(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 34

The tall, waterproof boots seemed a bit much. Benny looked like something out of a low-budget Vietnam movie as he took high, dramatic steps through the wet muck, but he never sunk that deep into it. And yet, the boots seemed to fit a kind of style, one that he definitely wore better.
"It looks different. I don't remember it looking like this."
It did look different, but it was honestly hard to tell most places from each other out beyond the first dirt roads. "I think it might have looked, I don't know, grander."
Benny laughed briefly, before the dry dirt in the air turned his laugh into a cough. "Grander? Very fine words you've started using, Marie. You sound like the theater folk from up north."
He had a point. Even after staying with the Hansens at their farm for a relaxing five weeks, it was hard to adopt the accent. Strong vowels, sharp consonants, but most of all, a very defined vocabulary. They weren't simple, but they liked things to be, including conversation.
"I guess that comes from that job of yours," he added, voice dropping a bit. "Am I right to guess I won't be seeing much of your friends from that embassy thing this time, either?"
He respected the silence that took the place of an answer. Unseen people weren't simple, they required a lot of faith in the seen person to believe in, to believe they even existed. I had earned that respect, but that didn't mean it didn't bother him. The rest of the family simply never mentioned it, especially around the children. Children didn't care about manners. They would ask, if they heard.
"They give you very little time to travel on your own, I guess," he then added, his voice hinting that the real question had yet to be asked.
"Yeah. I would love to visit more, but the work demands a lot."
There was a lie and two truths in that. The work demanded nothing, but showing up within a day from his perspective when months had actually passed would leave awkward questions about unusually rapid aging. The second truth was that visiting more often would have been a dream. The place was welcoming and calm like nothing else could even hope to be. Then again, sometimes that kind of calm became a stress unto itself.
"It's over there," he said very casually, pointing towards something. It was hard to see exactly what, though, and that apparently became clear to him quite quickly.
"There. By the clearing at the edge of the treeline, the large grassy bump."
He pointed again, moving his arm up and down a bit for emphasis, looking for all the world like he was showing how to fish for big game.
"Right... there," he finally said, grabbing one arm and pointing it manually, even extending the index finger with his own hand. There was, indeed, a small clearing there, but it looked more like a random patch of green than anything more sinister.
"How the hell did you..."
Benny made a point of looking casual as he cleared his throat.
"Sorry, but how the... how on Earth did you even spot that? It looks like everything else."
"Erik spotted it," he said, his voice a bit somber all of a sudden. "Said he could almost smell it."
The mention of the brother's name wasn't a social faux pas in any way, but it came with baggage attached. Susanne and the children had been at the house pretty much constantly for the full five weeks, and that meant Erik couldn't be. A single visit helped see why. He was a mess, but under the circumstances, as Benny repreatedly pointed out, he was doing a miracle of a job. Then again, those circumstances were not the best.
Walking towards the clearing made it stand out more from the background. Benny had eyes for the place, for the area, he knew what looked right, what fit in. That kind of keen eye took a lifetime to build though, and anyone else would need to pass by the spot by sheer luck to know it from the surroundings. But it was angular, far too angular, with the kind of definite beginning and end that natural things lacked. It didn't blend in, not up close.
"Did you ever find a way in?"
At that question, Benny grew a bit pale. He suddenly had a look in his eyes like he feared what would come next no matter what he answered, so he simply answered nothing. He didn't need to. It was a WWII bunker, and thus not very discrete in its architecture. The only thing in the way was several years of layer upon layer of dirt getting caught by it from various winds, adding to whatever it had originally been covered with, and the thick grass and low brush that inevitably grew on it all. It took a handful of minutes of poking with the iron rod that Benny had sensibly brought to find something that sounded like metal under the layers of earth, and the shovel he had along with the rod made it easy to peel away the thick layer. Grass and weeds had put down their roots, making it more like cutting and rolling away a thick blanket than digging a hole.
"That explains a lot," Benny mumbled as the patch of grass gave way to the steel door.
"Such as?"
"Well, this," he said, pointing around the spot, "this isn't my land. It belonged to an elderly fellow before and during most of the war, Allan Eriksen. But when he moved away after his wife died, his son took over. Never got the guy's name, but everybody got the feeling he was war profiteering, the way he spent money on silly things. Just, nobody ever knew from what."
Looking at the door suddenly felt far more sinister. Despite what was expected to be down there, the idea of someone actually making money, making a deal from selling the right to use the land to Nazis, gave it a whole different tie to the real world. The sanity behind the insanity was sometimes more frightening than the insanity itself.
"Makes you wonder how the wife died."
Benny nodded. "Or if old Eriksen moved at all."
The door, surprisingly, swung open at little more than a hard pull. The locking mechanism, a large internal bolt that looked heavier than most small children, was badly bent, even twisted, as if someone had tried, and perhaps actually succeeded, forcing the door open from the inside.
"You were going back to your embassy people tomorrow, right?" asked Benny, sounding more than a bit uncomfortable.
"Yeah. Wait, why?"
He was nervously holding the small oil lamp he had brought for what was planned to follow. He kept looking at it, then looking at the darkness inside the open steel door.
"Is this really what you want to do on your last day here?"
An honest answer would have been a flat no. There were so many far more enjoyable things to do. Play with the kids while Sus read out loud from her old books. Visit Erik one more time. Ride the horses. Fish by the little river.
"This bit is not about what I want. It's about what has to be done."
With a sigh, Benny got the oil lamp going, the flickering light making the darkness seem less to be pushed back, and more to flee, slithering back as it flailed its black tentacles in revulsion. Even after standing there a few seconds, watching the somewhat illuminated hallway, the darkness was made to seem alive by the dancing of the small but powerful flame inside the lamp. Benny's habit of moving it around did little to diminish that effect, of course.
The place was a wreck. Scattered bits of wood had perhaps at one point been furniture of some kind, but now, it was barely even more than splinters. But Benny cared very little about that. He was frozen in place, looking at deep cuts in the wall.
"Do you think anything is still alive down here?" he asked, sounding oddly calm at it, as if it was nothing more than idle curiousity.
"I don't see how, honestly. With how thick the layer of grass on the door was, that door had to have been sealed shut years ago. But just in case, did you bring..."
Benny didn't wait for the question to finish before patting his pocket. Just for emphasis, stopped and took out the gun inside. An old revolver, six chambers, all loaded. And the tips of the visible bullets glistened.
"Cost us a pretty price, but all silver. All blessed, too."
It was a different time. The blessing meant a lot to him. But given the situation, anyone could be forgiven for seeking out some supernatural assistance.
"The silver should do it. Whatever the Nazis did to these poor souls, their bodies might still see it as a disease. Silver is good for that."
Perhaps as a courtesy, Benny said nothing in response. He always had, and his family, too. There was an intense discomfort in it for them, that much was clear, accepting someone into their lives that was not a devout Christian like them. It was a smaller world, their world, with fewer new ideas forcing themselves into their lives. But the mutual respect did wonders to leave all that out of the conversation.
The hallway ended rather abruptly, the flickering light of the lamp only catching the sudden lack of nearby walls when it was nearly there. In its defense, there was very little different to shine a light on! As in the hallway, furniture lay shattered all over the place, some of it nearly ground to a dust. There was nothing left standing, and the cuts in the walls were many, perhaps even more than in the hallway. But the similarities ended just as abruptly.
"Marie," said Benny in a voice that made him sound about to hurl. He had moved a bit to the side, taking a careful look amongst the debris. He had found something.
"What? Just tell me instead of..."
His lack of words became horribly understandable, looking at the floor behind a small pile of crushed wood.
"What is... Where's the rest of him? I assume it's a him..."
"I think the leg is sticking out over there," Benny said. He was clearly on the verge of being sick. "Arm and head, no idea."
The body wore a uniform, although it was badly torn and then faded by time. The collar, what was left of it, bore a swastika. The design was a bit odd, but the four hooked arms were easily recognized.
"Well, he's not gonna turn, that's a kind of relief, I guess."
Benny looked over, a weird expression on his face from that remark.
"I have to wonder what you do for that embassy, Marie, I really do."
Examining the room beyond the mauled body gave very little new information. A series of bullet holes in the far walls suggested that someone had fought to keep something from reaching the steel door, but there were no guns anywhere, or even bullet casings. Then again, the rubble could obscure a lot, even if obscuring every single casing seemed a bit on the far side.
"He wasn't alone," Benny mumbled, a nauseus look on his face. His eyes were fixed on somethng in the rubble. As he had suggested, it was another corpse, wearing another Nazi uniform. Somehow, after the first one, the second seemed like a formality. A brutal, disgusting formality, but a formality nonetheless.
Beyond that, another hallway ran deeper down, this one turning in an almost corkscrew fashion. It was impossible not to share Benny's lost stare down into the darkness, as the flickering light of the oil lamp failed to get around the center of the turn. There were fewer bullet holes in the walls. But there were just as many cuts and scrapes.
"What is it you want to find down here, Marie? Gold, answers? Some salvation for past deeds?"
Had the words come from most other men, they might have sounded like mockery, or complaints. Benny sounded concerned. Life within The Embassy sometimes made it hard to find people that were both honest and concerned, and yet mustered the courage to move beyond their little bubble of life that they know and trust. Benny had experiences, true, and those expreiences guided his actions. But even beyond those, even back when those experiences were made, his honest concern was a bit of a trademark of his. It made him far easier to trust than most.
"The people I work for..."
It was hard to finish the sentence, knowing that there was a fixed limit on what Benny could be told. Too much knowledge might endanger The Embassy. But even worse, it could easily paint him a target to very bad people, very powerful bad people.
"The people, that embassy thing...I would like them to reach out, have a permanent place of business here. This might be the spot."
It was hard at first to notice Benny, who was walking last, had stopped. It was the sudden seized movement of the light that hinted at it first.
"Here?!" he said in a disturbingly loud voice. "Marie, this is a bunker. A secret Nazi bunker, where secret Nazi experiments have made monsters of people. What kind of company do you keep that they would want to build a home here?!"
Answers wanted out. Keeping the man in the dark about so many things was becoming not just a burden, it was becoming shameful. It was becoming painful.
"You fought in the war, right, Benny?"
There was an incoherent mumble. He didn't need to answer, he had spoken in hushed and uncomfortable voices about his role in first the resistance, and then as a volunteer soldier, risking everything if someone simply mentioned to the wrong people who he was. Back then, of course, he had not known about the nearby Nazi bunker, filled with abominations and horrible sciences.
"You know the value of taking an enemy stronghold. Studying, learning, using the enemy's knowledge and strengths against it. This place could be such a strength."
There was a silence from him, but the light began moving again.
"You never told me you hunted Nazis, you and your embassy. You never told me much, in fact, at all."
"We hunt many kinds of monsters."
As if to dramatically underline the sentence, the winding tunnel ended.
The view was, for lack of a strongerh word, grueling. Blood was everywhere, long red streaks on the floor and big spiderlegged splatters along the walls. Holes in the walls were, from the looks of it, from standard bullets, but so many had been fired that in places, it looked like the walls had been dug out deliberately. Like someone was trying to shoot their way out, although that was hardly the case so deep underground.
"What happened here, Benny?"
The question was rhetorical, but it seemed Benny was not in a mindset to notice that. He began a string of barely half finished sentences, his mouth trying to formulate what his brain simply did not know.
Walking through the silent chaos was like walking through someone's bad dream. Bits and pieces of people lay scattered around like a child's forgotten toys, the pale dried husks of fingers looking almost indistinguishable from bits of broken wood.
"Where are the bodies?" he said, finally finishing a whole sentence. There were no bodies. Bits and pieces, yes, but no larger parts. No torso, no arms or legs.
"Where is the furniture?" he added, in a lower voice, as if talking to himself more than anyone else.
He was right, of course. It took a little while to notice, but while bits and pieces of chairs could be found easily, anyone would be hard pressed to assemble any of it into something looking even remotely like a whole chair.
And still, another problem was far more pressing. From the first steel door and through the corkscrew tunnel, it had all been a single, direct line, no choice in where to go other than forward or back. This room was round, and it had hallways protruding from it in a symmetric pattern of eight. None of htem hard doors, and from what little light could reach down them, each looked like the other.
"Why do I feel we have been given center stage in some awful show, Benny?!"
He said nothing, making just a hushed grunt.
"Whatever your embassy does, whatever they pay you, Marie, I think you should be asking yourself if this is the battlefield you are ready to die on?"
It really wasn't.
"How about..."
The mere act of repressing the urge to say "leaving" was an excersize in restraint.
"How about we look down one of these, and assume the rest are no different??"
Benny made a quick grunt in agreement, though even from just that one sound, it was clear he felt no love for the idea. With the lamp held straight out from his face, almost as if to trick any attackers into striking the lamp before him, he moved forward at a snail's pace.
"Do you think Erik was brought down here? That they did this to him?" he asked, voice a mix of frayed nerves and suppressed anger at whoever had been running this horrifying place.
"I mean, maybe he had to..."
"No."
The very direct answer made Benny stop what was slowly becoming a nervous ramble. He gave a quick glance, his eyes asking more questions than his mouth perhaps even could.
"No, Benny, I think that something insane went on in here, and that insanity broke out. Erik was infected long after that, by whatever managed to escape."
No farther down the offshoot corridor than the main room was still visible, light already caught new features along the walls. Iron bars, set just a bit inside the walls along the hallway's side. At first, they looked like jail cells.
"Was this a prison? Did the Nazis house prisoners down here?"
It was impossible to tell from his voice, but logic would dictate that he did not expect an answer to that question. He was moving the lamp about, haphazardly and fast, making the shadows of iron bars race across the walls deeper behind them like fleeing shapes.
"Wait, stop!"
Benny reacted instantly, stopping in his track. The lamp dangled from the sudden halt, the shadows now dancing like drunken sailors. Inside the cells, amongst the bars, here and there a shape could be seen. Not one of them moved, but they were clearly not part of the architecture.
"Another corpse?" asked Benny, trying his best to peer through the moving shadows and still somewhat persistent darkness.
"Maybe..."
It wasn't much of an answer, but it was hard to see. The figure looked human, but dried out, very few features of a living human left to see. It made the body look twisted, deformed. But the question was how much of the deformity was just from that.
"Shit!"
The outburst wasn't very loud, but it was sudden enough to spook Benny. He stepped aside, the lamp again beginning to swing wildly!
"What? What, Marie, what?!"
"Fur. It has fur!"
"Shit!" Benny hissed, now agreeing with the outburst. "Werewolves. I damned well knew it!"
The place suddenly felt different, wrong, as if something sinister had been awakened. Nothing had changed, though. The lamp still illuminated the same naked walls, the silence still permeated the place. All that had changed was knowing what the place was, knowing it now for certain!
"We need to leave, Marie. I don't like this place."
"I never liked it, Benny."
It was perhaps not the best response, not a comfort to the man who clearly worried about more than just himself. Even with a calm and emotionless tone, it sounded callous, even maybe harsh. But Benny said nothing. His breath was quicker, leaving a soft echo between the metal bars and naked walls, and that told plenty. But he never said a word of complaint.
"We look at whatever room comes beyond these cages, and then we leave, how about that?"
"Yeah..." Benny replied, it sounding more like a kneejerk response, a sound leaving his mouth out of habit, than a conscious agreement.
Walking on seemed more and more like a wasteland trek. The cages stretched on seemingly forever, even if that forever was, in reality, only a few minutes. Here and there, shapes could be made out in the dark, but they never looked like real beings, not even real corpses. However long they had been there, starving to death, it had wrecked them to the point that they were hard to recognize as anything but vaguely humanoid shapes, and some not even that. When the trek finally ended, it felt like discovering a new shore.
"Who would do this, Marie?" Benny asked in an increasingly uneasy voice. "I mean, yeah, Nazis would experiment on people, especially when all began to seem lost to them, I'm not blind to that. But this..." He waved the lamp around gently while walking slowly. "This is something else. This is too big, too outrageous. Had they done this, they would have used it in the war, somehow."
There was a logic to it. The place was huge, especially considering this was just one corridor out of eight that left the central room. It all had the fingerprints of late-war Nazi desperation, and yet it seemed to be something entirely onto itself.
"Also," he suddenly added, sounding even surprised, himself, "where is everyone? Yes, some corpses, and yes, we had some of these monsters roaming free, perhaps even a few still, or those they infected..." His voice dropped at the last few words, his mind no doubt drifting to his brother. "But, I mean, all those cages? All this room? There should be more. Right?"
It seemed best to not answer. The answer would agree too much and unsettle him even more. As luck, or whatever it counted as in the given situation, would have it, the corridor ended. All that lay ahead was a large, badly broken door. Wood with iron fittings. A heavy door, ripped apart on its hinges.
It creaked open, the iron edges holding the torn wooden mass together, but only just. Behind it was a large, open room, ceiling high enough that the light from the lamp didn't reach it.
"Benny, open the lamp."
The thin torch from the wall inside the room easily lit up on contact with the flame inside the small oil lamp. The wood in the torch was dry enough that a careless move could have set the entire thing on fire, but with care, it burned safely. And that torch could light the next, and onward. Quite quickly, the light in the room became bright enough to drown out the small lamp.
"Marie... What the hell is this place?"
It was a good question. Pillars of carefully cut stone had somehow been assembled in the room to hold up the high ceiling, the room wide enough to perhaps not support the roof on its own. Row upon row of heavy wooden benches now knocked about and fairly broken, were clearly meant to be arranged to face a raised section of floor up ahead. It looked like a community theater. Or a church.
"How many were in here?" he whispered, this time clearly just to himself.
"Never mind that, Benny. I would like to know something else."
Looking a bit foolish now, with torches lit along the wall, Benny turned and held the still lit oil lamp ahead of him to, in his mind, see clearly.
"What is that?"
There were banners at the end of the room, banners embrasing the raised floor like a proud parent showing off a small child to the world. They were torn, badly, but only the lower parts. Under the high ceiling, their upper parts were out of reach to most, be it human or monster. And at least one human or monster sat motionless, dead, against the wall between them.
"This is a Nazi bunker, right?"
Benny nodded, saying nothing.
"So where are the swastikas?"
It took a second for Benny's face to stop being contorted in powerful confusion. He still looked baffled, though.
"But... the uniforms outside?"
"No, I thought so, too. But those are not swastikas. No sharply angled arms. A swastika is a tilted square. I mean, its overall shape is."
"Yes, your point be..."
It dawned on him when he looked at the banners. They were of the infamously Nazi sort, heavy tapestries in bright, bloody red. And at the middle, the symbol. But not the regular Nazi swastika. Close, but not exact. It was round, a circle swastika.
"What is this place, Marie?"
"Bad."
That was all the answer he needed.