Shadows Will Fall (9 page)

With her own gun, Terah shot the creature between the eyes. The captain fell to the ground clutching his bloody hand where a big chunk of flesh was missing.

Skorzeny, who had been up on the parapet, climbed down the ladder. As he neared the captain, the man started to say something to him.

Skorzeny pulled his pistol and shot the captain in the head.

“Christ, Skorzeny! You didn't have to do that,” Deitel said. “He was only just bitten. It would be hours before he turned.”

“He was bitten?”. Skorzeny asked as he pulled the last crate off the hood of the field car.

Outside, they saw Rucker riding in and out of the undead creatures, drawing them farther away. Finally he stopped at the far gate, well away from any of them, and stroked the horse's neck.

“Good girl. Good girl. We can do this,” he whispered to the horse. “Are you ready?”

The horse neighed, and he brought her back on her hind legs. And then she was off, charging straight at the barricade. Rucker rode low on her neck and gave her all the rein she wanted as they approached the barricade.

Behind the barricade, everyone stood transfixed. Deitel, next to Terah, took her hand in his. He could hear Terah whispering to herself, “Come on . . .”

Even the undead stopped and stared.

One of the
draugr
stepped directly into Rucker's path.

Rucker shoved the reins between his teeth and pulled a pistol. It wasn't his usual large Colt or his twin revolvers, but the Tesla gun. It was as slow as Christmas to recharge, and he knew he would only get one shot. He had to make it count.

He pointed it at the
draugr
and a bolt of blue electricity shot out, striking the thing and sending it to the ground, where it seized up like it was having an epileptic seizure.

“You can do it, girl,” Rucker whispered in the horse's ear as he spurred her on again. “I believe in you. Come on, come on, and . . .
up
!”

The horse leapt up and over the hood of the field car. She landed gracefully on the cobblestones and came to an abrupt halt, shoes throwing sparks.

While the soldiers restacked the barricade, everyone cheered.

Rucker, leading the horse in an excited circle, raised his hat.

“Once more, girl,” Rucker whispered. “For the boys.”

He pulled her up on her hind legs, waved his cowboy hat, and gave them a yell straight out of West Texas.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Poenari Citadel

Wallachia Region

A
s he dismounted, one of the German techs brought Rucker a canteen. He took a swig and then spit it out.

“What the hell?”

The technician looked confused. “
Das es wasser . . .
water.”

“Ugh. Find me a beer,” he said. Then he drained the canteen.

Terah shook her head and smiled wryly. “Quit pestering the help.”

Rucker surveyed the scene for the first time.

“Yeah, I can't help but notice there are a lot of SS storm troopers and army engineers running around here. Not shooting at me and such,” he said.

“A lot has happened since you got away,” Deitel said.

Skorzeny gave a slow clap. “Excellent ploy—crashing the plane,” he said.

Rucker nodded.

“I let them believe it so I could hunt you on my own,” Skorzeny said, a bit of the wolf in his voice.

“It would be your last adventure, commando,” Rucker shot back with equal aplomb and aggression.

“Are you two done comparing your pistols?” Terah said. “Yes? So what's the plan?”

“No hug, just, ‘What did you bring me?' ” Rucker said.

“You do have a plan, right?” Terah asked.

“Of course. The plan was to get back into Poenari Citadel,” he said.

“And then?” Deitel asked.

“And then, come up with another plan,” Rucker said.

“You may be a good pilot, Rucker,” Skorzeny said. “But I'm not sure why you think you can give orders to my men or to me.”

“If you don't want my help, that's fine,” Rucker said, nose-to-nose with the German. “I can get my people out of here and leave you lot to your own.”

“Another meaningless bluff. Then again, that is the coward's way,” Skorzeny said. “And you've shown how good you are at running away from a fight.”

Rucker's knuckles were white when the shout from the wall came.

“Gentlemen?” came the voice of one of the guards atop the parapet. “You need to see this.”

One after another Rucker, Terah, Deitel, Skorzeny, and Filotoma climbed the ladder to the parapets. Groups of the undead were gathered at the corners of the wall. They were stacking themselves one atop the other. Their body ladder was getting higher.

“Not good,” Terah said.

“My God, they're organizing,” Deitel said.

Skorzeny ordered five of the soldiers to the parapets and gave them orders to shoot only if the creatures were at the top of the wall. They had to conserve their ammunition. He gave orders to Lang to search out the two
draugrs,
but the two had anticipated this, and blended seamlessly among the throng of maroon-clad undead.

A half hour passed, marked only by shots ringing out sporadically—the guards on the wall taking out the undead who came close to reaching the top of the wall. Everyone noticed that the frequency of the gunshots was increasing.

Another gunshot rang out, the bullet hitting a part of the wall beside Rucker and Skorzeny.

“What the . . . ?” Skorzeny said.

Rucker scanned the mass of undead. A few of them were clumsily holding Mauser rifles. A
draugr
stood behind them, issuing orders.

Another shot echoed. By the sound of the bullet, both men could tell it went well over their heads. The looked around and the
draugr
was gone.

“Great,” Rucker said. “They're learning how to use firearms now.”

“We're running out of time,” Skorzeny said.

One of the
nachtmenn
charged at the wall. Despite the large chunks eaten from its arms, it was making the climb with relative ease. Its lips were drawn tight, there was black blood around its muzzle, and its normally black, shark-like eyes were a milky white.

“Aim for the mouth,” Skorzeny said.

He and Rucker opened up on the undead
nachtmann.
It shrugged off the first few shots, but a sustained burst from Skorzeny caught it in the eye at the same time a well-aimed shot by Rucker went through its mouth to its brain.

“And there's that,” Rucker said after a moment. “The transgenics creatures are rising from the dead as well.”

“I'm not sure how long we can hold them off,” Skorzeny said. “Can we use that lightning gun of yours?”

“It's a teleforce weapon,” Rucker and Deitel said at the same time.

Which, of course, didn't explain anything.

“According to Mr. Tesla,” Rucker said, “it produces ‘manifestations of energy in free air.' But it takes a while to recharge between shots. It's slow as a muzzle loader and only affects one at a time.”

“Did you make it through with a message to Chuy?” Terah asked him.

Rucker nodded. “Yeah, but even he couldn't land my crate on that plateau where they had the Storch. So a landing is out.”

Lang had climbed down from his perch. He reported to where the group was standing around an open fire.

“Sir, our ammunition is running low. And something else,” the young sniper said. “I've been observing the horde, looking for the
draugrkommandos.
They're doing a good job of blending with the mass of those things. They pop up and issue orders to the ones smart enough to obey, and then melt back into the horde.”

“We have the radio,” Terah said, “but I'm not sure what good it will do right now.”

“We could call in an air strike on the castle,” Skorzeny said. “We might survive in the underground catacombs.”

It was a last resort, but one they had to consider. Amria had been keeping a distance from anyone in a German uniform. But now she, too, gathered with the informal war council, as did Filotoma. No one wanted to die, but they all knew what would happen if those things got loose. Worse, none of them wanted to end up as one of the walking dead. Better to die cleanly in an explosion.

“So what are we going to do?” Skorzeny asked.

Rucker held up a hand to silence him. “Do you hear that?” he asked, then stood and looked up in the air.

Then the rest heard it.

“Look there,” Terah said. “Up in the sky.”

“It's a plane,” Deitel said.

“Just in time,” Rucker said.

Skorzeny beamed. “It's the
fallschirmjäger
battalion from Wolfsberg. The message must have gotten through.”

It seemed now the boot was on the other foot.

“No, that's not a Luftwaffe plane,” Deitel said. “It's a pair of Rolls Royce eight-cylinder engines, pushing out 1,350 horsepower.”

Then Rucker's eyes looked like cue balls.

“What?” Deitel said. “I listened.”

The engines of the
Raposa
roared as she passed overhead. Terah had never been so happy to see that silver twin-engine bird. Chuy dipped his wing in signal to Rucker.

Rucker grabbed a flare gun, pointed it straight in the air and pulled the trigger. It gave the
Raposa
a bearing. He got on the wireless.

“Goldilocks to Mama Bear,” he said. “Send in the Big Bad Wolf. And make sure it lands on the right side. Inner courtyard. Don't miss.”

“Roger that, Goldilocks,” Chuy said. “One precision low-altitude drop, coming up. Out.”

“Everybody make some room,” Rucker said. “This is going to be tight.”

Chuy brought the
Raposa
over the castle once at a low altitude, getting his bearings. He slowed to near-stall speed. His second pass was about a thousand feet above the castle. As he passed overhead, a crate dropped from the belly, deploying a parachute at the last possible second to ensure it fell into the inner courtyard.

It was a rough landing, but it worked. Rucker immediately set about prying the crate open. Everyone wanted to know what Chuy had delivered. Heavy weapons? Dragon belchers? Heavy machine guns?

What came out was the last thing they expected—a little white-haired man in a purple suit, a long scarf, and a floppy black hat, along with a machine the size of a large steamer trunk. Connected to the device by several thick cables was a Tesla gun the size of a field howitzer. A crystal blue orb sat atop a ten-foot-long barrel segmented and lined with smaller brass tubes along its side. There were two horizontal, scalloped fins at the mouth of the barrel.

“Well then. Hello there,” Lysander Benjamin said. He saw the amazed looks on the faces of Terah, Deitel, and an uncomfortable number of men in SS uniforms. “I see we've made stranger bedfellows than politics.”

“I ask you to bring a weapon,” Skorzeny said to Rucker, “and you bring us an old man and something out of a Buck Rogers comic strip. I should have known.”

It was hard to say which of the two items in the crate was more interesting.

“Look what daddy brought us,” Rucker said, rubbing his hands together. “And yeah, didn't I say Buck Rogers too, Doc?” He motioned to a couple of engineers. “Let's get this thing set up.”

Terah and Skorzeny brought Rucker and Lysander up to speed on what had transpired, while the engineers followed the instructions Tesla had dictated. The weapon wouldn't kill the undead, but it should stun them sufficiently that the survivors could get out the front gate, secure it behind them, and leave it to an aerial bombardment to cleanse the castle of the undead.

If Lysander was uncomfortable working in a war council with Skorzeny, Hoffstetter, and Lang, he didn't let it show.

Needs must when the devil comes dancing,
his father used to say. To this day he wasn't entirely sure what it meant, but he always found it reassuring.

“We have to lock these things in,” he said, “until they can be properly destroyed. If even one gets out, it could spread the infection exponentially. Within a few weeks or months they would take over the world.”

“Just one?” Hoffstetter said, looking skeptical. He was still fuzzy-headed from being knocked out five hours before, and had little notion his life was in the hands of the very Freeholders he'd wanted to have the
draugrkommandos
execute.

“Take a penny,” Rucker said. “Double it every day, and by the end of the month you're a millionaire. Same principle here. I thought you people were supposed to be good at math.”

Hoffstetter snorted.

One of the engineers reported to the group.

“Sir, the device is ready. It's charged and awaiting your orders,” he said.

“Good work, son. And don't call me sir,” Rucker said. “We need to get everyone together and ready to move out as soon as these things hit the ground!”

It took less than ten minutes, but all thirty of the survivors—storm troopers, engineers, civilians, and technicians—were ready to move. Terah had the reins of Rucker's horse.

“All right,” Rucker said, taking up position behind the Tesla cannon. He aimed it straight at the barricade. “Let's light this thing up and get the hell out of Dodge City.”

The technicians flipped the final arming switch. Two of the soldiers opened a hole in the barricade.

“Fire in the hole!” Rucker yelled.

A huge bolt of blue energy exploded from the tip of the barrel. It hit the first creature and dispersed, like electricity, through to the creatures close to it, and from them to the next closest. From Lang's position, he saw the lightning spread to better than ninety percent of the horde.

There was an ozone smell like forest air. They looked through the barricade to see the effect.

Nothing. It had shocked the undead, but they'd recovered almost immediately.

It hadn't worked.

Worse, it looked like it agitated the creatures.

“What the . . . Why . . . How . . . god dammit!” Rucker said.

“The nervous system,” Lysander said. “You said the pistol worked on the intelligent creature, the
draugr,
yes? Tesla said this works on the nervous system, disrupting it. These—with their nervous system so affected by the failure of Übel's machine and Amria's spell—it must not affect them.”

Deitel rubbed his palm over his face. “Now he tells us.”

“We have to make a break for it while we can,” Skorzeny said. “We can send out groups of people to distract the creatures, to lead them away as Rucker did. Then the rest can make it across the courtyard.”

“That's suicide,” Terah said “They'll get us all. And the runners wouldn't stand a chance.”

“We'll only take volunteers to be runners,” Skorzeny said. “I will be first to volunteer.”

It was a challenge to Rucker, who wasn't as enamored of dying, much less bravely.

“Knock yourself out, Otto,” he said. “I'd rather figure out how to get us all out of here.” Now Skorzeny was clenching his fists.

Lang broke the tension.

“I can maintain a firing post from here—help make sure the rest make it to the front gate,” he said.

“But then you wouldn't be able to . . .” Deitel said.

“I can save one round for myself,” Lang said.

“It won't work, they will take us all,” Filotoma said. “We stand our ground. All together or none at all.”

“We have to leave behind anyone injured or slow,” Hoffstetter was saying. “They will slow us down.”

“We can't risk . . .”

“We have to . . .”

“It's insane . . .”

The whole group of survivors in the courtyard degenerated into an argument that grew louder and nastier with each tick of the second hand.

Lysander saw that Rucker was uncharacteristically silent. He stood still amidst a storm of chaos and strife. While everyone was shouting at each other in levels approaching panic, he was calculating.

Then Rucker drew the handheld Tesla gun and fired it into the air.

“Everybody shut up and listen. I know what we're going to do.”

“Who the hell put you in charge?” Major Hoffstetter demanded,. “Who are you? Who is this man? Who do you think you are to give orders?”.