NULL WAFFE

By Desmond Reddick

Black Forest, Germany

The two men moved steadily through the thickly wooded hillside. Both clad in white, they would be invisible from above, which was the reasoning for going in on foot. A heli-drop would have been much quicker, but there was fear of the radar station connected to the bunker in the mountain activating what lay beneath.

“You a Jools Holalnd fan?” Micromax asked, trying to break the silence. He’d been humming the tunes playing in his headset since they began their journey.

Omerta, his partner, remained silent.

“Right, Squeeze is a favorite of mine, but there’s no denying they went to shite without him. Guy’s a prodigy on the ivories, y’know?”

They cleared the forested hillside and stepped out into the open air near the peak. From where they stood, they could clearly see the meteorological station and the weather radar jutting out of the earth beside it.

Feldberg Mountain, the highest in Germany next to the Swiss Alps, had been used to measure weather for a century, but an observatory had been built there along with a radar tower in the years leading up to the Second World War.

The German government had asked the U.N. to step in and investigate rumors of a Nazi technology lab built inside the mountain at the same time, hence the reason why these two were here. An Italian martial arts monk and a British DJ turned superhero were Germany’s last hope in defending themselves from a mountain. Or so Micromax’s bored imagination would believe.

He wondered how much more bored their colleague was talking to librarians and felt a little bit better.

Omerta took off in a slow crouched prance toward the station on the snow-covered peak. Micromax turned off his music and followed closely.

For several minutes, all the two could hear was the crunching of their footsteps on icy snow. Then Omerta stopped. He spread his legs wide and crouched lower to the ground than most other could pull off in that stance. Holding a hand palm downward at a crack in the icy floor of the mountain, he looked at his partner.

Though the lower half of his face was covered by a black kerchief, his eyes implored and quietly Micromax could hear a single word in his head:  Here.

Micromax held his hand above the crack before continuing.

“I don’t feel a thing, but yer the dog’s bollocks in that aspect, so let’s take a looksy.”

Micromax grew to twenty feet and his hands grew even larger in proportion. They flattened quite widely and he set himself to digging. He wrenched chunks of icy dirt out of the ground until his hands hit steel two feet down.

Finishing squaring off his dig, he ran his massive flat fingers around the outer edge of what appeared to be a plain steel cap bolted to a steel frame set in the surrounding ground. He dug his fingers underneath the outer edge of the cap and wrenched it out of the frame.

The screaming metal and bolts popping filled the air.

They had unearthed a hole in the ground. It was dark and appeared to be deep.

Omerta looked up at his giant partner and gestured for him to go first. Micromax shrunk down to two feet tall, cracked a glow stick and leaped in. He bounded off of opposite walls a dozen or so times before landing solidly on his feet.

Seeing that Micromax did not fall too far and hit the ground safely, Omerta leaped down landing gingerly in a tripod squat. Two legs spread back and outward, and his right hand kept him off the ground while his left hand held a glow stick that he cracked on the way down.

The hallway was flat and long. The drop was only far enough to create a good ceiling of earth above them as they walked toward whatever it was at the centre of the mountain. The ground was paved smoothly but the walls were hardened dirt. The low ceiling was also dirt but had insulated wires running along them. Lamps hung at intervals but there was no visible switch or any indication they would even turn on if the men found the switch.

At the end of the hall was a steel door. Omerta got closer. When he was inches away, he raised the glow stick to words painted on the door and looked back at Micromax:

“Weapon Zero,” Micromax said. “What in bloody Hell is that?”

Berlin

“And what is in there, doctor?” Vormund asked.

“You ask again, as if I know, Herr Vormund. And, again, I do not,” the archivist said as he walked back around his desk to take a seat in the large and comfortable chair. He would have looked a much younger man but the white shock of perfectly coiffed hair on top of his head betrayed his age.

Vormund, formerly Hauptmann Deutschland scanned the walls of the man’s office. The darkly stained wooden walls contrasted sharply with the off-white framed diplomas from prestigious universities around the world. Nearest to the door, the diplomas stopped and several black and white framed photos lined the wall.

The hero – bearing the national colors red, yellow and black – paid close attention to a picture of a little boy and an old man. The ear shape and heavily pointed chin on the child told Vormund right away that the child grew up to be the man behind the desk. It was the older man in the picture that scratched at the hero’s memory.

“Whatever it is, I am sure that it remains as it was when it was abandoned after the war,” he assured his country’s champion.

“And you’ve never been out there?” Vormund asked.

“This is no Hollywood film, Vormund. I am kept far too busy as archivist here to go gallivanting on adventures in the Black Forest.”

Vormund ignored the dig at his friends.

“You’ll excuse my forthright nature, sir. My friends have gone out there and as mission leader, I’m a little concerned about them.”

“I have a doctorate in history, not a crystal ball.”

Vormund grunted to acknowledge that he’d heard the archivist and turned back to the picture. The older man standing beside the boy wore a lapel pin that was both turned to the side and partially obscured by the boy’s body.

“Ah,” the archivist noticed Vormund’s interest. “My father.”

“What did you say your name was, again?” Vormund asked as he realized the lapel pin was the circular red and white Nazi party pin with the obscured black swastika.

“Volker. Andreas Volker,” the archivist answered.

Vormund lost his balance for a second and fell forward into the wall, knocking the picture off. The glass from the frame shattered at his feet as he held himself up with his hands. The world swam in his head, feeling as though the room was spinning on a crooked axis. The young archivist and his Nazi father peered up through broken glass, smiling at him in black and white.

“My father was Berthold Volker. You and your kind knew him as one third of Agent Axis.”

Vormund collapsed to his knees, a heavy fluttering rung in his head and forced his eyes shut. The stench of sulphur filled the room, seemingly replacing the oxygen in the air. As he gasped, he rolled onto his back.

“Science dictated my father`s life. I can tell you there is no item of supernatural significance in that area of the world left over from the war.”

The historian chuckled.

“Because,” he whispered, “I have them all.”

Vormund wretched, then rolled over and vomited on the hardwood floor. Shaking, he tried to regain control of his body, but he felt as though his elbows and knees were lubricated joints with no hold. He lay on his side wishing that the historian would punch him or kick him. Anything but magic.

“But, technologically speaking, my father would have loved to see what your friends are up against out there. Let’s just say that they have worse odds than you do of making it out alive.”

Vormund tried to respond but only screamed as the darkness moved in around him.

“My name now,” Volker said, “is Götterdämmerung. And I am your end.

Black Forest

Micromax never expected an answer from his silent Italian friend. Why the United Nations would saddle a man so used to being bombarded with noise with a man who has sworn not to talk, was beyond him. Regardless, only seconds would pass after his question when both men received the answer.

TANG!

A fist-sized indentation popped out at the two superheroes in the dark hallway.

“Stone the fuckin’ crows,” he mumbled. Micromax touched the comm. pad on the outside of his goggles, opening a direct line to his superior officer.

TANG!

“We’re…ehm…going ta need a little help here, mate. Things have all gone a bit Pete Tong.”

K-TONG!

On the third hit, the door exploded outward, knocking Micromax down the hallway, sliding underneath the heavy steel door. Omerta, having side-stepped the door, dropped into a fighting stance. But what came out of the door was not a man but a wall of fire.

Fireballs shot out and carried on down the hall to the outer door. At least Omerta thought they were fireballs. Then one grabbed him by the front of his gi. They hurtled toward daylight.

Omerta noticed that the hand that grabbed him, once on fire, now appeared mechanical. He struggled, punched and kicked at human pressure points and joints to no avail. As the android carrying him exited the mountainside entrance, it arced into the air like the others before it, coloring the sky with ribbons of fire.

Micromax pushed the steel door off of his body as the last of the flaming robots passed over him. He got to his feet and immediately grew to thirty feet tall, pushing the barriers he’d previously been able to achieve.

Heavy slabs of frozen dirt cracked and fell from Micromax’s head and shoulders as he grew right through what used to be the ceiling of the underground hallway. He tapped the side of his cowl to turn some tunes back on to keep him focused. “Striking Matches” by Squeeze started playing in his headset as he looked at the robots swooping through the air lit up like human-shaped torches.

“Hello, my lovelies. Where have I seen your kind before?”

LIBERTY NOTES: I know what you’re thinking. “After all that, the son of a bitch ends on a clifhanger? I could take all the teases before because things ended relatively definitively, but this is friggin’ ridiculous!” Don’t worry, it won’t be too long until all of these stories collide in the webpages of Liberty Legion as Jim Hammond, the Original Human Torch joins the fray. Things are only just beginning.