Just Cause: Revised & Expanded Edition (35 page)

“Hester,” ordered Scott through clenched teeth. Hester was the only one who spoke German. The Professor spat to one side and kneeled down next to the man, disgust leaching from his pores.

“He keeps saying
übermensch
, over and over,” said Hester after a moment, getting back to his feet.

“What’s that mean?” Downs wiped his mouth. His face had gone as pale as the moon.

“Super man,” Hester answered. Mercifully, the man stopped moving as his injuries overcame him.

Scott felt all the strength drain out of his legs. “Holy Christ. What if they did it?”

Stills’ lip curled in disdain. He was undoubtedly still upset about Scott stopping him, since he believed the only good kraut was a dead kraut, no matter the circumstances. “Did what?”

“Made someone like us,” said Hester.

“Bullshit! How could you make a parahuman?” Stills shoved his knife back into its sheath.

“Nobody knows how we got our powers,” said Scott. “I didn’t really know about mine until I hit eighteen. You found out about yours by accident, Stills, and Downs didn’t get his until after Basic Training. The Nazis have scientists; maybe they figured something out.”

The four men were silent for a moment as each considered the possibility of a Nazi parahuman.

“Okay, let’s move in,” said Scott finally.

“What, in there?” Stills was adamant. “No way.”

“That’s an order, Corporal. Salvage any documents you can find.”

Rifles drawn, they moved into the castle.

The entryway was filled with smoke. A smoldering Nazi flag hung in the middle of the hall. Somewhere ahead, they could all hear the sounds of a fire.

“How come it ain’t burning out here?” Downs asked.

“Stone don’t burn, kid,” said Stills.

They passed through another doorway into a courtyard. There was the remains of a building in the middle of the courtyard where the explosion must have occurred. Some of the cobblestones around the ruin glowed white hot. The force of the explosion seemed to have blown out most of the fire, leaving behind only the charred inflammables in its wake.

“It does if it gets hot enough.” Hester coughed through the acrid fumes in the air. “I never heard of anything making this kind of heat except a volcano.”

Shattered Klieg lights and warped scaffolding surrounded the courtyard. Scott looked around intently. Up on the castle wall was a steel and glass booth that was in just the spot he would have picked for an observation gallery. The glass was melted and blackened.

“Stills, can you get up there to check that out?”

“Affirmative.” Stills winked out of the courtyard and appeared up on the wall. Rifle out, he kicked open the door and peered inside. In a moment, he called out from the doorway. “Sergeant, you better get up here!”

Scott took as deep a breath as he could in the smoky air and concentrated. His feet left the ground and he flew up to the top of the wall. A reek of charred flesh emerged from the booth. Scott swallowed hard, then stepped into the enclosure.

Everything in the room from window height and up had been charred black. Ash eddied in the air currents. Two people had been seated in chairs, presumably to watch the events unfolding in the courtyard below. Their legs and lower bodies were relatively unharmed, but from the waist up, they were essentially unrecognizable lumps of charcoal.

“What is this?” Scott asked, disturbed at the strangeness the scene entailed.

“Some kinda observation tower. I figure there might be some notes or something here, but I didn’t want to touch nothin’ without your approval first.” Stills glanced at the two smoking corpses. “Shitty way to go. Must have been one hell of a burst to cook ‘em like that!”

Scott clicked on his electric torch and began searching for anything he could take with him back to Allied Command. A shelf of notebooks might have been promising, but they had been turned into lattices of ash that disintegrated when he touched them. He began rooting through drawers in a low file cabinet. Nothing. No notes, no binders, nothing to show but death.

“Sergeant!” Downs’ voice was urgent from down in the courtyard.

Scott leaned out of the observation booth door. “What, Sounder?”

“Heartbeat, sir, and it isn’t one of ours.”

A sudden rush of air and ash behind Scott informed him that Stills had just teleported out. Sure enough, he appeared an instant later next to Downs, already drawing his knife.

Scott vaulted the edge of the wall and dropped the twenty feet to the courtyard. For a trained paratrooper, even one who could fly, it was like any other landing. Hester had his pistol out and was slowly circling, like a hawk preparing to strike. His left hand clutched a fist-sized chunk of rock that vibrated with barely-contained kinetic energy.

“Where is it, Ray?” Scott grasped his own pistol at the ready.

Downs turned around slowly, using his ears like a radar set. “Through there.” He pointed to the stone building in the center of the courtyard. It was long, stretching nearly two-thirds of the length of the courtyard itself. A large portion of the roof had been immolated in the explosion. “Sounds like he’s inside a metal box by the echo of it.”

“Maybe he can tell us what happened here,” said Hester.

“Move in,” said Scott. “And watch yourselves. It’s still damn hot in here.”

The four men advanced to the building. The entry doors had been blown off their hinges and lay smoldering on the courtyard cobbles. Two by two, they entered the building.

Inside was a long, low-ceilinged hall. Strange metal implements lined each wall at regular intervals, twisted into unrecognizable shapes by the heat. Small metal boxes were bolted down by each sculpture. Scott approached one cautiously and flipped open the catch with the tip of his rifle. Inside it was a smoke-stained German army uniform. He looked back down the hall, trying to picture it before the accident.

“Beds. These were beds.” Hester stepped up next to him. “That’s why the footlockers are here.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Was it a hospital?”

Hester looked grim. “Not a chance. This looks like a lab of some sort. These poor guys were subjects.” They glanced down and saw charred bone fragments amid the ash remains of flesh and bedding.

“Sarge, in there.” Downs motioned to a bank of heavy clothing lockers against one wall. He and Stills stepped up to them. The young man closed his eyes, listening intently next to each door. He stopped at the third locker, opened his eyes, and nodded. Stills took up a position on one side of the door, Downs the other. Scott and Hester raised their weapons, preparing for the worst. Stills nodded and raised his fingers in a silent count.
One… two… three!
 

Downs yanked open the door and a man pitched forward onto the charred floor. He coughed and choked, rolling onto his side. A rope of mucus and blood trailed from his mouth. His skin had an odd, waxy sheen to it. With horror, Scott realized his eyes had been burned out; their remains leaked down his cheeks.

In his hands, he was clutching a notebook.

“This him?” Scott asked. Downs nodded, eyes wide. “Professor, check him out and confiscate that book. Downs, Stills, check the rest of the lockers, including the footlockers.”

Hester dropped to his knees and started to pull the notebook away from the man. The man started and closed a desperate hand around Hester’s wrist, babbling something in German. Hester kept his cool and asked the man a question. The man stuttered as if he was drugged.

“Give him some morhpine,” said Scott. “Maybe it’ll help us get some answers from him.”

As the drug kicked in, the man became somewhat more lucid. He spoke rapid-fire German, as if he was trying to get all of his thoughts out before he perished from whatever it was that was eating him up inside. Hester took frantic notes in the man’s notebook. Most of the man’s speech was so jumbled and incoherent that he couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

Stills and Downs returned from their search to report. “One hundred footlockers. One was empty, and there was no sign of a body beside it.” Stills glanced around the room.

The man on the floor began to laugh. Not just
laughing
, thought Scott with horror, but
cackling
like an insane witch in a motion picture. His whooping laugh degenerated into a thick, bubbly cough that spurted bloody mucus from his mouth and nostrils. Hester recoiled from the grotesque droplets.

“Yah… yah… one lived!” The man spoke in heavily-accented English.

“You speak English?” Scott stepped forward.

“Ya… a little.” The man’s laughter fell into a hacking cough.

“What do you mean,
one lived
?” Stills eyes narrowed.

“The experiment… it was… success! Thousands die so that one may live.
Heil Hitler!
We have created… your superman!”

“What the hell does he mean by that?” Downs shouted.

“I think that’s obvious, kid,” said Hester.

“
No!
He’s… he’s sick or something. Look at him. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.” Downs’ face grew dark beneath the soot stains.

“At ease,
Private
,” growled Scott.

“We’re supposed to be the only ones. They told us we were the only ones!” Downs raised his rifle like a club.

“Stills,” said Scott. The teleport popped from his spot to reappear directly behind Downs. He yanked the rifle from the boy’s hands. When Downs spun around in fury, Stills cuffed him hard across the face, sending him sprawling. “Stills, stand down,” Scott bawled in his best drill-sergeant’s voice.

Downs didn’t rise from where he had landed in a heap. His voice was racked by sobs. “We’re supposed to be the only ones,” he repeated as he gasped for air.

Scott stalked over to the boy. “We don’t have time for this.
On your feet, soldier! Atten-SHUN!
”

Months of conditioned reflexes kicked in and Downs jumped up, ramrod straight, tears tracking clean streaks down his sooty face. “Sorry, sir.” He gulped and wiped his nose, and then paused, listening. “Does anyone else hear that?”

The other three soldiers looked around warily, weapons raised. “Hear what?” Scott snapped at him.

“That sort of humming, whistling sound. Kind of like before a steam valve busts.”

Another cackling laugh emerged from the forgotten man on the floor. His flesh seemed to be moving from waxy to almost liquid, like it wasn’t sticking to his bones anymore. “Ya… Messer’s Device… it will pulse again… all will perish.”

Hester started as if he’d been goosed. “Device?”

“What’s
pulse
?” Downs looked frightened.

“It’s bad, whatever it is.” said Scott. “Stills, take that journal. If anything happens, you get clear with it.”

“But Sergeant
—
”

“That’s an order, Corporal. Move out, boys, asses and elbows!”

The four men ran for it, back down the hall and through the entryway. They cleared the castle wall and were pelting across the mud for the evergreen forest across the road when a light as bright as day erupted from the castle behind them.

Scott had a sensation of being as transparent as glass, followed by a twisting, wrenching pain. His mind whirled madly as it tried to reconcile the fact that he had just been teleported. Acute vertigo hit him like a right hook and he fell hard onto a rocky surface, retching from the dizziness and the awful sensation.

That’s when he heard the screaming. He tried to focus his spinning eyes. A fiery orange and red blur resolved itself into the largest explosion he had ever seen. The castle had been flung apart by the force of it, and the evergreens had been knocked flat, burning so fast they exploded as the water within their trunks flashed into steam. He realized he was up on the high mountain that overlooked the castle, or what was left of it. He shivered violently, although from the cold or the altitude or the sudden shift in location he couldn’t tell.

The screaming continued and Scott saw Stills writhing on the ground in agony. His left arm was missing halfway through his bicep, as neat as if someone had lopped it off with a band saw. Blood poured out of the stump.

Scott forced himself up to his knees, fumbling for his pack and for the morphine. The world spun around him as he found the emergency kit. He flopped down next to Stills, whose screams had softened to animalistic moans. He ripped off the sleeve of his fatigues and fashioned a tourniquet around Stills’ arm. Even in the darkness, with the angry glow of the fire below, the man had gone deathly pale.

Stills had lost so much blood; Scott was afraid that the morphine would kill him, but he wasn’t a medic and wouldn’t trust himself to alter a dose. In a few minutes the narcotic took hold of Stills and his whimpering subsided.

Scott hunkered down next to him to wait until morning. Neither of them was in any shape to travel, and if Stills was going to die, it would happen in the next few hours. There was no sign of Hester or Downs. Scott was certain they had died down below in front of the castle. The heat from the explosion had been so strong that where there had been mud was now cracked earth with a glossy sheen over it. The forest had been leveled, and what hadn’t been blown to splinters was burning away.

He had a fair idea of what happened. When the device pulsed, it had blown up, like an overheated boiler. In the fraction of a second after the burst, Stills had reached out to Scott, who happened to be right next to him, and teleported them both up the mountainside.

Stills was able to move more mass than himself, since he could teleport with a full pack, but he’d never attempted to move another whole person. His body must have rebelled at the attempt and left part of itself behind. Scott felt fortunate to be all in one piece and to not have any parts of the local landscape impaled through him. Teleporting to an unseen location was one of Stills’ great fears; he was afraid of materializing in the same space occupied by another object. Army doctors had no idea what would happen if he did.

Scott knew that no matter what else happened, he had to get that notebook back to the Allies. He had to tell them what they’d learned at Aufstein, that the Nazis were trying to create their own parahumans.