There Ain't Gonna Be No World War Three, Chapter 14

14. The Resurrection of Charity

The castle, so far, had been embarrassingly nazi-free. Having started on the third floor where the door from the servants' quarters connected, they had been working their way down to ground level floor by floor. Tamora had expected long, red-carpeted halls with massive Hammer Horror curtains edged with gold braid and rows of silent, immaculately-polished suits of armour which might or might not conceal lurking alien nazis. Instead, every room was empty, and draughty, and free of even the most basic fittings, apart from the occasional smoke alarm and fire extinguisher.

"You häff säid", commented Herr Schieß, "zät zere vere nazis hidink in ze castle."

"There are", said Tamora. "There so are."

"Zey are hidink extremely well."

Sukhbir, meanwhile, was rubbing her shoulders, grimacing. "It's cold in here."

"Did Winston Churchill say oo, it's a bit cold in here when he jumped onto the beach at D-Day?" said Tamora. "Did he say, golly, the nazis have hidden extremely well, maybe I should go home?"

"No, she iss right", said the café lady. "It iss werry cöld in here. Too cold." She walked cautiously to a doorway, clutching a rolling pin anxiously as she peered round a corner into the next corridor.

"Ze front door", she said. "Ze front door iss...vergangen."

"Whass that sound?" said Cubic Zirc.

"Sounds like a really old TV on in an empty room", said Narinder. "You know, like, how you can hear if an old TV set is on in the dark, even if you can't see it?"

"Yeah, because it's saying, like, Hello, welcome to Britain's Funniest Accidental Deaths at three in the morning", complained Sukhbir, "because it's the one in your room, next door to my room, while I'm trying to sleep."

"No, I mean, even with the sound turned down. It's, like, ultrasonic. Can't you hear it? It's really loud."

"I can hear it", said Tamora. She poked her face out round the same corner the café lady had been looking round. "Cor blimey O'Reilly. She's right."

She walked out into the corridor. It was the main entrance hall of the castle. It had once had a big, imposing-looking, very very thick timber door, thick as the tree trunks that had produced the wood for it. She had seen the door from the outside. It had been studded with iron bolts as big as cats' heads. Now, it was lying in smoking pieces all over the hallway, some of it matchwood, some of it charcoal. The doorstep had vanished with the door, and had been replaced by a crater bordered by cracked flagstones. Snow was drifting into the hallway.

"My nazis", said Tamora with grim certainty, "must have come this way." She was oddly happy to have been proven right.

"Änd zey vent zät väy", said the café lady, nodding at a set of muddy and bloody boot prints coming in through the shattered doorway and pouring into a cellar entrance further down the hallway.

"Zät door", said the café lady, "voss two hundred years öld." Her hands gripped the rolling pin so hard that it squeaked. Tamora was certain that any nazi caught underneath it would be mercilessly flattened, and then possibly pressed into mince pie cases and microwaved.

"I cän smell somesink", said the lady. "I häff not smelt it for a wery lonk time."

"Since nineteen forty-five?" said Tamora in fear.

The woman narrowed her eyes at Tamora. "I äm not sö öld as ziss. Nö. Since Octöber I häff not heard it. Octöber, ziss iss vhen ve test ze boilers for heatink ze old castle. Ve do not use zem, but every year ze insurance cömpany, zey tell us to svitch zem on, vone time önly in ze year, to proof zey are not dängerous vhen zey vörk. But now", she said, "it iss Jänuary."

"Maybe them insurance people come early this year", suggested Zirc.

"Änd ze äir from downstäirs", said the lady. "It iss werry varm. Too varm."

Standing next to the cellar entrance, Tamora could indeed feel hot air belching from it, as if the cellar contained a private entrance to Hell.

"There's a man down there", she said, squinting into the dark. "Lying on the steps. His face is bright red. Like he's been burned. I'm going down to take a look."

Herr Schieß put a hand on her shoulder. "I do not sink sö, young lädy. Not if you do not vant to look just like him."

As the man had a moustache, Tamora stopped in her tracks.

"Why?" she said.

"Kohlenmonoxid", said Herr Schieß.

"Nein", said the café lady in disbelief.

Herr Schieß shrugged. He produced a matchbox, struck a match, and tossed it down the cellar steps. It bounced from step to step, burning with a yellow flame. As it bounced lower, the yellow flame turned blue, but continued to burn.

"Carbon monoxide", said Herr Schieß, "burns viz a blue fläme. Ze män häss died off carbon monoxide poisoning, vhich turns ze blood bright red. Someone häss lit ze boiler vhen ze äir vent häss been blocked. Ze cellar häss filled viz poison gäs."

"Why would someone do that?" said Tamora.

"I häff no idea."

"Is it safe to go down there?"

"If you hölt your breath."

Tamora was still staring at the dead man. His eyes were wide open, and he had a look of total astonishment, as if he could not believe something had proved capable of killing him.

"Omigod", she said. "Look underneath him."

Under the man's body, a thick blue blot of goop was spread out on the flagstones.

"Vhat äm I looking at?" said Herr Schieß.

"It's, like, left him", said Tamora. "Because he's, like, no use for living in any more. Because he's dead."

"You häff säid", said Herr Schieß weakly, "blue älien mind contröl amoebas, I sink."

"That's wun roight there", said Zirc, staring at it venomously. "A Nazi Amoeba."

The blue alien mind control amoeba was trying to slither uphill. It was having difficulty. It was vibrating like a plate of jelly on a washing machine. It looked ill.

"Carbon monoxide kills it", said Tamora. "Just like it does us. Someone set a trap for it, for all of them, down there. Lit the boiler and blocked up the air vent. Deliberately."

"Hermann", said the woman. Her face was ashen. She turned to Herr Schieß. "Es hat ihn sein müssen. Er könnte noch dort unten sein -"

"Ruhe, ruhe", said Herr Schieß, patting her shoulder. "I äm göing down to turn off ze boiler", he announced, breathed in at great length, lit a match, held both the match and his breath, and walked off down the stairs.

"Stop him!" said Sukhbir.

"The goop'll get him!" said Zirc.

They waited, not daring to breathe.

Eventually, they heard a shout from below:

"ALLES AUS!"

Red-faced, with his lips clamped tightly together, Herr Schieß plodded back up the steps, stopped to check the soles of his shoes for goop, and finally took a long and shuddering breath.

"I häff alsö öpened a couple of vindöws. It vill be säfe to gö down soon. Ve should väit."

"Hermann?" said the woman.

Herr Schieß shook his head. "He voss not down zere", he said. "But zere vere mäny özzer men. All dead."

"And blue amoebas?" said Tamora.

"Greät big pools off blue amoebas", nodded Herr Schieß. "All...shiverink, like ze vone down zere." He shuddered as unhappily as one of the amoebas he was describing as he pointed down the stairs.

"We have to get down there and kill them", said Sukhbir.

"Wiv bleach an electric", nodded Cubic Zirc.

"Zey might be intelligent", said Herr Schieß.

"Who iss to say ve häff ze right to kill anozzer living creature?" agonized Stefan.

"They are intelligent", said Tamora. "And they're also nazis."

Herr Schieß looked at Anton and Stefan. He looked back at Tamora.

"OK, zey are töast."

"You häff talked me into it", said Stefan.

"Vhere iss ze junction box?" said Anton.

At the other end of the hallway, Narinder screamed. A brilliant fountain of sparks shot across the flagstones. Narinder, who only a second ago had been looking out through the ruins of the front door into the courtyard, was now cowering down halfway across the entrance passage, hands over her head.

"There's something out there", said Narinder. "Hovering over the castle! It shot at me!" She looked out at a fresh glowing hole in the stones of the entrance passage. "It won't let us leave! It's got us pinned down! We're trapped!"

***

"What is it, Arjit?"

Porsh was staring out of the tower window with eyes even bigger than Sukhbir's when faced with a spider in her bathtub. The spider was hovering outside, balancing on thin air, a bungalow-sized torpedo of mottled black-and-grey camouflage colours that seemed to ooze and flow across its surface, making distinguishing fine detail impossible. Two things were clear, however. Firstly, it did not belong here - not in the air above this castle, and not even on this world. Secondly, the only clearly defined marking on its skin, crawling across a fin on its dorsal surface, was a big, black swastika.

Harjit was sneaking across the empty tower room towards the device, across creaking floorboards that were all the room contained. Porsh hung back in the doorway, hiding behind the jamb.

"Careful, Arjit - they moight ear ya."

Tongue in the corner of her mouth, Harjit was crawling towards the window like a commando. Under one arm, she had the red steel tube of a fire extinguisher. In her teeth, she had the seven-foot wooden pole of the window-opener.

"Wot you doin, Arjit? You dun't wanna make that thing mad, I mean, it's firin stuff at the carstle."

"Vat", said Harjit past the window-opener, "ish preshishely why I am going to make vish fing mag."

"I dun't understand you, Arjit. You oughta take that window-opener outa your mouth."

Harjit took the window-opener out of her mouth and reached up delicately to hook open the window.

"Thass better. Now you come back over ere an we'll goo round the other soide of the carstle an foind a window to jump out of - ARJIT!"

Harjit had leaned out of the window, had taken hold of the window-opener with both hands, and was using it to whack the butt end of the UFO.

"THAT'S IT, YOU UGLY PUDDU! I'M OVER HERE! TURN AROUND! LET ME SEE YOUR IMPORTANT LITTLE PLACES!"

Horribly, the torpedo had begun to swing around in the air, as if Harjit had attracted its attention. It was also starting to rise.

"THAT'S GOOD! THAT'S GOOD! KEEP TURNING! YOU'RE A BIG FAT PIECE OF HIGH TECHNOLOGY, AREN'T YOU? GOT A BIG OLD POWER PLANT INSIDE YOU! AND THAT NOISE COMING FROM SOMEWHERE IN YOUR MANGY INNARDS IS EITHER AIR COMING IN OR AIR COMING OUT! WHILE YOU'RE DOWN HERE ON EARTH, YOU'RE USING OUR ATMOSPHERE TO COOL YOURSELF!"

The ship had now almost completely swung round to cover the tower window. It was a stubby cigar shape, with three fins as thick as submarine conning towers. The topmost fin had what looked like a cockpit in its base.

"AND THAT MEANS THE AIR HAS TO BE GOING IN TO ONE OF THOSE BIG BLACK HOLES IN YOUR NOSE! AND IF THE AIR CAN GO INTO IT - THIS CAN GO INTO IT! BREATHE IN!"

The fire extinguisher was balanced on her shoulder like a shot putt. Harjit pivoted, shrieking horribly, as the cylinder flew out into the black air intakes currently pointing directly at her like gun barrels. The cylinder rattled into the intake; the barely audible ultrasonic whine of the vehicle rose to an unhealthy shriek. Harjit flattened herself against the floor. The ship began to turn faster in the air, turning rapidly as if preparing to leave in haste.

Then one side of it exploded.

Harjit punched the air. "POWDER EXTINGUISHER! DRY POWDER, YOU SOOR! AND THE THING ABOUT POWDER IS, IT ABSORBS HEAT REALLY, REALLY QUICKLY!"

The ship was heavily damaged on one side. The camouflage patterns around the damaged area were rippling like water around a thrown stone. Inside it, damaged electrical connections were fizzing like a living thing.

The ship was still rising. Rising so that the pot belly turret underneath it could turn and direct an innocuous-looking black pinhole directly at the tower window.

There was an unbearably bright light. The window exploded. Masonry crashed down. Harjit covered her head. The ship was still turning, but the turret continued to turn with it, and continued to fire, focussing on the castle. A cloud of brick dust and wood splinters filled the tower room. Porsh cringed behind the doorway and screamed.

When she dared to poke her head round the door again, half the tower room was not there, and neither was Harjit.

***

The van wallowed to a halt at the base of the zig-zag track clinging to the edge of the near-sheer escarpment that led up to the castle.

"Why have we stopped?" said Turpin.

"You see this stuff?" said Quantrill, pointing to the world outside the van. "This is called ice. It is like water, only harder."

"I know what ice is", said Turpin indignantly.

"Get out and take a walk around on it, then", said Quantrill.

Turpin looked at Quantrill oddly, but shrugged, unbuckled his seatbelt, opened the passenger side door, stepped out and slipped flat on his face.

"Do you take my point?" said Quantrill.

A feeble thumbs-up rose into the air next to the van.

"I am not driving this van", said Quantrill, "up that hill. It will not go up that hill."

"I could try it", said Armand gamely.

"We could just walk it", said Ant. He threw back the side door and slipped down into the road, trying to tread on uncompacted snow rather than ice. "It's not far, just up at the top of that rise. Look - you can see the walls from here -"

"ANTHONY."

Ant turned back. Turpin had climbed up onto his elbows onto his ice, and was staring up at a perfectly cloudless sky, as if the sky had things even worse than clouds in it.

"What?"

"Don't go any further." He looked up at George Quantrill. "You hear that?"

Quantrill nodded. "I can hear it." He squinted up into the towering trees. "But I can't see it."

Ant strained to hear.

"Saucer drive?" he said. It was almost a physical sensation rather than a sound, hovering on the very edge of hearing. Across the road, a little old lady had stopped on the pavement and was tapping her ear, presumably because she'd assumed her hearing aid was malfunctioning. She had hair scraped into a purple hairnet, thick bifocal spectacles, and a shiny brown handbag the colour of dog poo. Ant prayed she would carry on blaming the hearing aid.

Turpin nodded. "Somewhere close by. Has to be hovering; the drive note's constant. Don't recognize it. I'd know a Fantasm or an Aurora."

Quantrill shook his head. "It's not one of ours. We should be careful."

"You have no idea." Turpin drew a Mark One Orgonizer from his own tunic. "If it's what I'm hoping it isn't, I put half a thousand rounds into one of those things out near Krasnaya Three last year and barely tickled it. It took cruiser-power guns from a Revere to finish it off. If one of those things is hovering somewhere above us right now, we need to worry."

"We should get into the trees", said Quantrill.

"Sure. Those very cold trees with no leaves on them. If that ship up there has infra-red sensors, we'll stick out like, you know, you and me would in a crowd of normal earth people."

"Have you got any other suggestions?"

Turpin tried to think of some. He grimaced and shrugged. "The trees it is."

They began slipping and sliding up the slope. Ant showed Turpin how to grab tree trunks and travel from one to the other uphill, hand over hand. Quantrill was making better time than Turpin. He had been living with Earth gravity for longer. Armand, meanwhile, was nearly at the top of the hill already.

"He's moving faster than all of us", gasped Turpin.

"He's dafter than all of us", said Quantrill contemptuously. "Let him go. If he's daft enough to stick his head out of the woods first and get it spread round the landscape, at least he'll give us some advance warning of what's up there."

Ant gawped at Quantrill, unable to believe he was listening to a man from Gondolin. He looked at Turpin. Turpin was looking thoughtfully at Quantrill's back, but otherwise didn't react. High above, Armand was still scrambling higher, dutifully doing what he'd been told to, without any sign of fear, closer and closer to the castle walls -

Alarmed, Ant hissed: "ARMAND!"

Armand stopped, and turned round. "What is it, Teds?"

"Er." Ant looked up at the empty grey battlements, at the gently rustling forest. "It's dangerous up there, that's all. Keep your head down and your eyes up. If anything hits us it'll come from overhead."

"Hello", said a voice from uphill. "Who are you? Why are you carrying that big hairdryer?"

Armand turned his attention back uphill. "Airdroyer?"

"That thing you've got in your hand."

The girl had stepped out from behind a tree. She was blonde, and very pretty, dressed in a blouse, a tweed skirt, stockings, and a coat. She was also wearing a hat. The hat had a veil. Armand looked at her in alarm.

"You goin to a fooneral?" he said.

She laughed tinklingly. "No, silly. Of course not. Whose funeral would I be going to?"

Further down the slope, Turpin and Quantrill had stopped dead. Turpin's face was now a perfect colour for camouflage against the snow.

"What's wrong?" whispered Ant.

Turpin looked at Quantrill; silently, the two of them crouched down behind the snow-laden bushes. Turpin looked up at Ant.

"While we're on the subject of funerals", said Turpin, "we went to hers."

***

Far above, hinges shrieked under the weight of half a tonne of door, and something heavy fell through that opened door and tumbled down step after step after step. Eventually, it showed itself at the foot of the stairs, where it lay gasping in precious breathable air.

"Back again, brother", said the Baron.

Kurt von und zu Spitzenburg dragged himself up onto his elbows, and spat out a mouthful of blue goop. Then he glared up at the Baron.

"WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?"

"I didn't do anything, Kurt. I'm not sure what was done, but whatever it was, my grandson did it." The Baron watched Kurt vomit up great gouts of viscous blue goop, elastic as egg white. "I'm not an expert on your current physiology, Kurt. Is what you're doing right now a good thing, or a bad one? I'm guessing bad."

Kurt stared at the glutinous mucus oozing from him. "It's dead", he said. "Something killed it."

"But didn't kill you. Unfortunate, I'd say."

Something clattered across the concrete floor towards him, raising sparks. Long, glittering, metallic. Kurt looked down at it.

"You can't be serious."

"Deadly."

"It was just the girl before, brother. If you'd killed her, you'd just have killed a Neger, no loss to the world, right? This is me. If you kill me -"

"You die."

Kurt blinked for a moment in shock. Then he spat out the last remnants of the blue goop, rose slowly to his feet, and picked up the sword.

"All right, brother. If that's the way you want it. I have over fifty years on you. This will not take long."

Without warning, he threw himself up and at the Baron, whipping the blade up towards his face. The Baron stepped back and flicked Kurt's sword aside; somehow, in the eyeblink when the parry happened, a gash an inch long opened in Kurt's hand.

Kurt swore, and held up the wound indignantly. "Foul shot, brother. Cutting at my hand!"

He looked at his hand, turning it round, inspecting the injury.

"We're not fighting for points any more, Kurt. And are you expecting something to happen to that wound? You're spending an inordinate amount of time staring at a tiny little shaving cut."

The tiny little shaving cut wept blood. "It's not closing", said Kurt in disbelief.

"Ah", said the Baron. "I see. I thought you were being abnormally courageous. I knew there had to be a reason for it."

With a despairing howl, Kurt leapt forward and hacked at the Baron's head. The Baron sidestepped and brought Kurt's sword down in a circle of steel. At the end of the parry, Kurt yelped and jumped back, slapping his hand over his leg.

"Foul!" complained Kurt. "If you can't kill me cleanly according to the rules, don't kill me at all!"

"RULES?" hissed the Baron. "Rules? What rules were you following when you dragged civilians in off the streets, men, women and children, and sent them off in cattle cars? What rules were you following when you allowed the animals you were commanding to take away prisoners' bedding, shoes, and clothing in the middle of winter? While you were doing that, I was out on the Ostfront, fighting for my life! You disgraced the family name, Kurt! You disgraced the name of Germany! Though God knows I am as guilty as you - I saw people spitting on Jews in the streets, I saw them smashing panes of glass in shop fronts, and did nothing. I should have known what was happening out in the countryside, in the special camps people never talked about. I should have known the evil we see in the surface is only ever the tip of the iceberg. Don't tell me about rules, Kurt. You never used any in your whole miserable existence."

Kurt stabbed at the scar on his face with a finger. "I used rules when I got this, brother! I had the courage to stand and face my enemy, within sword length!"

"You were wearing a mail shirt and goggles! You were a little boy at a rich man's college, playing at soldiers! That is the only wound you ever got in six years of fighting!"

Kurt licked his lips, darting an eye at his brother's legs. "There is a wound far deeper than any you have ever received, brother, and that one was given me treacherously by you."

The Baron's brows furrowed. "What are you talking about?"

"You stole my Ilse!" blurted Kurt. "She was mine and you knew it! She would have waited for me for a lifetime! And you stole my inheritance! My title!"

The Baron's sword dropped. He stepped back.

"If Ilse had waited for you for a lifetime, Kurt", he said, "what reward would she have got for her patience? She would have grown old, grown grey, while you were out among the stars. You knew where you were going, Kurt; and you knew how long you would be away. And would you have embraced that eighty-year-old woman when you came back? Would you have rewarded her fidelity? I think not.

"As for the title and castle, you can have them, for all they're worth. I here and now yield you the title of Baron von und zu Spitzenburg, as is only legally right and proper."

Kurt's own sword drooped to the floor.

"You'd do that?"

"I have just done that. The castle is mortgaged to the hilt, and the title means nothing."

"Thank you, brother", said Kurt. "I appreciate that."

With that, he darted his sword forward without warning. The Baron sidestepped just a fraction; sword clanged off sword.

Kurt stared into his brother's eyes, mouth open in shock, close enough to taste his breath.

Then, he collapsed onto the concrete, several inches of sabre protruding from his back.

"And with that, I am the Baron again", said the Baron. "Thank you, brother."

Kurt's eyes were motionless, goggling at the ceiling.

The Baron was breathing heavily. More clumsily than he had before, he set his boot in Kurt's stomach, and pulled his sabre out, nearly falling over as he did so. He winced at a sharp pain in the centre of his chest.

"Feels almost as if you did manage to run me through, Kurt", he said, wheezing. "Well, this old bag of bones lasted just long enough." He fell forward as far as the wall, putting a hand on it to remain upright. "Who knows, maybe it will last another minute or so. Let us see. Let us see."

Feeling his way along the wall, he tottered towards the exit to the outside world.