Warbound: Book Three of the Grimnoir Chronicles - eARC

  “Something like that,” Wells answered slowly.

  “There is no need for shame. In the Imperium, men such as yourself would be highly valued for your unique intellect. I have been led to understand that many members of Unit 731 share your specific mental affliction. It enables them to conduct their experiments on human subjects without hesitation or remorse. You do not feel what others feel, but your analysis of how they think has made you a very capable mimic.”

  “Then you know why I’m good at my job.” Wells gave him that odd little smirk again. “Regardless of my original personal goals when I embarked on my particular path of study, today, my understanding Saito better enables you to kill him better. Tell me everything about this bastard and I promise I will help deliver him into your hands.”

  “That is intriguing . . .” Toru stroked his chin. It could help, and he had nothing better to do on this accursed tub. “Very well. If it helps me end Saito’s life, then I will put up with all manner of nonsense. Continue your questions.”

  Wells looked around again for a spot to sit, but then finally gave up and sat on the hard metal floor. The pen went back to the notepad. “I think I’m going to enjoy our sessions together, Toru. May I call you Toru? Now where were we?”

  Chapter 10

  Germany has the strongest army in the world, and the Germans don’t like being laughed at and are looking for somebody on whom to vent their temper and use their strength. It is 38 years since Germany had her last war, and she is very strong and very restless, like a person whose boots are too small for him. With the formation of this great legion, a momentous hour has struck. The Ninth Army is an indestructible blend of technology and magic. Every last soldier is a mighty wizard. Nothing can match us. Nothing. Our rivals are envious of our magic, and they force us to legitimate defense. Germany will triumph. Bear yourselves as Huns of Attila. For a thousand years let the French tremble at the approach of a German!

  —Kaiser Wilhelm II,

  Speech at the Magical Services Branch Headquarters,1914

  Dead City, Germany

  Dead City was a horrible place.

  Faye didn’t like zombies one bit. To be honest, they scared the heck out of her, and she was a very difficult to girl to scare. She hadn’t allowed herself to be scared very much since the day Madi had murdered her Grandpa, and the times she had been afraid since had been more about being scared for her friends and very rarely for her own safety. There simply wasn’t much out there that she couldn’t handle if she just kept calm and took care of business, and being scared never helped that. Zombies were different though. They were unnatural. They were just nasty, gross, make-your-skin-crawl, make-your-stomach-hurt, make-your-hair-stand on end, scary, and in this awful city, they were everywhere.

  She tried to move fast, never staying in one place for too long. Luckily, Dead City was a mess of broken edges and fallen walls. Very few of the buildings were in one piece. The only ones which had been repaired was from back when the people were still trying to make it decent and livable, by the living people like Heinrich, back before the Kaiser’s million undead soldiers had gotten too crazy and too hungry.

  Faye appeared on the fifth-floor window ledge of what had probably once been a bank. At least she thought it looked banklike, since there had been big stone columns out in front. Only one of them was still standing and the others had fallen to lie broken in the road. The columns were whiter than the grey ground, so they looked a little like bleached bones. Not that there weren’t plenty of real bones lying around.

  Scanning for threats, Faye leaned out around the corner. The gritty dust under the soles of her shoes crunched. At least this ledge didn’t break like the last one she’d landed on. The place was positively falling apart. The coast was clear. The poor hungry zombies who’d been chasing her around the first floor were still down there screaming and throwing a fit. She figured they’d forget soon enough and go back to their shuffling and muttering.

  Jacques had given her a map. On it he’d marked the spots where he thought Zachary might be staying. It was a big, clumsy, hard-to-fold mass of paper, so she’d simply memorized the whole thing in a few seconds and was trusting in her far superior head map. It didn’t help, however, that Jacques’ map had been made from back when this place had still been Berlin, and things had made sense. Some of the roads on the maps were flooded canals now. Others were filled with buildings that had fallen. But even then, there were a lot of places to check, and so far she hadn’t had any luck.

  Her search would be totally pointless if it turned out that the zombie she was looking for had gone crazy and wandering aimlessly like most of the undead around here. She didn’t mind the wanderers so much; they showed up on her head map just fine so she could stay one step ahead of them. The talkers and jabberers were nice too, because she could hear them coming. It was the ones who were holding still that worried her. Already she’d nearly Traveled right into two of them. Living things positively glowed on her head map, moving things too. Dead and still? That was a problem.

  The windows on this floor had no glass in them. Come to think of it, she didn’t think a pane of glass had survived anywhere in the city. Hadn’t seen a single one yet, matter of fact. Had the Peace Ray shattered them all? Or had the undead smashed everything they might see their ugly reflections in? Either way, she could see inside the dusty room. There was nothing that she could spot with her grey eyes or that she could sense on her head map that suggested there was any danger.

  Jacques had said that Zachary would gravitate toward “living” in the tallest places. Back when he’d been alive he had been some sort of artist, and he’d even drawn illustrations in the pulps, of cowboys and Indians and spacemen and pirates and gangsters. Surely it was in an artist’s nature to like rooms with a view. Jacques had also given her a package to deliver, should she find him. She didn’t know what it was, but the satchel was really heavy and felt like it was filled with books. Either it was a gift, or maybe Jacques thought that the more weight she Traveled with, the faster it would use up her Power, and he was simply trying to get her caught and eaten. Well, fat chance of that, because Faye was still the best Traveler ever. So she’d show him.

  “Zachary? You in there?” Faye stuck her head through the window hole. “Hello? Anybody?”

  She hadn’t seen the dead woman. She’d been still for so long that it was almost like she’d been stuck to the floor. The zombie sat up with a screech, spilling a choking cloud of grey dust. It startled her, but more than anything Faye really felt sorry for these poor dead folks. She would’ve loved to do them all a favor and kill every last single one of them, but zombies didn’t die easy. You could even cut them into pieces and the pieces just kept on twitching and screaming. She’d heard that they kept on feeling hungrier and hungrier, but nothing could ever feed them. They moved only because magic had stuck their souls to their bodies like some horrible glue. What would it be like to get hurt, but to never get better, and to always feel whatever it was that killed you? Delilah had been the toughest person Faye had ever known, so she’d handled it for a bit, but in the end getting turned into ash by the Peace Ray had been for the best.

  The zombie lurched for Faye, but her legs really had been fused to the floor from sitting for so long, so it took her a second to tear free. Like most of the undead Faye had seen so far, this one was weathered, all dry and shrunken, and naked, clothing long since rotted off, and too crazy or in too much pain to care about dressing proper. There was a great ripping noise, a bunch of leathery leg and butt jerky was left on the floor, and then the zombie was coming right at Faye.

  She had already picked her next stop. “Sorry to wake you, ma’am,” and then Faye stepped off the ledge and Traveled safely away.

  Faye was really thankful for her particular abilities right about then. She’d been blessed to be a Traveler, as it really was the best kind of magic ever. When she’d first started meeting other types of Actives as she’d sought out the Grimnoir, she’d
been a little jealous of the other’s seemingly more useful abilities, like super strength or healing or controlling animals. But now Faye knew that she was the lucky one. Nobody else would be able to get around Dead City in one piece . . . Not that she could imagine anybody ever wanting to.

  So many walls had fallen over that it had created a maze where the streets had been, and in some spots it was hard to tell where the streets ended and the sewers which had been beneath began. It wasn’t like the roads were level anymore, with big piles of spilled brick like the buildings had puked their guts up before they’d died.

  There was lots of graffiti at ground level. It looked angry, but it was all in German, so she couldn’t read it. None of the graffiti was new, though. So the dead had probably done that sort of thing at first to pass the time before they’d either given up or run out of paint.

  It was in one of those tunnels created by fallen walls that somebody answered her calls. The response had gotten her hopes up, only it turned out to only be another undead having a brief moment of coherence, and though she didn’t speak the language, she’d thought the dead man was asking if she were his daughter, but then he’d lost his mind again and tried to eat her.

  The sun was getting high. Hours had passed, and she was getting tired, hungry, and thirsty. Dead City was huge. All of these years that she’d heard about the destruction of Berlin, she’d never realized just how dang big it was. She had Traveled two hundred and eighty-seven times since she’d started her search, and she hadn’t even scratched the surface. Her Power was still burning bright, but her body was getting worn out.

  She stopped in what had probably been a park to eat her lunch. The bench was lopsided, the trees were barren sticks coming out of the ground, the stream was dry, and the bridge that had crossed it was now just a big pile of rocks, but at least it was in the open so she could see in every direction long enough to eat the chicken sandwich she’d packed.

  She supposed there had been a lot of lakes around Berlin, because when it had all gotten broken, the lakes had come spilling back in. There was water everywhere, but most of it was cloudly with muck, and she’d seen a few zombies floating all bloated and soft like, or bits of people sticking out of the muck, so she’d be darned if she was gonna drink any Dead City water. It made her glad she’d brought a canteen.

  It was nice to take a minute to relax, and then she realized that there was a severed head stuck in the branches of a nearby tree. Like every other plant she’s seen in the city, this tree was all blasted, black, ashy, and dead, and for once the random body part seemed equally still. “How’d you get up there?” she asked the head, but when she did, the eyes opened and it started hissing at her. The noise must have drawn attention, because within thirty seconds there were answering moans and shrieks from all around the park. Company was coming. “Thanks a lot, jerk.” Faye stuffed the rest of her sandwich in her mouth and took a swig of water so it wasn’t so dry that she’d choke—now that would be an ironic way to die while in Dead City—and she Traveled to her next selected destination.

  How had Heinrich survived here for so long? She gained new respect for her friend as she walked the broken rooftops. Occasionally she found evidence of other mortals who had tried to enter Dead City, but usually only bits and pieces of them. Jacques had told her about foolish treasure hunters, so she figured the half-eaten man she found with a shovel, burlap sack full of jewelry, antiques and a Mauser pistol had been one of those. The C96 was all dried out and could use a good cleaning, but she kept the pistol anyway. She had her Browning .45 hidden beneath her shirt, but a spare gun never hurt.

  One hour of time and forty Travels later, Faye had her first stroke of luck. Not only was this dead man mostly sane, he was rather polite, helpful, and even well dressed.

  “Hello?” Faye crept across the broken floor tile, darting between the beams of sunlight sneaking through the boarded-up window slats. She’d learned the hard way in the last apartment building that sometimes the zombies could be wedged into the ceilings too. That one had nearly pulled her hair. “Anybody home?”

  “Hallo. Wer ist da?”

  “Sorry to bug you.” Faye peeked around the crumbling brick corner. There was a tall, thin shape standing in the back of the next room. His stance was wary, not all hunched over and dragging like most dead folks she’d met. “My name is Faye. Do you speak English?”

  There was a long pause. “Yes . . . Forgive me. I do not often receive visitors. Come in.”

  What luck! He didn’t immediately try to eat her face and he spoke English!

  It was dark inside, but her grey eyes could see just fine. He was dead all right, bug-eyed, skin all dried out and cracked-open scabby, but despite that he was dressed in a very snazzy army uniform, and his chest was covered in ribbons and medals and gold braids leading up to big golden things on his shoulders which looked like they should be used for cleaning boots, and speaking of boots, his went up to his knees and were so polished and shiny that if there was sunshine they would probably be blinding. He was even wearing a sword, and it was one of the only metal things she’d seen in town that wasn’t rusty. On the table next to him was a bottle, which had been empty since Faye had been a little girl, and a weird German helmet with a spike on top of it. The helmet was darn near as sparkly as the boots. “I was getting ready for the parade.”

  Apparently there were different kinds of zombie crazy.

  “I’m Faye. What’s your name?”

  “Field Marshal . . .” His voice was a hissing wheeze. The zombie tilted his head to the side. “I do not remember . . . What are you doing in my study? American, no? Have you brought the new draft of the armistice treaty? Are you with Pershing’s expeditionary unit?”

  In a sense, yes, her and Mr. black Jack went way back, but she didn’t want to complicate matters. “I’m not in the army or nothing. I’m here looking for somebody. Maybe you can give me directions?”

  The zombie general, or whatever he was, gave her a bow with a flourish. His bones creaked ominously. “Of course, young lady. How may I be of assistance?”

  “I’m looking for a man who lives around here somewhere. His name is Zachary.”

  “Zachary, you say? I do not know this man, I think . . . Did you see my medals? How they gleam?”

  “They’re very nice. The man I’m looking for can tell the future.”

  “Ah, the Fortune Teller. Yes. I know of him. He moved to the top floor of the Fenstermacher building down the street.”

  “Really? Which one is that?”

  “It is not far from here. It is the one the Kaiser had a radio tower built on top of . . . I went there once. All of the notable members of high society in Berlin did. An actual Fortune Teller. How marvelous, I thought. I wished to know if there was any chance the Kaiser’s forces could turn this run of bad luck . . . Alas, there was not.”

  “Thank you, Field Marshal. You’ve been a big help.”

  The zombie sounded very sad. “Not so many of us visit the Fortune Teller anymore.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I think he is a charlatan. Our fortunes were all the same. I do not remember mine exactly.” His dried features seemed to scrunch up in confusion. “It was very . . . depressing.” He shuffled around to his table and picked up his empty bottle. “Please, please don’t go. Stay and have a drink.” He poured an imaginary drink into the dry glass. “I could use some company for a bit.”

  She was rather impatient to go, but she felt bad for the old dead soldier. She took the proffered empty glass. “Okay, but just one.”

  One imaginary drink had turned into five, and then ten, and the field marshal had told her stories about where every one of his medals had come from, and then he’d talked about his lovely wife, and their twin babies, who were probably her age by now, but the undead didn’t seem to have a real good grasp on time. It was funny how that worked out, but it wasn’t like imaginary booze was going to befuddle her or the empty bottle was going to run out of anything
except for dust, so Faye had sat their pretending to sip air while an old zombie held a conversation.

  It was the least she could do for the good advice, and she figured an hour spent like that had probably saved her ten times that long searching the city, assuming the field marshal had given her the right address, of course. She’d made her apologies, said she had other commitments, and Traveled through the ceiling.

  Faye had to dodge between two groups of particularly aggressive undead who seemed to be having a turf war over the main boulevard, and then she nearly got her head blown off when it turned out one of them still had a working rifle and was a fairly good shot with it. That neighborhood turned out to be a real pain since there were other snipers up on the roofs, so it forced her back through the building interiors and torn-up streets. A sleeper had scratched her boot with his bony fingers and a few minutes later a different one had ripped a chunk of fabric from her blouse. That one had made her angry enough that she’d shot it a few times with the old Mauser pistol, just to make a point, but the gunfire had merely drawn more attention, so she’d had to Travel fast.

  She reached the Fenstermacher building. It had probably been a big factory of some kind before it had started falling apart. The radio tower the field marshal had told her about had rusted badly and was leaning over. The next time there was a strong wind, it would probably end up in the street, and she supposed any zombies that got squished underneath it would just be stuck and angry forever.

  Faye picked a spot in what appeared to be a large, empty room. So far, avoiding corners seemed to be the safest method. She popped into existence, dropped softly to the floor, and looked around for any dusty lumps that could be angry dead folks. Clear. At least there was quite a bit of sunshine for once. Then she realized that her gentle landing hadn’t disturbed any dust, because the floor had been swept.