Astronomy Read online

  This awful feeling had been forming in the pit of her stomach since last night. When she was a teenager, Susan had done stuff like this to mean old ladies on her block. You sign them up to get junk mail that they don’t want. It’s amazing the things people will send you on the slightest pretext—life insurance, snow tires, the odd American agent. . . .

  “Are you saying we were both conned into coming to Berlin?” She hoped she didn’t sound hysterical. “Just on a goof? On the off chance we might get this Malmagden killed?”

  “Such things have happened before, for one officer to try and get another shot as a criminal or a traitor.”

  I’m going to die down here, Susan said to herself, and it’s all for nothing.

  Schoenberg had one of those faces made for misery. “I don’t deny that mistakes have been made.”

  “But the joke’s on us, isn’t it.” She wanted to kick something. “What, are you all bored? Is this your idea of laughs? Do you people just do things like this?”

  Schoenberg laughed bitterly. “Herr Malmagden is hardly blameless. Who do you think it was destroyed the Faulkenberg Reservoir research facility?” He had evidence for this too—a blueprint for the ceremonial tower beside the lake. Little X’s were drawn here and there. Susan had blown up enough buildings that she knew what she was looking at—pressure points.

  Christ, she thought. We wasted our time invading this place. Leave them alone long enough, they take care of each other.

  “It is my assumption that Stürmbannführer Kriene, the head of the Faulkenberg Reservoir project, brought us here to implicate Malmagden. These were the two most powerful men in Zentralbund der Geheimlehre’s Advanced Research Division. They hate each other—did hate each other,” he corrected himself.

  Schoenberg looked away bitterly. “Now look what their hatred has led them to. They have cost us the war. They have toyed with forces beyond human comprehension, and it was all just—”

  It was the smell of death made them both look up.

  Five men stood back from the bare electric bulb. The one in front wore the uniform of a German officer. The four behind him were so large they hunched forward just to clear the top of her cell door.

  Susan found herself staring at them. Something in their silhouettes looked oddly jointed. Hard to tell in this light.

  The man in front was smaller and aspired to a rakish elegance. An amused smile appeared in the peripheral glow of his cigarette.

  “You must be the Allied agent my men have told me so much about.” He took her hand. “I am enchanted, Fräulein . . . ?”

  “Berne. Katje Berne.” That was the name on her identity papers.

  He actually kissed her hand. Anybody told her a guy in twentieth-century Europe went around kissing hands, she would have laughed out loud. But some people, their power comes from a certain sense of entitlement. This guy looked like he had a castle somewhere. Susan stared in amazement, thinking: My dream date with Dracula.

  “I am the man that Oberstürmführer Schoenberg has spoken of. I am Krzysztof Malmagden.” He didn’t bow exactly. She could see he was holding himself back.

  Malmagden turned his amused smile toward the corner of the cell where Schoenberg was fussing with his valise.

  “You are quite right, Oberstürmführer. I have toyed with forces beyond human comprehension. Yet I am here. And some others are not.”

  The Lieutenant rose to explain himself. Malmagden put a hand to his shoulder, sat him back down.

  “You have been telling tales out of school,” he addressed the young lieutenant in a parental tone.

  “I have documents to back up everything I have said. You and Stürmbannführer Kriene used your position to wage a personal war on each other. You cost many German lives in the course of this rivalry. You have cost us the war.”

  But Schoenberg’s defiance was the brittle defiance of an employee. Malmagden laughed.

  “Your accusations come at a peculiar time, Herr Schoenberg. Have you called Gestapo headquarters lately? I don’t believe anyone is there to hear.”

  Schoenberg looked around at the huge men of Malmagden’s personal guard. They were standing all around him. He gulped a little. “I am not collecting this material for the Gestapo,” he said. “I am giving it to the Allies, for their war crimes tribunal.”

  Indeed, Susan found Schoenberg’s briefcase in her lap.

  Malmagden smiled—“Pardon me”—and took it back. There followed a struggle as Schoenberg grabbed for the case. Malmagden shoved him backward. They fell over the tabletop. Papers exploded out the top of the valise, drifted about the room, filling the bouncing light with jittering shadows.

  Susan thought for half a second and went for Malmagden. Something circled her about the waist and lifted her off the two men. She smelled rotten meat and turned back to see the huge face of something barely human.

  Malmagden’s guard smiled at her. This was a distinctly canine smile, full of teeth and hunger. The nose was too long on the sides. The eyes that glinted in the lamplight were red and shimmering like dogs’ eyes.

  “It’s all right, Liebchen,” Malmagden assured her. “The Gestapo will harm you no more.”

  They were going to kill Schoenberg, she realized, right here in her cell. They were going to use her as their excuse to do it.

  “He gave me cigarettes,” she managed. “He was nice. Please.”

  The German patted her arm. “If he was nice to you, it was to entrap you in some greater admission.”

  “No, you don’t understand. He didn’t even ask me anything. Look. He just gave me cigarettes.” She held up the pack for them to see.

  “The Gestapo are cunning interrogators.” Malmagden led her from the cell. Schoenberg moved to follow after. Malmagden’s guard stepped in his way.

  Susan reached back for him. Malmagden whisked her hand away. “Don’t trouble yourself with him any further,” he said. He led her out into the tunnel. Behind her, Susan heard a scream of pain. Then another.

  Malmagden was asking her if she’d been out of her cell since her arrival. He seemed appalled that any guest of his should spend a week in these conditions.

  A long wail of anguish echoed down the hall. Susan turned back for him. Malmagden grabbed her by the arm. His hand was harder than she had imagined. She looked in his face and saw the spoiled European dandy had transformed into something cold and quiet.

  “This war crimes business, this is a serious charge,” he said. “Not even Stürmbannführer Kriene accused me of such a terrible thing, and Kriene was a frustrated and embittered man who knew few limits.”

  “I risked my life to bring you out of here,” she said. “You played me for an idiot. You’re going to pay for that.”

  “I must demur on that point; it was Herr Kriene who arranged for your mission into Berlin. As for what I will pay for? I will pay terribly, that is true. In a currency that I doubt you can even imagine.”

  Malmagden, she realized, was taking her to see something. Maybe he was taking her to some nice, quiet spot where he could put a bullet in her brain. She was having a hard time getting up the proper attitude of concern.

  They stepped up onto a catwalk overlooking huge expanses of darkness. Susan counted two, three rooms the size of small auditoriums. They came upon a final room, barely lit to gloom by a single lamp in the far corner.

  She needed a moment before the room came into focus. Her eyes had to adjust to the light. Her mind had to adjust to the images.

  She saw a sticky red smear along a wall. She saw a red mess in the center of the floor. She looked a little closer and realized it was a face, someone’s face, ripped from their head. A torso sat, calm and headless against a wall.

  “What is this?”

  “It was a field hospital,” Malmagden said. “It held over one hundred twenty patients, three doctors, and eight nurses.”

  Susan saw parts. As they walked on, she tallied up heads, arms, denuded torsos—no bodies. Every once in a while, she would ca
tch some hint of motion from one of these body parts, just out the corner of her eye. But of course that was ridiculous. When she turned to look, there was nothing but stillness.

  She started to ask what happened. Malmagden motioned her on. This wasn’t what he had brought her to see. This was just a little tune-up.

  Up ahead, the darkness thickened with the smell of rotten flesh. Susan heard shuffling sounds. She heard garbled-headed talk, nonsense syllables that went from guttural growls on up to hooting screams that put a corkscrew down her spine.

  Below their elevated walkway, something moved. She peered through the metal slats at men in German uniforms. But something was wrong.

  Two of the men grabbed a third and took him down, leaning into his face. As they came away, she saw chunks of bloody meat in their mouths.

  As for the man on the ground, he clutched at the wrist of his nearest assailant, and managed to bite off two fingers. The scent of blood brought together a small knot of soldiers. They converged on the two bleeding men. When they pulled away again, nothing but mess remained.

  The smell of death was so overpowering that Susan retched. Her vomit fell through the grate to land on an upturned palm. She saw the man stare at it with dull curiosity. He licked it, and then looked up at her.

  At the sight of Susan and Malmagden, a wail of hunger began to pass through the throng. It rolled across the room like the discordant swell of music as an orchestra tunes. Add a high screech of animal bloodlust, the profound basso of rage.

  Susan started to back up the way they had come. Malmagden took her and led her on.

  “You would die back there,” he explained. “We have to find the Havel River locks. That is where you will reach the surface.”

  “This is your Totenstürm,” she managed. “This is your army of the dead.”

  “They were my Totenstürm. I fear they are mine no longer,” Malmagden said sadly. “They were supposed to receive a treatment that would have made them pliant to my college of philosophers. But things came up.”

  “Your philosophers.” Susan looked back toward her cell. Them?

  “My learned colleagues: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Kant.”

  “You’re a funny man,” she said. She liked that in a Nazi.

  “They are ghouls, actually, from the Vale of Pnath, which is not a place you will find on many maps.” Susan shuddered, dimly recalling some passing mention of this from her early Watermark training. “However, they are scholars of no small talent as well. They worked with the Totenstürm and we had some success. Our army was taking shape. Last night, in the wake of the travesty at Faulkenberg Reservoir, someone came down here and released a battalion of Totenstürm shock troops into the sewers.” Malmagden indicated a giant gate swinging loose on its hinge. Behind it lay a cell the size of the Roman Coliseum, empty now. “It is obvious to me that these are the same people who have tried to use an Allied agent to get me branded a traitor. Subtlety failed them; they decided the only vengeance they could count on was to have me set upon and torn to pieces by my own dead.”

  “How could anyone hate you so much?” Susan was maybe even more amazed at the motive for this crime than she was the means. “There are a couple hundred people dead in that hospital. All that suffering was simply to kill you?”

  Malmagden laughed. “You Americans. You have yet to see the true power of hate. The Führer understood. People love to hate. They while away their afternoons in violent fantasies, what they would do to this person or that person if they caught them alone. People can excuse anything in the name of hate. It is quite something to see.”

  “No one can hate that much.”

  Malmagden gave her a look of fond amusement. “You think America is immune,” he said. “Your time will come.”

  They were at the aqueducts leading from the Havel River. Late evening sunlight slanted in from a sewer grate. A line of barrel-shaped floodgates loomed out of the darkness, taller than her head. A metal key longer than a crowbar lay beside them. Malmagden took the key and led her up to a metal stairwell to the operating mechanism.

  Susan got a really awful feeling at the sight of that key. She was shaking her head even before Malmagden told her what he needed her to do.

  He laughed, all innocent. “Not to worry,” he said. “You come out of this all right.” He pointed up at the sewer grate at the top of a second short stair. “I only need one thing from you before you escape.”

  He jammed the key into the gearbox of a giant valve. Susan looked down the tunnel. Malmagden’s Totenstürm roamed through the dusk just at the edge of her vision. She could almost convince herself that she and Malmagden were the last living people down here. If it were only that simple.

  “You’re fucking crazy,” she said.

  Malmagden winced, visibly pained by her language. “You Americans,” he sighed. “There is a heartless quality to your naïveté.”

  “The hell’s the matter with you people? Your buddy Kriene is out in the Franconian Wald playing with stuff that boils away reservoirs. You’re trying to contain an army of zombies. Does everything you do threaten to destroy the world?”

  “You have no idea what men will do when their country is foundering.”

  “There’s hundreds of people alive down here.”

  “They are doomed,” Malmagden said. “One way or another. If we take their lives, it will be more humane than if they are torn to pieces. More importantly, if I kill them, they will stay dead.”

  She looked at him, going, What? What was that?

  “I need your help.” He steadied the giant key in its gearbox. He pressed his shoulder beneath the lever to show her what he required of her. “This is too much for one person alone.”

  Susan started up the stairs for daylight. She didn’t even think about it. Malmagden was strong, but she was quick. She figured she’d be gone while he was still thinking it over. She reached the grate and pushed. It gave easily. She glanced back once, just to see where he was.

  Malmagden stood down by the water locks, where she’d left him. “I am not going to chase you,” he said. “If you wish to leave”—he flung his hand up at the surface—“go.”

  That was all the encouragement she needed.

  “One thing? Bitte?”

  He nodded for her to look out into the tunnel. A series of bridges branched off from the elevated walkway. Next bridge over, she saw Malmagden’s guard. No mistaking them out here. When they stretched to their full height, they must’ve been over seven feet tall. Three of them were bearing packages. They held their loads high overhead, so that she could see them clearly.

  “You need to understand,” Malmagden said. “From an intellectual viewpoint as well as an emotional one.”

  “What is that? What are you doing?”

  She found herself coming down the stairs. Some little voice inside her told her she was making a mistake. She had no doubt it was right.

  “We operated our Totenstürm program for a year with little success,” he said. “However, as the Russians closed in on Berlin, one of Zentralbund’s scientists began reviving our dead heroes with a new necrolophagic agent. This last batch spreads logarithmically, through direct contact. Do you understand? One dead man kills a living man, and then you have two walking dead. And so on. It received limited battlefield exposure, but the results were spectacular. Spectacular and dreadful. If this particular Totenstürm group actually reach the surface of Berlin, they could sweep across Europe like a new plague.”

  She hardly heard what he was saying. Her eyes were on Malmagden’s guard. “What have they got in their hands?” she demanded. Somehow though, she already knew. Schopenhauer was holding one of her Volksstürm guards over his head, like a squirming, crying bag of kittens.

  He waited just long enough to draw the attention of a hundred dull eyes. The crowd of zombies converged directly below the bridge. Susan remembered ants at a picnic finding a droplet of Coca Cola drying in the sun.

  Schopenhauer walked up
and down the bridge with his pathetic load, teasing the bloodlust of the dead into high frenzy. When they were leaping and swiping their hands at him, Schopenhauer flung the boy into their midst. The one she called Crosby went right after him.

  Alexander Schoenberg had just enough life in him to grab at the handrail as he fell past. It took a moment of prying and biting before Hegel got his hand loose.

  Susan saw the darkness come to life around the three of them. She saw small, unidentifiable body parts appear momentarily, and then swirl away on the sea of arms.

  A long wail of excruciation preceded a loop of intestine. It spurted up through the heads, caught about necks, wrapped over shoulders. The screaming stepped up a notch, and then another.

  Malmagden stepped aside to let her leave. “Go,” he said. “Make your way back home.”

  “You son of a bitch! I swear to Christ, I’ll find you—”

  “All those children and old people down here—this is how they will die. This is how many of them are dying at this moment. Help me now. Before this horror is compounded a thousandfold.”

  The screaming went on and on. Susan thought they would die within a few moments, but the dead were hungry, or clumsy, or too stupid to know they were eating the flesh of live human beings.

  One of her former guards was saying something—pleading in a loud voice. He was begging for one of them to find a gun.

  “Bastard,” she wept. “Bastard.”

  Malmagden wedged his shoulder close to the head of the wrench. He put a hand over it, to steady the drive as they both leaned into it.

  The screaming became a chorus. She recognized the voice of Schoenberg. She took her place behind Malmagden. She could hardly see for the tears in her eyes.

  The valve looked untouched and rusted over, but no—she rammed her shoulder into it once, twice, and water began roaring beneath her feet. It turned with surprising ease.

  How many thousands of gallons per second? It spread in a wide green wall that washed all the horror down the sewer, out of sight.

  Abruptly, the screaming ceased. The lowing of the dead went on another moment or two, and then they disappeared into the darkness.