Free Swastika by Michael Slade Page B

deer.
    “I can’t.” Quivering.
    “Toughen up!” demanded his dad.
    His hands were shaking. He began to cry. He pointed to the forest clearing, where two Bambis stood watching.
    “They’ll survive. I did. Now wash your hands in blood!”
    He hesitated, frozen.
    Too long for his dad’s temper.
    The führer clenched his son by the scruff of his neck and whipped him with his belt until the pain was more than he could take, giving him no alternative but to plunge down the blade.
    Jabbing a finger into the gaping slit in the deer’s neck, his dad had blooded him with the warm, red war paint, signing a swastika on his forehead.
    “Wear it with pride!” commanded the former Werewolf.
    *    *    *
     
    Swiveling 180 degrees in the waxwork corridor, the Nazi killer clomped across the threshold into the replica of Hitler’s private quarters. Jackboots echoed through the tight confines of this bunker, for tonight Swastika was all dressed up in the same Black Corps uniform that had once been worn by his grandfather, SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher.

Untermenschen
     
    At heart, he was a nihilist. He hated everyone. His upbringing on a pig farm behind the Iron Curtain had warped his outlook on this shitty world and all the subhumans in it. Total and absolute destruction of everybody and himself had been his impossible dream. But now he actually had the means to bring that about, thanks to the treasure trove of long-lost Nazi secrets that he had recovered from the Knight’s Hall at Castle Werewolf in what was now Poland.
    As a boy in East Germany, he had often heard the Teutonic myth of Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods, which told how the end of the world had begun with the birth of a brood of wolves fathered by the great wolf Fenrir in a forest to the east. One of the pack had chased the sun and caught it in its jaws, extinguishing light and plunging the landscape into endless winter. As snowstorms swirled, war broke out all over the earth, culminating in an epic battle between the Norse gods and evil giants on a battlefield in front of the gates of Valhalla. Its upper jaw touching the heavens and its lower jaw brushing the ground, Fenrir, the demon wolf, spurted fire from its eyes and nostrils and dripped blood from its fangs. The wolf swallowed up Odin, the king of the gods, with a single snap of its jaws, and the rest of the combatants slaughtered each other chaotically. With all their gods dead, men were abandoned, and the human race was swept from the surface of the world by a cataclysm of fire, earthquakes, and tidal waves that subsumed everything into an abyss of nothingness.
    Only now did the East German boy, having grown into a man, see the myth of Götterdämmerung as a prophesy. Of late, he had watched with interest as America veered toward the political right, nodding with agreement when the Christian crusade was launched against those “sand niggers,” and recognizing the echoes of his ancestral past in the tortures of Abu Ghraib and the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. That’s why he had sent a sample of the treasure trove from Castle Werewolf to the Pentagon by way of Switzerland, along with an extortion demand for a billion American dollars.
    Götterdämmerung!
    As a nihilist, he would gladly sacrifice his life to the cause of the end of the world, but not before he had a money-is-no-object blowout of sky-high proportions to compensate for all the suffering and deprivation he had once endured.
    Meanwhile, there was the hunt …
    *    *    *
     
    He thought of himself as “the Aryan” when he was on the hunt, prowling the streets of boy’s town in this dusty farm truck, just another hick from the sticks looking for male ass. Oh, he was looking for ass, was obsessed with ass. But not male ass for perverted sex like all these Untermenschen cruising Davie Street.
    Davie Street was the club scene for fags in Vancouver. There was a sewer to fit every subhuman debauchery in