Willem shook his head. “Nothing so complex. All they did was harness them to a big parachute and then tie them together with a bow knot so they would not escape during transport. Then they shoved them out the back of a bomber on a strip line. It undid the bow knot and released the parachute. Some of them were killed, of course. But so what? Between ours and the ones generated from their own ranks, they have enough.”
“How were they released from the parachutes?”
“We found a wind-up spring clip. When the spring wound down, the clip opened and they were released. Diabolical simplicity.”
I drank some wine. “There are tote Männer in Berlin.” I tried to frame it as a logical proposition. I could imagine them lurching through the city.
“There are tote Männer all over Germany. There are tote Männer in London from the V2 Todesluft attack. Von Braun even managed to extend the range of the V2 with a V1 attachment. There are tote Männer in Moscow. Tell me, Weber. How many tote Männer must there be to become self-sustaining?”
Weber peered at him owlishly. “They cannot be self-sustaining. Eventually all of the raw material would be used up.”
“You are so comforting,” Willem said dryly.
I stared at the wine bottle. “When will they reach here?”
“They were behind me when I crossed the border. One day? Two days? They move slowly but steadily and they will be brought here by our scent.”
We had all underestimated them. They were in the camp by morning.
They had broken through the barbed wire holding the inmates easily. The inmates were bitten and mauled by the hundreds. The guards died when they insisted on firing on the tote Männer and the tote Männer, of course, did not fall.
The scent of the inmates was so strong that it overpowered our own smells. The tote Männer did not know we were there. We took care to remain hidden in the headquarters building. With so many possible hosts around, the tote Männer ignored the buildings. Each time a few seemed to take interest, there was another inmate to attack.
Elsa refused to let Helmut near the windows. During a lull in the fighting she sat next to me as I watched through the window.
“What are those things?” Elsa said quietly. Her face was milk white but her voice was calm. “Max? Uncle? What are those things?”
“We call them tote Männer,” I said.
“Is that what you were building in the camps? Is that your weapon?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “Did they escape from another camp?”
“No.” Willem laughed dryly. “The Allies were kind enough to return these to us.”
“Helmut must not see them.”
“Yes,” I said. “More importantly, they must not see us.”
She nodded.
Eventually, the inmates were all infected. We had discovered in experiments that infected hosts were ignored by tote Männer. But there were still so many of them our own scent remained undiscovered. The tote Männer wandered off in small groups, heading east toward Krakow.
The remaining freed inmates, now euphorically infected hosts, were not so ignorant as the tote Männer. They tried to enter the headquarters building. Willem and I defended the place as best we could. Hoess and Mengele tried to gain entrance by sweet reasonableness and grumbled when we shot at them. They wandered off arm in arm.
By the end of the third day after the attack, we saw hosts finding small places to sleep. That evening the camp was entirely still.
“We have to leave,” Willem insisted. This was Monday morning. By Wednesday night we would be fighting for our lives.
“I’m ready,” Elsa said. “Those things will not hurt Helmut. I will kill him first.”
I nodded. It pleased me that Elsa understood the situation. “Where shall we go? Our tote Männer are to the west and south. Their tote Männer are to the north and east. We have no petrol-the depot was blown up in the bombing.”
“What shall we do, then?” demanded Willem.
“They are not very intelligent-as I said a long time ago, think of them as crocodiles. They can use their eyes but largely they depend upon scent. Therefore, we can block ourselves up in one of the gas chambers. They are air tight.”
“We will smother,” said Elsa.
“No.” I shook my head. “We have three days. I can devise air circulation. It will be slow and diffuse up through the chimneys. But I do not think it will be sufficient to cause the tote Männer to attack the chamber. We can hold out for help.”
It took most of those three days to set ourselves up. We had to change the locks on the doors so we could get ourselves out and convert the exhaust fans to give us a little air. We stockpiled as much food and water as we could carry. I even built a periscope through which I could observe the courtyard in front of the chamber and the areas around.
We were carrying one of the last loads into the chamber when a toter Mann leapt on Willem from the roof. Willem grabbed his pistol as he hurled the toter Mann to one side. Weber cried out and wrestled with Willem. The toter Mann attacked both of them. Finally, Willem threw down Weber and emptied the clip of his pistol into the toter Mann’s head. He turned to club Weber but Weber climbed the wall and was gone. Willem turned his attention back to the toter Mann, which had ceased moving as its head had ceased to have any shape. The worms wriggled out like thin spaghetti.
Willem looked at me and held up his arm. His fingers and wrist were bitten. “Do I have any chance at all?”
I shook my head.
“Well, then.” He replaced the clip in the pistol. “Perhaps I have time enough to kill Weber for this.”
“Don’t wait too long,” I advised. “Once you start to feel the euphoria you won’t want to kill him at all.”
“I won’t.”
He nodded at me and I saluted him. Then I went inside the chamber and sealed the door.
Which brings me to the present.
It has been ten weeks since we sealed the door of the chamber. No one has come to help us. Sure enough, the tote Männer have not detected us though they often walk around the building sensing something. Our scent is diffuse enough not to trigger an attack.
But they do not wander off as the previous tote Männer did. They have remained. Worse, instead of degrading in ten weeks as our experiments suggested, they remain whole. I am now forced to admit that the deterioration we observed in our experiments was more likely the result of captivity than any natural process.
I watch them. Sometimes a group of them will disappear into the surrounding forest and then return with a deer or the corpse of a man or child. Then they eat. We never took an opportunity to observe their lifecycle. It seems that once the initial infection period is over, they can, after their own fashion, hunt and eat.
We ran out of water two days ago. We ran out of food nearly a week before that. Helmut cries continuously. The sounds do not appear to penetrate the walls of the chamber-at least, the tote Männer do not respond.
I had planned to hold out longer-perhaps attempt an escape or brave the tote Männer and try to bring back supplies. It is now September. Surely, the impending winter would stop them. Then, when they were dormant, we could leave. But in these last days I have witnessed disturbing changes in their behavior. I saw one toter Mann walking around the camp wrapped in a rug found in one of the camp buildings. A small group of five or six gathered around a trash barrel in which smoldered a low fire. At first, I thought the disease might have managed to retrieve the host memories or that the hosts were recovering-both indicated disaster for us. We would be discovered.
But this is different. The tote Männer stand near the fires until they smolder and only then move away. They drape blankets and clothes completely over their heads but leave their feet unshod. Whatever is motivating them, it is not some surfacing human being but the dark wisdom of the disease itself.