As the last of them started down the hill, one gave Hunter a hearty pat on the back and said, "You are here to write, aren't you, scribe? Then I suggest you start here."
Hunter waited for the entire column to march into the meat grinder, then he proceeded down the road to doom. It was obvious the fighting had been going on here for quite some time. There were bodies everywhere, but many were already skeletons. Some of these were locked in grotesque positions, a sick testament of the brutality that had been going on here. But then, strangely, Hunter saw something that did not compute. He was staring down at a trench full of skeletons, combat passing them by long ago. Two were locked in an embrace of death, both had plunged a long saber into the other apparently at the exact same moment. They'd died together.
But strangely, both were wearing Nazi badges on their uniforms. The uniforms themselves were different. One was blue like the soldiers in the column he'd followed wore. But the other was jet black. Yet both had Nazi regalia on them.
This didn't make any sense.
Hunter resisted the urge to get right down into the trench with the dead; he was curious, but not morbidly so. He continued down the road instead, heading slowly for the thick of the battle. Exactly what he was going to do once he got close to the action, he didn't have a clue. He noticed, though, there were no soldiers coming back up the road. He'd been in combat before. He'd been on battlefields not unlike this one. Always there were wounded and deserters heading in the opposite direction from the fighting. But not now. The road was empty but for him.
Whoever was fighting down here, it was a fight to the death. He was soon within a half mile of the front line. The stink of cordite was almost overwhelming. He came upon many more examples of two Nazi soldiers locked in a death embrace; each one was more baffling than the next. What was going on here? Were the Nazis in the blue uniforms battling impostors, enemy soldiers who were dressed in black Nazi uniforms? That didn't make sense, either, not with a battle of this gargantuan scale. But what could be another explanation?
Suddenly his ears were pierced right down to the drums. The noise was so intense, and came so quickly, Hunter found his hands on the side of his head, trying to keep the sonic blast out. He dropped to his knees as an enormous shadow went over him an instant later.
It was one of the bombers. The ones he'd seen flying overhead at very high altitude. But this monster was coming in no more than one hundred feet off the ground. It was decorated with many swastikas, and it had bombs attached all along its belly and wings. In a world of disturbing visions, this one was especially so. The soldiers all over the battlefield had turned their weapons up toward it and were firing at it. Suddenly the air itself seemed full of lead.
But something else was wrong here. This huge aircraft — its wingspan had to be at least 500 feet long — was on fire. Its fuselage, its tail section, and more than half its dozen propeller engines were all in flames. It wasn't swooping low to bomb the troops in front of him, though. It was in the process of crashing.
And the reason for this was soon evident. Trailing the plane down was a small squadron of fighter aircraft, weird designs with weird engines propped atop their fuselages and racks of missiles and machine guns taking up the entire underside of their wings. These aircraft were still firing into the bomber, even though the plane was about to impact at any second. But again, despite the impending doom, Hunter could see the insignia on these attacking planes… and incredible as it seemed, yes, they, too, were marked with swastikas.
He dove into the nearest trench, knocking the dead away so he might hang on to one more moment of life. The big airplane hit a second later, not 500 feet down the road from him. He saw the tail section break off and cartwheel backward right over his head. A string of crewmen, all of them engulfed in flames, came tumbling out of the resulting hole.
The impact of the airplane shook the ground so much, many of the skeletons around Hunter fell to pieces. But then, a heartbeat later, there was another, even fiercer explosion. This one even more powerful.
Hunter looked up through the bones and saw a sea of red flame go over the trench. The heat was so intense, it sucked up some of those skeletons that had not turned to dust and took them away with it. It was all Hunter could do to stay down, hug the ground, for to be caught up in that firestorm would have surely been the end of him, fantasy world or not. The noise was almost as horrible. His ears were bleeding again. And it went on for what seemed like forever. It felt like his skin was peeling away, the heat was so intense. His battered eardrums were ready to burst. Where the hell was sister morphine now that he really needed her?
Then, just like that, it was over. No more sound. No more fire. No more skeletons getting one last free ride into the heavens. Hunter stayed down low. One minute. Two minutes. Three.
Finally, he got the gumption to lift his head, to look out over the top of the trench.
But he was met with a cloud of cordite before he was halfway to the edge. He fell back down to the bottom of the trench, near suffocation, the stink was so thick. He held his breath another minute, two, three. Until he could hold it no more. If the next deep breath had been more cordite, he would die on the spot.
But it wasn't cordite — not entirely anyway. It was air, or what passed for air on this crazy place. He finally gathered the strength to pick himself up again and peek over the edge. What he saw would stay with him for the rest of his life.
There was nothing left. Not for a mile on either side of him. The land itself, wiped clean.
The bomber? Now it, too, was dust. How much gunpowder had it been carrying? Tons? Enough to equal an atomic bomb?
Whatever the case, it had left a path two miles wide in which nothing existed anymore. What was left was yellow dust. Bombs, gunpowder, bodies, and wreckage reduced to yellow dust.
And this dust now covered one of the roads that led directly to the mountain they called Valhalla.
It took him an hour to get to the base of the mountain, another hour to climb it.
When he reached the top, he found that the castle wasn't a castle at all. It was a prop, a facade in this fake world. Walls, turrets, even the moat was fake. What's more, he saw no indication that any of the Nazi soldiers from either side had even ever been up here. All that fighting — for nothing?
Why? Why had these mental pukes fought so hard? What was up here that was so valuable? Was there a hall of mirrors inside this place? He had to find out.
He walked through the fake door and entered a hall. This place was so phony, the floor was still covered with unused nails. The wind whistled as it blew through the cracks in the thin veneer of fake wood. The walls were bare. No mirrors here.
In the middle of this hall was a pedestal, on top of it was gold box. Gold paint, that is, flaking off in many places. Hunter studied the pathetic-looking lock holding its flimsy top shut. He blew on it. It snapped open.
He brushed the remains of the lock away, opened the box, looked inside… and then laughed. That's when it all came together — the secret of this particular attraction. This Hall of Mirrors. More proof of the creator's strange sense of humor.
This place was not so much another world as it was another kind of hell. A Nazi hell. A place where Nazis went to die. A place where they were doomed forever not to rape and pillage the innocent and defenseless of the world, but to fight and kill each other. Over and over and over again. A world of mirrors — Nazis looking at themselves. Seeing the hate, unable to do anything but battle themselves.
And what were they fighting for? This unattainable thing that was secured with a lock that would have broken off with a sneeze. If any of them ever made it to the top and looked inside the box, this was their prize: a photograph of the original Nazi, the first monster of them all, Adolf Hitler.