DARMSTADT, GERMANY. 1943.

Cade was surprised how simple it was to get inside the Nazi research base. Almost no one challenged him or asked to see his papers; the time the OSS spent expertly forging the documents seemed like a waste now. Perhaps it was because every soldier he met was distracted and frightened, the taste of panic in their sweat. Or perhaps, he thought, he just looked like he belonged in the SS uniform.

But something was definitely happening at the base. High-ranking Nazi officers from every branch of the military were there, along with officials from Berlin. Cade easily lost himself in the crowd.

The rumors coming to the OSS were of a weapon that could turn the tide of the war permanently in the Nazis’ favor. Something inhumanly horrible, which put it squarely in Cade’s department. He was sent first to London, where he was given his cover identity, and then literally shipped in a long pine box behind enemy lines.

There was anticipation among the Nazi brass, but no one seemed particularly happy. Whatever they had come here to see, it scared them as well. Perhaps even more than it scared the Allied intelligence officers.

The crowd moved into a large operating theater at the center of the complex. It resembled a Roman coliseum, where gladiators would battle for the crowds. Everyone found their seats, and waited.

Cade overheard two German officers – dressed in the gray of the army, not the black-and-silver of the SS – muttering to one another about the scientist behind the secret weapon. They dragged on cigarettes and kept their voices low, but not so low that Cade couldn’t hear them.

“Idiocy,” one said. “Our men starve in Stalingrad, and the Fuehrer has given millions to this lunatic.”

“You know why we’re here? He really believes that pile of rocks is his property. The abandoned castle. It was part of his agreement to work for the Reich – reclaiming his ancestral home, he said.”

“He’s related to the Frankensteins?”

The other officer laughed. “He says he is the Baron Von Frankenstein.”

“God,” the other man said. It sounded like a curse. They both smoked in silence after that.

Just before midnight – a little dramatic, Cade thought – the scientist emerged from a door at the rear of the theater and moved to the center of the room.

There was no question: it was Cade’s target. Johann Konrad. The same scientist rumored to be behind the germ weapon that nearly reached Eisenhower the year before. He matched the photos Cade had seen in his briefing.

“Thank you all for coming,” Konrad said, with a slight bow. He looked utterly comfortable in front of the assembled Nazis. If he had any doubts or fears, they didn’t show.

Maybe he was insane, Cade thought, but he certainly didn’t act like it.

Konrad stood before a bank of equipment and a large platform, covered with a sheet, tilted to face the audience. The equipment was beyond anything Cade had seen. He couldn’t make much sense of it, but committed all the parts to memory.

“I know many of you have gone to great effort to be here tonight. Believe me, you will want to tell your grandchildren about this moment: the moment when you saw the birth of a new future and the creation of the final victory of our thousand-year Reich.”

Konrad took hold of the sheet, and whipped it away, like a magician revealing his best trick.

“Gentlemen, this is the Unmenschsoldat,” he said proudly.

Definitely too dramatic, Cade thought.

Still, the thing was visually arresting, if not impressive. Larger than a normal man in every way – taller, broader and heavier. Some of that could have been the inevitable bloat of decomposition, of course. Wire sutures ran across the creature’s skin at odd angles. Tubes from the machine behind Konrad ran into points at the neck and chest. Dead eyes stared blankly out into the crowd.

The crowd stared back.

Then there was a snort of laughter from one of the smokers, behind Cade.

Konrad looked as if he’d expected applause. He scowled.

“Something amusing?” he asked, spearing the man with a look.

The smoker wasn’t about to back down. “Forgive me, Herr Professor, if I am unimpressed,” he said. Cade and the other men in the audience turned to see him. He wore the rank of a colonel in the Wehrmacht, and a dueling scar on one cheek. An aristocrat. “We have rather enough corpses on the battlefield,” he said.

A smattering of laughter. Konrad acknowledged it with a tip of his head. “Yes. The major problem with soldiers – they keep dying.”

He pointed to the creature behind him. “But imagine a soldier who literally cannot die. Who will keep fighting, no matter how grievous the wound. Who can be simply re-assembled, if necessary.”

Murmurs from the crowd. But definite sounds of interest, Cade noticed.

“Impossible,” someone said.

“Not at all,” Konrad replied. “Years ago, alchemists searched for the ‘Elixir of Life’ – the secret to immortality. But I discovered, through my experiments, that death is, paradoxically, fundamental to survival. Our bodies are in a constant state of flux. Cells must die in order to be replaced. To halt this process, to freeze it in place, is to turn living tissue into a corpse-like state.”

They were listening to him now. Konrad’s certainty carried its own weight. Even the skeptic was quiet.

“For all my efforts, I was left with things not much more alive than this husk you see here. I could halt decomposition, even strengthen bone and muscle tissue, making it far more durable than in life. But the creatures themselves were sluggish. Applying the Elixir, in that state, to living beings reduced them to a sort of walking death.”

Konrad paused, and began flipping switches on the bank of machinery behind his grotesque giant.

“From death, however, I was able to discover the secret to eternal life. Halting the chaotic whirl of birth, reproduction and senescence at the cellular level is only the first step. The second – the actual animation of dead matter – requires the infusion of the pure life essence itself. Many scientists have dismissed the alchemists’ concept of the vis vitalis – the life force that separates the organic from the inorganic. However, this force is real. And it is as transferable as electricity, from one battery to another. That is what this machine does – it takes the life force of one subject and turns it into energy for the Unmenschsoldat.”

The colonel scoffed again. “And how will this monster of yours know what to do? How do you give a corpse an order?”

Murmurs of agreement. Konrad was undisturbed. “You don’t have to,” he said. “The creatures react on an instinctual level, at the very basest of human response. All they know is pain, and their only answer is to attack. Any light, movement or noise will draw them. More importantly, they seem to find actual life anathema.”

The colonel looked confused. “What do you mean, anathema?”

Konrad gave another patronizing smile. “Distilling the vis vitalis into the Elixir of Life inverts its properties,” he said.  “The creatures will seek out the authentic life of any human around them. And they will seek to snuff it out. It is as if life itself becomes hateful to them.”

The colonel scowled. “We still have to kill someone to make one of your soldiers. Hardly seems efficient.”

“Nature requires a balance,” Konrad said. “There is no such thing as something for nothing. But for the cost of one life, we get an undying, unkillable fighter. I would call that an advantage, wouldn’t you?”

“Only if you can find a volunteer,” the man shot back.

The doctor gestured, and two orderlies in white coats went back through the door.

“Fortunately,” Konrad replied, with a smug look, “we don’t require allegiance to our beliefs in our volunteers.”

The orderlies brought out another gurney, this one normal-sized. The body on it appeared shrunken, childlike, in the white hospital sheets.

Cade bit back his anger. An internee from the concentration camps. He’d seen them before, of course. Most of the men in this room had.

Konrad’s work must have been impressive to the Fuehrer, if he was willing to give up any of the camps’ victims. There were quotas to fill, agreements to keep, with the Other Side.

Konrad went to his machine and unspooled lines of tubing. He attached needles to the ends, and then jammed them into the body of the prisoner.

The man on the gurney struggled slightly, despite being half-starved and clearly drugged.

“Once this process has been replicated on an industrial scale, of course, this preparation will not be necessary. We will feed the human fuel into one end, and the Unmenschsoldat will emerge from the other. For now, however, I simply throw this switch to initiate the transfer.”

Konrad smiled for the audience as he reached for a large handle on his machine. “Finally a use for the Jüden, ja?

Cade had seen enough.

With a feral growl, he leaped up from his seat, clearing the heads of every man below him.

He landed, light as a cat, on the floor of the operating theater.

For a moment, there was only shock in the room. Then anger, shouted commands.

Two Nazi soldiers tried to grab Cade. He put them both into the wall, and started toward Konrad.

The men in the seats above were reacting now. Bullets chipped the floor near Cade. He stepped between them easily.

Anger peeled his lips back from his teeth. He locked eyes with Konrad.

The scientist didn’t run, didn’t turn. The strangest thing happened: he smiled.

Cade heard him whisper, “Der Amerikanisch Blutsauger.”

He looked oddly pleased.

It didn’t stop him from flipping the switch, however.

The effect was instantaneous. The prisoner on the table convulsed and screamed. The life emptied from him in less than a second.

And the giant cadaver’s hand twitched.

The bullets stopped. Even Cade stopped. Everyone in the room was riveted, as the awful mannequin sat up, and its dead eyes blinked.

It stiffly swung its legs from the table, and blocked Cade’s path.

Cade shook off his hesitation. Konrad was already running, out the door at the back of the theater.

Cade crouched and sprang.

The Unmenschsoldat met him halfway, and knocked him back across the room.

Cade got up. The blow felt like getting hit by a truck. A human would have been killed. It was stronger than he was.

Now it was moving, faster than he expected, coming at him again.

Cade gathered himself. This wasn’t going to be easy…

_{© COPYRIGHT 2011 CHRISTOPHER FARNSWORTH.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.}