The defused yellow glow of the oil lantern held high illuminated the dank chamber out to about two meters from the door. The light-bringer discerned nothing in the space and turn to move to the next such cell.
From a shadowed corner a figure leapt, colliding with the man and causing him to drop the lantern. Striking the stones on edge, the reservoir split spilling oil into the straw and filth covering the floor, the wick almost drown, but not quite. Red flame erupted to bathe the scene in hellish light.
A young man in a brown uniform lay on his back, hands holding clawed fingers from his throat. The creature atop him shrieked in rage and frustration, filthy, matted hair hanging down to obscure the face in shadows. The body was impossibly thin, though fueled by an inhuman desire to kill, but brutality and starvation made it no match for the fit young man.
‘Please stop,’ the man had to shout over the now desperate sounds being made by his attacker.
Everything stopped.
‘You . . . you are not German . ‘ the accent was not familiar to the man, the voice dry and ragged and definitely female.
‘No, he replied. I am a British officer.’
The boney figure clad in grey rags collapsed on the man’s chest and began to sob.
*****
Major William Vicks, No. 6 Commando, 1st Commando Brigade, sat across a crude table from his attacker and observed her silently as she wolfed down one of those dreadful American ‘K’ rations. Though he was sure she would require more than one, he was also aware that too much food at once could be worse than none at all to the skeletal woman.
Not once did she look up at him, keeping her head down to allow her unshorn hair to cover her face and the little pile of food the man had provided. As with so many liberated from concentration camps, even this single serving was like a banquet to those used to far less. When her stomach began to revolt she slowed and took a moment to peer at her rescuer through the veil of her hair.
Uniforms she was used to, having been surrounded by them for so long, but the color and markings were all wrong. There were no grinning death’s head skulls, no rigid eagles with spread wings and no black Swastika on white enclosed by blood red. Her eyes moved up the man’s uniform to his face and she saw pity. It made her mad at first. Who was this man to pity her? Then their eyes met and she saw the pity wasn’t just detached emotion. This man truly cared.
‘My name is Bill,’ he said softly. ‘What is yours?’
It took her a moment to swallow the lump of canned meat she’d been chewing and with a voice more nearly her own she said ‘I am . . . I am . . . ‘
She closed her eyes and tears leaked from the corners. She couldn’t even remember her name. Silently she held out her arm, wrist up to display the numbers branded there. The man slowly read the numbers to him self as if to memorize them then cleared his throat.
‘I have commandeered the commandant’s offices and can provide you with clean clothes and a hot shower any time you are ready’
‘What about all the others?’ she whispered.
He folded his hands on the table and stared at them.‘There are no others,’ he replied.
For the first time she looked up at him, allowing him a good look at her. Haunted blue eyes the color of an Alpine lake stared blankly at the Major from a bruised and grimy face that may once have been something beyond merely plain.
‘But there must be,’ she insisted.
The Major’s stoic face told her the truth. Lowering her head once more she said, ‘When may I leave?’
‘As soon as you have a shower and put on some clean clothes,’ he replied. ‘And after the medic has checked you over.’
She stood suddenly, the chair tipping over onto its back. Hands pressed flat on the tabletop she glared at the soldier.
‘I wish nothing more from this place,’ she growled and in so saying pulled the grey tattered smock-like dress she’d worn for so long over her head and dropping it to the floor.
Naked she turned for the door, her emaciated body painful for the man to see. Hurriedly he stood and stepped in front of her, blocking her way. Without a word he unbuttoned his tunic jacket and pulled it off. Moving behind her and held it up as if offering her a wrap after a concert. Gratefully she slipped her arms in and pulled it closed tightly around her body.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘May we go?’
In response the Major pushed open the door and caught the eye of a waiting corporal.
‘Get me a car,’ he commanded. The man snapped a salute and hared off.
The woman stood on the porch of the building and tried to make sense of the chaos around her. The camp was full of brown uniformed British soldiers, many with arm bands emblazoned with a red cross in a white circle. Shifting her gaze from the nearer field she saw the wire fence and beyond a group of soldiers standing around something below ground level.
‘What are they doing, she asked the Major, indicating the group outside the wire with a tip of the head.
‘That is our chaplain and rabbi,’ the Major replied.
‘What are they doing?’ she asked again.
‘Giving the Last Rites,’ he said very quietly.
She stepped off the porch and started walking toward the open gates.
‘Wait!’ the Major called after her.
She ignored him and increased her speed, the small bit of food given her providing the energy she hadn’t had in a very long time. Behind her she heard the Major’s steps and fearing he would stop her, she broke into a staggering trot. He caught up to her but did not try to stop her.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to go there.’
‘I must,’ she said but slowed to a shuffling walk when she was sure he would not try to detain her.
One of the group, a chaplain by the cross embroidered silk drape around his neck, put out an arm to stop her but it was too late. Dropping to her knees she lost the meager meal she’d consumed only moments ago. A hand came to rest on her bowed back then the Major was kneeling with her, his strong arm going around her protectively.
‘I do wish you hadn’t come over here,’ he said gently.
‘I had to,’ she said, wiping the bile from her mouth with the back of a grubby hand. ‘This is monstrous!’
‘Yes,’ he replied and she turned her face into his chest and cried.
A few minutes later she sat beside him in the back of a car that sped away from the horror of the camp and the life that was all she could remember. On his knee was a single folder file with a number in black ink across the tab, hers. It was May 1, 1945 and War in Europe ended just a few days later.
*****
The file Major Vicks had obtained on that day in the camp failed to provide much information on ‘Test Subject 7210549’ other than a name, Samantha Elsbach and an approximate age, 25. It did not disclose the nature of experiments conducted on the subject nor any outcome and the woman’s memory was so damaged that even she could not remember anything other than the camp from which she had been liberated.
Major Vicks took a proprietary interest in the sole survivor of Camp Number 1050, Neustadt in Holstein, district of Ostholstein, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, even going so far request permission to remain with the woman while she was processed through the British Army’s medical system. That permission was not rescinded, by some legerdemain of Army paperwork, until some weeks after the war ended officially.
Within a month the medics in London could find no evidence of trauma to the woman, not even the tattoos that had been burned into her wrist and further studies were requested by the medical corps. At this point, Lt. Colonel Vicks, newly promoted, stepped in and with help from the new SAS Regiment commander Brigadier James Michael ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert of the 77th Brigade Chindit operations in China fame, extracted the young woman from the clutches of ‘mad’ scientists for a second time.
With the end of the war, Vicks was reduced in rank back to Major and by October the SAS had been disbanded, leaving him time to at last concentrate on his … TBC
*****
Samantha Vicks looked curiously around the neighborhood, noting the diner across the street, the towering cranes of the waterfront a few blocks west and the dilapidated structure before her that was bordered by a four meter high cyclone fence. She turned back to the taxi and leaned into the passenger side window to hand the cabbie a pair of $20’s.
‘Thank you,’ she said with a slight British accent. ‘Do keep the change.’
‘Lady,’ said the cabbie. ‘You sure you wanna be dropped in THIS neighborhood?’
His passenger was conservatively dress in grey business suit complete with seamed nylons and black low-heeled pumps. She had not allowed the man to place her single roll-around bag in the trunk but had instead pulled it into the rear seat beside her. Regardless of the obviously expensive suit, no woman that stunningly beautiful should ever be dropped off in a place with this just as the sun was going down.
‘Lady, you are gonna get your ass … self robbed or raped!’ the man warned.
‘I will be just fine,’ she assured him as she straightened and pulled the little handle up to full extension on her roll-around.
Seeing she had no intension to take his advice the cabbie sighed and put the car into gear just as his radio squawked. Lifting the mike to his lips he responded and for a second forgot about the woman as he noted the address of his next fare. When he looked back in the rear-view mirror, she was gone.
*****
Samantha hadn’t disappeared, in fact she could still see the cab as it rolled away but she had taken a step very few could perceive and stood on a concrete pad facing a battered warehouse door. Lifting a hand she banged twice on the rusted metal with the heel of her fist. It was somewhat surprising the whole thing didn’t collapse.
After several increasingly nervous moments, the door opened and a handsome man in his early twenties with a shock of ice white hair regarded her.
‘May I help you,’ he said slowly.
Samantha looked in around his well-muscled body to an opulent living area complete with a central fireplace, expensive furniture and a state-of-the-art TV/Stereo system. Allowing herself a small self-satisfied smile, she pushed in past the young man and stood her roll-around on end. She held out a hand to him.
‘I am Samantha Vicks, your new office manager,’ she announced. ‘You must be James Hawkins, Icehawk’
*****
Grey eyes pierced her soul and for a long time all she could see was those eyes, then the other shifted his gaze and released her though her heart threatened to leap from her chest.
She’d felt his approach, a buzzing, like ants on her spine so it had been no surprise when a heavy fist banged on the door. What had been a surprise was the sudden rush of heat in her when she’d opened that door to reveal the tall well-built man with black hair down past his shoulders and those mesmerizing grey eyes. Never in her life had she felt so powerfully attracted to a man like she was to this one and when she took his offer hand it had been all she could do not to allow her knees to liquefy and collapse in a heap at his feet.
‘I am Jake,’ he said. ‘Jake Carstairs. I am He-Who-Probes and I have been searching a very long time for you.’
*****
Jake’s story was so outlandish Samantha immediately discredited it as the fanciful imagination of an obvious nutter but slowly she began to note things she had never questioned and began to ponder this new sense of Jake she seemed to have whenever they were within a few miles of each other. His claim that they were, first of all, aliens from another world, and second, distant cousins began to feel . . . right. She had always attributed her continued youth, she appeared no older than her late twenties, to something the Nazi doctors had done, but here was Jake claiming to be nearly a hundred years old.
After marrying Major William Vicks toward the end of the war, she’d never considered her age.
The first time she allowed herself the pleasure of Jake had been in her office while the business of the team carried on around them. When they had finished she was both horrified at her wonton behavior and thrilled by it. Suddenly something was more important to her then her job. At heart she knew she wasn’t in love with her distant cousin, but she also knew the physical attraction between them was unstoppable and almost all consuming.
It became a sport for them, treating each other so properly when in the presence of any of the team, he always called her Ms. Vicks and she always called him Mr. Carstairs, yet trying their damnest to devour one another when alone. For Samantha, who’d been married to the same man for over fifty years and been content with the limited passions of an English gentleman, Jake Carstairs was like the breaking of a dam, a very huge dam and she made a vow to her self to enjoy every moment of it as long as it should last.