Free Alphabet House by Jussi Adler-Olsen

stretchers continued towards the pallid, whitish light of the opening at the far end of the platform. Another lorry was backing up to the skids.
    Its arrival was drowned out by the crunching sound of boots in the frosty snow. The last man in the column shouted at the escort in front and pointed at Bryan and the other stretcher.
    Some soldiers took hold of them and followed the sagging flock of men.
    As they reached the end of the train they put the stretchers down for a moment. It took time to fill up the lorry. A railway worker started to walk across the rails, knocking the switch points with a long pole as he passed. A soldier shouted at him threateningly, gun raised. Dropping the pole in the snow, the man slithered back the way he came, finally disappearing behind a big sign that towered between the sets of tracks.
Freiburg im
Breisgau
it said, in proud, clear letters.
    Not a single one of the officers who stood there waiting had said a word. Everything had taken place under strict supervision, making it impossible for Bryan to look back and see whether James was lying on the stretcher a couple of feet away.
    It must have been quite late in the afternoon. The sun would soon be setting. The street seemed deserted, apart from the SS officers guarding the area in front of the freight station.
    So this was their destination for the time being. Freiburg, a town in the Rhine district by the French border in the southwest corner of the German Reich, which was only thirty miles from the Swiss border and freedom.
     
     
    Two rows of figures were seated in the semi-darkness on benches in the back of the lorry. Between them, several stretchers lay sideways across the floor, so tightly packed together that the ends stuck under the feet of the seated figures. Luckily Bryan had been placed under a soldier with short legs whose boots didn’t rest as heavily on his frozen shins.
    When the last stretcher had been loaded, the accompanying soldiers jumped in and rolled down the tarpaulin, while the escort closed the tailboard.
    The sudden darkness made it impossible for Bryan to see. The shape beside him was lying quite still. Forty men were breathing heavily and irregularly. There were a few scattered murmurs and grunts. Two guards squeezed down side by side at the end of the bench and talked quietly to one another.
    Then Bryan felt the shape beside him move. A tentative hand groped the side of his body and found his chest. There it remained.
    Bryan seized it and returned its quiet squeeze.
     
     
    Gradually, as the silhouettes acquired faces, Bryan realised the lorryload of patients had several things in common. But one was more obvious than the rest, the common denominator that now included himself and James.
    They were all mentally ill.
    James had already tried to make him understand this with meaningful glances, pointing out one or two men in particular.
    Most of them sat quite still, heads bobbing from side to side as the lorry rumbled along. A few sat tensing their necks, eyes fixed on an imaginary point in the air. Others twisted their arms together awkwardly and rocked almost imperceptibly back and forth, alternately clenching and spreading their fingers.
    James rolled his eyes and pointed to his open mouth.
They’re pumped full of medicine
, Bryan deduced in agreement. They, too, had been sedated and the poison was still in their bodies, as exhibited by their slow-motion reflexes and unusually sluggish brain activity. If they’d had a chance to stand up, they would have fallen over.
    Bryan began to feel a mixture of relief and renewed anxiety. So the red tag meant they were mentally ill. This had been their objective and therefore they were relieved. But now they’d been lumped together with this group of mentally warped soldiers,and what did they propose to do with them? The master race’s care of the incurably ill could easily be implemented with a syringe, or even more simply with a bullet.
    Those were the rumours.
    The