“What? Are you crazy? They’re here for you!”
“Do it.” Michael saw the rifle on the ground, its butt broken off. Krolle was whimpering, trying to pull one of the Lugers from its holster. “Don’t wait for me.” He walked to Major Krolle, grabbed the holster, and flung it away. Krolle gasped, blood running from a gash across his forehead and his eyes dazed. “Go!” Michael shouted to Bauman, and he and the Russian ran toward the truck.
Krolle moaned, finally recognizing the man who stood before him. There was a whistle around Krolle’s thick neck, and he put it to his mouth but he didn’t have wind enough to blow.
Michael heard the clatter of bullets against armor plate. He looked back and saw that Lazaris and Bauman had reached the truck and climbed inside. The machine gunner was still firing at the tower guards, but now slugs were striking the truck as well. More soldiers were coming, alerted by the blast and blaze. A rifle bullet ricocheted off one of the truck’s tire shields, and the machine gunner swiveled his weapon and shot down the soldier who’d fired it. The kitchen was heating up; it was time to get out. The truck was put into reverse, and withdrew through the flame-edged aperture where the gate had been.
At his feet, Krolle was trying to crawl away. “Help me,” he croaked. “Someone…” But he could not be heard over the shouts and the firing of guns and the wailing emergency siren, a sound that must’ve reached Berlin. Michael said, “Major?” and the man looked at him. Krolle’s face distorted into a rictus of sheer horror.
Michael’s mouth was opening, the muscles rippling in his jaws. Making room for the fangs that slid, dripping saliva, from their sockets. Dark bands of hair rose over the naked flesh, and his fingers and toes began to hook into claws.
Krolle scrambled up, slipped, got up again with a strangled yelp and ran. Not toward the gate, because the monstrous figure blocked his way, but in the opposite direction, into the depths of Falkenhausen. Michael, his spine contorting and his joints cracking, followed like the shadow of death.
The major fell to his knees beside a barracks and tried to get his bulk into the crawl space beneath. Failing that, he struggled up once more and staggered on, calling for help in a voice that did not carry. A wooden building was on fire perhaps three hundred yards away, hit by a mortar shell. Its red light capered in the sky. The searchlights were still probing, their paths interweaving, and guards shot at each other in the confusion.
There was no confusion in the mind of the wolf. He knew his task, and he would relish this one.
Krolle looked back over his shoulder and saw the thing’s green eyes. He gave a bleat of fear, his robe dusty and undone, and his well-fed, white belly hanging out. He kept running, trying to call for help between gasps of air. He dared to look again and saw the monster gaining on him with a steady, powerful loping stride-and then Krolle’s ankles hit a low pinewood barrier, and with a scream he pitched over it and slid facedown a steep dirt incline.
Michael leaped nimbly across the barricade-set there to keep trucks from tumbling over-and stood on the edge of the incline, peering at what lay before him. In his wolf’s body his heart hammered with a fearsome rhythm as he saw the beast’s banquet laid out at the bottom of the pit.
How many corpses were strewn there was impossible to say. Three thousand? Five thousand? He didn’t know. The steep-walled pit was about fifty yards from side to side, and the naked dead lay tangled in obscene, bony piles, thrown one on top of another so deep that he couldn’t see the pit’s floor. In that gray, hideous, unfathomable mass of rib cages, emaciated arms and legs, bald skulls and hollowed eyes, one figure in a red robe struggled toward the pit’s opposite side, crawling across the bridges of decaying flesh.
Michael held his position on the edge, his claws gripping the soft dirt. The firelight leaped, painting the huge mass grave with hell’s radiance. His mind was numbed; there was so much death. Reality seemed warped, a bad dream from which he must surely soon awaken. This was the fingerprint of true evil, beyond which all fictions paled.
Michael lifted his head to heaven, and screamed.
It came out as a hoarse, ragged wolf’s wail. In the pit Krolle heard it, and looked back. Sweat glistened on his face, flies swarming around him. “Stay away from me!” he shouted to the monster on the pit’s edge. His voice cracked, and madness broke through. “Stay away from-”
A corpse shifted beneath him with a noise like a whisper. Its movement caused other bodies to part, and Krolle lost his balance. He clawed at a broken shoulder, trying to grip a pair of legs with his sweaty hands, but flesh rippled under his fingers and he went down amid the dead. The corpses rose and fell like sea waves, and Krolle thrashed to stay at the surface. He opened his mouth to scream; flies rushed into it, and were sucked down his throat. Flies blinded him, and winnowed into his ears. He clawed at rotting flesh, his boots finding no purchase. His head went under, corpses shifting around him like waking sleepers. Taken one by one, the bodies weighed about as much as the shovels that had pitched them down here; together, in their twisted linkage of arms and legs, they closed over Krolle’s head and crushed him down into the suffocating depths. He was borne to the bottom, where a slender arm hooked around his throat and flies struggled in his windpipe.
Krolle was gone. The corpses kept shifting, all across the pit, making room for another. Michael, his green eyes burning with tears of horror, turned away from the dead, and ran toward the living.
He scared the yellow piss out of two Dobermans that were being held on leashes by their masters, and then he streaked past them and across the open ground near where the wrecked motorcycle lay. A truckful of soldiers was about to drive through the broken gate, in pursuit of the rescue team. Michael changed their plans by leaping up over the truck’s tailgate into the rear, and the soldiers yelled and jumped out as if they’d grown wings. The driver, intimidated by the sight of a thin and obviously hungry wolf snapping at his face on the other side of the windshield, immediately lost control and the truck slammed into Falkenhausen’s stone wall.
But the wolf was no longer perched on the hood. Michael bounded through the blown-open gate, and out into freedom. He cut across the dirt road and entered the forest, his nose sniffing. Engine oil, gunpowder, and… ah, yes… the rank odor of a Russian fighter pilot.
He kept to the brush on the road’s edge, following the scents. The smell of blood: someone had been wounded. About a mile away from Falkenhausen the truck had turned off the main road onto one that was little more than a… well, than a wolf’s trail. The rescue team had been prepared; what looked-and smelled-like a second truck had come out of this trail and roared away to leave tire treads for the pursuers, while the original vehicle had entered the dense forest. Michael followed Lazaris’s reek, through the silent sylvan glades.
He followed the twisting trail for almost eight miles, and then he heard the voices and saw the glint of flashlights. He crouched amid the pines and watched. In a clearing before him, shielded from aerial observation by a camouflage net overhead, were the armored truck and two civilian cars. Workers were dismantling the truck, rapidly removing the armor and taking the machine gun off its mount. At the same time others were hurriedly painting the truck white with a Red Cross on the cab doors. The cargo-bay area was being transformed into an ambulance, with tiers of stretcher beds. The machine gun was wrapped in burlap, put into a wooden box lined with rubber, lowered into a trench. Then shovels went to work, covering the weapon.