Twilight of the Dead Read online

  Cursing myself for not using the crossbow on Gorgo, I pulled my Nagant pistol from its holster and fired at the retreating monster. Both shots just missed his head as he dived through the doorway. Shifting targets, I put two shots through Komarov's head, sending the reanimated corpse over backwards. Eisenstein used the butt of his submachine gun to smash Gorky's skull to a bloody pulp.

  "What happened to Gorgo?" Eisenstein gasped once the last of our attackers had stopped moving.

  The prisoner tilted her head towards the side door. "Through there."

  Eisenstein glanced out the window. The sun was sinking ever closer to the horizon but it was still daylight. "He can't have gone far. One step outside and he'll be burned alive."

  "Don't be so sure," the woman said. "My squad was lying in wait here two days before Gorgo arrived. We searched the building, didn't find anything. But that bastard appeared out of thin air and slaughtered most of my men in under a minute."

  "How'd you know Gorgo was coming here?" I asked her.

  "Untie me and I'll tell you."

  "That can wait," Eisenstein snapped. "Victor, reload your weapons and wait here. I'm going to see what's through that door."

  I pulled a fresh supply of wooden bolts from my knapsack and slotted them into place on the crossbow while Eisenstein edged across the room. Once I'd nodded my readiness, Eisenstein kicked open the door and tensed to face Gorgo. But nothing came from beyond the door: no sound, no movement, no attack. Eisenstein crept inside and a long, agonising silence followed before a fresh curse echoed in the air. Eisenstein emerged from the bedroom as a vehicle's engine roared in the distance.

  "Damn it!"

  "What's wrong? Where's Gorgo?"

  Eisenstein ignored my question, racing out of the farmhouse. A few desultory gunshots followed before silence fell upon the dilapidated structure once more.

  "You were going to untie me?" the prisoner prompted.

  "Yes, sorry, I forgot," I muttered, pulling a silver-edged knife from inside my left boot to slice through the ropes binding her. Once cut free she rolled aside, hands rubbing her joints and massaging the places where the cords had cut into her arms and legs.

  "How do you feel?" I asked.

  She gave me a withering glare of disdain. "Like I've been bound, beaten and battered. How do you think I feel?"

  "A little gratitude wouldn't go astray," I pointed out. "We've just saved you from having your throat ripped out by one of the most powerful vampyr in this bloody war."

  "I didn't ask you to save me. It was your blundering that got my men killed!"

  "How do you come to that brilliant conclusion?" I snapped.

  "One of your squad must have tipped off Gorgo about the trap we'd laid for him."

  I couldn't help but laugh at her twisted logic. "Gorgo was the one laying the trap here, not you. He had dozens of German corpses buried around this building waiting to be resurrected. He must have known smert krofpeet units were operating along this section and decided to see how many of us he could lure into an ambush. Had you considered that possibility?"

  The woman frowned. "No. No, I hadn't..." She looked round the farmhouse, taking in the corpses and the clouds of ash still hanging in the air. "What a mess."

  Eisenstein returned, his face black with cold anger. "Gorgo got away. There was a hidden tunnel in the bedroom leading down the hill to a waiting German staff car. The bastard must have planned this whole thing - a ruse to lure both our squads here - and we fell for it."

  "Have you got any water?" the woman asked. "I haven't had a drink for hours."

  "Only holy water," I said, offering my little flask. "We were in a rush to get here before sundown, to make sure Gorgo wouldn't make an easy escape."

  She took the flask and drank gratefully from its contents, wiping her lips dry with the back of one hand. "My name's Charnosova, Mariya Charnosova."

  "I'm Victor Zunetov and that's Grigori Eisenstein," I replied, pointing at my comrade.

  "We should get back to our own lines," Eisenstein decided. "It'll be dark soon and I don't want to be out in the open when the sun sets. Especially now we're inside Rumanian territory."

  "Agreed," Mariya said, getting to her feet with some difficulty. She looked about the room, searching for something. "Gorgo's men took my weapons when they overwhelmed us."

  I strode across to the bedroom and glanced inside, spotting a black knapsack with a red star symbol on its side. A handful of sharpened wooden stakes protruded from within. I brought the knapsack out to Mariya who smiled at me in thanks. Her eyes were striking, warm and comforting despite her injuries and her bruises, despite her harsh words and accusations earlier. I found myself staring into her eyes, unable to tear my gaze away. In a war so ugly and brutal, it was a shock to be confronted with such beauty. In my experience, few survived the company of vampyr, and yet Mariya had withstood torture and interrogation at the hands of Constanta's second-in-command. It was clear that she had remarkable reserves of courage and strength, making her a valuable addition to our decimated unit. Convincing Eisenstein of that would be another matter entirely.

  TWO

  Hans and Ralf Vollmer never knew whether it was fate, chance or happenstance that reunited them on one of the war's most decisive days. August 23rd was a Wednesday and the battle for Rumania was changing from a rout to capitulation. The Red Army had launched its offensive three days earlier with a dawn artillery barrage followed by armoured spearheads stabbing deep into German-held territory. Within thirty-six hours the Rumanian positions between Jassy and Tirgu Frumos had caved in, and Russian troops were streaming down the Prut River valley. Many of the Axis companies in eastern Rumania were outflanked and encircled, cut off from supplies, and all hope of retreat was vanquished in a matter of hours.

  For the Vollmer brothers and their friend Gunther Stiefel, these events were merely the latest in a long line of reversals. All three of them had entered Russia as part of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Wehrmacht's Blitzkrieg tactics tearing through the ill-prepared Red Army defences. But much had befallen the invaders since then: the harsh, early winter of 1941 that halted the German advance twenty kilometres from the Russian capital, Moscow; the bitter Siege of Leningrad, where a city and its defenders somehow held their own against unspeakable terrors; the battle for Stalingrad, where Hitler's mightiest warriors could not dislodge a tiny army from the banks of the Volga, no matter what devastation was brought upon that once mighty city; the mechanised Armageddon that was the Battle of Kursk, where tanks died screaming in a clash of titanic proportions; and a dozen other reversals, each contributing another fracture to the once all-conquering Wehrmacht machine.

  All that was history by August 1944, the backdrop to an army slowly, painfully retracting its claws from territory first claimed three years before. Of all the lands Hitler did not wish to give up, Rumania was among the most vital, for it provided the Third Reich with oil. Without fuel Germany had no hope of victory, though few on the front line still believed victory was possible. Should Rumania fall to the Red Army, the writing was on the wall for Hitler and his cronies in Berlin. It would be merely a matter of months before the Thousand-Year Reich was wiped away, destroyed and discredited in a dozen years. But for Ralf, Hans and Gunther, the end of the war could not come soon enough. Each had seen enough death and suffering to last them a thousand lifetimes, and none of them wished to witness anymore.

  Hans was the youngest of the Vollmer brothers, a new recruit fresh from the Hitler Youth ranks when Operation Barbarossa had begun in 1941. Back then he'd believed every word the Nazi propaganda machine fed him. He swallowed all the lies and justifications and tyranny without question, his thoughts guided and shaped by what Berlin wanted him to believe.

  To Hans's young eyes, the Eastern Front was a holy war aimed at stopping the Bolshevik taint spreading across Europe, an anti-Communist crusade to secure new territory for the Fatherland. But his eyes were opened to the terrible truth behind the lie when he dis
covered that the Wehrmacht had bound itself to creatures of the night, loosing undead horrors upon the battlefields of Eastern Europe.

  Ralf had had none of his younger brother's illusions, even in 1941. The eldest Vollmer was a veteran Panzer commander then, with a crew of four ready to obey his every word without question. The five men inside the metal behemoth had fought not for some mythic greater glory, but because it was their job - they were soldiers and this was what they'd trained to do. Nazi propaganda had no place inside a Panzer, as far as the crew was concerned.

  Like his men, Ralf wanted to do his part in the battle for the Ostfront and then go home, with his personal code of honour satisfied. But Berlin had other ideas. The Wehrmacht was required to conquer the Soviets by any means necessary, even if that meant forming an unholy alliance with vampyr from Rumania's Transylvania region. Ralf, Gunther and the others found themselves sharing a tank with a vampyr, and later fighting mechanised battles alongside creatures whose only motivation was bloody victory. The Panzer crew tolerated this for as long as it could, but after three months it could take no more of this hypocrisy and chose to rebel against the undead.

  There had been a third Vollmer brother stationed on the Ostfront in 1941. Klaus was a Stuka pilot with the Luftwaffe. Like his siblings, Klaus became aware of the horrific alliance the generals back in Berlin had formed. All three brothers pooled what they had learned about the vampyr, assessing the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the undead enemy.

  The Vollmers planned and executed a mutiny against Constanta's Rumanian Mountain Troops, ambushing the bloodsuckers near an abandoned settlement called Ordzhonikidze on September 27th, 1941. More than a thousand vampyr were wiped out, but Constanta escaped to wreak vengeance upon the surviving conspirators. Klaus was not one of the survivors, having sacrificed himself to save the others. In the years that followed, Hans and Ralf often wondered whether their dead brother had not chosen the wiser course of action. Perhaps it was better to die in battle for a cause you believed in, rather than to survive and be forced to fight alongside monstrous creatures of the night.

  All the human survivors of the ambush at Ordzhonikidze were court-martialled. Those that escaped execution were busted down in rank and scattered along the length of the Ostfront. The mutiny cost Ralf and his men their tank. All five men were demoted from Panzer crew to Panzergrenadiers, and were forced to run alongside the vehicle in which they had once ridden so proudly. The demotion cost three of the former crew their lives. Radio operator Helmut Richter perished in the cold outside Stalingrad, while gunlayer Willy Buchheim and loader Martin Schmid were blown apart by Red Army artillery at Kursk.

  Like other survivors of the mutiny, Ralf and Gunther learned not to speak of what they had seen and done with the outsiders. The penalty for a German soldier caught talking about the vampyr was death by firing squad, though the order prohibiting such talk was never made official. The presence of the undead among the Wehrmacht's allies was the Eastern Front's dirty little secret, something to be kept from the history books.

  Hans spent most of 1942 trying not to freeze to death near the Arctic Circle. His penance for helping organise the mutiny was a posting to Finland, where he joined local soldiers and other German troops in besieging Leningrad from the north. Both sides had entrenched positions by the time Hans arrived, so his greatest enemy was fighting off the bitter cold. Later he heard rumours that Constanta had visited the siege and left a dozen Rumanians behind to augment the war of terror and attrition. Hans tried to convince others about the threat posed by the vampyr, but most of his comrades thought him insane.

  When the blockade began to crumble early in 1943, Hans was reallocated to a scratch unit further south, which was used to plug gaps in the established companies along the Ostfront. It was such an operation that took him and two others from his unit to the outskirts of Ploesti on August 23rd, fifty kilometres north of the Rumanian capital, Bucharest.

  Hans and his two comrades, Ganz and Berkel, were ordered to join a Panzergrenadier squad trying to stem the Soviet advance. They found the beleaguered soldiers a few kilometres north-east of Ploesti, waiting by the remnants of a railway line while a squad of engineers tried to restore telegraph communications with headquarters. The screams of Stalin's Organs - the Red Army's famous Katyusha rocket launchers - were all too audible in the distance. To Hans's eyes, the Panzergrenadiers looked like broken men. Their uniforms were shabby and in need of repair, while most of the soldiers were carrying at least one injury.

  The perpetually hungry Ganz volunteered to see what rations were available while Berkel went in search of the unit commander. Hans moved among the men, hoping rather than expecting to see a familiar face among the dour, listless troops. It had been more than a year since he'd last had any letters from home, and even longer since he'd heard from his elder brother. For all their ideological disagreements in the past, Hans missed Ralf. But he walked right past his sibling nonetheless when they came face to face.

  It was Gunther who recognised the younger Vollmer, his friendly features splitting into a broad smile. "Hans? Hans, is that you? God in heaven, what are you doing here?"

  Hans stopped and stared at Gunther's mud-smeared face, trying to recognise him. There were more lines than before and the eyes possessed a sadness Hans had never previously seen in them, but those smiling features were still unmistakable.

  "Gunther? Gunther Stiefel?"

  "One and the same! Scheisse, when did you grow up so fast?"

  "Three years in hell will do that to you."

  "Ach, tell me about it." Gunther cupped a hand by his face and shouted at a shuffling, solitary figure who was wandering on ahead. "Ralf! Ralf, come back here!"

  The figure stopped and slowly turned round. Bronzed by the sun and heavily wrinkled around the eyes, Ralf looked every one of his thirty-three years and more. A scratchy, ragged beard grew across much of his face, evidence that he had long since given up caring about his appearance. Added to this was a slump in his shoulders and a despairing stance that spoke of utter weariness and resignation.

  "Gunther, I need a piss and I need it now. Unless you've got something of crucial importance to the war you need to say, let me empty my bladder."

  "How about a family reunion, old friend?"

  Ralf strode back towards Gunther, his face a murderous scowl. "I swear, if you're..."

  But his words died away as Ralf caught sight of the person standing next to Gunther. "Hans? What in God's name are you doing here?"

  "I've come to help your sorry company," the younger Vollmer replied. "And from the looks of this lot, you could do with all the help you can get."

  Ralf embraced his brother, the two men clapping each other joyfully on the back, both grateful to see a familiar face after so long away from home, fighting in foreign lands. Eventually they extricated themselves and stepped back to look at each other.

  "You've lost weight," Ralf commented, "and some hair, too. Going bald already, eh?"

  "Runs in the family," Hans retorted cheerfully, rubbing a hand across his elder brother's close-cropped scalp. "That beard doesn't suit you at all."

  "Least I can grow a beard," Ralf said. "You're twenty-two and you still haven't got any stubble!"

  "My birthday's not for another month. I'm still twenty-one."

  "Yeah? Well, I feel closer to a hundred these days." Ralf clapped a hand on Gunther's shoulder. "Where did we put that confiscated vodka? This calls for a celebration."

  "I thought you were going for a piss?"

  "Ach, that can wait. It's not every day your little brother comes to visit!"

  "This is more than just a visit," Hans interjected. "I'm part of a relief team sent to help fill out the gaps in your unit."

  "Good. We've been more than two dozen men short for weeks, and now HQ has got us babysitting these engineers while the Bolsheviks are blowing seven kinds of hell out of the poor bastards trying to hold the front line. How many men did you bring with you? Twenty?"

>   Hans grimaced and shook his head.

  "Ten?" Gunther asked hopefully.

  "Three, including me."

  "Three?" Ralf snapped, letting an angry curse fall from his lips. "Well, I suppose it's better than nothing. These men of yours, are they any good?"

  "Ganz is fonder of eating than fighting, with the waistline to prove it, but he's a crack shot. Berkel's a tough little bastard. We should be glad he's on our side. Don't make any jokes about his height... He's liable to react badly."

  "Sounds promising," Gunther said brightly.

  "We'll see," Ralf grumbled.

  Berkel appeared in the distance, his eyes lighting up when he caught sight of Hans. The short, curly-haired figure pushed his way through the Panzergrenadiers to reach him.

  "Hans, I can't find the bloody commander. Seems the last one got killed and this lot hasn't had a replacement assigned to them yet. Nobody's sure who's in charge, but they suggested I should talk to a guy with the same last name as you - Vollmer."

  "I'm Vollmer," Ralf volunteered.

  "He's my brother," Hans explained to the baffled Berkel.

  "Then this is for you," the diminutive soldier said, handing a sealed pouch to Ralf. "HQ told me to deliver it to the unit's commanding officer. It's for his eyes only."

  "Typical headquarters paranoia. God forbid the soldiers fighting this way should be told what's going on." Ralf pulled a dagger from inside his right boot and used the blade's edge to slice open the pouch. From inside he removed a single sheet of instructions and a bloodstained map that had been folded over several times. Ralf skimmed the typewritten page, swearing under his breath before handing it to Gunther.

  "Read it out loud. Let everyone hear what they want us to do."

  Gunther glanced down the page, the colour draining from his features as he did so. After a moment, he called for the surrounding Panzergrenadiers to pay attention. "The following is a direct order from our commanders in Bucharest. We are to proceed north-west towards the mountains for five kilometres to a particular map reference, where we will rendezvous with a consignment of equipment for the Rumanian Mountain Troops. We are required to escort the convoy over the Alps into Transylvania. Our liaison with the Rumanians will be an Obergefreiter Cringu."