Shadows Will Fall (7 page)

As the civilians, prisoners, technicians, officers, and scientists ran for the inner courtyard, the storm troopers on the line held fast. Then every other trooper fell back ten yards, taking up firing position again. The remaining front rank repeated the process, falling ten yards behind the second rank and then turning to cover their mates.

By chance, Terah and Deitel found themselves back-to-back with Skorzeny and two of the storm troopers. Skorzeny planned to be the last one into the inner courtyard. Already the technicians were at work on the barricade.

The
wehr-wolves
tore into the mass of undead. But their natural means of attack—to tear into the throat—had little effect. By sheer weight of numbers, the creatures fell on the transgenic wolves. The cry of the last one sounded like the howl of a dog.

The
nachtmenn
were having more luck. With their lightning speed, they maneuvered around the hoard of undead and found the control for the gate. While the other five stood shoulder-to-shoulder, the sixth pulled the lever that lowered the outer gate. The rattle and squeal of the chains and the thunder of it slamming down attracted the attention of the horde. It was too far and too dark for those in the inner courtyard to see. The
nachtmenn
stood against the swarm of the undead. Their massive, clawed hands struck the first of the undead to approach them, sending their heads flying across the courtyard. But the horde wouldn't stop. They smelled living flesh. Like the
wehr-wolves,
the
nachtmenn
fell under the inexorable mass of undead that attacked.

Standing on the inner courtyard wall, still weak and dizzy, Amria looked upon the chaos and carnage among the living, the dead, and the undead that she had unleashed in corrupting the reanimation process with her curse.

She smiled.

Let them all die
.

A
midst the screams and pandemonium, the
draugrkommandos
led by Hauser found Dr. Übel. The doctor stood paralyzed with fear. They towered over Übel, blank faces staring at him with dead eyes.

Then one spoke.

“Come with us, Father. We can protect you.”

“Thank you, my child,” Dr. Übel said.

S
omewhere behind his iron mask Colonel Uhrwerk was running through calculations and probabilities. He'd done his duty by placing Skorzeny in command. Now it was time for him to leave. This was not a decision made in haste or driven by fear. Speaking entirely objectively, he was of far more value to the Reich than the remaining storm troopers or Übel's experiments. The spear could be recovered. The lives of those here were not material assets in the way that he was.

Uhrwerk would get clear, find a wireless, and call in a bomb strike on the castle. They could sort out the rubble and recover the spear after that. He had to be sure this infection was cleansed away. It was simply a matter of walking out of one of the smaller outer gates, locking it behind him, and marching the fifty miles to Piteşti.

With neither haste nor hesitation, Uhrwerk started toward the front gate. All around him the undead staggered about. Some were feeding on the last remains of the storm troopers who had attacked. Others were feeding on the fallen
wehr-wolves
and
nachtmenn
. One last
nachtmann
fought valiantly against a wave of the creatures, but to no avail. It went down. The undead didn't seem to take note of Uhrwerk at all, as he expected. At the front gate, he unlatched the outer door and threw it open, then felt a hand clamp on his shoulder.

Uhrwerk turned and found himself face-to-face with one of the three infected
draugrkommandos
. It seemed that whatever afflicted it earlier had passed. But its complexions was gray and its eyes, nose, and mouth rimmed with blood, just as the Death's Head Legion had been.

It drew a raspy breath. Uhrwerk found it fascinating. The creature appeared to have more trouble breathing than the three uninfected
draugrs
.

“What are you?” the
draugr
asked him.

“I might ask the same,” the colonel said.

Another raspy breath.

“What are you?” the creature demanded angrily, reaching out and shaking Uhrwerk.

With blinding speed Uhrwerk drove his right hand into the center of the creature's chest. It looked down at Uhrwerk's arm, buried up to the elbow, and took another raspy breath.

“That won't hurt us,” it said. A smile spread on its face.

“It wasn't intended to hurt you. It was intended to hold you still,” Uhrwerk said.

His metal fingers flat, he drove his left hand under the creature's jaw and deep into its brain. He made a fist, squishing the cranial matter. When he pulled his hands free of the thing, the
draugr
slid to the cobblestones.

From behind, a second
draugr
wrapped an arm around Uhrwerk's neck. It grabbed his metal mask and ripped it free, spinning him around.

Even before the
draugr
had been converted, as a live man, it wouldn't have understood what it now saw beneath the mask it had removed. Instead of a face, it saw an almost infinitely complex series of clockwork machinery, intricately interlaced gears of all sizes, all turning in uniform precision and altogether performing millions of difference calculations per second. The sum total of these constituted the brain functions of Colonel Uhrwerk. While a small amount of his human body remained encased in the metal form her wore, all that he once was been had long ago been replaced by one of Übel's more ingenious inventions. He was a clockwork man through and through, with so little human material remaining that the undead did not sense his presence.

In a confused rage, and before Uhrwerk could react, the
draugr
grabbed Uhrwerk's right arm and ripped it from its socket. A green mechanical fluid and puff of steam erupted from the stump. The arm clattered on the cobblestones, clicking and whirring.

“You did this to us,” the
draugr
rasped. “And you're not even human?”

In a primitive rage, it roared. Behind it, more of the creatures were approaching. Uhrwerk knew he wouldn't last against so many of these monstrosities. He backhanded the
draugr
before him, sent it sprawling into the cluster of undead. Then he ran for the archer's door—a small, hidden doorway that opened to a stairwell within the castle wall, once allowing bowmen to take up position on top of the wall in a siege. Barring it behind him, Uhrwerk climbed the narrow stairway.

The hatchway opened to the walkway and battlements atop the wall. Below in the outer courtyard, he saw the mass of undead. They were making their way toward the inner courtyard. Outside the wall it was a forty-foot drop to the solid stone ground beyond the castle. Without hesitation, Uhrwerk climbed the battlement and stepped off. As he fell he extended his left arm and dug his metal hand into the stone wall. Sparks showered around as it slowed his descent, enough that the servos and pumps in his legs were able to absorb the impact of landing.

After hitting the ground he set out for Piteşti, with only a slight limp and not a single look back.

S
korzeny and Terah stood with their backs to the inner courtyard gate, watching the carnage in the outer courtyard. The melee between the undead and the
nachtmenn
was over. Many of the undead wandered about listlessly. Those closer, who sensed the gathering of the living in the inner courtyard, were coming their way. The flesh on the creatures was more drawn than it had been, exposing their teeth. Their gums had receded, making their maws all the more animalistic. Their fingernails were longer and more clawlike. Their complexion was more of a green-hued gray, where it had been ashen before. Most alarming, they were moving with more agility. They were getting faster.

They swarmed over Übel's machine. Clusters were hunting in different directions, mainly toward the inner courtyard. When one of the creatures was within twenty feet, Skorzeny shot it in the face.

“They're changing,” Terah said. “Mutating.”

Skorzeny agreed. “And they're moving with a more predatory gait. Übel said that shouldn't be happening. If anything, they should be slowing.”

“This isn't what Übel planned, that's for sure,” she said.

“That's everyone,” Skorzeny noted as the last trooper passed through the gateway. “And the outer gate is secure. Get inside.”

Field cars had been wedged into the gateway. The wall itself was twenty feet high and made of thick stone and mortar with rock infill. Heavy wooden crates, lumber, and anything else not nailed down was piled atop the field cars, leaving only a small gap at the top. Then heavy-duty cargo netting had been thrown over the barricade and tightened.

Now, the engineers among the survivors set to work shoring up the hasty defense, putting their skills to a job they could not have imagined. The inner courtyard was their last redoubt. They could retreat into the castle, but in the narrow corridors and great rooms there would be no way to erect another barricade. They would be overrun in no time.

When the first wave of the undead staggered into the barricade, it held. The next wave smashed in behind the first, crushing the first against the barricade. It groaned—or was that the creatures being crushed?—but it held.

Skorzeny issued orders to round up every weapon and round of ammunition that could be found. He also ordered the men to find alternative weapons—clubs, knives, sticks—anything that could be fashioned to pierce, smash, or remove a human skull. Even with the best fire discipline, the ammunition would run out long before they ran out of creatures to kill.

Skorzeny ordered Deitel and two of his troopers to search the main keep and the bailey for any other weapons they might have overlooked. In the main chambers of the keep, the rusted old pikes on the walls were mainly decorative. They were there because, over the years, no vandal or looter had dared set foot in the castle keep. Seeing that they were useless, Deitel looked elsewhere.

Unlike the Poenari castle's bailey, where the lord's chamberlain and household staff had residences on the higher levels, the master's residence in the keep was on the ground floor. The great hall, in turn, was on the second story. Deitel had not studied medieval architecture, but this seemed peculiar.

There were three separate doorways to pass through to reach the master room. It had taken the engineers hours to breach the intricate defenses of the master room, and there was little in the way of reward for their efforts. In the master's bedchamber, which Hoffstetter had claimed for his own, there were likewise no useful items. A field bunk had been set up for Hoffstetter, and two chests of his personal effects sat beside it.

Molded, warped wooden dressers, tables, and faded, torn, and decaying tapestries were all about the room. Something wasn't right, but Deitel couldn't put his finger on it. There was a hole in the shape of an inverted triangle all the way through the far wall of the room. It stretched from floor to ceiling and opened to the outside of the castle and a straight drop down the cliff. Deitel realized it was the result of damage from the earthquake in the 1880s that Amria had described.

“We already searched and secured all the rooms on this level and all the ones above it,” one of the two troopers said to him. “We found little more than rotten furniture covered by decades if not centuries of dust. This is pointless.”

The master's bed was on a stone dais in the center of the room, the ornately carved frame warped and rotten. Over the decades, rainwater had poured into the room. The moisture had ruined the woodwork and rotted the Persian rug. The water that leaked in had, over the years, created a sluice through the accumulated dust on the floor, leaving a stain of its path that ran from the hole in the wall to the rug, where it stopped.

Where did the water go from there? Deitel wondered.

“Wait,” he said to the trooper. “Here, get that end,” and he grabbed the edge of the Persian rug. The troopers each took a side and lifted the rug. It split apart in their hands. Underneath, sunk into the floor, was an iron trapdoor.

The troopers and Deitel looked at one another.

“Vampires sleep underground, according to the stories,” Deitel said.

It was heavy, but the troopers pulled the door open with a nerve-wracking creak. Torch in hand, Deitel descended the stairwell it had hid. After another door, inscribed with ancient, indecipherable runes, they found themselves inside the private sanctum of the master of this castle—Vlad Tepes, the Son of the Dragon, Draculae.

Oddly, it smelled of fresh earth. Tapestries with gold dragons on a field of black and crimson lined the walls, and while dusty, they were not rotten. In the center of the room, a stone crypt bore the same runes as the door. In the torchlight, metal gleamed along the walls. The slab atop the crypt was pushed to the side. It was empty.

Not taking his eyes off the crypt, Deitel took a few tentative steps into the room. The gleam came from the handles of a score of weapons lining the wall to his right. There were hideous, ornately carved broadswords, short swords, pikes, maces, knives, and a two-handed great sword. The obsidian steel weapons looked like they'd been oiled that day. They absorbed the light. Only the decorative engraving on their scalloped handles and cross guards reflected the torches. The blades were razor sharp.

One of the two troopers stepped up to the wall and removed a broadsword.

“Gather these,” he said. “We need to take them up to the courtyard.”

I
n the courtyard, Terah saw to the wounded and got some of the lab technicians to round up field rations and water. So far all the wounds she saw were from the gunfire and the fighting that had occurred. She caught Amria's eye and saw that the girl's anger hadn't subsided at all, but that the girl seemed oddly—disturbingly—self-satisfied.