Breakpoint - Part 17

Part Seventeen

Harry

“I’m starting to get worried,” Harry said to Stella. “Like, maybe they fell into a time hole level of worried. We should’ve heard back from Rin and Mick by now.”

“If they did, they’ll find their way back,” Stella told him as she stroked his chest in bed, the cool light from the neon outside a contrast to the sniping pitter-pater of the rain fall. They were sleeping together naked because the heat was far more brutal than either of them had anticipated, even with the rainfall outside. “Len’s proof that sometimes you aren’t gone for as long as you think, or a lot longer.

“Len. Ha.” 

            “How’s he handling his last little adventure through time?”

            “Not well,” Harry said. “Len’s used to everything being straight forward. Bullet A goes into person B and solves problem C, and all that. But this? This isn’t like that. This is Circle Tango goes into Three Squiggly Lines Above a Jackal with some kanji beneath it, and that’s not anything he can make sense of. Hell, we’re all barely working with scraps of information, trying to piece together how this… how any of this… works. So he’s going to try everything he can to try and regain some level of control, make pieces fit that simply don’t. He’s… he’s gonna be tense. He’s going to be snappy and feisty and he’s going to be jumping at every shadow he sees. Keep an eye out for that.”

            “He’s your boss, Harry, not mine,” Stella said. “And I’m fucking you, not him.”

            “Let’s keep it that way.” Harry sighed as he slowly moved out from underneath Stella. “Christ Almighty, does it ever not fucking rain on this island?”

            “I think it’s peaceful,” Stella said to him as she watched him slide out of the bed. “And it keeps the heat somewhat in check. The last few days have been brutal. Still, it’s the middle of the night, Harry. What the hell are you doing getting out of bed?”

            “I’m not sure,” Harry said. “It’s like I can feel a prickling of hairs along the back of my neck, like there’s a different kind of storm coming.”

            “Are you telling me you’ve got some kind of supernatural intuition now?”

            “On an island full of time-traveling Nazis?” Harry laughed. “Perish the thought. I don’t know. There’s something heavy in the air, and I can’t seem to get my mind to rest.”

            She stepped in behind him and slid her arms around his waist, placing her chin on his shoulder, looking out into the darkness and sheets of falling water. He wasn’t entirely surprised to feel her nipples stiff against his back. She was aroused a lot more than anyone he’d ever dated before. “That’s just rain, baby.”

             Three bolts of lightning from different directions all converged on one single spot, out near the foot of the mountain, with the impassable door in it, as the sky lit up in a smear of searing white light. And just as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone again, leaving only the blackness of the night, the diffuse glow of the neon signs and the inescapable walls of precipitation.

            “That’s not just rain,” he said, but Stella was already pulling on her clothes, tossing some of his to him. They were dressed and out the door less than a minute later. Harry was hoping that most of the people on the island were asleep, since without much in the way of lights outside of the buildings, not a lot of people opted to be night owls. He didn’t see anyone else making a run for it, so he felt at least a little confident that they weren’t going to have to worry about the other residents.

            They darted through the rain, their shoes getting gummed up with mud even as they mostly tried to stick to what little paved areas there were on the trail. The hours of precipitation had flooded the path with sludge thoroughly. There was a subtle glow coming from the top of the hill, an orange and red flicker that had to be a fire struggling to fight against the assault of rain, a battle it was clearly losing.

            As they came up and over the ridge, Harry’s eyes widened a little bit, as Mick was using mud as an impromptu fire blanket, helping Rin slather down a third person, caking them in heavy earth, trying to put out a burning jacket they’d seemed to get themselves tangled up in.

            “Oh thank Christ, you’re back!” Harry said.

            “We’ve been gone two days, Harry,” Mick replied. “It’s not the end of the world.”

            “You’ve been gone four days, not two.”

            “Goddamn time travel,” Mick grumbled. “To be expected, though, I suppose. We knew there was a lot of weirdness when we started seeing Nazi planes and encampments and shit all over the place, so I suppose the amount of time we were going being off fits into that.”

            “Who’s the tagalong?”

            “Prisoner of war,” Rin said, beaming with pride and amusement. “We caught ourselves a live Nazi. One we can question and see if they know any more about what the fuck is going on in this place than we do.”

                                        *

 The idea of holding anyone ‘prisoner’ was much more complicated on the island, simply because none of the doors locked. That meant that anyone being kept prisoner needed a guard on them full time, and the prisoner had to remain tied up the whole time, or for as much time as possible. Also, bringing food out of the cantina was frowned upon, even though some people still did it.

Harry had been on watch for only a few minutes when the Nazi decided to speak to him. “We are not so different, you and I,” the woman said to him, shifting her bound wrists in front of her slightly. “We are both are simply minor cogs in the machines put forth by our countries.”

She wasn’t at all what Harry had expected when they said they’d brought back a Nazi. Oh, genetically she looked the type – blonde hair and blue eyes, like any good Aryan trooper would be, with an impressive figure – but she also seemed like she wasn’t much of a soldier, with barely any callouses on her hands or scars on her flesh. They had her stripped down to her bra and panties, leaving her the dignity of remaining in her underwear while giving her no place to try and find something to help her pull the rope bindings free.

“Yeah, you can try whatever Nazi bullshit you like on me, and it’s not going to help.”

“I’m only a Nazi by circumstance, mein Freunde,” she sighed. “Without putting in military service, I would not be allowed to vote. I would not be allowed to choose who I would marry. I would not be allowed to run for office. Service is required for citizenship.”

“And you’re okay with all the things the Nazis do?”

“Of course not, but we don’t have the liberty to just ignore orders that we do not like.”

“You’re obligated to stand up to orders that are illegal or immoral,” Harry countered, an angry roll pitching through his voice. “That’s the only thing we can do in a world that doesn’t make any fucking sense. We don’t hate people based on the color of their skin, or which imaginary sky person they choose to worship, or who they choose to love.”

“Well,” the woman said, looking down, “I can agree on the latter one at least. My country continually told me I could not love who I loved, and when they found out that I was attracted to women, they forcibly enrolled me in the military and shipped me off to war.”

“Why not desert?”

“It is very hard to escape the machine, once you are deep in the pit of its belly,” she said. “I considered it. Numerous times. I did, after all, have a gun now, but I was surrounded by others with guns, and many of them were bloodthirsty murderers who simply wanted an excuse to take as many human lives as they could. Our side, their side, your side – it did not matter. The kill was the only thing that mattered.” She looked towards the window, back into the night with its sheets of rain. “Perhaps that is untrue. For some of them, the cruelty was part of the thrill.” She looked back at him in frustration. “I kept wanting to run away, to escape, but when you feel surrounded by your enemies, there seems no safe place to go, nowhere you can turn where you can escape and be free.” She inhaled a breath and then slowly let it out. “We are all the lifeless dead. In the end.”

“Let’s start simple,” Harry said to her. “I’m Harry. What’s your name?”

“Lena Schmitt. I’m a radio operator for… well, the unit’s name and my rank don’t really matter, do they? You’re one of them.”

“One of whom?”

“The travelers. The aliens. Whatever you are, you aren’t from my world.”

“You might be able to make that argument. What year is it, Lena?”

“1967.”

Harry’s eyes narrowed at that. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“Why, was it funny?” she said with a curious look.

“Is Adolf Hitler still in charge of the Nazis?”

It was her turn to narrow her eyes back at him. “The Fuhrer died twenty years ago from a heart attack, and was succeeded by his wife, Ava, who has been in charge of the party since.” She seemed to consider her next words very carefully. “What year is it, Harry?”

“Here?” he laughed. “We think it’s 2007. Might be 2008. We’re not entirely sure.”

“How are you not sure?”

“I take it you haven’t been on the island very long then,” Harry chuckled.

“Just a week or so.”

“Yeah, we’re a few months in at this point, although again, it’s hard to be sure.”

“What happened in the future that you lost the ability to tell time?”

“First,” Harry sighed, “we’re not from your future. We’re from a future, that much is certain, but the Nazis lost in 1945 in our past, which is clearly not where you’re from.”

“How on earth could the Nazi army be defeated?”

“I’d love to say we stuck it to you, but the Yanks pulled out the biggest bomb anyone had ever seen and dropped a couple of them on the Japanese, then threatened to drop some more of them, on both Japan and Germany, and then everyone folded like a cheap suit.”

“How many people killed?”

“Nearly half a million within a matter of seconds.”

She nodded sagely. “Then yes, I can see Germany choosing to surrender, in the face of that. How did th—”

“He and Ava Braun committed suicide in a bunker, which pretty much ended everything.”

She frowned, not in objection, but simply in how that puzzle piece didn’t seem to fit with anything else in her worldview. “That… does not sound much like the person we were told led our country so fearlessly.”

“No, you’ll find politicians lie to their people with surprising regularity,” Harry said. “That’s not exclusive to your neck of the woods but seems to be a universal truth. Every politician is a born liar, and even if they weren’t, they become one the moment they take office.”

The woman looked down at her bound hands once more before looking back up to him. “Might I make a request of my captors?”

“We’ll probably ignore it, but sure, ask for your favor.”

“Don’t send me back. Let me go, leave me locked up or kill me, but don’t send me back.”

“Why’s that?”

“I was never a very good Nazi,” she sighed. “As I said earlier, I’m attracted to women. That’s forbidden under the Fuhrer’s orders. They would never let me be with someone back home.”

“What, there’s no such thing as a gay Nazi?”

“Not a living one.”

Len

            Now that he had a sort of rudimentary baseline understanding of how the portals were working, Len was having a grand old time engaging in one of the most closely linked things to the tropical environment they found themselves in – piracy.

            Because he could see the portals with the black light flashlight, he knew how to duck in and out of areas, or how to lead unsuspecting pursuers into traps and get away without so much as a scratch. So now he was starting to raid any Nazi camp he came across.

            The one he was staring at currently was nestled in a little clearing not far in from the coast, as if the group of eight soldiers wanted to get away from the oceanic breeze, but not so far in that they would need to worry about the island’s more dangerous predators.

            They hadn’t taken him into consideration, however.

            The moon was high and full in the sky, giving him ample light to work with, in addition to the large bonfire the squad had built to provide a bit of warmth and safety, but all Len could see was a big bullseye on each and every one of the Nazis.

            Most of them were asleep when Len decided to make his move. They had left two on guard to watch the perimeter, one on the north side of the camp, one on the south, close enough so they could chat every so often, but not that they would be talking all night, especially since the sleeping others were in-between them, and one of them was clearly the squad’s leader.

            This was the kind of thing he was built for, he realized, as he moved through the undergrowth, crawling closer and closer to the northern most Nazi. The man was smoking a cigarette, which made him even dumber than Len had originally thought. Cigarette smoke was bad for night vision, and it also gave any onlooker a nice little red tracer as to where the person’s mouth was.

            Before the man had any idea what was happening, Len had sprung up from the deep grass and plunged a knife right into the man’s throat. Len had waited until the man’s hands were a decent distance from his weapon, so he wouldn’t get off a single round in shock and alert his squadmates. The man was dead before his knees hit the soil, and Len rolled the corpse onto its back so he could pull his knife back loose once more.

            He needed to move quickly, skirting around the outside of the camp, keeping low and quiet, until he was nearly on top of the second man, who was just starting to turn and look at where the first man had disappeared from, which let Len bring up the blade, this time slicing across the man’s throat, opening it to let the blood flow out and the man drop off to one side as well, like his partner, giving nothing away to the sleeping troops gathered around the fire.

            One at a time, he moved from person to person and slit their throats, his hand over their mouths so they could not make a sound to disturb the others. Before any of them were even slightly wiser, they were all dead, leaving Len standing in the center of a field of blood and flesh, covered in the spent vitae of his enemies.

            “The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi,” Len grumbled as he surveyed his handiwork. He knew that he should feel something about having just taken eight lives of men who were basically defenseless, but they were enemy combatants, and he needed to compartmentalize the lives he took, including how, when and where he took them, and these were all righteous kills. They were Nazis, after all.

            The problem lay in what kind of Nazi they were.

            As soon as he started searching the closest body, he knew he was still dealing with Twilight Zone level shit. The man was carrying a small book with him that Len would’ve assumed was the Bible until he opened the leather-bound pages to look at them and saw what resembled Egyptian hieroglyphics staring back at him. They weren’t drawn but were in fact some sort of standardized printing language, although he didn’t have time to count various numbers of characters he saw, much less try and decipher any form of meaning from it.

            Also in the man’s wallet were several scraps of paper that Len assumed had to be Bizarro Nazi Bucks, as they had a stern looking woman at the center of them, with a sort of wispy shadow of Adolf Hitler behind her and to his relief, the numbers were at least western Arabic, so he could understand that much. The coins were of a similar design, although they had a number of different faces on them, both men and women, the largest of which featured Adolf once more, although he looked a little older than Len remembered him looking in pictures.

            Another thing Len was glad to find was that there was a map with actual English on it, although the font for the writing was oddly serifed, and strangely blocky. It was of the south Pacific and had an area circled on it in pen, although it was a fairly large area. It did, however, line up with about where they suspected the island might be located.

            It was many of the other locations on the map that bothered him. He could see Australia and New Zealand off to one side, but they weren’t labelled as such – they were labelled “Neu Nurnberg Prison” and “Little Deckersburg.” That certainly wasn’t right, but it did further the thought that whatever world they were from, the timeline had certainly split a ways back.

            What surprised him even further, however, was that these men, like all the other Nazis he’d encountered on the island, didn’t have any form of radio on them. Not even one big backpack style radio for ranged communication. These men were cutoff from whoever it was they were supposed to report back to.

            One of them did have a satchel with three gold bars in it, clearly taken from the Vatican stash, which was heavy enough that Len had to consider before he just slung it around his neck and decided to bring it with him, and he tucked the money, the map and the Bible into it as well.

            The last and final thing was just as confusing as the rest of the items – packs of unfiltered cigarettes with the writing on them in Cyrillic. The number of Russian cigarettes they’d found without finding a single goddamn Russian was uncomforting.

            He was a little torn about what to do with the bodies – he could’ve dragged them to the beach and tossed them into the ocean, but that felt like a lot of work for something the jungle could just handle on its own. Len did, however, make sure to put out the fire, snuffing it out and then letting it grow dark and cold. Within a few minutes, he saw a number of birds starting to circle overhead, so he made his way out of the circle just before a large condor or something diving down to scoop one of the bodies up, pulling the entire body with it as it returned upwards towards the sky.

            With the bird hauling away a carcass, Len almost missed the ninth Nazi walking towards the camp, but luckily, he was still in concealment when the soldier pushed through the brush, so as soon as the Nazi was within arm’s reach, Len attempted to slice the man’s throat with an underhand sweep, but the moonlight must have reflected off of Len’s blade because he leaned back and ducked out of Len’s cutting strike.

            The man was reaching for his own knife when Len jerked his arm back, sinking the point of the knife into the edge of the man’s throat, but it was enough to cause the man to reach up and clench at his neck, which was all the opportunity Len needed to jam his blade into the man’s eyesocket and send him crumbling to the dirt.

            Len wanted to take off quickly, but he at least though to give the man’s body a quick cursory glance and found something that made all this worth the time. The man had a backpack with him and jutting out from it he could see a long bendy stick which he immediately recognized as an old-style antenna. Searching through the top of the man’s back revealed exactly what Len had been looking for – a radio.

            He grabbed the backpack and slung it over one shoulder and then started heading back for the specific spot he knew would still be there to take him back home. He’d spent the last couple of days hopping in and out of any portal he could find and had been laying out at least a rough map he could use to get between what he’d established were five distinct places, meaning there was a total of 6 different versions of the island, at least. He suspected there might have been one or two more versions that he just hadn’t come across yet. There was also a very distinct possibility that each version of the island had a few portal pathways unique to that island, because he just didn’t have the time to explore that thoroughly, and he wanted to stay close to the island.

            Just as he was nearing the location of his portal back, he heard airplanes overhead and looked up to see a German fighter engaged in combat with a blue and gold plane bearing what looked like the flag from Vatican City on it. The two dipped down lower closer to the island, the Vatican plane immediately stopping shooting, but the Nazi plane opened up a quick burst and immediately regretted it. As soon as the bullets left the guns, shreds of time-space ribboned around the plane, and tore it to pieces, as the Vatican plane lifted back into the sky, leaving the Nazi plane to explode and crash down into the jungle below.

            “Since when did the Vatican get an Air Force?” Len muttered to himself as he checked that the invisible portal was still there, and then stepped back through into his own version of reality.

===================

Cast

Scarab

• Len (John) – The head of the Scarab unit, American, Caucasian, ex-CIA.

• Rin – The Scarab unit’s trained sniper/demolitions expert, Asian, ex-US Army Ranger.

• Harry – The Scarab unit’s trained vehicular expert, British, ex-MI6.

• Mick – The Scarb unit’s extraction/infiltration expert, black, British, ex-MI6.

Scarab adjacent

• Mira – Len’s former partner, ex-Mossad. Her disappearance triggered Scarab’s interest in The Island.

• Iris – Mick’s wife, went missing (presumed dead) in early 2001, only to appear on The Island in 2007 with no knowledge of her missing time.

• Calisto (deceased) – Woman paired with Harry, formerly of Spanish intelligence services.

• Stella – Woman paired with Harry, formerly of South Korean intelligence services.

  Prominent islanders

• Tex – Runs the bar, has been on The Island longer than almost anyone else, very likely not Texan.

• Kreiger – An operative with a bad history for members of Scarab. Presumably killed when a bullet ripped through his body.

• Lynch – CIA operative who left Len to die on an op gone bad.