The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(81)

It was Bremer who devised an irritant to be added to the mixture. The irritant would not be poisonous in any way but would cause a mucous flow from the nose. The subjects would be forced to swallow. It worked in Birkenau experiments with great success.

By this time, Hitler had been sending V1’s against Britain for a few weeks. My purpose was to be able to replace the explosive in the V1 with a Todesluft canister and infect the Allies in their home territories.

Once we had the Todesluft device perfected, we approached Willem with it. Willem at once saw the possibilities but denied us the chance to try it out in a V1. Instead, he told us of a new rocket, vastly more powerful and accurate. It was to be called the V2.





The bombers over Berlin never stopped during that summer. Up until we released the tote M?nner, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and the other camps had been spared for some reason. By July, we had a version of the Todesluft device ready for the V2 and after the first few reached their targets, the Allies, realizing where our production facilities must be located, started bombing the camps. I had to drag Weber from our burning laboratories. He wanted to save his “children.” I triggered the containment-failure devices and incinerated the last remaining tote M?nner squads but saved inoculum samples and the Todesluft devices to operate elsewhere. It was curious: the incubation pens and the holding areas were completely destroyed but the gas chambers survived the bombing.

I had thought to travel immediately to Krakow to be with Elsa. But before I could, Elsa showed up at the camp. Weber, Elsa, Helmut, and I were able to find safety in the basement of the headquarters building. I managed to locate an intact phone and called Willem to tell him where we were.

The bombing ceased in a day or so. The inmates were taken care of and we had food and water. Power was restored the following day.

Weber liked to be near us. Something profound had come undone in him. He mourned the death of his squad over and over. On the third day he accosted me out in the street as I cleaned up the front of the building.

“Could it have been the Jews?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The failure of our tote M?nner.”

I sighed. “The tote M?nner did not fail.”

“How can you say that? Germany is still losing the war!”

I considered responding to this. How could any single weapon ever win a war on its own? It was our failure, not any failure of the tote M?nner. But that would only have encouraged him. “We haven’t lost yet.”

He ignored that. “We made tote M?nner out of the Jews. Perhaps there was a judengeist that impaired them.”

“What would you have done instead? Made them out of Germans as Willem did?”

“I should not have been so reluctant to use Poles,” Weber said and sat on the bench, sunk in apathy.

I continued shoveling broken concrete and shards of wood out of the street.





Willem showed up that night. He was half-drunk and I was surprised he’d managed to drive all the way from Berlin. Morose and untalkative, he refused to speak until after dinner when Elsa had taken Helmut and herself to bed.

“The Americans are smarter than we are.”

“Beg pardon?” I said, ready to defend German intelligence.

“It had to be the Americans. The British would not have considered it.”

“Considered what?”

Willem stared at me. “Of course. How could you know? They have been raining tote M?nner on Berlin. All over Germany.”

“That’s impossible. Did they drop them out of the bombers? Did they think we would be intimidated by smashed body parts?”

Willem shook his head. “Nothing so complex. All they did was harness them to a big parachute and then tie them together with a bow knot so they would not escape during transport. Then they shoved them out the back of a bomber on a strip line. It undid the bow knot and released the parachute. Some of them were killed, of course. But so what? Between ours and the ones generated from their own ranks, they have enough.”

“How were they released from the parachutes?”

“We found a wind-up spring clip. When the spring wound down, the clip opened and they were released. Diabolical simplicity.”

I drank some wine. “There are tote M?nner in Berlin.” I tried to frame it as a logical proposition. I could imagine them lurching through the city.

“There are tote M?nner all over Germany. There are tote M?nner in London from the V2 Todesluft attack. Von Braun even managed to extend the range of the V2 with a V1 attachment. There are tote M?nner in Moscow. Tell me, Weber. How many tote M?nner must there be to become self-sustaining?”

Weber peered at him owlishly. “They cannot be self-sustaining. Eventually all of the raw material would be used up.”

“You are so comforting,” Willem said dryly.

I stared at the wine bottle. “When will they reach here?”

“They were behind me when I crossed the border. One day? Two days? They move slowly but steadily and they will be brought here by our scent.”

We had all underestimated them. They were in the camp by morning.





They had broken through the barbed wire holding the inmates easily. The inmates were bitten and mauled by the hundreds. The guards died when they insisted on firing on the tote M?nner and the tote M?nner, of course, did not fall.