Blackbone (35 page)

Bauhopf yelled. The knife shook in his hand. Kirst’s eyes flashed open. For the first time in twenty-four hours, Kirst was
aware.
He glimpsed Bauhopf’s horror-stricken face and the knife in his hand then he saw the blackness rear up above his chest and descend on his mouth. His scream was cut off as the nightform disappeared down his throat.

Bauhopf gave a loud grunt then swung the knife down in a wide arc and sliced open Kirst’s throat. Instinctively, Hopkins jerked out his .45. As blood spurted from Kirst’s wound, Hopkins’ gun spat flame. The bullet hit Bauhopf in the right temple. He was slammed back against the wall, then he sank to the floor, still clutching the knife.

Kirst sat bolt upright, his wild eyes connecting with Hopkins, who sprang back in shock and watched him vault off the cot, hands flying to his throat, trying to stop the jetting blood. Kirst swooped around the cubicle like a trapped bird, plunging, gagging, fluttering, retching. An MP coming in from the ward ran right into his fist and dropped like a stone. Cuno came in after him. Kirst slammed him to the floor.

As Kirst’s body was gripped by a series of violent, spasmodic convulsions, Hopkins shakily leveled his .45 but couldn’t bring himself to shoot: he was so fascinated by the sight of this dead man insanely thrashing about in front of him.

Kirst crashed against the medicine cabinet and froze as he saw his reflection in the mirror.

Hopkins saw it too. So did Cuno, getting up from the floor. It wasn’t Kirst’s face. It was a twisted parody of human features. It had a wolfish snout with large, curved canine incisors, thick lips fixed in a permanent snarl, deeply hooded and burning eyes, quivering, pointed ears—the entire head was encased in a leathery reptilian skin covered with mottled eruptions. A glistening forked tongue flecked with blood darted from between the lips. It was the face of the djinn.

Cuno turned and vomited on the floor. Hopkins raised the .45, but Kirst lashed out and struck the weapon from his hand. Hopkins shrank into a corner and cowered, and Kirst bolted to the door, shouldering the jamb hard enough to splinter the wood. Then he sprang off into the storm with an inhuman howl, one hand clutching his split-open throat.

Hopkins stumbled down the steps and fell into the snow. Gilman arrived with Steuben and the rest of the MPs and, dumbfounded, they watched Kirst’s fleeing figure with its head rocking back as if on a hinge.

Hopkins was first to gather his wits. He jumped up and snatched a tommy gun from the nearest MP. He fired a warning burst over Kirst’s head.

Gilman reached out to stop him, but Hopkins lunged forward and bounded through the snow after Kirst. “Don’t shoot!” Gilman yelled, charging after him with Steuben following.

At the gate, Loring and the MPs on guard heard the warning burst and turned to see Kirst running toward them, holding his throat and screaming and roaring like a pack of wild animals.

Loring shouted at the men behind her, “Shut the gate! Don’t let him out!”

They did it quickly, leaving Loring inside with two MPs readying weapons. Kirst was hit with a spotlight from the nearest tower.

Hopkins floundered up the slope, yelling at Kirst to halt. Kirst bounded past the MPs and bolted for the fence. He sprang four feet off the ground and grabbed the barbed wire with both hands. His head flopped back. Loring saw the gaping throat wound and the dead eyes. Instinctively she backed away. The MPs stared in disbelief.

Ignoring the sharp barbs, the djinn forced Kirst to climb the fence. The flesh was torn from his hands. His legs kicked wildly, trying to dig into the links for footholds. He was hit with a second spot. Everybody was shouting now.

Hopkins reached the base of the fence and positioned himself directly beneath Kirst.

Realizing what he was going to do, Loring yelled, “No!” and charged toward him.

As Kirst reached the top, Hopkins raised his tommy gun and fired one long burst. Bullets tore into Kirst’s back. Blood spurted. His body stiffened at the top of the fence. Loring stopped and stared up at him, horrified.

Gilman, Steuben, and the others arrived in time to see the spotlights converge on Kirst’s body, limp and hanging from the topmost strands of barbed wire, gently twisting in the wind. Kirst’s head hung by gristle and bone, lying all the way back between his shoulder blades.

From the gaping slit in his throat, illuminated by the spotlights, a thick cloud of black smoke poured out of the body. It flowed against the fence and recoiled with an echoing howl of rage. Then it appeared to be caught on the wind and whipped away into the camp. It disappeared into the storm.

Gilman, Loring, mid Steuben looked at each other.

Chapter 25

As the fence swayed from the impact of Hopkins’ gunfire, feathery clots of snow broke off the top and blew about their faces. Around them a trackless ocean of white continued to draw down a curtain of swirling flakes from the sky.

Gilman watched the trail of blackness vanish among the huts. The Germans gathering at the bottom of the slope were unaware of it as it rushed over their heads.

“Is it gone?” Gilman asked Loring.

“I doubt it.” She looked up at Kirst’s body. “Killing him drove it out, but it couldn’t get past the fence because of the way the camp is shaped—with its five sides. It’s trapped in here, and the only way it will ever get out is inside a new host.”

The MPs exchanged nervous glances. They didn’t like what they had seen. They didn’t like the idea that Kirst had run around for several minutes with his head nearly severed from his body. They didn’t like the gory, gaping smile where his neck had been, or his cold dead eyes.

Hopkins stood very still, clutching the tommy gun tightly to his body, trying to make sense of what he had seen. Cuno appeared behind him, his eyes darting toward Kirst as he described to Steuben what had happened in Kirst’s cubicle and what he and Hopkins had seen in the mirror.

As Steuben translated, Hopkins kicked snow with his boot, muttering to himself.

Gilman turned to Hopkins and, indicating Cuno, said, “Is he telling the truth? Did you kill one of the Germans?”

Hopkins stopped kicking snow. “Bauhopf. He took a knife to Kirst, sir—slashed his throat. So I shot him. But then—” Glancing up at Kirst, he struggled with the memory. “Kirst got up, sir, and he was holding his throat and kind of crashing about, and then he stopped in front of the mirror, and instead of his face we saw this... this
thing
...” His eyes traveled back up to Kirst and stayed rooted to the body while Cuno gave a clinical description of the face of the djinn. Steuben provided an artless translation. The MPs listened, liking all of this even less than what they had witnessed.

Gilman turned and slogged through the snow, down the fence line, away from the MPs. Steuben, Bruckner, Cuno, Loring, and Hopkins joined him, huddled against the storm.

“Look, it’s vital now that we all know what we’re up against, because its purpose—according to Miss Holloway—is helped by keeping us in the dark. So the lid is off. Major Steuben, you will please inform your men—and Hopkins, you’ll pass the word to the MPs.”

“What word?”

Gilman drew a breath. “What’s been going on around here—the killing—is due to something that was living
inside
Kirst.”

Hopkins stared at him.

“It’s sort of a parasite,” said Loring, aiming for a credible description. “In point of fact, a demon. It’s called a djinn.”

“Hopkins, that’s d-j-i-n-n,” Gilman added. “It’s not in any field manual, so there’s no regulation procedure for dealing with it, other than initiative. That black cloud we all just saw leaving Kirst’s body? That was it.”

Hopkins’ expression became a halfhearted smirk.

“You’ll have to force yourself to believe it,” said Gilman, “so you can convince the others.”

“Me?”

“It killed Gebhard in the shower hut. It forced Eckmann to kill Schliebert. It even made Eckmann hang himself.”

“Why?”

“It feeds off the death of its victims,” said Loring, “whether it does the killing itself or just
causes
them to die.”

“So far tonight, it’s killed Sergeant Vinge and the three men in that mine shaft. And even though you pulled the trigger, the djinn was responsible for Bauhopf.” Gilman glanced back at the body on the fence. “As well as Kirst.”

“What are you giving me?”

“Hopkins, you saw its face in the mirror. You and Cuno.”

“I saw some trick!”

“The mirror...” Loring was momentarily lost in thought, then she brightened. “That’s why they saw it! That’s what the silver is for—it’ll show us where the djinn
is!”
She tugged on the chain at her neck and pulled out the silver talisman Yazir had given her. “No matter what shape or substance it takes on or where it hides, we can find it by catching its reflection in silver. We need mirrors!”

“Which we may be a little short of,” Gilman said.

“Look, the more it kills, the stronger it gets. It’s going to keep killing. But from now on, it’s vulnerable. It has no place to hide. We’ve got to do something while it’s deprived of a host—and before it finds a new one! At least when it was inside Kirst, we knew where it was! Now it could take any one of us—anybody inside this compound! And if it does, we won’t know who!”

She fell silent. Snow blew around them. They glanced at the MPs waiting beneath Kirst’s body, at the Germans still emerging from the huts, disregarding the storm and forming a growing mob.

“How is it going to get a new host?” Gilman asked.

Loring was thoughtful a moment. “It has to be ingested. The sorcerer in Ur-Tawaq
fed
it to his assistant. Kirst apparently drank it. It will disguise itself as something edible. It could become food, drink, cigarette smoke...” She looked at Gilman. They both stared at the mob of Germans down the hill.

“Well, that does it,” said Gilman. “We’ve got to get everybody out of here—right now.”

“Wait a minute!” Hopkins snapped. “Those men are prisoners. They’re not getting out of here!”

“Hopkins—”

Hopkins brandished his tommy gun. “Uh-uh, Major. You can believe all that hocus-pocus if you want to, but not me. What do you think you’re dealing with here? They’re Germans! They’re going to escape any way they can! This may be the best act I’ve ever seen, but it stops right here!” He slammed the bolt action back and steadied the weapon.

Steuben stepped forward. “Major Gilman, I give you my word my men won’t attempt to escape—”

“What about the three in the mine shaft?” interrupted Hopkins. “What were they doing—digging a new latrine?”

“They were fools. They wouldn’t have gotten far in this storm. Captain Hopkins, we all have a common enemy now. Vinge was
your
man. This demon is no longer killing only Germans.”

Hopkins smirked again then glowered at Gilman. “What about Window Hill, Major? The last time you trusted a German?”

Gilman’s eyes went cold. “Hopkins, who I trust and why is none of your business, unless it happens to be you—which it’s not.”

With the storm growing around him, Gilman leaned into the wind and motioned the MPs over. They slogged up close, eyeing Hopkins and his readied tommy gun.

“Shit,” Hopkins said, lowering his weapon. Handing it to the nearest MP, he turned and stalked off through the gate.

A few minutes later, MPs were removing Bauhopf’s body from the
Krankenhaus
and taking it across to the rec hut past a line of grim-looking Germans. As Steuben called a meeting of hut captains outside the
Krankenhaus,
Cuno regretfully admitted his part in the night’s tragedy. “I was trying to prevent this,” he told Steuben. “Bauhopf and some others were determined to kill Kirst. I had to tell them what we had seen this afternoon—”

“So it’s all over camp by now,” said Steuben. Cuno nodded. Steuben turned to confer with the hut captains. “Kirst is dead,” he began. “So is Bauhopf. So are Mueller, Dortmunder and Hoffman, and the MP, Sergeant Vinge. But the Americans are not to blame—nor are any of us. There is a story going around that something was living inside Kirst. That story is true. There is a monster loose in this camp.”

The hut captains regarded Steuben blankly. Bruckner grunted.

“It doesn’t matter to me what you choose to believe,” Steuben added. “I only care that from this point you follow orders and regard this as a military operation. That means no committees, no discussion, no voting—only orders.” He paused, glancing at each of them, his gaze settling on Bruckner. “Major Gilman wants all of us out,” he said.

“Out?” said one of the men. “What do you mean, out?”

“Out of this camp. Outside the fence” They looked at him in surprise. “This is not an invitation to escape. It’s a necessary move to save lives. Hut captains, round up your men, return to your huts, pick up only warm clothing and blankets. Leave behind all edible food and drink, and all cigarettes. You are to give the men strict orders not to eat, drink, or smoke anything that is presently inside this camp. Tell them the food is poisoned. Tell them anything you like, but every bit of it stays here. As soon as you’re ready, assemble outside the huts and wait for the MPs to escort you out. Any questions?”