The Secret of Lions (11 page)

Although Heinrik had been reassigned, the
prison staff was shorthanded. He agreed to fill in as necessary.
One of his duties had become to walk Hitler in the mornings. It was
only for thirty minutes, but still he dreaded it.

It was just about time for Hitler’s morning
walk. Heinrik glowered at the thought of him.

Hitler should have become a distant memory.
He should have been forgotten by now, left in the ashes of
Heinrik’s mind. There should have been no more reason to worry
about that man. Gracy had forgotten him, but Heinrik’s dreams and
fears would not allow him to forget.

Upon entering the guards’ walkway, Heinrik
heard the blare of the alarm. It screeched over and over. It
emitted from the loudspeakers. The nearest one to Heinrik was out
in the hallway, near the main staff entrance. He searched franticly
for another guard, someone to tell him what was happening.

One guard was still inside the employees’
lounge. He looked young. Heinrik could tell that he was definitely
new and was barely old enough to even be considered a grown man. He
looked back at Heinrik with fear in his eyes. The guard did not
know what to do. He was completely inept. Heinrik shared his fear
and anxiety. The young guard paced back and forth. He looked lost
in his own tracks.

Heinrik had never heard the prison’s alarm
go off before, not in the five years that he’d worked there. He
remembered participating in numerous training exercises, as was
required by the prison, but never did they sound the alarm. He
gathered his thoughts and tried to stay calm. He was the
highest-ranking guard in the prison. It was his responsibility to
rise to the occasion and lead others. The alarm meant that there
were prisoners loose; it was up to him to lead the other guards to
locate and detain the escaped prisoners.

Heinrik abandoned his lunch pail. He tossed
it onto an old table that sat in the middle of the guards’ lounge.
The table was littered with playing cards, soda bottles, and old
soup cans. The guards were not the cleanest members of the prison
staff, but no one complained.

Heinrik ran out of the lounge, passing
another guard who headed toward the yard. On his way out, he turned
to Heinrik and said, “Sir. Sir. It’s a prison break.”

Heinrik followed him to the yard. No one was
out there. In the distance, Heinrik observed several birds
scattering from their perches. The approaching guards startled
them. A host of sparrows flew off into completely different
directions. Some of the birds became confused by the different
flight patterns. They scattered everywhere. Many of them readjusted
their flight paths in order to follow their brethren. It was
chaos.

A good number of the day crew had not yet
arrived and many of the night crew had already left, leaving few
guards to recover the loose prisoners.

The other guard turned toward him and said,
“Follow me into cell block five. I think that’s where we are
needed. I heard one of the cleaning guys mention something about
block five.”

Five is Hitler’s cell block,
Heinrik
thought.

The majority of inmates of cell block five
were mental patients. They were dangerous criminals; some were
armed robbers, rapists, murders, but most were psychotic. Some had
even lost their grip on reality. Some of these prisoners did not
believe that they were even in prison. Instead, they believed that
they were working a farm or still in the army in the trenches
fighting the war.

One believed he was a POW in a British
prison camp during the Great War, never mind that none of the
guards spoke English. Heinrik and his fellow guards often chuckled
at his expense.

Heinrik followed his comrade who ran toward
a building opposite from the guards’ entrance. He lost track of the
other guard for a moment. The guard disappeared into an open
doorway. When Heinrik followed, he saw a shadow in the corner of
his eye. It was the other guard. He quickly disappeared around the
opposite corner. Heinrik picked up his pace and chased after him,
trying desperately to keep up.

Before Heinrik could realize what the sound
was, the guard shrieked. His inhuman scream echoed in Heinrik’s
ears. He gurgled and gagged as if he were submerged underwater.

Heinrik turned the corner to find a horrible
scene. Three prisoners stood around the screaming guard. One of
them held the guard by pulling both of his arms back in an
inescapable death-lock. He stabbed a shiv into the back of the
man’s neck. Heinrik watched as a rusted blade pierced from out of
the guard’s Adam’s apple.

Blood splattered, soaking the collar of his
shirt in a wet, crimson color. The guard gyrated and squirmed
violently, trying to escape with his life; instead, he weakened
himself and sped up his death. Still, he fought, kicking his legs
up in the air. Within moments of struggling with his attackers for
his life, he was dead. The free prisoners dropped the corpse and
turned their focus to Heinrik.

“Come here, guard, and join your friend,”
one of the prisoners said. He gestured at Heinrik with the
shiv.

Heinrik froze.

One of the prisoners knelt down beside the
dead guard and picked up his gun. He cocked it and aimed it toward
Heinrik. The young, inexperienced guard Heinrik had seen out at the
guards’ lounge had suddenly entered from behind. The young guard
entered so fast that he startled the prisoners.

The gun went off. The prisoner shot him,
firing three times. The bullets entered into his chest and exited
through his back. The first bullet splintered into a cell door on
the opposite side of the corridor. The other ricocheted off the
concrete wall and shattered the lantern above.

At that moment, Heinrik ran down the hall.
He narrowly escaped his attackers. They chased close behind him.
Each time his foot hit the ground, dust shot up behind Heinrik.

“Stop, guard,” one prisoner called out.

The floor down the corridor was wet. Heinrik
slipped and hit the ground hard. Dazed for a moment, he looked up.
A cell door was open in front of him. The cell was number thirteen.
It was Hitler’s cell.

Heinrik saw a blurry figure standing in the
doorway. He stood almost dreamlike. The face was covered in shadow,
but there was a gleam from a metal object in his hand. It appeared
to be a razor-sharp shiv.

Suddenly, the figure moved slightly out of
the shadow. It was Hitler. He peered down at Heinrik with a
sinister look on his face. He placed a finger over his lips and
said, “Shh.”

Very slowly, he recoiled into the darkness
of his cell.

“There you are, guard,” the prisoner said,
standing over him. He pointed the gun right at Heinrik’s face. “You
are going to die.”

Out of the darkness, from beyond the cell’s
door, Hitler stepped out directly behind the three prisoners. The
one standing in the far back vanished into the darkness and let out
the slightest whimper. Hitler stabbed the shiv straight through
him, penetrating through to the other side of his body. The tip of
the shiv was visibly poking out of his chest underneath his shirt.
The blade retracted out of the man’s back and stabbed once
again.

Heinrik was the only person to witness the
brutal slaying.

The second prisoner noticed that his
companion was missing. He moved closer to the darkened cell to look
for him. Suddenly, Hitler appeared holding two shivs. He slashed
out with both blades and cut the man’s throat clean away.

The prisoner staggered backward toward the
wall, his hand gripped tightly around the bloody gash. His head
swayed back, the weight of it too heavy for the remaining part of
his neck to hold upright. Blood seeped out, covering his chest
until the dull colors of his prison clothes became unrecognizable
and he fell back into the darkness.

The final prisoner realized what was
happening. He turned and fired the gun twice into the blackness of
cell thirteen. He paused and started to tremble, stricken with
fear. Hitler stepped out into the light. His features were outlined
like a silhouette by the morning sunlight that glimmered in through
cracks in his cell’s outer wall.

With betrayal reflected deep within his
voice, the final prisoner uttered one final word before his death,
“Adolf?”

A moment later, Hitler pierced both shivs
into his chest, completely shattering the man’s ribcage.

Hitler’s thick, stumpy hands tightly
squeezed the shivs’ handles. In a vile act of brutality, he twisted
the murderous blades toward each other and then away, as if they
were knobs on a mechanical man. He left them there for a long
moment, staring into the man’s eyes as he died. The pupils dilated
until they lost all sense of life. Finally, Hitler pulled the
blood-soaked shivs out of the corpse.

Heinrik watched in sheer terror as the
prisoner’s body fell to the ground, flushing out all of its
previous flesh color. Very quickly, the body turned into a ghastly,
white tone.

34

Hitler stood over the corpse for a moment
and watched as it made a death twitch.

Heinrik looked up at him; his eyes met with
Hitler’s for a long, terrifying moment. Hitler tilted his head
slightly. Heinrik had never felt such terror before. The nightmare
that he had had about Gracy and Hitler came crawling to the
forefront of his mind. His terror in that moment was as close to
the fear that he felt in his dream as he could imagine himself
reaching. The stench of the prison halls crept into his nostrils,
causing him to relive every sensation that he’d endured in that
horrible nightmare.

In his nightmare, Hitler had embraced Gracy,
and Heinrik had been powerless to stop it. Heinrik’s words and
protests were useless. Gracy ignored them. The nightmare had become
real, too real. The horror overwhelmed him.

He was exhausted from the chase, from the
tension. He felt faint. His fatigue was so potent that he blacked
out.

35

Trees rustled under the weight of the heavy
wind. Special investigators, soldiers, and night guards populated
the prison yard as they walked up and down, surveying the attempted
prison break. A furious warden stood with them. He had been called
in on his day off. He was forced to help wade through the
unexplained events of the failed prison break and the dead bodies
that lay in its wake.

My father was the key to the entire
perplexing event. He woke up lying on a cot in the guards’
quarters. He felt dazed. Various uniformed officials surrounded him
in this cramped, tiny room, including some military officials he
did not recognize.

Heinrik sat up and realized his cot was
elevated slightly higher off the ground than it should have been.
The warden sat in front of him looking disturbed and uncomfortable.
He sipped on a mug filled with hot coffee, and unbeknownst to
Heinrik, it had a little whiskey in it. A pale steam emerged gently
from the top of the cup and evaporated into the musty room.

“Do you want some coffee? It’s fresher than
usual. The military officers brought it with them,” the warden
said. He held out an extra cup, whiskey and all. It struck Heinrik
as odd that the warden was acting so nice.

“Yes,” Heinrik nodded. Slowly, he sat up on
the cot, careful not to trigger any sudden pain. He was
particularly worried about his head. A severe and painful headache
lingered on his temple.

“Heinrik, do you remember anything? Do you
remember what happened?”

“I blacked out. But I remember some of it. I
thought that I was going to die,” he answered.

“So it was self-defense?” the warden
asked.

“Self-defense?” Heinrik said.

“Why did you kill all of those
prisoners?”

“What? What are you talking about?” Heinrik
asked, confused.

“Heinrik, we know what happened. You are not
in any real trouble. We understand you were scared. Your emotions
got the best of you. A deep rage overcame you when you saw what
those men had done to the other guards,” the warden said. His fat
belly lumped out and spilled over his belt.

“What?”

“Heinrik, it is fine. Those men killed your
fellow guards and would have killed you. They were trying to
escape. You did what anyone might have done.”

“I am still lost, sir,” Heinrik said,
rubbing his forehead.

“Heinrik, you are not in any trouble, not by
any means. So I don’t want you to think that you are. I just have
to ask you something. Did you have to cut those men up into all of
those pieces?”

“What? What are you talking about, warden?”
Heinrik asked, still confused.

“Heinrik, we know what happened. One of the
prisoners witnessed the whole thing from his cell,” the warden
explained.

“What?” Heinrik asked, shaking his head. He
looked up at the warden. His eyes had finally adjusted, helping him
to focus on the absurdity in the warden’s questions. Heinrik felt
colossally baffled.

“Yes, one of the inmates saw the whole
thing. He told us that it was self-defense. He said they were going
to kill you. You were only defending yourself. You were in a very
dangerous situation,” the warden said.

He sipped more coffee out of the mug. He
slurped it back, moving his eyes over Heinrik, scanning him for a
reaction. The warden’s hand shook as the coffee slid down his
throat. He wondered if Heinrik noticed the jittering. He was
nervous after discovering a side of Heinrik that he would have
never suspected, a dark, savage side.

“The thing is that there was so much blood,
Heinrik,” the warden said, staring at Heinrik’s chest.

Heinrik’s eyes slowly moved down and focused
on the shirt he wore. His clothes were soaked in blood. His shirt,
the sleeves, his pants, and even his brown, leather belt were all
covered in blood. The stains had already transformed into a
darkish, brown color. The blots were obviously red, but somehow
they appeared to have dried into a dark, claret blend, like a mixed
painter’s palette.