Last Orgy of the 13th Reich

Last Orgy of the 13th Reich

      The muzzle of Commander Schmidt's pistol tasted of gun oil and burned powder, undercut with metallic blood and salt urine from when he had discharged it not twenty minutes before inside the subhuman woman, his favourite from among the joy division. She lay now, brown eyes staring glassily at the ceiling upon his silken sheets, midnight black hair fanned out beneath her, once lustrous skin already the colour of muddy ash. He removed the gun from his mouth with a sob, ashamed at his own cowardice as he took another swig from the bottle of cognac he held in his other hand before staggering to his feet, heading across his quarters to his desk and pushing the corpse of his radio operator from the chair. He wiped the bloody foam and the glinting remains of the last cyanide ampoule off of the polished teak with the sleeve of his uniform shirt, and read the decoded orders again.

LIQUIDATE RESEARCH CAMP 9. EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.

ALL HAIL THE 13TH REICH.

      He banged the bottle on the table, letting out a short scream, and put a bullet in the cypher machine, a whirling piece of the mechanism gashing his forehead. The pain felt good, cutting through the fog of liquor. He fumbled in his desk drawer, tossing aside papers and trinkets, and found a half-used cylinder of military-issue amphetamine tablets. He downed one with another mouthful of the brandy and began to feel more like himself almost immediately as he stumbled towards the balcony that overlooked his realm of wonders.

      The camp was a medieval painting of hell. Oily black smoke poured unceasingly from the chimneys of the medical centre crematorium as their glorious experiments were tossed half alive into the furnaces, joining the grey pall from the burning huts. The gallows were full, the top bar bending under the weight of corpses. More bodies, mostly of prisoners in their dirty blue uniforms, some of guards, lay crumpled in the spaces between the buildings beneath crude epithets graffitied in their own blood. He could hear someone singing an old patriotic song, the lyrics changed to something haphazardly obscene. In the middle distance, a burst of fully automatic fire cut off a woman's scream. He heard a strange, animalistic grunting from down below on the parade ground, and his eyes focused on the form of one of his men, trousers round his ankles, the bony form of one of the prisoners writhing beneath him. Schmidt levelled his pistol, squinting to aim, and began to fire. By the time the slide locked back, both had stopped moving. He threw the gun away and saluted his fallen comrade, swaying as he turned his attention to the horizon, beyond the dark, impenetrable forest. The red glow had grown brighter since he last looked; that must be the nearby town burning now, where he had spent many a pleasant day's leave; the sullen peasant women and the dead-eyed youths he forced himself on liberated now by the communist advance. If he strained his ears, he swore he could hear the distant crackle of the machine guns and the sinister whoop of the rocket launchers. It would only be hours. Behind it was the same; the road to the capital had been cut off by enemy armour two days ago. His mind revolted at the thought of the punishments and humiliations that would await any of them unfortunate enough to be alive when the camp was overrun. The Reich was falling.

      Beneath the sound of flames and distant combat, he became aware of a sort of humming, very low and faint. He closed his eyes, the bottle slipping from his grip to shatter on the floor as he concentrated. The sound began to grow louder, the pitch to rise; it was incredibly far off, somewhere up in the sky. He began to think of choirs of angels, then to more primal myths of his blood. Valkyries descending from the lofty pinnacles of Valhalla to carry off the chosen warriors. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he raised his arms, opening his eyes again as he looked up at the grim heavens from which human ashes fell like snow. All of a sudden, the sound became discordant, like the buzzing of hornets as the clouds opened, the vast formation of bombers heading towards him glinting brazenly in the sun. There were no fighters to challenge them, for the aviation fuel had run out weeks ago, and the crews of the flak towers were dead or drunk or somewhere in between, embroiled in the suicidal bacchanal below.

      A smile came to Schmidt's lips as he heard the high-pitched whine of the 8,000lb blockbusters descending in pitch, then silence as his eardrums imploded. He saw the trees of the dark forest thrown up like chaff, the medical centre disappearing from sub-basement to chimney top in a great plume of dust, the guard towers crumpling like cigarette packets, the wire singing through the air, the huts blown apart, and then he was flying upwards, the great stone slabs of the parade ground suspended in empty space around him, his beautifully crisp black trousers and his field-grey shirt and his long shiny leather boots torn from his body by the blast wave, and then shortly after his very skin, fluttering ahead of him like a torn flag as he raced upwards through an infinite tunnel of white light...

      The pain stopped. The light dimmed. He was in a plain room; the grey walls of some material so smooth as to be unidentifiable. He blinked. His mind was clear of the effects of the liquor and the speed. He saw the two buttons on the wall in front of him. One red and one green. He ran one fully fleshed hand across his chest, and became aware suddenly of his real body, floating in the negative buoyancy tank; the viscous oxygel filling his lungs, the pulsating waste tubes burrowing into his abdomen and lower back, the bundle of filament-thin wires that sprouted like a cybernetic cordyceps from the hole drilled in the centre of his forehead. His vision doubled, seeing the thin fingers of his real hand silhouetted by the lights of the real switch on the inside of the tank door. The suppressed parts of his memory flooded back; he felt his blood pulsing, a stirring in his genitals as he recalled it all. How long had he been in here? How long had each cycle taken? A day, a week, a year? How many of the others were still left, bobbing in their own sterile chambers? How many had been replaced with indistinguishable AI puppets?

      Did it really matter?

      The muscles of his jaw ached with the grin as his real body and his virtual body pushed the green button at the same time and he felt himself plunging backwards down a bottomless black well...

      Prisoner Schmidt awoke with a start amidst a huddle of bodies, the reek of sweat and piss in his nostrils. The train had stopped, finally. He shivered as the door of the cattle cart rattled open, the thin grey uniform they had forced on him offering scant protection from the cold. The look in the eyes of the guards chilled him more though; not so much the murderous hatred he had come to expect, but more a strange, bestial lust. He shuddered to see the camp emerging through the mist as they were marched in their thin shoes down the straight road from the train halt. The concrete bulk of some great chimneyed building loomed over it all in the morning half-light; what indescribable horrors would he and his fellow prisoners encounter there?

      The guards refused to answer their questions with anything except a swift kick or the blow of a rifle butt. There was no warmth in the morning sun that was burning off the mist as they were lined up on the parade ground, separated by sex and by the humiliating symbols of their crimes and perversions that they wore on their right breasts. He was conscious of the heavy machine guns in the towers as he raised his eyes, squinting to get a good look at the camp commander as she addressed them. Her blue uniform was spotless, knee-high boots mirror polished, her raven hair slicked back, bronze skin shining in the morning sun that illuminated her high balcony, catching on gleaming flecks of spittle as she harangued them. Perhaps it would be best to break ranks now, to be cut down in a few moments of agony by the barking guns? But something rooted him. He felt a strange stirring of recollection as he looked at the Commander, a vague image of a room somewhere both very nearby and impossibly remote, the smell of gunpowder and bitter almonds. It slipped away from him as her ranting reached its climax, her eyes seeming to look directly at him, as surely they must have seemed to look directly at every one of the trembling prisoners.

      “...no place has been found for you within the great community of our people, but you shall still be of service to True Humans! Degenerates and perverts, solicitors and whores, propagandists and saboteurs, here at Research Camp 9 your foul crimes shall be paid for! We shall mould you into something far more glorious, or we shall eliminate you utterly! Either way, the disgusting filth I see huddled before me shall be burned away, the stench of your iniquities consumed in the purifying fire of our united purpose!” She banged her fist on the balustrade, before slamming it across her chest in the imperial salute.

      “All hail the Fourteenth Reich!”