The Past Sucks, page 8
Footsteps raced up the stairs.
And they came down too.
There was blood on the stairs! An accusing trail of Hitler’s blood pointing my way like an arrow.
When had he started leaking so much?
The descending footsteps slowed, taking on a stalking quality.
Attack is the best form of defense. I don’t know who said that, but I’d heard it so many times I decided it must be true. So I charged the Nazi coming to kill me.
He was waiting for me.
We snapped shots at each other with our pistols, while trying to dodge out of the other’s way.
I don’t know why we bothered with the dodging. Bullets move fast.
Pain ripped through my foot. The other man grunted too, falling back behind a turn in the stairwell.
I staggered, but I kept to my feet and pounded up the stairs to finish the job.
The instant I put weight onto my left foot, agony shot through my entire body and exploded inside my head.
And then… nothing. The pain vanished.
My mind felt peculiarly spongy, but my neck lump seemed to be trying to tell me about something called a pain limiter.
I ignored my head. And my foot. And advanced on my foe.
All I could see of him were a pair of jackboots poking out onto the quarter landing. The rest of him was on his back, presumably with a pistol aimed at where he expected me to appear.
I yanked hard on the boots and brought him tumbling down the steps, helping him on his way with a brace of rounds through his head.
After stuffing the dead Nazi’s pistol into my baggy pants pocket, I went back down for Hitler.
I had him lean on my shoulder and together the walking wounded climbed the stairs.
“Would you believe, they promised me hot food and hot women?” I told him. (I get talkative when I’m nervous.) “I have serious trust issues with my employer.”
“I don’t blame you for being suspicious,” he said between bubbling groans as I carried him up the steps to the second floor. “Those who control you can never be trusted. They will always betray you in the end.”
“Really? Do you know the people who hired me?”
“I don’t need to. I know you’re not a communist, which means whoever you believe you’re working for, behind them is the international capitalist conspiracy. And behind them…”
He stopped when he saw the anger on my face. I had decided that I’d heard quite enough of that kind of talk.
Propping him against the wall, I withdrew my arms. “Stay there.”
“Why?” He seemed confused.
I rolled my shoulders. “That feels better.” I gave him a hard sideswipe to the jaw. His head snapped to one side and Hitler was out for the count. “And that feels better still.”
I knew Ox had told me to play nice with him, but I’d already shot him in the chest. How much worse could it get?
I soon found out.
Although I felt good about shutting down his sick rant, I also felt a damned idiot. Hitler hadn’t entirely been cooperative before, but now he was dead weight, which meant that due to some annoying law of physics he was suddenly twice as heavy.
Even in a firefighter’s carry, a slightly overweight middle-aged German was tough to move around in a hurry, and every muscle was already screaming from the working over they’d given me in the cloakroom. At least I could still feel that particular source of pain, unlike my left foot which was completely numb but made slurping sounds as it moved inside the jackboot filled with my blood.
Limping, slowing, and grumbling constant obscenities, like a brave and chivalrous knight from a troubadour’s tale that didn’t quite make the cut, I came to the Ox’s rescue.
Chapter 17
I wasn’t ready for the scene that awaited me in Room 418.
It was a luxury suite on the top floor that the Nazis had commandeered.
The Ox was there, brushing her golden hair in front of a dresser. In addition to the SS man dead outside in the corridor, there were two SA men. A rank-and-file trooper sprawled on the floor at an angle that suggested important bones had been fractured. Another man, in a fancier uniform with pips on his collar, had been less fortunate.
I assumed this was the storm commander Kirchheim had referred to. He was still alive. But that didn’t mean he was better off than his underling.
His saggy pants were around his ankles and his genitals had been…
When I was a kid, I once went to a well-off friend’s birthday party. His parents had hired an entertainer who stretched rubber balloons and tied them into shapes that vaguely resembled animals.
That wasn’t at all what the Ox had done to the storm commander. I don’t think the balloon thing was physically possible. However, it’s a far happier image than the sight of what she’d actually done to him, so we’ll work with the balloon animals as a substitute.
I felt sick to the core.
I’m quite sure the storm commander didn’t feel too clever either. He was whimpering somewhere far beyond sanity.
Oh, well. He deserved it. And plenty more.
“Are you okay?” I asked the Ox. The words felt stupid because she’d obviously been able to look after herself.
“Of course. Any loose ends?”
“I guess.” I let Hitler fall to the floor and winced at the rattling sound from his throat and chest. The guy with the moustache was a little damaged.
She tipped him into the recovery position and while I locked the door, she gave him a quick check. “Nothing our medics can’t handle, so long as we’re quick. Anything else?”
“Well…” I began. I was thinking of Zeitzler, but loose ends sounded like sticking around, and I didn’t think we were welcome in Düsseldorf anymore.
Someone tried the door. They yelled threats.
“No,” I said. “Nothing important.”
I looked at the window and tried to remember where we were in relation to the balconies and decorative ledges I’d seen on the way in. The Parkhotel had an ornate façade with plenty of sticky-out bits. We might be able to climb down to the street.
More shouting and loud banging on the door.
But none of us could cling to the wall with a wounded Hitler on our back.
When we’d come down from our rooms, the Ox had carried her gear inside her clutch bag, but the Nazis must have taken it same as they’d taken everything out of my pockets.
“We need to grab our gear to get back, don’t we?” I asked her, my words hot and bitter because I resented being kept so ignorant. “We’ll have to abandon the target and try again later.”
The Ox narrowed her eyes. “Mission failure is not an option for the likes of you. There will be no second chance.”
“Trubbing marvelous.” I walked to the door. “Shall I let them in then?” I flinched when splinters and bullets flew into the room as the Nazis tried shooting out the lock.
“Get back here!” she yelled.
I froze, expecting the door to fly open and the bad guys rush in.
It didn’t. In fact, the shooting stopped. It seemed that shooting out a lock wasn’t as easy as they made out in the holo-dramas.
“Stiletto! Focus! Again! I have all I need to get home about my person. Trust me.”
“Really?” I backed away from the door. “You don’t inspire trust. In fact, you do the opposite. You… unspire? Outspire? Are they even words?”
There was another barrage of pistol shots and splintering wood.
“Not as easy as it looks,” I sneered, and turned around to the door. But the sneaky bastards had switched to shooting out the hinges.
The Ox was standing over the wannabe dictator’s head, ignoring both my tirade and the invaders at the door. With her thumb, she pressed out the silver centers to her earrings. Now I recognized them as the disks she’d placed on my forehead when she’d extracted me from Essen.
She placed one on each of the Fuhrer’s butt cheeks. Then she waved at me to come closer.
As I stood astride his legs, she undid the top two buttons of her dress, reached in, and rummaged around. I heard a ripping of undergarments. Then she brought out two rods of blue metal that sprang into the shape of dowsing rods.
Behind me, the abused door finally capitulated and flew open.
The Ox reached for my hands and placed them over her hips.
Nazis poured into the room like a swarm of angered killer hornets, but I barely noticed. All my attention was on the woman standing over Hitler and the feel of the soft wool of her skirt stretching over her flanks.
I’ve been told all my life that I’m incapable of thinking about more than one thing at a time. And usually that one thing is sex.
I hadn’t believed it until then.
“Raise your hands or I’ll shoot you like the dogs you are.” The SS man yelling at me sounded terribly angry, but I couldn’t stay angry at the Ox.
I felt a stirring in her loins.
Said loins began vibrating. Which was disconcerting to say the least. Then I started shaking too.
The power build up was like air heavy with electrical potential before an imminent thunderstorm, but it was a hundred times greater. The power originated from the disks resting on the Fuhrer’s buttocks, and I could almost see exotic energy twisting into a knotted cord of force that fed out of his ass and into the dowsing rods as if they were aerials.
The SS officer pushed the business end of his pistol against my forehead (Mauser C96 flashed somewhere in my mind).
The rods twitched.
Time went weird.
I saw the officer’s finger squeeze the trigger and felt a falling sensation.
Chapter 18
You know that feeling when you dream of falling and it jerks you, gasping, out of a deep sleep?
I felt that.
And then we were back in the same room in the Kennel we’d set off from, lying naked on the damp green tiles within the red hoops, the gentle wisps of scented steam reminding me uncomfortably of cheap holo-movie depictions of the afterlife.
The red light rimming the airlock to the control room turned green. With a hiss of pressure change, the hatch opened and a medical team in hazmat suits rushed over to save Hitler.
It looked routine and that was troubling. Did people usually return from these missions with bullet wounds and limbs cut off by swords or whatever?
Probably, but that was a worry for another day. I stepped aside to let the medics do their thing.
So this was the time room. While Hitler gets attention, let me describe it a little more.
A sequence of red hoops was arranged in a ring at its center. Apparently, these were toroidal field coils or superconductor tori – something like that – but everyone called them power donuts. The time travelers stood inside them and returned inside the ring too. If you squashed together like you were filming a new entry in the Elevator Orgy movie franchise, I reckoned two dozen temponauts could fit inside.
The rest of the room was empty, and with floor, ceiling, and walls covered in green tiles, it felt like a morgue. Maybe the light veil of steam was intended to hide the starkness of those tiles.
Technicians beavered away on the other side of a porthole that could have come from a spaceship. An airlock connected us too, but that wasn’t for the temponauts. We came through a door marked ‘In’ and left through a door I shan’t bother to name.
The Ox was headed for the exit door now.
“Did I pass?” I asked her.
She halted, but before she answered, the medics came for me. I’d been so overcome with getting back alive that I’d forgotten I’d been beaten to a pulp and shot in the foot.
“Pass what?”
“You know, my probation?”
She appeared confused. “There is no probation. Only continuous assessment. The superior agent determines—”
My agonized scream interrupted her. The medic had fed what looked like a metal centipede into the bullet wound in my foot. It was eating me from the inside out and first on its list of tortures was to reacquaint me with my pain signals.
The Ox waited until my screams had subsided into whimpers. “I decide whether your conduct is acceptable. There’s no need to pass a probationary period.”
The foot pain backed off substantially. I relaxed… until the Ox added, “Nor is there a point after which it’s more difficult to dispose of you, should you disappoint.”
I un-relaxed.
“Why did you think there’s a probation?”
“The brain tech told me.”
She snorted. “Never listen to techs. Always whining. Always causing trouble. Worse than droids, some of them.”
“Then, as my senior, did you think I performed okay?”
“You tell me.”
I hadn’t expected that. I was hardly going to tell her that I’d messed up.
“Not here.” She smiled with unusual warmth. “Later, at the debrief in Zone Blue-Alpha.”
I frowned. I’d studied the map of the Kennel. It had levels and something called arrondissements that seemed to be a pretentious name for zones, but they were numbered. There was no Zone Blue-Alpha.
She took pity on me for the first time. Unless you counted her saving my life, I supposed, but that seemed like a long time ago now. Or maybe she was simply bored of me being confused all the time.
“Zone Blue-Alpha is a bar. It’s across the street from the main entrance to the Kennel. You can’t miss it.” She hesitated but then shook her head. “No, even you can’t miss it.”
“Funny. Just one thing, boss. Money. How do I buy drinks?”
“A personal banking chip is embedded in your head. Charging will happen automatically.”
“The droid said my balance was six thousand dollars. I don’t know whether that’s barely enough to buy a small bag of candy or could buy a swanky downtown apartment.”
“Relax, Stiletto. Even if you drank all night long, you couldn’t drink your dollar balance dry.”
Now, that was fighting talk.
She laughed at my obvious eagerness. “First we need to get ourselves decontaminated. Then you can have a beer.”
I looked down at my foot.
“Just give me a minute to finish up here,” the medic told the Ox. “Then you can take him through decontam. He needs to go easy on the foot for a day or so.”
I didn’t care for the way the medic talked about me but not to me. Nor for the wet slurp as the metal centipede plopped out of my foot. However, these were trifling matters compared to the wonders I pictured awaiting me in decontamination.
I assumed it was vital for the continued survival of the human species that we didn’t bring pathogens back from the past. So I imagined the Ox and I performing our solemn duty by passing — still naked — into a tiled tunnel. A narrow one whose tight confines meant that the Ox and I would have no choice but to unfortunately press our bodies against each other.
After sharing a long and steamy sterilizing wash with water jets like a masseuse’s fingers, and no harsh chemicals at all, we would proceed to the drying room. There I imagined a deep red glow as if the room were a cavern heated by lava. The glow would throw enticing shadows over the Ox’s contours.
A metallic snap brought me from my daydream.
“All done,” the medic announced.
My foot and lower leg were encased in a polished silver boot. I looked like a damned cyborg.
I glanced at Hitler, who was still undergoing medical treatment, then forgot him instantly when the Ox beckoned me follow.
She led me through the exit hatch and out into a tiled corridor that terminated in a small changing room with a few benches, shelving alcoves, and a drinks dispenser. We passed through to the other side, where a baffle led out from the room.
The Ox stopped, smirked, and shook her head. She pointed at the wall beside me. “Not so fast, Stillo. Male decontam is that way.”
She sauntered off, leaving me to my shattered daydream.
Still, she’d called me Stillo for the first time. And she’d invited me for a drink.
At long last, it seemed things were finally about to get interesting.
Chapter 19
“Give us a twirl, robo boy.”
I sucked in a breath and then… did nothing.
I had no come back. Threw no punches. I couldn’t because I was the new guy. There would be plenty more of this crap to get through before they tired of giving me shit just for giggles.
I rose from our bench and gave my ragged audience a twirl on the sticky floorboards, lifting my pants legs so they could get a good look at my shiny medical boot.
They started hooting and clapping out a rhythm. But if they thought I was going to dance a jig for them, they could go suck on the Devil’s teats. New guy I might be, but I had my limits.
“You’ll get Monique steaming in her panties,” teased Sandro LaFratta, one of my new co-workers whose skin was so pale I think he was raised underground. “She’s a machine lover. I mean, for real. It was a thing in her era.”
I regarded the woman he was maligning or… maybe describing honestly. Monique DeSalle was short with a heart-shaped face and rounded cheekbones like she was smuggling baseballs under her skin. Her amber eyes glowed like hot toffee but there was cold intellect behind them, and it was studying me now. Like a pinned bug.
“Oh, I’m for real,” LaFratta continued. “Monique flew deep space missions in a metal coffin. Just her and the ship. Being alone isn’t good for the soul, so they made ships that could cater for all the needs of the crew.” He winked, running a hand through his blond hair. “Every need. Know what I mean?”
I didn’t. Not specifically, and I had to tell my brain to stop filling in the missing details with lurid speculation. Unfortunately, my brain rarely does as it’s told.
None of which escaped Monique’s notice. “I had hoped you wouldn’t be another gullible demented ape.” Her glare was so cold, a lucrative career awaited her as an ice machine.
“Future’s a big place,” I retorted. “Maybe you’re the dumb ape if you think robot sex can’t be a part of it.”
Her full lips froze in an ‘O’. Then she relaxed and flicked the crazy waves of her hair as she saluted me with her glass of fizzing blue liquid. “That’s actually a fair point, Stiletto. But for your information, in my tiny segment of your future, I was a Navy officer. LaFratta made up the solo mission nonsense. In fact, I flew tin tubs. Destroyers to you. I was in a confined space for many months at a time, but I commanded a couple of hundred salty sailors. They were definitely more animal than machine.”
