Shadows Will Fall by Trey Garrison Page A

courtyard to see. The nachtmenn stood against the swarm of the undead. Their massive, clawed hands struck the first of the undead to approach them, sending their heads flying across the courtyard. But the horde wouldn’t stop. They smelled living flesh. Like the wehr-wolves, the nachtmenn fell under the inexorable mass of undead that attacked.
    Standing on the inner courtyard wall, still weak and dizzy, Amria looked upon the chaos and carnage among the living, the dead, and the undead that she had unleashed in corrupting the reanimation process with her curse.
    She smiled.
    Let them all die .
    A midst the screams and pandemonium, the draugrkommandos led by Hauser found Dr. Übel. The doctor stood paralyzed with fear. They towered over Übel, blank faces staring at him with dead eyes.
    Then one spoke.
    â€œCome with us, Father. We can protect you.”
    â€œThank you, my child,” Dr. Übel said.
    S omewhere behind his iron mask Colonel Uhrwerk was running through calculations and probabilities. He’d done his duty by placing Skorzeny in command. Now it was time for him to leave. This was not a decision made in haste or driven by fear. Speaking entirely objectively, he was of far more value to the Reich than the remaining storm troopers or Übel’s experiments. The spear could be recovered. The lives of those here were not material assets in the way that he was.
    Uhrwerk would get clear, find a wireless, and call in a bomb strike on the castle. They could sort out the rubble and recover the spear after that. He had to be sure this infection was cleansed away. It was simply a matter of walking out of one of the smaller outer gates, locking it behind him, and marching the fifty miles to Piteşti.
    With neither haste nor hesitation, Uhrwerk started toward the front gate. All around him the undead staggered about. Some were feeding on the last remains of the storm troopers who had attacked. Others were feeding on the fallen wehr-wolves and nachtmenn . One last nachtmann fought valiantly against a wave of the creatures, but to no avail. It went down. The undead didn’t seem to take note of Uhrwerk at all, as he expected. At the front gate, he unlatched the outer door and threw it open, then felt a hand clamp on his shoulder.
    Uhrwerk turned and found himself face-to-face with one of the three infected draugrkommandos . It seemed that whatever afflicted it earlier had passed. But its complexions was gray and its eyes, nose, and mouth rimmed with blood, just as the Death’s Head Legion had been.
    It drew a raspy breath. Uhrwerk found it fascinating. The creature appeared to have more trouble breathing than the three uninfected draugrs .
    â€œWhat are you?” the draugr asked him.
    â€œI might ask the same,” the colonel said.
    Another raspy breath.
    â€œWhat are you?” the creature demanded angrily, reaching out and shaking Uhrwerk.
    With blinding speed Uhrwerk drove his right hand into the center of the creature’s chest. It looked down at Uhrwerk’s arm, buried up to the elbow, and took another raspy breath.
    â€œThat won’t hurt us,” it said. A smile spread on its face.
    â€œIt wasn’t intended to hurt you. It was intended to hold you still,” Uhrwerk said.
    His metal fingers flat, he drove his left hand under the creature’s jaw and deep into its brain. He made a fist, squishing the cranial matter. When he pulled his hands free of the thing, the draugr slid to the cobblestones.
    From behind, a second draugr wrapped an arm around Uhrwerk’s neck. It grabbed his metal mask and ripped it free, spinning him around.
    Even before the draugr had been converted, as a live man, it wouldn’t have understood what it now saw beneath the mask it had removed. Instead of a face, it saw an almost infinitely complex series of clockwork machinery, intricately interlaced gears of all sizes, all turning in uniform precision and altogether performing