Berlin or Bust

^{CHAPTER EIGHT} BLAME

RAF Station Martlesham Heath fell silent as the world turned black with night. Lying in his bunk, Steiner couldn’t sleep despite his exhaustion. Around him, the paratroopers of three nations murmured and tossed in their sleep. A man cried out, reliving some personal horror.

Horror kept Steiner awake.

Ghouls walked the earth. They shambled toward the Allied lines in their thousands and tens of thousands. They were everywhere in Belgium and Luxembourg. Even more of the things migrated across Germany, turning it into a charnel house.

The war was over, already lost while he got drunk and played cards in Genoa, and a new war had begun. A war of survival against the undead.

He just couldn’t get his head around it.

The Nazis had given the same bug to Wehrmacht forces on the Eastern Front. Right now, it was likely spreading through Poland and the Balkans.

Denied victory, Hitler might just take the whole world down with him.

The scale of this nightmare was too much to comprehend.

No use sleeping now. He got up, pulled on his trousers, and hitched his suspenders over his shoulders. He put on his boots and quilted jacket and quietly crept through the cavernous hangar until the freezing night greeted him outside.

His back to the hangar’s metal wall, he lit one of his Chesterfields and blew a stream of smoke into the frosty air. Around him, the RAF station’s crisscrossing airstrips and big utilitarian buildings stood silent under a starry sky.

The weather was continuing to clear. Good for flying.

As the Brit officer had said, the party was on.

The machine-gunner sagged against the wall until sitting on the cold ground. A crushing weight had fallen on his chest, not just a bone-deep weariness but also an exhaustion in his soul. The crushing weight of shame.

He’d fought for the madman who’d done this.

Steiner hated Hitler now. He’d hated him for a while but had never had the courage to admit it, even to himself.

The black-and-white images came back to him, one grisly sequence standing out from the rest. A German soldier emptying his MP40 into a lurching American. The American staggering, chest smoking, before lunging forward.

The German tearing off his helmet to throw in a final desperate defense against the creature, whose jaws opened impossibly wide as he closed…

Huddled on the ground, the machine-gunner lowered his head against his forearms and sobbed.

Soldiers found different ways of denying death. Wolff knew if he died, it would be for the Fallschirmjäger, the man’s personal god. Schulte was cynical and chased skirts. Muller had his sense of family honor to uphold. Weber held to his belief in vast conspiracies against Germany. Animal antagonized everybody.

Steiner just laughed at it. The psychotic SS, the shrieking officers, the crazy Italians, the spunky Americans, the stiff Brits, the savage bloodshed over patches of dirt. These were all jokes that told themselves. The whole war was a big joke, a cosmic joke about the ridiculous things people believed and what they’d kill and die for. Limitless fodder for endless sarcasm.

But this. This just wasn’t funny anymore.

A voice above him: “What’s wrong with you?”

Steiner looked up through blurred vision to take in three dark figures standing over him. Americans.

He didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer, as he faced the inevitability of shame for the rest of his life, something no amount of humor could ever help him deny.

“Thinking about what you did, you fucking Kraut?” The man kicked him hard with his boot. “I know you speak English. Answer me.”

“We did not know,” Steiner sighed in his heavily accented English.

“You knew. All you Krauts knew.”

Another American said, “Or you didn’t want to know.”

“Maybe he thought a guy like Hitler would never, ever do something like this.”

“What could I do?” Steiner moaned.

He was one man, fighting for his country and following orders. His unit had never abused prisoners or killed civilians.

What could he do? What could one man have done?

Nonetheless, the shame crushed him.

“What could you do, Fritz? How about kill yourself—”

“Do it,” Steiner said.

The Americans looked at each other. “Do what?”

“I know why you followed me here. I want you to do it.”

The Americans said nothing. The gravity knife one of the paratroopers held glimmered in the starlight. The air thickened with impending violence.

Make it quick, Steiner thought.

“Christ, look at him,” one of the Americans said. “I can’t.”

“Because we aren’t him, Escobedo.”

“Better he live with what he did,” the third said. “It’s punishment enough.”

Another man stepped out of the hangar. “You boys have three seconds before I put my boot up each of your sorry asses.”

The Americans jumped. “Sorry, Sarge.”

One spat on Steiner’s shoulder. “Maybe another time, Fritz.”

“Back in your bunks, you stupid idiots,” the newcomer growled. “We’re seeing action tomorrow night. Get your shut-eye while you can.”

The men skulked back into the hangar under the sergeant’s frosty glare. The sergeant approached Steiner and sat next to him, looking up at the stars.

“Weather’s clearing,” the man said. “We’ll be able to launch bombers and fighters to help out our guys fighting at the Meuse. It’ll buy us time to do our jobs. Your officers told you we’re jumping tomorrow?”

Steiner nodded. His mouth had gone dry. He was shivering with burnt adrenaline. He’d thought the Americans were going to put him out of his misery.

“I’m Sergeant Pierce,” the American told him. “You speak English, right?”

“Ja,” Steiner said. “A little.”

“You come out here to commit suicide by American?”

“Everybody I know back home might be dead because of a madman for whom I fought for years.”

During the war, everybody horrible thing he’d had to do with his MG42, he’d stuffed it in his rucksack. A little more weight to carry every day. The weight of at least twenty Americans mowed down under his gun’s withering fire.

This new weight might be too much to carry.

“We fought those things at Bastogne before we ran out of ammo and ran like hell,” said Pierce. “It was hell. Those men who almost jumped you, they lost a lot of friends.” He sighed. “Even if my boys survive this, I don’t know how many of them are going to be right in the head at the end of it.”

Steiner understood. The Americans carried their own unbearable weight.

“Are you still loyal to Hitler?” Pierce added. “Are you fighting for him now?”

“Nein.”

“Good.”

Rage burned in Steiner’s chest now. “Fuck Hitler.”

“Don’t fight for him then. Don’t even fight for Germany. I’ve got a suggestion exactly where to put your loyalty and lay down your life.”

Steiner frowned. “Do not ask me to fight for America.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, pal.”

“Then where? Where should I put my loyalty?”

“The human race.”

“The human race,” Steiner echoed.

“Yeah. Fight for that. Our countries, this war, none of it matters anymore. Not when facing this. We’re all in this together. And we happen to need you. And when I say ‘we,’ I mean anybody with a pulse.”

Steiner thought about it. He couldn’t erase the stain, but he could make amends. “I will fight.”

Sergeant Pierce stood and dusted his pants. “That’s good to hear. Because if we don’t do our part, it’s the end for all of us.”