Liese?
Was that Liese over there? Oh, my God!
Liese! It was Liese! This morning she had worn a dove-colored dress and grey, silk stockings. She must have come back to look for him.
The raging fire above gave just enough light to show that there was no way across the chasm. Lessing shouted Liese’s name, but she did not answer, nor did she move. After a while it was clear that the woman across the way was dead.
Wrench and Goddard found him huddled upon the living-room carpet, his oxygen mask off and his pack discarded beside him. They half-carried, half-dragged him back outside, down the corridor, and into the stairwell.
“Maybe it wasn’t Liese.” Wrench made calming motions.
Lessing answered only, “It was.”
“Wait’ll we get across that hole and… uh… see who it was… is.”
“God damn you.” He was very tired. “Leave me alone.”
“You’re coming with us,” Goddard stated. “As soon as our guys come back from scouting, I’ll have ‘em take you down to the ambulance.” He put out a tentative hand.
For some reason Lessing found the gesture comforting. He let Goddard help him up.
“You look like shit,” Wrench said, not unkindly. “Go back down. We can finish looking for survivors, though I’ll bet there aren’t any. If poor Mulder was up here he’s thumbed now. Our people must’ve headed out the main doors, right into the arms of Korinek’s doggies. He wouldn’t shoot the little fish, only Party officers… like us.”
“Liese is probably among the prisoners,” Goddard said. “Even Korinek wouldn’t shoot a woman.” Big Bear Bilclass="underline" the eternal sexist! Somehow he didn’t sound very confident.
“Look, I’m green light,” Lessing told them. “We’ve still got a job to do. I’ve lost buddies in combat before.” A snapshot-bright vision rose before him: a pretty, thin-faced girl in a dusty, military uniform. The girl was dead, her limbs stretched and twisted at odd angles in a foxhole fringed with dry, yellow grass and heaped about with whitish mud-bricks. Where had he seen that? Syria?
Then, too, there was… ice-blue.
“God… catch him!” Wrench yelped. “He’s going down!” Things got dark inside as well as out.
Later he found himself sprawled between Goddard and Wrench on a hard stairstep in near darkness. One of their electric lanterns sat on the floor nearby, its beam a bright bull’s-eye on the smoke-black- ened wall. The reek of burning was strong here, but the air was cool and damp from the sprinkler system. They must have come down a floor or two. He couldn’t remember.
Liese. Oh, Liese!
“He’s coming around,” Wrench muttered. “…Hate to lose Liese,” Goddard was saying. “The Party needs her.”
“Yeah. As if that were your only reason!” “She
“I know,” Wrench said. He reached across to lay a hand on Goddard’s arm. “I know, man. You were in love with her too.” People almost never spoke this personally to Bill Goddard.
Goddard took no offense. “More’n you know.” Lessing felt his grief like a physical blanket swaddling them.
“I remember when Lessing married Jameela,” Wrench continued. “You wanted Lessing and his golden bint-baby out of the Party, so that you could have a chance with Liese.”
Goddard’s nostrils flared; at least Wrench had succeeded in changing the subject. “Lessing was wrong to marry Jameela Husaini! He didn’t know jack-shit about race, about genetics, about eugenics! He still doesn’t! Just Mr. Average American Fuckhead, brainwashed by the media and what passes for an ‘education!’ Maybe you shouldn’t blame somebody for being ignorant, but Lessing tries extra hard! No ambition, no goal, no particular morality, no ideology… no reason to come in out of the goddamned rain!”
“Innocent as a baby’s bunghole, that’s our Alan.” Wrench’s fingers pried at Lessing’s right eyelid. “God, he’s still in shock. What do we do?”
Goddard ignored him. “Lessing never liked me. I’m the fanatic, the guy who doesn’t back off from violence, the one who’s just as ready to stand up and fight as our enemies are. He never understood about racial survival, the wrongs of race-mixing, the real nature of our opposition.”
“No,” Wrench said slowly. “I don’t think he ever did. He ought to now…”
“Liese…” Goddard whispered her name, very quietly.
Wrench lurched up to lean on the metal banister. “We’ve got to get going. Where the hell are our guys, anyhow?”
“I sent ‘em to see if they can find a way out of here. Korinek and his gubbin’ Jews have us trapped.”
“Always the Jews. Fanatics…,” Wrench snickered nervously, “…like us.”
“Yeah. They do what they have to do: their terror gangs, their pressure groups, their money, their media control. Even after Pacov, after all that’s happened, they’ll be back. I don’t blame ‘em; I just fight ‘em. Guys like Lessing think that if we’re nice to ‘em, lean over backwards to be ‘unprejudiced,’ give ‘em more than their share of our goodies, let ‘em run our government and our media, let ‘em scare us with their accusations of ‘anti-Semitism,’ then they’ll live with us in beautiful peace and harmony. It’s all so ‘ecumenical,’ so bullshit ‘liberal’!”
“Makes a great Sunday school lesson, you gotta admit.”
“Propaganda! For two thousand years the Jews have worked their butts off to take over our society. They get in, they get accepted, then they take charge. They’re smart: it’s hard to make people see what’s happening right under their goddamned noses.”
“You don’t have to tell me!” Wrench would let Goddard talk, nevertheless; it helped work some of the grief and anger out of the big man’s system.
“We have two choices: we export ‘em, the way the Germans did before World War II, or else we take ‘em out entirely. I don’t balk at either solution. They do what they have to do, and so do we. The end does justify the means when racial survival is at stake. The only morality is the morality of the living.”
A boom and a prolonged hammering echoed up from below. Wrench jumped convulsively. “What’s that?”
“A grenade!” Goddard exclaimed. “Gunfire! Shit, we better think up a plan! If Korinek’s doggies come charging up the stairs, ws’Tefungled!”
Wrench waved a hand before Lessing’s face. “What do we do about this gubber? He’s in dinkin’ shock… out of it.”
Lessing swam up from a hundred leagues beneath the sea. He said, “No, I’m green light now. Give me a jack up.” He hauled himself erect. “Hand over your M-25, Wrench. I can use it better than you can.”
He felt like a thousand-year-old ship raised from a watery grave. He clung to the masthead and pulled seaweed and flotsam from his rotting bones. The Ancient Mariner? Davy Jones? No, that was some other movie!
He stumbled over, picked up the automatic rifle, and staggered off down the stairs, leaving the other two to follow.
One, two, three floors they descended in silence, Lessing in the lead. Wrench in the middle, and Goddard bringing up the rear. The sprinkler system was still working on some of these floors; on others there was no sound, no light: only a dank and smoky darkness that stank of burning.
Feet grated on the stairs below, and Lessing held up a hand. He signed toward the fire-door on their landing, and Wrench and Goddard slipped through and took up positions behind it. He himself went back up half a flight to the between-floors landing and hunkered down behind the steel banister where he could see who was coming. He checked his M-25 and laid the Belgian automatic beside him as back-up. Then he turned off the electric lantern.