The Division of the Damned (28 page)

By night Arak would take his troop out to wreak mayhem among the front
line soldiers. He hunted with
relish, as only those re-born to kill could understand. They slashed and fed on Russian troops every night, knowing no bounds to their blood lust. It was vampire heaven, spoilt only by the coming of the blazing dawn every day.

Von Struck had decided from the start that they should try to win over the hearts of the peasants. In every village they came across they made an effort to be civil and respectful to the village elders and the local populace. Soon, the myth of the ghostly mounted German squad, who were humane to the people but merciless to their enemies, grew out of all proportion to their deeds. Gone were the days of cowering peasants and terrified children. It was, for them all, a good feeling.

"This is what we should have done when we first came," Henning said one evening as they set up camp. "Just goes to show how stupid they are in Berlin."

In every village they heard the same story. The Red Army would come and take all the males in the village for cannon fodder, confiscate the food and demand shelter and entertainment for the Commissars and Party officials. The Commissars would hold court and pass judgment on those accused of helping the German invaders. The sentences were never lenient.

"They just can’t win, can they?" Gruhn had once said aloud to himself
.
"It just hasn’t stopped for them, has it?”

"First we came and robbed them blind,” Muschinski answered him. "Now they’re liberated by the Russians and they’re robbing them blind.”

"They must hate the world,
” Henning opined to all, and then to
himself
, "I know I would.”

The days turned to weeks, and weeks turned to months. Every day was the same routine, broken only by contact with the enemy or the villagers.

The rations came every week with orders from Berlin. Arak would send two of his men back to the castle every third night and they would return the next evening with their provisions. They had all wondered at the stamina of the vampires and their inhuman endurance.

Rasch sometimes wrote Von Struck a brief note imparting news from Germany or on developments at the castle. They were invariably full of regurgitated rubbish from the propaganda department in Berlin or wild fantasies about the progress he was making with the serum. Von Struck had given up reading them and they ended up customarily on the fire or being used for sanitary purposes.

It was the middle of May before they met with the results of their allies' work. The patrols started well before dawn and usually ended before dark. They would ride out on an empty stomach and stop around eight to eat and rest their horses.

The sun was dazzling and it tired their already fatigued eyes with its intensity. They had found a shaded glade in which to rest for breakfast and the sun’s rays poking through the leafy boughs added to the pleasing feel of the early morning break. They ate their food cold so as not to make a fire and spent some time cleaning weapons or grooming the horses.

It was Nau who made the gruesome discovery. He was looking for a suitable spot to perform his ablutions, a shovel in one hand and a bunch of Rasch’s letters in the other. The undergrowth was sparse and he was forced to go quite a way from their spot to achieve any privacy. After a couple of minutes he noticed an area where the foliage seemed to be denser, and thus more se
cluded. He pressed into the low-
hung
branches and through to the other side. An errant branch whipped his face and he closed his eyes as he walked through, only to open them again to a scene from Dante’s Inferno.

The first thing to strike him was the smell. Sweet and rancid, it hit his senses like a freight train, forcing him to gag. The crescendo of a million disturbed flies provided the soundtrack to the butchery before him. There were three command vehicles, camouflaged and ready for action, spread around a clearing measuring approximately twenty by twenty meters. Draped on the vehicles and hanging from the boughs of the trees were the remains of what had once been a command and control troop.

Naked human trunks, their limbs hacked off and thrown around the clearing, were strewn on the floor like slabs of beef. Every
single
one had had its throat slit, gouged or sawn
through,
and every face held a rigid scream of terror etched on its features. The bodies showed signs of mutilation after death, and were it not for the human heads attached to the torsos, it would have been hard to recognise these ragged carcasses as being once human.

Nau surveyed the carnage with the calm, analytical mind of a man who had seen a lot of slaughter. He had once thrown a satchel charge of explosives into a pillbox and followed inside to wipe out the survivors. The men he had killed had looked almost untouched, as if they were all sleeping. The concussion had produced only a minor trickle of blood from one of his victim’s ears. Nothing more could be seen. He had also seen the results of a Red Army salvo on a field hospital. But he had never seen anything like this.

He counted the torsos. There were eighteen in
all. Eighteen destroyed bodies
—
legless, armless, throats gashed open, the cadavers defiled and exploited for every drop of blood. He could almost feel the residue of the rage and hatred of the attackers and he subconsciously crouched before its spectre.

"I once saw an artillery barrage hit a graveyard,” Henning said when he surveyed the butchery. "There were corpses thrown everywhere. The stink was unholy and it lingered in the fabric of our tunics for days after. This is ten times worse.”

"Don’t think about it. They’re the enemy and they’d probably be singing and dancing on our corpses if that was us," Gruhn offered to nobody in particular.

"What little of our corpses that would be left," Grand added. "They must really hate old Ivan. Look, the wounds are dry so they killed them, sucked their blood and mutilated them.”

Von Struck ended the reverie
.
"I think they hate all of us. All humans, regardless of nationalit
y, are their prey. No, I’m wrong.
T
hey don’t hate
us,
they just don’t count us as their equal. We‘re the chickens and
they’re the foxes. The only thing that’s stopping them from doing this to us is their own private,
G
odless agenda.”

"What are we doing with these monsters? This isn’t right, boss." Muschinski was staring at the flyblown massacre, shaking his head in shock.

"Calm down now, Muschi." Henning went to put an arm on his shoulder but Muschinski pushed it away. They all looked at him as he took a step back, his tone of voice mushrooming in pitch.

"No, this isn’t right. First we build the camps and then we decide to shoot all the Jews. We push them into death camps because shooting’s too much of a strain. Now this, this sacrilege from people we call our allies. When’s it all going to end? When are we going to stop? I didn’t march into Russia to kill children. I came here to fight Communists."

Henning took a step towards him
.
"Muschi
—
”

"No, it’s true Henning, we’re damned, damned for all eternity, and do you know what’s unfair about the whole thing? I haven’t done a fucking thing wrong.” He opened his arms, palms
upwards, as if pleading to them.
"Have I done anything wrong? Have I killed women and children? No. I haven’t killed any civilians. I’ve fought against an enemy that wanted to kill me but I’ve never killed anybody who doesn’t deserve it. I was in school when this fucking war started so I didn’t even help begin it. It’s not fucking fair!"  

The last was screamed at the stunned and silent squad. Muschinski was panting loudly but otherwise nobody, except for the uninterested flies, made a sound. He turned towards the site of the mass execution. “Who will pay for this? Who will be held accountable?” Nobody answered. "I’ll tell you wh
o’ll be blamed
—
us! We’ll be blamed and we’ll pay for this with our souls.”

Von Struck wasn’t immune to the feelings that Muschinski had just articulated but he knew he had to take control of the situation as Muschi’s outburst had unsettled them all.

"Muschinski," he barked.
"
G
et a grip
,
man. We all know it too but we don’t snivel about it like women. Let’s
get out of here and do our job
—
”

”And what is our job?” he cried, now totally abandoned to his anguish. "To help these devils send us to hell?"

"Our job is to protect the Fatherland, our families and loved ones. Men, this is what we cannot allow ourselves to forget. If we give in, nothing stands between Ivan and our kith and kin.”

He turned to the rest of the group who had played mute witness to the drama as it had unfolded
.
"Your parents, wives, girlfriends, everybody you know,
is
looking to you to carry on the fight, to save them from Ivan’s terrible revenge. And make no mistake, they will want their revenge. For all the slaughter, the terror and the inhuman tragedy that we have inflicted on them in the name of our Führer, they will want
their revenge.”

Henning was slowly nodding his head in agreement but that was the only movement in the squad. With faces like stone, all had locked their eyes onto Von Struck who, for the second time since they met him, reiterated their situation in lucid, apolitical terms.

"It’s all I ask of you. Let’s stay true to ourselves and do our job honourably and as soldiers. As long as we keep to the code, as long as we kill only those who choose to march against us, we cannot be blamed for atrocities like this. Remember, we are not the villains here." He looked each one in the eye before he carried on. "Over the months, we have set an example in this region that is beyond reproach. Let’s keep it together and look after each other. Muschi is
right in one respect, though
—
our new allies are an abomination.
However, if they manage to keep Ivan from raping Berlin, well that’s fine with me.
We don’t have to like them but we can use them for the time-being.”

He walked over to the now silent Muschinski and picked up the rifle that he’d dropped during his tirade,

"Take it, SS Sturmann Muschinski,” he said compellingly
. "A
nd then take your place in the squad.” Quietly, with one hand on Muschinski’s arm, he continued, "Nils, I need you. We need you, please
…”

Muschinski nodded acceptance and took the rifle. Von Struck looked to the men and Henning took his cue
.
"Right, come on lads, let’s get going.”

They left the annihilation behind them and wordlessly went back to the glade to prepare for the day's ride.

Chapter 34

Transylvania

June

Rasch was always present at the railway sidings when the new arrivals came. It appeared to him to be the only part of his plan that wasn’t going awry. The trains were bringing up to two thousand prisoners a week. Some would be used as slave labour, some would become soldiers and the rest were used as food. The vampire soldiers now numbered over a thousand, and three new barrack blocks had been hastily erected to house and protect them from the sun. The complex of buildings also had its own concentration camp that held at any one time five hundred inmates and barracks for the Ukrainian guards. Rasch didn’t understand why the Reich employed these barbarians, and their coarse language and rough demeanour unsettled him.

The prisoners were put into four categories depending on where they came from. Russian prisoners of war were invariably used to reinforce the ranks. Once they had used a train full of Sonderkommando, but Rasch had complained so bitterly about the racial quandary of Jews fighting for the SS that the
c
ount agreed not to use them again. He himself saw no problem but he was respectful of his suppliers’ sensibilities.

Sonderkommando were in the firs
t line, used for labour but
also used as food. Common criminals from the concentr
ation camp system were used as c
apos for the building sites and the rest of the inmates, the Jews, the Communists and the intelligentsia, depending on their health and the vampire’s feeding cycle, either worked or were bled.

However, that is where the accomplishments stopped. Rasch's camp administration was perfect but success with the serum was as elusive and far off now as it had been in January. They had tested five different formulae and each time there had been a fiery disaster. He was sure the two Jews he had in the lab were not pulling their weight. However, they seemed so scared of him that he could hardly believe they would have the audacity to shirk their duties.

As he jumped onto the lorry, one of the guards ran up to him and gave him the mail. He quickly scanned through the pile, recognising the heavy Gothic script his sister preferred to use, a communication from Berlin and a few letters for the guards.