bloodthirsty subhumans lurking just over the perimeter. Time seems to stumble on the edge of the promised new day, and slip backwards out of thousands of years into the first dark age. Society could collapse and make not so much as a puff of smoke that one could see from here. Karl Schweinfurter would be eighteen in two months, and had never successfully shot a target with his rifle, let alone another human being. But he was sworn to duty, to the protection of his family, his hearth and his faith. They were one day into the new millennium, treading on the thin ice of borrowed time before the Last Days, Gotterdammerung, Ragnarok.
He reconnoitered the knob-shaped hill that overlooked the road on three sides before he sat down on his rock, waited ten minutes more before he knelt and began to dig in the snow and soft earth underneath. He wasn't worried about being caught unawares by intruders—in the thirteen months he'd been here, there'd been none. The Jägers were another matter. Most reserve sentries suspected they were only detailed out in the woods for the elite warriors' stalking practice. Guard duty sucked, but it beat graveyard shifts in the slaughterhouse, and it was the only time one could be alone for longer than a toilet trip.
Karl found the bottle and dug it out, pocketed the cap, rubbed the mouth of the bottle vigorously so it wouldn't stick to his lips, and took a good stiff belt. Jägermeister, the cough syrup of kings. His friends in school had sworn by its economical buzz value and ferocious, loopy potency, but Karl had never enjoyed it before, preferring beer, pot or even Nyquil over Jäger shots. But beer was impractical and even if it were possible to score weed, the Jägers would scent it on his clothes and come down on him.
Karl believed fervently in God and was pretty sure about the divine selection of the white man, but he was beginning to have his doubts about Heilige Berg. His parents, good God-fearing working people who owned a corner market in Nampa, had the best of intentions when they sent him here to, as Papa put it, "wake up the righteous man in you," after he and some school-friends were caught drunk and disorderly in a Circle K parking lot on a school day. Papa had switched the family to the Teutonic Heritage Church the year before because only they had answers for what the world was coming to, and they had a ready answer for Karl's problems, too.
Karl's first impression of the church's mountain retreat was little better than the one he made upon the community at large. Climbing down from the shaky second-hand school bus in a parka and two layers of bluejeans, he'd goggled at the ranks of hearty teenaged commandos in white arctic camouflage standing at attention at the far end of the parking lot. He'd come expecting a lame tough love church camp with the same white separatist leanings as the church in town. He unzipped his parka to the brutal predawn cold to show his abundant, upbeat piety in the form of a T-shirt he'd got on a family vacation pilgrimage to the Creation Research Museum in Santee, California. Faded and worn through in the left armpit, the shirt still clearly depicted a stylized Darwin fish flat on its back, with its ridiculous, abominable legs pointed skyward. A circle and slash negated the mythical beast, under which a caption proclaimed, NO WAY…. Beneath it, the original, legless Jesus fish floated on a field of heavenly light, the Greek name of Jesus in its flank slightly misspelled, but no less holy. The caption read, YAHWEH!!! Mama still chuckled every time she saw it, but Grossvater Egil Reuss, the pastor of Heilige Berg, had failed to see the humor. The huge, shield-bearded cleric had seized Karl by the hood of his parka and jerked him off his feet so that he lay supine in the slush with an enraged frost giant who might have been the second coming of Beowulf looming over him.
"Was ist los?" Grossvater Egil roared in his face. "Was machst du dabei, mit den Judische
He reconnoitered the knob-shaped hill that overlooked the road on three sides before he sat down on his rock, waited ten minutes more before he knelt and began to dig in the snow and soft earth underneath. He wasn't worried about being caught unawares by intruders—in the thirteen months he'd been here, there'd been none. The Jägers were another matter. Most reserve sentries suspected they were only detailed out in the woods for the elite warriors' stalking practice. Guard duty sucked, but it beat graveyard shifts in the slaughterhouse, and it was the only time one could be alone for longer than a toilet trip.
Karl found the bottle and dug it out, pocketed the cap, rubbed the mouth of the bottle vigorously so it wouldn't stick to his lips, and took a good stiff belt. Jägermeister, the cough syrup of kings. His friends in school had sworn by its economical buzz value and ferocious, loopy potency, but Karl had never enjoyed it before, preferring beer, pot or even Nyquil over Jäger shots. But beer was impractical and even if it were possible to score weed, the Jägers would scent it on his clothes and come down on him.
Karl believed fervently in God and was pretty sure about the divine selection of the white man, but he was beginning to have his doubts about Heilige Berg. His parents, good God-fearing working people who owned a corner market in Nampa, had the best of intentions when they sent him here to, as Papa put it, "wake up the righteous man in you," after he and some school-friends were caught drunk and disorderly in a Circle K parking lot on a school day. Papa had switched the family to the Teutonic Heritage Church the year before because only they had answers for what the world was coming to, and they had a ready answer for Karl's problems, too.
Karl's first impression of the church's mountain retreat was little better than the one he made upon the community at large. Climbing down from the shaky second-hand school bus in a parka and two layers of bluejeans, he'd goggled at the ranks of hearty teenaged commandos in white arctic camouflage standing at attention at the far end of the parking lot. He'd come expecting a lame tough love church camp with the same white separatist leanings as the church in town. He unzipped his parka to the brutal predawn cold to show his abundant, upbeat piety in the form of a T-shirt he'd got on a family vacation pilgrimage to the Creation Research Museum in Santee, California. Faded and worn through in the left armpit, the shirt still clearly depicted a stylized Darwin fish flat on its back, with its ridiculous, abominable legs pointed skyward. A circle and slash negated the mythical beast, under which a caption proclaimed, NO WAY…. Beneath it, the original, legless Jesus fish floated on a field of heavenly light, the Greek name of Jesus in its flank slightly misspelled, but no less holy. The caption read, YAHWEH!!! Mama still chuckled every time she saw it, but Grossvater Egil Reuss, the pastor of Heilige Berg, had failed to see the humor. The huge, shield-bearded cleric had seized Karl by the hood of his parka and jerked him off his feet so that he lay supine in the slush with an enraged frost giant who might have been the second coming of Beowulf looming over him.
"Was ist los?" Grossvater Egil roared in his face. "Was machst du dabei, mit den Judische
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