The Black Gate (27 page)

Peter let out another roar, a soundless cry of vengeful anticipation as he fell through the portal that would return him to his own space and time.

***

“Give it to me,” Mina demanded, holding out her free hand for the journal.

Baumann laughed. “Entertaining. To the last. I’m going to enjoy killing you. It won’t make up for not being able to kill your old lover myself, but it’ll do. I’m going to…”

The bank of capacitors exploded in a cataclysm of electric arcs, and the platform on which they were mounted began to sag as the supports gave way.

Mina looked beyond Baumann to the ring, which was now visibly warped in its mountings. The gate closed with sudden finality, the boom as the aperture in space-time terminated barely audible amidst the pandemonium in the collapsing chamber.
 

She stepped to the railing, momentarily ignoring Baumann. “
Peter!
”

Her call was answered with an ear-splitting bellow as a creature that was a twin to the ill-fated Ivan fell from the gate into the water that now inundated the lower part of the cavern. He was surrounded by other nameless horrors, small and large, that had appeared with him. The thing turned to look up at the command platform, the great eyes locking with her own for the briefest of moments.

“Oh, no,” she whispered. “Peter, what have you done?”

“This should be entertaining,” Baumann quipped, turning to watch the spectacle unfold in the impromptu arena below.

***

While Peter knew that his body had been transformed, he couldn’t help but think of himself as the sole crew member of a great biological engine of destruction. Imagining his hands and feet working levers and pedals to make the weapon in which he was now encased do his bidding, he set to work.
 

While the creatures that had come from Hell were far more horrific in appearance, he knew the greatest threat to the outside world was posed by the immortal SS soldiers who had followed Baumann through the gate. Most of them had already been killed in the melee, but he counted seven that still lived, fighting for their lives.

Smashing and shoving the alien monstrosities from his path, Peter reached the nearest of Hitler’s new Teutonic Knights. Snatching him from the pincers of one of the beasts from the other side, Peter took him in his car-sized fists and severed the man’s head from his body, then shoved the twitching carcass into his maw. The act disgusted Peter, but his new body was ravenously hungry. His war machine required fuel, and fuel abounded here.

One by one he sought them out, fighting the other things only when he had to, and one by one Hitler’s immortal Teutonic Knights died.
 

He roared in pain as a huge chunk of rock fell from the chamber’s ceiling, driving him to his knees just as a crab-like thing attacked him with serrated pincers as large as the dinner table in the dining room on the first level. The pincers sawed through his armored hide and bit deep into the flesh of his right knee.
 

Ignoring the pincer that was trying to sever his leg, he grabbed the segmented arm that held the thing’s other pincer. Bending it backwards, he was rewarded with a sharp
crack
as the joint broke and the pincer fell limp into the water.

Peter tried to lever the other pincer from his leg, but it was demonically strong. Instead, he grabbed up the car-sized rock that had struck him. Rising to his full height, he smashed the rock down onto the monster’s carapace, shattering the chitinous shell and crushing the organs within.

The pincer convulsed once, grating on the tree trunk size femur of his leg before it fell open, releasing him.

With blood streaming from his leg into the turbulent water, Peter ignored the pain and limped forward toward the command platform, using his fists and teeth to kill everything that threatened to block his path.
 

***

Baumann’s blood smeared smirk faded to a frown as he saw the thing Peter had become, a twin to the dreaded Ivan, wading through the chaos, heading right for him. The lights flickered, throwing the deadly contests raging in the flooding pit into stroboscopic relief, the action momentarily frozen like a series of photographs. Then the backup batteries kicked in, bringing the lights back up, if noticeably dimmer than they had been before.

After rending a gigantic centipede-like creature with his giant claws, Peter looked up, right at Baumann, and roared.

“I suppose it’s time for me to go,” Baumann said.

“You’re not going anywhere.”

He turned around to find Mina standing between him and the elevator. “Do you honestly think you can stop me?”

“I don’t have to stop you. I only have to keep you here until Peter comes.”

With a snarl, Baumann attacked, launching himself at Mina with inhuman speed. But Baumann was at a disadvantage. He was larger and stronger than Mina, yes, but she had extensive experience fighting with her hands, whereas Baumann had spent most of his time fighting from within the armored bowels of a tank.
 

She also had the knife Peter had used to kill von Falkenstein.
 

Using his own momentum against him, she snatched one of his arms and levered him over one hip, sending him flying to the floor. Before Baumann could do more than shake his head, trying to regain his senses, she was on him, the knife blade flashing as she cut and stabbed.

Crying out in pain, he finally managed to throw her off before scuttling back toward the command consoles. His arms were crisscrossed with deep cuts, and she had come very close to slitting his throat. “You bitch!”

Getting to his feet, he crouched down, preparing to spring, but never got the chance. An enormous clawed hand reached over the railing, two of the claws spearing him through the chest like sword blades. Baumann screamed as he wriggled like a worm skewered upon a fish hook.
 

An enormous gray scaled head rose above the railing as the giant fist closed around Baumann, slowly crushing his torso.
 

“Peter!” Mina went to him, putting a hand to the thick gray scales of the face.
 

“Go,” Peter rasped. The evolutionary trajectory upon which he had been sent had not been favored with the ability to talk, but that single word he could manage. “
Go!
”

She shook her head in fervent denial. “No! I won’t leave you here…”

The roof of the cavern above them collapsed. Using the fist in which he held Baumann, who reached for her as if hoping for mercy, Peter sent Mina flying across the platform to slam up against the elevator doors.
 

“
No!
” She cried as the avalanche carried his body away, Baumann still clutched in his grip.
 

With hot tears streaming down her cheeks, Mina forced the elevator doors open and leaped upward into the shaft just as the command platform and all that remained of The Black Gate was smashed into oblivion.

EPILOGUE

Mina had no idea how many hours, if not days, it took for her to reach the surface. Parts of the main elevator shaft had collapsed, and when she finally reached Level One she found that it was nothing more than a ruin of concrete and rock. Had it not been for the inhuman strength granted her by the gate’s dark powers, she would have perished below ground with Peter and the others.

But she at last reached the elevator from Level One to the surface. The elevator itself was marooned at the bottom of the shaft, there no longer being any electricity to run it. But the shaft itself was clear, and in but a few eager bounds Mina reached the top and the spiral stairs that would take her to the surface.
 

She was not, however, alone. A squad of soldiers, those few who hadn’t gotten orders to join the battle on Level Three and had still been on the surface, had gathered at the entrance to the elevator to see if anyone in the facility was left alive. To say they were shocked when she leaped out of the dark shaft would have been a terrible understatement. And their shock was all the greater when she quickly disabled them by breaking their legs and snatching away their weapons. Then, one by one, she killed them all, feeding to replenish her strength, her hunger warring with her self-disgust at the thing she had become.

After she had dealt with them, she had gone back to listen for any signs of life from the destroyed elevator shaft. Aside from the rumble of rock shifting far below, she heard nothing. No one else had survived.

Sated, she made to leave the tomb of concrete and stone. But as soon as she set foot into the sunlight her skin began to smolder as if someone had doused her with acid. With a cry of pain and surprise, she leapt back into the shadows of the entrance. She experimented a few more times, sticking only her hand into the sun’s direct light, and was rewarded with blistering pain. Falling to her knees in the shadows, she wept.

As the sun finally began to set, she cautiously left her refuge. Standing atop the remains of the castle, she watched the blood red streaks that painted the clouds fade as day gave way to night.
 

Not long after, she heard the sound of vehicles coming up the hill. Hiding among the trees planted in the northern part of the castle grounds, she watched as a pair of armored half tracks and four trucks carrying soldiers pulled up in front of the wide stone steps that led to the entrance to the gate facility. With a few curt shouted orders from their officers, the soldiers got out and quickly formed a perimeter as the officers headed to the entrance. More shouting followed, no doubt after the bodies of the men she had killed were discovered, and the soldiers fanned out, scouring the grounds.
 

While Mina would not have hesitated to kill any of them, it proved easy for her to avoid them. She could see at night nearly as well as she could under bright light, and could move so quickly and silently that she was little more than a whispering shadow to the men who hunted for the killer of their comrades.

Finally deciding that further search was futile, the commander recalled most of the men. Leaving a pair of squads on guard, the other soldiers dragged out the bodies and put them in one of the trucks. That truck drove away, followed by the half tracks, and the other trucks were moved out of the way of the entrance, parked off to one side.
 

Nothing more happened until a few hours later, when Mina heard the sound of more heavy vehicles approaching. A trio of dump trucks labored up the road, their beds piled high with rocks and broken brick, no doubt debris from the Allied strike that day. The first truck backed up to the entrance and stopped. The soldiers took a pair of wheelbarrows and a set of shovels from the back of each truck, and with the enthusiasm typical of any endeavor undertaken by the SS, they began to ferry the debris from the trucks into the entrance.
 

Its bed finally empty, the first truck departed and the second pulled up. By the time the third truck was half empty, the first truck had returned with more debris, escorted by a flat bed truck groaning under the weight of sacks of concrete and a mixer. A detachment of soldiers, most of whom had stripped to the waist and were slick with sweat from exertion, despite the chill of night, pulled down the mixer and began to feed it concrete and water.

Out of curiosity she moved north, using the tree line along the west side of the hill for cover, until she had a clear view of the viaduct. She shook her head in wonder at the scale of the destruction wrought by the Allied bombs. The entire center section of the viaduct where it crossed over the Ruhr River was completely destroyed, with gigantic craters in the ground, partly filled with water from the river, on either side. And deep down below, where no one would ever see, was the collapsed chamber that had held von Falkenstein’s precious gate.

A series of flashes lit the western horizon, followed by the faint roll of thunder: Allied artillery hammering at the crumbling German lines. Without von Falkenstein’s immortal warriors to stem the tide, the fate of the Third Reich was now all but sealed.

She made her way closer to the viaduct, but stopped when she heard voices. A handful of men were down near the river surveying the damage, but the sounds she heard were coming from the railroad tunnel where the freight access portal to the facility was located.

Creeping through the darkness, she paused at the mouth of the tunnel. Making sure no one saw her, she slipped inside.
 

About fifty meters down the tunnel, soldiers were hard at work beside a flat car and engine. Some debris had fallen from the tunnel’s ceiling from the impact of the enormous bombs outside, but that was not the concern of these men. Moving closer, just to the edge of the light, she saw that they were bricking over the metal doors of the freight access portal.
 

Once they and the men at the castle entrance were through with their handiwork, it would be as though the facility had never existed. The SS was covering its tracks, no doubt hoping the Allies would never know about what lay deep beneath the ground.

Alone in the night, Mina made her way west, heading toward the sound of the guns.

***

Aaron Connelly pulled the big Ford sedan away from the estate, his emotions alternating between relief and outrage. While Peter’s fate remained unknown and the debate of whether he had betrayed his country still raged, enough time had passed that the powers that be had finally listed him as officially missing in action, presumed dead. While it wasn’t exactly in Connelly’s job description, he felt he owed Peter and took it upon himself to deliver the news to his wife.

She had simply given Connelly a look of utter boredom as they sat in the opulent parlor of her parents’ home and he told her what little he could about her husband’s sacrifice in the service of his country.
 

When Connelly had finished, she yawned and said, “Well, I guess I don’t have to worry about following through with the divorce.”

It was when she covered her yawning mouth that he noticed the engagement ring, with a central diamond that looked as big around as a dime.