Karl found the bottle and dug it out, pocketed the cap, rubbed the mouth of the bottle vigorously so it wouldn't stick to his lips, and took a good stiff belt. Jägermeister, the cough syrup of kings. His friends in school had sworn by its economical buzz value and ferocious, loopy potency, but Karl had never enjoyed it before, preferring beer, pot or even Nyquil over Jäger shots. But beer was impractical and even if it were possible to score weed, the Jägers would scent it on his clothes and come down on him.
Karl believed fervently in God and was pretty sure about the divine selection of the white man, but he was beginning to have his doubts about Heilige Berg. His parents, good God-fearing working people who owned a corner market in Nampa, had the best of intentions when they sent him here to, as Papa put it, "wake up the righteous man in you," after he and some school-friends were caught drunk and disorderly in a Circle K parking lot on a school day. Papa had switched the family to the Teutonic Heritage Church the year before because only they had answers for what the world was coming to, and they had a ready answer for Karl's problems, too.
Karl's first impression of the church's mountain retreat was little better than the one he made upon the community at large. Climbing down from the shaky second-hand school bus in a parka and two layers of bluejeans, he'd goggled at the ranks of hearty teenaged commandos in white arctic camouflage standing at attention at the far end of the parking lot. He'd come expecting a lame tough love church camp with the same white separatist leanings as the church in town. He unzipped his parka to the brutal predawn cold to show his abundant, upbeat piety in the form of a T-shirt he'd got on a family vacation pilgrimage to the Creation Research Museum in Santee, California. Faded and worn through in the left armpit, the shirt still clearly depicted a stylized Darwin fish flat on its back, with its ridiculous, abominable legs pointed skyward. A circle and slash negated the mythical beast, under which a caption proclaimed, NO WAY…. Beneath it, the original, legless Jesus fish floated on a field of heavenly light, the Greek name of Jesus in its flank slightly misspelled, but no less holy. The caption read, YAHWEH!!! Mama still chuckled every time she saw it, but Grossvater Egil Reuss, the pastor of Heilige Berg, had failed to see the humor. The huge, shield-bearded cleric had seized Karl by the hood of his parka and jerked him off his feet so that he lay supine in the slush with an enraged frost giant who might have been the second coming of Beowulf looming over him.
"Was ist los?" Grossvater Egil roared in his face. "Was machst du dabei, mit den Judische Hemd?"
When Karl only stammered out an apology in English, his rage only multiplied. "You have no mother tongue? God, boy, what is your name?"
"Karl Frederick Schweinfurter, sir."
"You're a race-traitor scrap of shit come to spy, aren't you, Karl?"
"No, sir, my—my parents sent me here."
"You're wearing a blasphemous rag on your body, Schweinhund," the man growled, to the gruff amusement of the assembled platoon of Jägers. "That is not the name of God."
Before Karl could offer further apologies, let alone explain that the shirt was a clever denunciation of evolution, Reuss tore the T-shirt clean off his body, leaving only the collar. "Strip, spy," he ordered, and urged all due haste by slapping him across the back of the neck with a hand as broad and hard as the blade of an oar. Karl staggered under the blows as he stripped down, sloughing his parka and his boots, his layered jeans and thermal underwear, and finally his boxer shorts, which were mercifully, and against all odds, still unsoiled. Shivering uncontrollably, he was struck again when he hugged himself for warmth. The only sound was the laughter of the Jägers and the crunch of the other new arrivals filing past him with eyes averted, until Grossvater Egil seized one by the hair and twisted him face to face with Karl. "Look at him, boy. He's not one of us. Er hat keinen Blut im Gesicht, keine Schade."
He steered Karl's pitiful nakedness to the edge of the lot, where brown, scabby snow had been bulldozed into a bank that came up to his waist. "Los, Kinder! All of you, look at this! Only the white man can blush, only the white man has shame, and can make blood in the face." He slapped Karl full force across his right cheek, sending him almost flying into the bank of snow. He crept slowly back to his feet, hesitating at every syllable spat from Grossvater's lips for another slap. "This—thing knows no shame! He brings blasphemy with the false Jewish name of God on a shirt, he backtalks in the face of right, and even in his nakedness and abasement, he cannot blush!"
Karl was sure that he was not only blushing, but probably openly bleeding, but said nothing. This was only the most extreme version of a situation with which he was very familiar, being made an example of. Perhaps it was because he always seemed to smirk from the deep, elliptical scar on his chin and lower lip where a pony at a petting zoo had bit him once when he'd tried to feed it a carrot mouth-to-mouth. Perhaps it was his hair, which hung in a shaggy, shoulder-length mullet that reminded older men how much of their own hair they'd left in the shower drain that morning. Or perhaps it was simply because he was forever destined to be the only one still screwing off when the teacher decided to crack the whip. For whatever reason, it was always Karl, so he stood as straight as he could in the freezing predawn cold, as the elder slapped him again and again until he'd proven to his own and the camp's satisfaction that Karl could, indeed, produce blood in the face.
"I will teach you shame, boy," the cleric roared in his ear. "From this day on, I am your Grossvater, and I will save you from the filth of the world and even from the filth that is within you, but you must cleanse yourself before God and this holy place."
And Karl had obeyed, scrubbing himself with snow until he had raised a glorious blush on every square inch of skin, as the population of Heilige Berg had watched and taken a lesson from his ablutions.
Heilige Berg was a religious retreat, and enjoyed the tax-free status and lack of federal oversight which the United States generally extended to all faith-based groups. In fact, it was a permanent settlement of two hundred trained fighting men and women, mostly kids whose almost exclusively Germanic or Scandinavian parents hoped to prepare them for the imminent racial holocaust they believed would herald the Last Days. But there were many whole families there, too, and after Karl had been at Heilige Berg for as long as he thought he could stand it—a month—his parents had come: not to take him home, but to stay.
His mother was attacked by black thugs one night as she went to put in the night deposit. They beat her face so badly she looked like a circus freak, Mama Schweinfurter the Mule-Faced Woman. Both her eyes were still closed up, and Papa had to lead her around. They'd told her they would rape her and give her a litter of black babies, but she was too old and ugly. This had been the worst of it for her, and she had begged Papa to take her to safety. Papa went to see Pastor Bochner, who made arrangements for Church people to manage the store, and held the deed in trust to the family house while they holed up on Heilige Berg. Mama had cried as she told him all of it again and again, her hands trying to cover the words they'd cut into her face: HO HO HO. Karl could guess what it meant, but he couldn't bring himself to tell Mama.
After that, things had taken a turn for the better at Heilige Berg; Karl was transferred from the slaughterhouse to guard duty, and was even allowed to go on supply trips into town. He would never make Jäger, but he was matched to Heidi, and they were assigned a joint room. He loved her and protected her, according to his duty, and she did the same, until the lights went off.
"Lord, is this how it's supposed to be? Heidi's pregnant, and I guess you like that alright, we're supposed to 'be fruitful and multiply,' and all. I love her, and I want to do right by her, that's a husband's job, right? But I can't help but wonder what you're planning, Lord. She's like four months along, and everybody's proud as punch of her, but I ain't never
been
with her, Lord. I believe in your power, and in the Virgin Mary and the fruit of her womb, Jesus, but I'm not a blind man, Lord, I see how she cavorts with the Jägers. I don't figure you had a hand in any of this—I mean, not the Heidi part of it, but…"
He sipped another shot of Jägermeister, the searing track down the back of his throat the only truly warm spot in his whole body. He struggled to find the words, but he had a hard time talking frankly to his own father, and Grossvater Egil had told them God did not hearken to prayers in the wilderness, but only through the concerted voice, focused through him, in the chapel. But Egil also said God saw and heard everything, so if he was going to watch Karl poison his body with sinful contraband, he might as well hear his tale of woe, too.
"Is this how it's supposed to be, Lord? If you love the world so much, why you want to let all them Antichrists and the Zionists take it over? Why are all the God-fearing folks pushed back into the middle of nowhere, when the rest of Creation belongs to a bunch of rooty-poot mud people who don't even hearken unto Your word? When we were kids, Papa used to take us to the neighborhood church back in Nampa, and there were blacks and even a couple of spics in the crowd, they seemed to love you just fine…"
He trailed off, unable to utter his last question tonight. If God could hear it in his heart, that was just fine, but if it was a sin to speak it, he wasn't going to compound his troubles. Besides, you never knew when one of the Jägers was lurking in the bushes, waiting to catch you in sin.
Lord, how is it only Grossvater Egil knows the truth? Lord, if Grossvater Egil was a liar, wouldn't you give a sign? Lord, do you even know about this place? Can you even see it?
He wiped the Jägermeister bottle down on his sweater and returned it to the soft dirt in the leeward side of the boulder.
A flash of blue-white light pinned him to the boulder. Karl stood up so fast he banged his head against the overhanging granite, and staggered backwards into a stand of scrub brush, fell down hard on his butt.
Knowing it was the Jägers, knowing his sins and his weakness had been found out, Karl stood to accept his punishment with the proper meekness. But there was no one around. The stillness was broken only by clumps of snow sloughing off the pines all around him, and by the muttering of engines on the road below.
Still rubbing his head, Karl brought his rifle around under his right arm and picked his way down the precipitous slope towards the road. Karl's lookout post stood on a knoll around which the narrow, two-lane highway looped in its meandering westward course through the valley. To the south of it, the nine hundred acre Heilige Berg compound rode the rolling hills into the thick evergreen forest, and down to the pasture and the slaughterhouse below. To the north, the valley slope was a tumbling knife edge of serrated cliff-faces, skirting a dry tributary of the Snake River and winding up at the pass leading into the Seven Devils Mountains, where the terrain got really difficult.
Karl kept losing his footing and caught himself each time only by falling against a tree. The stout pine trunks absorbed his runaway momentum, but each time dumped a shower of frozen snow down the back of his parka. For all his stealth, he was probably as easy to hear and spot as the thundering T-Rex in that movie he'd glimpsed once as they drove past the drive-in. It occurred to him that he should alert the Jägers on his walkie-talkie, but he felt like enough of a fool without scrambling the compound for a false alarm. Just because they saw fewer than a dozen vehicles passing up the canyon on an average week, didn't mean the first one he saw that night was the herald of Götterdämmerung.
He ran out of trees just short of the road, where the hillside became an ice-slick slide dumping out on the narrow shoulder. His boots reversed themselves too late, kicking up a fan of snow in front of him as he tumbled out onto the road. He fell hard on his ass again, but this time, the rifle slammed into his back and rendered his right arm tingly and numb. He rolled sideways on the shoulder, blinded to what he'd come to see.
A convoy of six deluxe charter style buses lumbered past him at little better than walking speed, engines grumbling in first gear as the great, chain-bound tires ground up the sheets of ice on the tarmac. The body panels were all black, and marked only with a white hemispheric coronal burst, like the leading edge of the sun emerging from a total eclipse. Karl blinked icy water out of his eyes and peered at the windows. They were tinted, and most were curtained, but a few faces watched him from behind the glass: sallow, sunken faces, huge eyes that looked painted on with a careless brush, jutting, beaklike noses, breathing tubes, oxygen masks. There may have been as many as sixty on each bus.
Karl shuddered and tried to clamber back up the slope in a reflex of pure horror. He remembered the filmstrips Grossvater Egil showed them after supper, the vulpine features of the Zionist hordes who plotted their extermination. He remembered, too, the other films he'd seen in the old high school in Nampa, the ones Grossvater Egil said were fake, but which had left no less of a mark on him for all that. The ones that showed the vulpine Zionist monsters caged up in boxcars bound for Dachau, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz. Jews or not, there was something profoundly wrong with the people on the buses, but unless it was contagious, Karl couldn't see how it presented a threat to the compound.
Perhaps they were the legions of the sick, come to be healed by Grossvater Egil, in accordance with the prophecy.
Must be the Jägermeister talking…
The first bus was only just now rounding the knoll and disappearing around the bend. At this rate, they would pass in front of the heavily fortified front gate in ten minutes. Karl stuffed his mouth full of snow to wash out the alcohol, then jogged alongside the road, screened by the front line of trees that marched up to the road beyond the knoll. There was a narrow but well-maintained Jäger trail here; it marked the perimeter that the elite guards walked. He was surprised not to have run into a Jäger already, but they'd probably already scrambled back to the compound in case the lost death-bed package tour pulled up at the front gate and asked to use the phone.