‘Sturmbannführer Stahl, can you hear me?’ Konrad asked. ‘Can anybody hear me?’
As if drawn to the sound, Haas’ dead body suddenly flew out of the darkness and landed with a bloody splat at Konrad’s feet. It was as if whatever had killed the soldier was toying with the prisoner, daring him to continue into the forbidding darkness. If it was a challenge, Konrad took it up. He pressed on. Beyond the soft glow of his torch, he saw a single figure lying on the floor. Unlike the lump of meat that was Haas, this body was intact, and apparently unharmed. It was Stahl. He lay spread-eagled on the floor. His eyes were now closed, his new found power hidden within his apparently unconscious body. Konrad knelt and examined the Nazi’s body.
‘He’s still alive!’ Konrad said to himself. He stood and pondered what to do next. ‘I just know I’m going to regret this…’
He reached down and eased the unconscious Stahl up off the floor and dragged him away to safety.
But as Konrad performed this unselfish, humanitarian act on behalf of the SS officer, a deep rumble, its pitch unheard by Konrad, or by the waiting Ziegler, began. Deep below the funnel, inside another infinitely sized chamber, huge pieces of machinery grinded into life. Great pistons rose and fell, driving impossibly sized billows which pumped like the disembowelled lungs of a butchered giant. If was as if the blood had fertilized the black and lifeless stone, acting like a grotesque version of sperm. Whatever the reasons, the spire was now alive; its timeless hibernation finally at an end.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The airlock remained blurred before Konrad’s eyes as he slumped to its deck. His pressure-suit, now stained with blood and dirt, weighed heavy upon his shoulders as his exhausted body finally gave in.
Only minutes before, both he and Ziegler had scrambled from the spire’s entrance with Stahl’s body, rolling and slithering down the mass of dirt like a pair of snakes in the desert as their suits’ internal systems incessantly warned about low air supplies. Inside his cumbersome pressure-suit, Stahl’s body felt like it weighed a tonne, and as such, the prisoners cursed the Nazi as they heaved and pulled their way to safety. At the same time, their task was made even more formidable by the walls of the funnel. At first, they attempted to drag the body out by hand, but the pit’s angled walls made this impossible. However, they eventually met with success after Ziegler climbed out the funnel and recovered Konrad’s discarded life-line. Gathering up the steel-line, he lowered it down into the funnel and the strong wire was then looped and knotted around the unconscious Nazi’s chest. Then rather ungainly, and after Konrad had managed to join Ziegler at the funnel’s lip, they pulled Stahl’s body out. Shortening the wire, the prisoners then dragged Stahl behind them like a pair of polar explorers pulling a sled. But as Konrad and Ziegler crossed the black expanse of the open chamber, then through the hellish menagerie, a palpable sense of being watched, and more frighteningly being pursued, gripped the two men. Each urged the other on, their eyes either locked on what lay ahead or on each other. They dared not look behind them in case they saw the mysterious abomination that had killed the soldiers stalking them too. But what the prisoners didn’t know of course, was that the source of the destruction lay dormant within the unconscious Nazi whose life they had saved.
Outside, at the foot of the spire, the prisoners eventually succumbed to exhaustion and the thinning air in their tanks. At first, Konrad had tried to fight the dizziness and the suffocating darkness that started to cloud his vision. He remembered gazing at Ziegler as he drooped in the dust next to Stahl, the swirling particles smothering his body as if the alien dirt was anxious to swallow him whole. He offered a helping hand to his companion, but such was his lack of strength, his arm impotently drooped in the wind and eventually, like his friend, he collapsed. As he lay in the cold soil he cast his eyes up at the monstrous structure. Were his dreams foretelling this moment all the time? Did they simply predict his cold death at the foot of this cruel alien tower? He pondered this as the dust then started to smother his prone body too. But as the lethal blackness filled his vision a light as bright as an angel’s halo appeared in the gloom. It drew nearer and swallowed him, and when his vision cleared he saw that he was resting on the deck of the airlock.
Konrad looked up and saw Mesler standing over him. The officer swept the dust from the prisoner’s helmet and looked him over. Satisfied that Konrad was in rude health, Mesler patted him on the shoulder and moved onto Ziegler, then the unconscious Stahl. As he examined them, the airlock’s wall of metal rose agonisingly into place. The hostile atmosphere still raged outside, but its horrific soundtrack was shut off the instant the airlock closed with a final hiss. At that moment relief surged through the prisoner when he realised that the hatch had also shut out the unseen presence.
Pink ultra-violet lights came on throughout the airlock to disinfect the exhausted astronauts. Once they faded away and the harsh, white lighting returned, Mesler hurriedly removed his own helmet. He drew in a huge lungful of the cool, artificial air and wiped away the sweat that dripped from his face. He then stood up and activated the intercom.
‘Doctor Blomberg, this is an emergency. Sturmbannführer Stahl is injured. I need to take him to the sickbay straight away. The UV shower’s over, so we’re clean now of any contaminants.’
‘Understood. What’s the matter with the Sturmbannführer?’ Blomberg asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘We’ll be waiting. Out.’
Meanwhile, Konrad had managed to remove his helmet, and along with Ziegler, they cautiously unclipped Stahl’s blood-smeared helmet and gently removed the round neck brace from the Nazi’s shoulder-harness. Stahl remained unconscious, but his pant-like breathing showed the signs that his body was working furiously. Sweat rolled down his flushed face, its heat steaming into the freezing airlock. Before they moved the body, Konrad saw Stahl’s charred gauntlet and lifted it up. ‘What happened here?’ he said as he showed off the scorched hole.
Like a curious toddler, Ziegler poked the damaged glove. He then twisted the gauntlet’s release catch and pulled it from Stahl’s hand. They expected to reveal blackened flesh, swollen blisters or exposed bone, but instead, Stahl’s palm was pristine and injury-free.
Mesler examined the singed glove and handed it back to the prisoners. ‘It doesn’t make sense. A hole like that would have caused his suit to depressurise. He should be dead,’ he said.
Ziegler caught a glimpse of his own suit’s air-tank gauge and gulped. It was virtually empty. ‘So should we!’
‘You’re lucky I found you at all in that storm outside,’ Mesler said. ‘Everyone else had given you up for dead. But I need as many hands as possible, so I couldn‘t afford to leave you out there to share our exalted leader‘s fate.’
‘We’re grateful, Herr Mesler,’ Konrad replied, but he noticed the pointed comment about the unconscious Nazi.
‘What the hell happened to you all in that building?’ the officer then asked as he lifted Stahl’s gore-smeared helmet. ‘What about the soldiers?’
‘They’re dead,’ Ziegler coldly whispered.
Mesler glanced out the airlock’s porthole at the dark wall and a look of fear filled his eyes. Genuine fear.
The three men moved onto the sickbay where Konrad disentangled himself from the cumbersome pressure-suit and gulped deeply on the air from an oxygen mask given to him by Doctor Blomberg. Ziegler, like himself, rested in an empty medical pod, slurping messily from a tumbler of water. The pod’s soft-cushioned padding was a luxury the two men had not encountered in years. Stahl still remained unconscious. He now lay on a raised dais in the middle of the circular room like a king or emperor lying in state. Standing over him was Blomberg, whose face was dominated by a quizzical frown as he waved his scanner over Stahl’s bare, sweat-smeared chest.