The Secret of Lions by Scott Blade Page A

a moment, he looked up.
A cell door was open in front of him. The cell was number thirteen.
It was Hitler’s cell.
    Heinrik saw a blurry figure standing in the
doorway. He stood almost dreamlike. The face was covered in shadow,
but there was a gleam from a metal object in his hand. It appeared
to be a razor-sharp shiv.
    Suddenly, the figure moved slightly out of
the shadow. It was Hitler. He peered down at Heinrik with a
sinister look on his face. He placed a finger over his lips and
said, “Shh.”
    Very slowly, he recoiled into the darkness
of his cell.
    “There you are, guard,” the prisoner said,
standing over him. He pointed the gun right at Heinrik’s face. “You
are going to die.”
    Out of the darkness, from beyond the cell’s
door, Hitler stepped out directly behind the three prisoners. The
one standing in the far back vanished into the darkness and let out
the slightest whimper. Hitler stabbed the shiv straight through
him, penetrating through to the other side of his body. The tip of
the shiv was visibly poking out of his chest underneath his shirt.
The blade retracted out of the man’s back and stabbed once
again.
    Heinrik was the only person to witness the
brutal slaying.
    The second prisoner noticed that his
companion was missing. He moved closer to the darkened cell to look
for him. Suddenly, Hitler appeared holding two shivs. He slashed
out with both blades and cut the man’s throat clean away.
    The prisoner staggered backward toward the
wall, his hand gripped tightly around the bloody gash. His head
swayed back, the weight of it too heavy for the remaining part of
his neck to hold upright. Blood seeped out, covering his chest
until the dull colors of his prison clothes became unrecognizable
and he fell back into the darkness.
    The final prisoner realized what was
happening. He turned and fired the gun twice into the blackness of
cell thirteen. He paused and started to tremble, stricken with
fear. Hitler stepped out into the light. His features were outlined
like a silhouette by the morning sunlight that glimmered in through
cracks in his cell’s outer wall.
    With betrayal reflected deep within his
voice, the final prisoner uttered one final word before his death,
“Adolf?”
    A moment later, Hitler pierced both shivs
into his chest, completely shattering the man’s ribcage.
    Hitler’s thick, stumpy hands tightly
squeezed the shivs’ handles. In a vile act of brutality, he twisted
the murderous blades toward each other and then away, as if they
were knobs on a mechanical man. He left them there for a long
moment, staring into the man’s eyes as he died. The pupils dilated
until they lost all sense of life. Finally, Hitler pulled the
blood-soaked shivs out of the corpse.
    Heinrik watched in sheer terror as the
prisoner’s body fell to the ground, flushing out all of its
previous flesh color. Very quickly, the body turned into a ghastly,
white tone.
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    Hitler stood over the corpse for a moment
and watched as it made a death twitch.
    Heinrik looked up at him; his eyes met with
Hitler’s for a long, terrifying moment. Hitler tilted his head
slightly. Heinrik had never felt such terror before. The nightmare
that he had had about Gracy and Hitler came crawling to the
forefront of his mind. His terror in that moment was as close to
the fear that he felt in his dream as he could imagine himself
reaching. The stench of the prison halls crept into his nostrils,
causing him to relive every sensation that he’d endured in that
horrible nightmare.
    In his nightmare, Hitler had embraced Gracy,
and Heinrik had been powerless to stop it. Heinrik’s words and
protests were useless. Gracy ignored them. The nightmare had become
real, too real. The horror overwhelmed him.
    He was exhausted from the chase, from the
tension. He felt faint. His fatigue was so potent that he blacked
out.
    35
    Trees rustled under the weight of the heavy
wind. Special investigators, soldiers, and night guards populated
the prison