Malmagden laughed. “You Americans. You have yet to see the true power of hate. The Führer understood. People love to hate. They while away their afternoons in violent fantasies, what they would do to this person or that person if they caught them alone. People can excuse anything in the name of hate. It is quite something to see.”
“No one can hate that much.”
Malmagden gave her a look of fond amusement. “You think America is immune,” he said. “Your time will come.”
They were at the aqueducts leading from the Havel River. Late evening sunlight slanted in from a sewer grate. A line of barrel-shaped floodgates loomed out of the darkness, taller than her head. A metal key longer than a crowbar lay beside them. Malmagden took the key and led her up to a metal stairwell to the operating mechanism.
Susan got a really awful feeling at the sight of that key. She was shaking her head even before Malmagden told her what he needed her to do.
He laughed, all innocent. “Not to worry,” he said. “You come out of this all right.” He pointed up at the sewer grate at the top of a second short stair. “I only need one thing from you before you escape.”
He jammed the key into the gearbox of a giant valve. Susan looked down the tunnel. Malmagden’s Totenstürm roamed through the dusk just at the edge of her vision. She could almost convince herself that she and Malmagden were the last living people down here. If it were only that simple.
“You’re fucking crazy,” she said.
Malmagden winced, visibly pained by her language. “You Americans,” he sighed. “There is a heartless quality to your naïveté.”
“The hell’s the matter with you people? Your buddy Kriene is out in the Franconian Wald playing with stuff that boils away reservoirs. You’re trying to contain an army of zombies. Does everything you do threaten to destroy the world?”
“You have no idea what men will do when their country is foundering.”
“There’s hundreds of people alive down here.”
“They are doomed,” Malmagden said. “One way or another. If we take their lives, it will be more humane than if they are torn to pieces. More importantly, if I kill them, they will stay dead.”
She looked at him, going, What? What was that?
“I need your help.” He steadied the giant key in its gearbox. He pressed his shoulder beneath the lever to show her what he required of her. “This is too much for one person alone.”
Susan started up the stairs for daylight. She didn’t even think about it. Malmagden was strong, but she was quick. She figured she’d be gone while he was still thinking it over. She reached the grate and pushed. It gave easily. She glanced back once, just to see where he was.
Malmagden stood down by the water locks, where she’d left him. “I am not going to chase you,” he said. “If you wish to leave”—he flung his hand up at the surface—“go.”
That was all the encouragement she needed.
“One thing? Bitte?”
He nodded for her to look out into the tunnel. A series of bridges branched off from the elevated walkway. Next bridge over, she saw Malmagden’s guard. No mistaking them out here. When they stretched to their full height, they must’ve been over seven feet tall. Three of them were bearing packages. They held their loads high overhead, so that she could see them clearly.
“You need to understand,” Malmagden said. “From an intellectual viewpoint as well as an emotional one.”
“What is that? What are you doing?”
She found herself coming down the stairs. Some little voice inside her told her she was making a mistake. She had no doubt it was right.
“We operated our Totenstürm program for a year with little success,” he said. “However, as the Russians closed in on Berlin, one of Zentralbund’s scientists began reviving our dead heroes with a new necrolophagic agent. This last batch spreads logarithmically, through direct contact. Do you understand? One dead man kills a living man, and then you have two walking dead. And so on. It received limited battlefield exposure, but the results were spectacular. Spectacular and dreadful. If this particular Totenstürm group actually reach the surface of Berlin, they could sweep across Europe like a new plague.”
She hardly heard what he was saying. Her eyes were on Malmagden’s guard. “What have they got in their hands?” she demanded. Somehow though, she already knew. Schopenhauer was holding one of her Volksstürm guards over his head, like a squirming, crying bag of kittens.
He waited just long enough to draw the attention of a hundred dull eyes. The crowd of zombies converged directly below the bridge. Susan remembered ants at a picnic finding a droplet of Coca Cola drying in the sun.