The Last Days of New Paris

“You let them die!”

“I needed to know what the Nazis had. So I could stop them. Your comrades,” she says the word mockingly, “were going to die, anyway. I work for Hell, Thibaut.”

Sam clenches her fist and opens her mouth in a sudden wordless shout, and Thibaut hears windows blow out on other floors. He wants to say more but men have appeared in the corridor, again, guards are firing machine guns at the exquisite corpse. It staggers but rallies. It steps through intervening space to stave in their heads. It pushes open a door and, polite as a curate, waits for its companions.

“After this,” Sam says, “we can have this out. But now? Shall we?” She indicates the way. Thibaut looks at her, at the flickering light in the threshold.

When after long moments he says nothing, she heads for it, and he follows.

—

A huge chamber. The center of Drancy has been hollowed into an emptiness fringed by the remnants of pipes and doorways, walls, where once there were bunks and berths, offices, laboratories, torture chambers, before the undesirables of Vichy were moved elsewhere. The room is full of terrible machines.

Panicked scientists and SS officers prod at gauges and dials below an Alesch crucifix. They have stayed behind as Sam’s hexes send fires through the building. On one wall above them is a big sigil it hurts Thibaut’s head to see.

In the center of the cavernous room priests are circled around a heaving tarpaulin-shrouded bulk. They are linked by chains and wires, a fence of men. They are fervently praying, clicking rosaries.

Beneath the shroud something huge is raging. It howls and moves.

—

Right below the crucifix Thibaut sees Alesch himself, sees him see them back. Alesch raises his hands in a kind of murderous cringe.

A uniformed man steps forward, pistol raised. An almost boyish face under dark sweat-slick hair, his mouth in a crooked gap-toothed grimace. Josef Mengele. He aims at the intruders and all his Gestapo aim, too.

Sam snaps, her witched camera blasting a man apart. Thibaut raises his own rifle, flexing his innards as hard as he can when he shoots and a flock of owl-headed jugs plummet from nothing to harass the Gestapo.

The exquisite corpse runs at the Germans. The soldiers fire. Their bullets do nothing. Someone shouts a curse. The manif reaches them. It hits with its hammers, breaking Nazi hands and bones and weapons as they scream and shoot it again.

“Take Alesch out!” Sam shouts. “And Mengele!” She scrambles for cover. The exquisite corpse is making for the priests now. “Call it off, quick!” she calls. “Sic it on the fucking doctor!”

And Thibaut shouts at it but the manif has its fury up. He tries to stop it, scrunching up his eyes, but if it hears his unvocalized plea it ignores him. It reaches the circle of prayers.

It leaps as it comes, its legs go stiff, it descends. It tramples a priest.

The man falls and dies. The chains that link him to his fellows snap.

One by one they begin to scream. They stare at their dead colleague. There is the sound of tearing canvas.

“Wait,” shouts Sam. “It’s broken the circle! Those machines…”

“What have you done?” someone yells in French.

From under the shroud, a shell roars out. A line of fire blasts a hole in the wall.

There is silence. Fingers grip the torn hole from beneath. They clutch. Something bellows.

The priests are pulling off the wires that link them, scrabbling to get away. Alesch is shouting, flattened against the wall, and Mengele is running. The thing beneath the tarpaulin grips it and begins to tear. With a wall-cracking cry, the beast uncovers itself, rips itself to light.

Fall Rot.

—

Caterpillar treads grind. The oilcloth falls shredded to unveil a tank. A Panzer III, stained by conflict, rolls forward on the concrete. From the front of the chassis, in front of the gun-turret, protrudes the torso and head of a giant. A man.

Fall Rot.

He is vast. He wears an outsized German helmet. His skin is cold white, his veins and muscles marked as if by wormtracks. He drips shadows from his eyes. His mouth is full of sharp teeth. He bunches immense arms.

The demon is a centaur of tank and great man-shape. It is festooned with German flags.

“They’ve made their own demon,” Sam screams. Absurd as ever, she raises her camera and begins to run right at Fall Rot. Her face is pure hate. “They built it…”

Made under German orders, by Mengele’s biological researches and Alesch’s toxic faith, from the broken matter of Hell’s natives and from the energies of manifested executed art and their own murderous tech. To be a loyal demon, to be made of Nazi triumph. The avatar of the defeat of France.

But their protections were precarious. The encircling prayer is gone, and Fall Rot rampages.

It grabs two crawling priests, one head in each fist. It slaps them together, killing them offhandedly, swings their limp bodies as clubs against their comrades.

It howls in what should never have been a language, spews dirt and exhaust. Sam comes for it, spitting magic.