He lay there for a very long time, floating along in his own little world and watching this very strange one pass him by. He saw many, many soldiers being carried in and out of the field hospital. Many more were moving up and down the trench. They seemed oblivious, or unconcerned, about the explosions going off all around them.
Maybe they're all full of morphine, too, Hunter thought. How well could an army fight if it was totally doped up? Not very well, he concluded.
At some point, he reached into his undershirt and pulled out the notebook that the nurses had found. It, too, had the word Scribe on it. Somehow, though in slow motion, he was able to flip through it. It was filled with not only pages of notes but also rudimentary sketches of the battlefield around him. The writing, of course, was not his own, and the artist was a better illustrator than he could ever be, opium-induced or not.
It took him a while to thumb through the notes, lying on his back, higher than high, with the sounds of war going on all around him. But together the notes and drawings gave him a startling portrait of what was going on here. This world, artificial as it was, was engulfed in a war. A total war. From its equator to its poles and everywhere in between. The notes described the movements of enormous armies of men, numbering in the millions if the owner of the notebook was to be believed, and weapons of unimaginable, if conventional, destructive power. This was a "gun powder war," those were the words of the unknown scribe. A conflict in which the idea of a superbomb was for someone to collect, deliver, and detonate several thousand pounds of gunpowder on the enemy.
Bombers filled with gunpowder intentionally crashed into targets. Massive oceangoing ships, similarly loaded, were used to ram into enemy coastal fortifications. Monstrous artillery pieces lobbing five- and ten-ton shells filled with… what else? Gunpowder.
What a strange way to fight a war, Hunter thought.
But who was this war against? And what was its ultimate goal?
The scribe gave no clues on that first question. His writings were such that it was implied the reader knew just who the enemy was.
As to its goal? At least on that he'd been very clean this war was being fought over a single piece of land, in fact a mountain, with a castle on top of it. The mountain, referred to many times in the scribblings, was called Valhalla.
And where was it? As it turned out, very, very close to Hunter's present location. He knew this because on the last full page of the notebook there was a magnificent sketch of the mountain and the castle, and if Hunter lowered the notebook at just the right angle, he could see that very mountain and that very castle off in the distance, not twenty miles away.
Just his luck to wind up near ground zero in this very messy conflict.
He finally put the notebook back into his undershirt and laid his head down again.
How was he ever going to find the Mad Russian in this mess?
He drifted off into an opium sleep, waking only when an extra large explosion went off close by.
He rolled off the stretcher, and with the last of the morphine draining out of him, found himself back in pain and sucking mud in the trench again.
Two more explosions came and went, the second one raining down a small storm of rocks and debris that covered him head to toe. When he emerged from the rubble, he discovered a column of Nazi soldiers trooping by him, unaffected by the most recent artillery barrage. They appeared to be fresh legs: new uniforms, shiny helmets, huge hand weapons. A certain elan. And where were they headed? There was only one answer to that: the nose of this column was pointing directly to the mountain of Valhalla.
Hunter knew he could not lie there forever. At the very least, the bitchy doctor might spot him again, decide that he was indeed a spy of some sort, and carry through his threat to have him executed. And instinct told him his quest might be the same as these Nazi soldiers.
He managed to pull his quadtrol from his leg pocket and bring it up to his mouth. He asked it a simple question this time: "Has the Mad Russian been here lately?" The answer was yes. (So the guru had been right.) "When was he here?" was his second question. The quadtrol replied, "Not enough information."
"OK then, where was he, the last time he was here?" The quadtrol directed him to a point just off his nose. The mountain called Valhalla. What more proof did he need?
If you found yourself on this House of Mirrors ride, the whole idea was to get to Valhalla.
So Hunter waited until he saw the end of the long column of soldiers. When it finally passed him, he painfully got to his feet and fell in behind them.
They marched for hours.
Down through the nightmarish battlefield, following avenues of trench works mat stretched off in all directions. They came under artillery attack several times, and were bombed several more. These attacks were unsuccessful, though, because the column leaders, for reasons unknown, seemed to know minutes before that the assaults were coming and made sure their men were under cover before they arrived.
Good intelligence, Hunter thought.
No one questioned his tagging along. To the contrary, the soldiers kept him down when he had to be down, and got him moving when he had to be moving. They might have even saved his life a few times. But there was no such thing as a good Nazi. Hunter knew these guys were only helping him because they thought he was one of them.
They reached a shallow hill that divided the churned-up battlefield neatly in two. The long column of soldiers, weary now from the march, trudged over its summit. At about the same time, Hunter could hear the booming of large guns again. These were not the reports of the artillery pieces he'd become used to hearing, though. These represented guns of very high caliber, and the resulting explosions again told the tale of the gunpowder fetish that somehow ruled this world.
It took nearly an hour for Hunter and the tail end of the column to reach the top of this hill. What he saw on the other side was another scene right out of a fever dream. For as far as he could see, horizon to horizon, a titanic battle was in progress. Easily hundreds of thousands of soldiers were involved, maybe even a million — it was hard to tell with all the smoke and fire and utter confusion.
Most of the fighting was being done hand-to-hand, in very close quarters, among a crazy patchwork of trenches and dugouts and natural fortifications. The big guns were set up about a mile to the right of Hunter's position. There were six of them, on high stilts and treads, and indeed, their barrels seemed a mile long or more. Each time one of them fired, the muzzle flash was so bright and the shell discharge so violent, Hunter imagined he could actually see the round cut through the fabric of time and space, a tear in this false reality, a very subtle, almost hidden reminder that he still was in a very different place.
Beyond this hellish battlefield, ten miles away at least,
Hunter could see the approaches to the tall mountain, at the top of which sat the castle of Valhalla. It was all too obvious now that the capture of this castle was why this war was being fought. In the meat grinder of the battle below him, he could clearly see half of the troops fiercely defending the roads leading to the castle. The others were trying very hard to overwhelm them.
At the same time, the massive guns were pounding the mountain where the castle was located. With each shell hit, a small piece of Hell would rise up, spilling flames and the strange screech of hundreds being killed instantaneously. The column of soldiers in front of him did not hesitate, though. They double-timed it down the hill, right into the action, disappearing into the chaos, the smoke, and noise.