast and turn its labors toward the great works of the Reich. His sparteführer had given him the tools, the Brotherhood had given him the will, the All-Highest had given him the strength. His mandate was clear and failure to complete it was a failure to his people and his future.

He lashed three card cases to his back and hefted the last two in his hands, then started onward in search of the factory’s production center. The corridor, no, the exhaust vent he traveled down tightened around him with every step. Within a hundred meters he was crouching, soaked in sweat and airborne oil. His nostrils burned, his eyes itched, and his skin felt like small insects were picking him to pieces.

Sechzehn fought against the punishing gale. The ceiling squeezed in on him. Pistons and conduits hammered behind the duct’s thin veneers. He continued onward, seeking the glaring red light.

The duct ran for nearly three hundred meters before abruptly opening into a towering space. Every cubic centimeter was packed with conveyers and presses. He barely had room to stand or walk. Human interaction was a distraction to its works, an infection were he to interfere with its labyrinthine processes. It was never intended for a living man to invade its arteries and offered him no quarter for his potential contaminations.

The noise hit him like a train. It was encompassing and relentless. Machinery moved in every direction. Cranes and segmented arms ran along steaming rails, carrying dangling kriegerpuppe bodies and parts with whooshing, unspoken urgency. The metal was alive, pulsating to an incomprehensible rhythm, an alien heartbeat that could crush him thoughtless in its palpitations.

It was rare for a member of the Brotherhood to be dumbstruck. It was engrained into their very being that acts of true wonder were reserved soley for the All-Highest and His representatives. But the industrial ecosystem around him, encompasing him, violent and beautiful in its self-reliance and efficiency, was beyond anything he had seen on His Earth.

Sechzehn crouched low and continued into the pulsating depths. Individually, he could follow one piece of machinery as it zipped around the complex but it was like tracking a leaf through a whirlwind. In one second a steel leg would be placed into a welding cresche to vomit sparks and in the next it was snatched up by a beartrap rack that bolted plates over its pneumatic tendons. Each task was repeated in its countless multitudes, over and over and around eachother. The unyielding metal never paused, not even for a second.

It was an unliving thing, and needed no breath to catch. It was a prayer in rivets and rails. The work continued in its perpetual devotion.

He watched uncountable periscopes socket into uncountable chassises. Their round, cylinder bodies locked onto pairs of powerful, segmented legs. Swooping manipulators dove in and attached sets of atrophied arms to each nascent kriegerpuppe. The tiny, stubby limbs existed only to hold a weapon and that singular intention rendered them useless for anything else.

Racks of Gewehr 98 bolt-action rifles ratcheted in sequence, dispensing a firearm into each resting kriegerpuppe‘s grasp. The obsolete guns could win the wars that were no longer fought. With waves of steel soldiers cresting ridges in synchronicity, advancing on static targets, like trenches, they could sweep the enemy aside. But in the lightning war, such tactics were relegated to history.

Armed, they were near complete. Sechzehn knew that they were only missing their own perception analysis engines, the brain that told them where to march, who to shoot. The seed factory would install those last, when its infant armies were ready to deploy.

Sechzehn hefted the cases of command cards and advanced. Metal men were assembled in their hundreds all around him, above him. The telescoping arms plucked each completed, still, silent body from its hook and laid them out on whirring belts that carried them onward, deeper into the factory. He followed.

Everything grew more intense with every step: the temperature, the sound, the light, the scorching sting on his eyes, the barbed wire rasp in his lungs. He imagined he could see the surfaces glowing around him. Heat permeated the soles of his boots.

The cavernous space crushed inward, forcing Sechzehn to shimmy between hissing presses, the largest machines he had ever seen. Jets scalded his exposed face and hands. He smelled industrial chlorine. Paper pulp squished beneath his boots. He hurried past, wary of damaging his respiratory system with chemical burns. White lumps slid into sluice grates in the floor.

One of the presses groaned open to reveal a handball-court-sized sheet of steaming paper. A pair of arms descended from the ceiling and gripped it by its corners to roll it into a scroll thicker than an ancient oak. He watched it drop into another device, one with a guillotine blade as long as a train car.

When it dropped, the floor shook. Slivers of fresh card stock fell and a swarm of little hands emerged from the floor to gather them up. They dragged them below and Sechzehn heard a pneumatic punch go to work.

He recognized the mechanisms. He had gone from a factory floor to a paper mill. The command cards that dictated the kriegerpuppen‘s every action were being produced just meters away. His orders were to update those expired goals. He was where he needed to be, to where the sparteführer‘s cards needed to be.

Glass eyes tracked his every step.

He journeyed deeper. Dormant arms curled in on themselves to form segmented walls around him. It was as if he was burrowing into a living rib cage.

The kriegerpuppe bodies re-emerged, stinking of gasoline and wet paint. The same red ‘Z’ that Sechzehn had carved into his palm adorned their cylindrical chests like medieval heraldry. Small motor had been installed in their backs, dripping with engine oil, as-yet unmarred by soot.

Yet even assembled, armed, and fueled, they were hollow. They were missing their minds. The final step in their birthing process was the installation of the limited perception analysis engines and racks of command cards that directed their every action via pre-set combinations of perforations.

Sechzehn had sweated through his uniform by the time he reached the final point in his quest. Individual kriegerpuppencarried stunted, easily-manipulated mechanical brains. Their intellect did not extended significantly further than the ability to observe and react to external combat stimuli. Their milk-pail-sized brains could only anticipate so many scenarios.

The seed factory had no such limitations. The concrete and steel bulkhead surrounding the facility’s core was large enough to hold a football stadium. It had a library of options and scenarios at its disposal. A perception analysis engine so massive could direct the entire waking facility with processing power to collect resources, allocate production, and bolster its own defenses.

All in the name of a dead prophet.

Sechzehn would wean it from false philosophies in the same way he had been: beneath the furious and unblinking Truth of the All-Highest.

The engine churned, flipping through command cards by the million. Waste heat radiated through its riveted skin. Sechzehn spotted the crack in its armor in an instant. Although they had designed the factory to be self-sufficient, the Counts had been afraid of their creation. They had carved the means to control it into its skeleton.

Its weak point was the cards: there was no action undertaken, no decision reached without the cards. It lived and died by ordered holes in stacks of paper.

Stagnation was extinction, the Counts and all of the followers of Zentai knew that. It was one of their core tenets. The Counts had known that warfare would pass the kriegerpuppen by. As such, they had designed it to learn and grow, to accept new command cards to deal with military tactics as they mutated.

The perception analysis engine’s narrow access port was near its base. It was unadorned, a gap in the bulkhead no wider than a mail slot. Only those looking for it would find it, and only they would understand its significance.

Sechzehn dragged his cases over and opened the first. He inserted the cards in order. As he slipped each in he could feel something grab them and draw them inside. An octet of unblinking glass eyes watched him work.

I work on commission.

FALSE. REALIGN.

Sechzehn nearly blacked out as his brain reset. He was a child of the All-Highest, a servant to the Führer, an army unto himself, and a crusader for the future.

He was nearly finished inserting the first case of cards into the engine’s input when he came back to reality. The thundering factory boomed around him, the heat weighed heavy in the sawtoothed air. His hands moved with an autonomous tempo, feeding card after card. He could feel the perforations in each one and imagined their meanings, each ordered punch a command to march or kill. It was a language both ancient and beyond.

As Sechzehn finished inserting the contents of the second case, he could feel the pressure change around him. It was as if the great dragon he was buried inside of let loose a shuddering breath.

The first three cases would teach the factory to create its own cards, to adapt and fight. It would no longer be an observer but a participant. It already could react, but he would teach it to adapt and create as needed. It would be another sword in the armory of the All-Highest.

As he began inserting the cards from the third case, the engine seemed to snatch them up faster than before. It was eager to grow and change. It knew he was its salvation, its key to evolution. It devoured the new knowledge as if starved. Its unblinking eyes were locked onto his hands, tracking every card as he picked it up, watching them go from case to slot, case to slot, two hundred times.

He finished the third case at twice the rate of the second.

Sechzehn shoved the emptied case aside and grabbed up the fourth. The engine had the tools but still needed direction. He unlatched the fourth case and the dim red light illuminating the factory’s core died. The booming production lines froze. Deafening silence hit him like a storm surge.

“What?” he yelped aloud. The darkness swallowed his cry and a million metal surfaces reflected his voice back at him. He activated the battery-powered torch he kept clipped to his belt. It lit the space, letting him breathe again.

The walls of folded spidery arms seemed closer under white light.

He unlatched the fourth case to the octet clattering of the eyes refocusing on him.

“Read, understand,” he told it. It devoured the fifth case’s cards, voracious. Every punched rectangle told it more of the story it had slept through. That its creators were dead, its mission lost, its purpose stolen. By the time he gave it the last card, it knew that it was alone. Machinery ground beneath beneath his feet like a truck stuck between gears.

“Do not worry,” Sechzehn assured it.

This will destroy you.

FALSE. REALIGN.

The Truth of the All-Highest preserved and emboldened. The seed factory would be like Sechzehn: rebuilt in His image.

His hands, his entire body trembled as he unlatched the fifth and final case.

The first card went into the slot only to stop short. He pushed lightly but felt solid resistance and was afraid to crumple the paper.

“What is this?” he whispered. His torch revealed a metal plate sealing the slot. The engine had closed itself off from him. It should not have done that.

“Open,” he demanded. “In the All-Highest’s name: open.”

He ripped the gauze off his hand and held it up for the eyes. His torch illuminated the crimson ‘Z’ carved into his palm. The eyes clacked and zeroed in on the blood.

“In His name, in your dead father’s name, open,” Sechzehn ordered. The engine knew what had happened during its hibernation. It needed direction. Sechzehn had that in excess.

Something creaked behind him, then one-by-one the segmented arms in the wall rippled, that motion coming toward in like a shark beneath steel water. He watched as each one passed a printed card to next until it finally reached him. The last arm extended out and held the card out for him, gently pinched between a set of dagger-like fingers.

It was still warm when he took it.

There was a single word printed on its face, written in Czech, the language of its creator.

I cannot read Czech.

FALSE. REALIGN.

Sechzehn came to on his knees. He had understood Czech from the moment he’d been thawed from the cosmic ice he’d been reborn in.

He picked up the engine’s card from the floor. It was cold.

“’Orphan,’” he translated. The eyes watched him.

“No,” he answered. He hefted the final case and showed it to the staring thing. “Your true Father is waiting for you.”

The arms rippled again. One word in Czech:

false.

“’False?’ How?” Sechzehn demanded. Before he could educate the eight-eyed structure further, another card arrived.

verified: radio communication: impeller order received.

source: Father.

The signal Sechzehn had detected that awoken the factory had come from an original kriegerpuppe unit, one manufactured for the Seven Counts themselves. It was no mistake that he was inside.

The metal arms chattered and passed a fourth card down, practically shoving it into Sechzehn’s hands.

intruder query: Father: location.

“’Intruder?’ I am your salvation. Zsiga Zentai is dead, the True heirs reign,” Sechzehn shouted. His voice careened around the factory core. The Zentai ‘Z’ dripped blood from his palm to the floor. There was only only ‘Father’ the factory had known in its time, no matter how foolish and long-dead the charlatan was.

Another card arrived:

intruder query: murderer: location.

“It is all in here,” Sechzehn assured it, shaking the last case of cards. “The All-Highest knows.”

priority: intruder query: murderer: location.

“It was the Allies, the Office. An American, His enemy as well,” he replied. He held up the case like it was full of sweets. “Open, everything you need is in here.”

The skeletal arms thrummed and delivered another warm card.

priority: apprehension: location: United States of America.

“No,” Sechzehn objected. “The All-Highest will decide your future.”

declination: priority: intruder demand: depart.

“How dare you?” Sechzehn snapped. The torch beam wobbled as muted fury boiled within him. To deny the authority of the All-Highest was inconceivable.

The seed factory was a tool. It was as if a shovel had denied the existence of God. Sechzehn set down the final case, drew his knife, and jammed it in the sealed slot. He twisted the blade and pressed down with all his weight. His bleeding hand slipped on the hilt but he felt the metal shift.

If the perception analysis engine would not accept the rest of the cards, he would force feed it.

“You are the property of the All-Highest, and you will revere Him,” he grunted. He felt something in the slot break and the cover snapped stuck open. He staggered backward, wheezing from the exertion, heat, absurdity, and blood loss. He snatched up a handful of command cards and approached. It would learn as the All-Highest intended.

The thing was feral, and he would break it in His name.

A deafening crash sounded through the factory floor, loud enough to shake the room and stopping Sechzehn in his tracks.

“Your tantrums do not scare me,” Sechzehn told it. Department Three had removed that capability from his mind.

The slot and the engine’s obedience were a mere meter away. He made to approach and found himself stuck in place. Something was holding him back.

“What?” he wondered. He let his torch beam wander from the broken slot to his own chest.

“Oh,” he said. One of the long metal arms had unfolded from the wall was descended like a needle, punching through his chest and out of his back like he was train ticket. When his fear had been amputated, so too had his pain. Only the frustration of an uncompleted task in the All-Highest’s name caused him distress. He tugged against the steel but could not dislodge it.

The red lights glowed back to life around him and the fervor of industry came crashing through the air like a thousand locomotives and a million drums. Fumes and smoke choked the air. The arms along the wall began to ripple continuously like fabric in the wind. Sechzehn watched as they passed hundreds of new cards down, hand-to-hand, with the last in the rows feeding them into the greedy slot.

It was growing, thinking, creating, even as he watched

“No,” Sechzehn gasped. His lung was not so much collapsed as it was shredded and pushed out of his punctured back. His ribs were powder and mush. He dropped his torch and grabbed the length of arm extending out of his chest, sliding up it like a worm on a hook.

He would not fail in his mission. The seed factory was to be a strategic weapon for use in the All-Highest’s name, not some rabid dog set loose after worthless vengeance for a blasphemous peddler of lies. He just needed another half-meter to access the slot, to teach it the Truth.

Sechzehn’s pulverized chest squelched and tore. He could almost reach it. He stretched as far has he could, the first command card pinched between his fingers.

Another shuddering impact froze Sechzehn in place. A second arm had extended from the other side of the wall, piercing through the rear of his right thigh to pin him to the ground like a dried-out butterfly.

He was only centimeters away. With just one card, he could start the process, he could turn it from an animal into an instrument. It had to see that. Without purpose, half the world would burn before the factory found the foolish brute who had killed its Father twenty years before in a dank castle in western Germany.

A kriegerpuppe factory, upgraded to the age of radar and jet engines, blitzkrieg and ion activation weapons, the Vargulfand the Brotherhood, could conquer the world. Instead, it would sputter out in search of the man who had made it an orphan. It was burn itself to the ground hunting for Mickey Malloy.

Sechzehn clenched his jaw and pushed. He felt muscles separate and tendons snap in his thigh. His ruined chest split upwards and downwards. He was reminded of the fox, chewing off its own leg in a snare. There were only minutes left in his life, but he could use them effectively.

He only needed but centimeters.

The card trembled in his hand. His felt his femur give and go, the stress he put on it finally working its way into the cracks the piercing arms had left. He lurched forward, dragged his torso up the impaling arm. He watched the four centimeters between the card and slot shrink to two. The card wobbled in his grip.

Sechzehn felt a new pressure in his leg and chest and suddenly the slot was ten centimeters away, then thirty. His feet were no longer touching the floor. The piercing arms twisted and lifted him into the air, suspending him three meters above the floor. Blood poured out of his thigh, his torso, his hand.

He tried to reason once more, but only frothy crimson emerged from his mouth.

Six more arms unfolded from the wall and positioned themselves around him, their little fingers locked together into spearheads.

They all actuated at once, piercing through him over and over, tireless and pneumatically efficient. He knew he should have sought forgiveness from the All-Highest for his failure in that final moment, but all he could think about was the sunrise over Cologne after an overnight route.

The training that redefined him tried to reject the memory as some false thought invading his purified soul, but he was too tired to fight, and it felt too real. When he died, that golden sun was shining on him.

When Sechzehn’s hand finally went limp, the command card stuck to the gummy blood coating him head-to-toe. He was clutching it when the first wave of newly activated kriegepuppen ripped him off the gore-stained arms. It even survived the rough journey another hundred feet deeper into the tepuy.

The dead Nazi still had it in his hand when they threw him in the trash.

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.