Fresh Short Story (Just written) - DOG EAT DOG

(Brief note by the Author: This delivery is fresh from the void. I started writing at 5:45. It is now 7:30. I was sitting around the bonfire one night, talking with my neighbor (we have bonfires every Friday), when I felt an itch in my brain. I scratch my brain by talking (what do you do?), and so there I was, wondering aloud what strange realms might await the Nazis after death. Not the foot soldiers, but The Brass, the crem de la crem of Fascist cock-swinging. As it turned out, it wasn't an itch. It was a string; one of those loose strands that, once pulled, seems to uncoil endlessly from its weave. I teased it around for a time, until I was finally ready to cut it, weft it, and use it to hang myself. Which is now. I hope you like it.) 

Boschen smelled urine. He awoke on his belly, bleary-eyed and aching. It felt like he was dying, his bones replaced by shattered glass, his hips a grinding agony, his breath swampy and pungent and thick enough to hover around his face. He blinked the crust from his eyes, surveying the scratched linoleum beyond his cage. A cage. There was a crumpled biscuit near the bars that smelled of dust.

                

All of them were out there, in their own cells, Heintsel, Lughbrecht, and Vorst, though their shapes remained foggy, unformed, shifting.

                

Drugs, Boschen thought. They gave me drugs.

                

He remembered nothing beyond the crumbling walls, the pulse-blast of artillery shells, the snows of Russia’s winter, winglike as it folded back over the walls of their collapsing stronghold.

                

To call the Polish axle plant a stronghold was ambitious. After fleeing the liberated deathcamp, the leaning building of old steel was all they could find. Fourteen dissenters had taken refuge in the axle plant’s basement, and right before Boschen and his men had lined them up against the wall, he'd paused to admire the pot-bellied furnace, its slatted bucket open to reveal a womb of molten bronze. 

The glow had lit his eyes. “Large enough to fit a Jew,” he’d jibed, and they’d all laughed, Heintsel saying, “Or a Pollack.”

                

Which they’d added promptly to the blaze.

                

All fourteen of them.

                

Before being reduced to burning prisoners for warmth, Boschen had been known as the King of Kulmhof. He’d built the Polish Extermination Camp up from its meager foundations, tightening the cells, maximizing square-footage by installing decking in the Barrows, engineering a concave shower chamber with foot-wide pipes so the dis-corporeal wastes could be hosed out with economy. But his greatest invention had been Lucifer’s Hallway. 

He thought of it now, in his his cage, seeing it in his mind, a glimmering tunnel of slate no wider than a man’s shoulders, zigging and zagging in a series of switchbacks so that a line of prisoners could only see twelve feet ahead at anytime.

                

Boschen had grown up in the slaughterhouses, his grandfather broad of shoulder and cold of spirit, always walking beyond the abattoir in his bloodied clothes for the kine to see, always shouting beyond the fence to the animals, taunting them, pointing to the carnage on his apron to say, Can you smell it? Did you know this one? Would you like to join your friend?   

                

The men and women and children and gypsies and sexual degenerates and all enemies of progress would walk naked, single-file, like his grandfather’s cows. They’d walk for a very long time, enough for 500 starving bodies to be pressed between those zagging walls without the “Shower Room” in sight. 

And then the heat would start. 

A pulse of sparked gas from the entrance, and a successive pulse at the next intersection every twenty seconds. The fire wasn’t designed to be lethal.

                

Its purpose was to motivate.

                

“They’d hear it coming,” Boschen called through his cage, though with the drugs, his voice now sounded like a growl. “Getting closer, like a great boiling snake. When the heat hit them, they’d jump like fleas. And you’d think, with all that panic, a few would’ve burnt alive, but nicht. Every piece of cargo made it to the showers. To safety.” A wicked smile. “We’d hear them from above, filthy, crying thanks to their Shylock God, singing their rat hymns to the tiles. And then, the gas. The merciful gas. An answer to their prayers.”

                

Boschen laughed through the bars, livened by his memory, smelling his awful breath. And then the drugs began to lift. 

The shifting prisms of his officers came slowly into view, their faces appearing healthy behind their cages, then shrinking, suddenly darker in color, their mouths stretching beaklike as if softened and sucked through a tube. Hair blistered up from their skin, their eyes sinking back. And as Boschen watched, his laughter going dry, Heintsel’s ears rose to furry points, resettling at the top of his skull.

                

“Impossible!” Boschen screamed, and heard himself growl again, though it no longer seemed a drugged hallucination, but sharp, actual. His heart quickened, and he tried to move. The impulse of rising on two legs was still there, but he felt his arms moving instead.

                

Only they weren’t arms.

                

And now he understood, a cinder-trace of memory breathing heat into his chest, this place, the smell of urine, the linoleum floor, the cages, the faces of his companions. He had seen all this before, perhaps a thousand times, not understanding until the last moment, the last breath.

                

Boschen snapped his head toward the sound of footsteps.

                

They were coming from beyond the door, upon which was a sign in English he couldn’t read. “Not again! No, not again!” His barks wild against the air, stirring his colleagues in their cages, all of them barking nonsense, pleas he couldn’t understand.

                

“This is a mistake!” Boschen tried to stand, and screamed with the pain of it. He looked back at his body, saw a shrunken patchy musculature, the hips weak and curled, the missing fur on his hip bisected with the scar of some failed surgery. White pain detonated along his nerves, through his pelvis, up his spine in a spear of cold fire.

                

He pissed himself as the door swung open.

                

“Hello, old boy.”

                

Boschen turned to the voice, whimpering, the dog sounds rising from his throat. The milky cataracts of his eye swiveled up through the bars, and locked onto the figure in blue doctor’s pajamas. He seemed a giant, deep-chested, smiling beneath a shelf of curly black hair.

                

Boschen lowered himself, scrabbling to the back of his cell, the man swinging the cage wide, snatching the fur behind Boschen’s neck and dragging him out into the open, the scratched linoleum suffering a few more scratches beneath his claws.

                

Boschen tried to bite, but he had no teeth, and the man only laughed, peeling off Boschen’s snout with one strong hand. The man in the doctor's clothes seemed to be enjoying himself, his laughter booming between the cages as he wrapped a too-tight collar around Boschen’s neck and yanked. Once, twice, thrice for good measure.

                

Boschen’s legs went out from under him, the pain exploding, taking his sight. He felt the cold floor conveying him, his bones dragging along the uneven pitch. For a moment his sight cleared, and he saw the two things remembered most clearly from this continued nightmare … only it wasn’t a nightmare. He knew that now, knew and began to weep.

                

The man turned to look at Boschen with disgust verging on ecstasy, with the need to remedy organic mistakes. It was an expression Boschen had worn countless nights as a celebrated organ in the indomitable Frankenstein of Germany’s Third Reich.

                

“Don’t worry, old boy,” The sweaty forehead inched closer, something bright dangling around the man’s thick neck, “it won’t be long now.”

                

Boschen stared at the Jewish Star, the pendant a burning Wormwood beneath the lights. He hissed, unable to believe it, the unjustness, the emasculation, and just as he was rousing himself to fight, to manifest one last infliction upon The Enemy, the man in doctor’s clothes yanked the leash, and Boschen pissed himself again.

                

The sign on the door dragged by in a fog, its English already collapsing, retreating into the womb-sanctum where all spiritual punishments are hidden, the lid clapping shut only to open again the next day, and the next, always slowly, enough to make him feel empowered, on and on ad infinitum. Boschen looked back at the sign before the doctor turned with a needle in his hand.

                

Euthanasia, it said.