Jaeger: Act II Podcast (Geist)

(I finally got this into podcast form.

It's what I've written so far for the Second Act of Jaeger.

It's lengthy, but that's what it is.

Listen if you get the time.

Graphic.

Dark.

A bit loud at places.

Music from Nine Inch Nails and the game Call of Duty.

Enjoy.

-Geist)

JAEGER
Act II
Decay

--

The mists, one of the few constants in Berlin, always first rolled over the grass that sprouted about the bomb craters in the earth, containing twisted steel that lay covered in moss, layered in dew. Then it would cross the bridge, dip into the river, and unhesitatingly creep through the broken city streets- passed through routes the humans dare not tread, saw sights no eyes could bear to see- until it fanned out to meet the rising of the sun over the tower of concrete sitting in the middle of the old city zoo, sans zoo-life. Not the metaphorical one; not the houses upon houses of discarded ambition and cruel desire covered in the dust, a thin brown veil of humiliation, a reminder that even Mother Earth wants you dead. That image had become imprinted in the minds of the civilians as a social norm, what all the cities of the time were to look like, the current trend. A city without bomb shells and hospitals flooded with dead and the rugged scars of war? Blasphemy, they said. Not a thing like it in Europe. And they were probably right.

But what even the invincible mists could never conquer as they dissipated amongst the gnarled and forgotten trees and twisted and rusty animal cages, the single object that stood above the walls of mediocrity that fell around it and preserved some primitive form of the interaction that fell with them, was the fortress tower der Flakturm, or, as the Berliners called it, something they should’ve had in Dresden. Standing higher than even the Reichstag, an entire order was embodied in its construction: practical, mechanical, scientific, efficient, it was made for the sole purpose of surviving just such a calamity as this end of an empire, of preserving the culture- no matter the cost in society.

Marie stopped for a moment in the swirling saturated air around her and her daughter and looked up into the rising sun as it was obscured by this monstrosity, plumes of smoke rising from it’s more recent wounds, men and women hurriedly finishing up the early morning work high above the ground on wooden walkways connecting various doors and windows before the Americans began their daily routine. The pebbles and broken bits of walls, still darkened from the last night’s downpour, trembled around her feet in the fog. Crisscrossing subways ran to and fro underneath the debris that used to be a place of joy and laughter, accompanied by the growl of hidden factories pumping forth what few weapons and little ammunition they could cobble together in the bleak light provided underground, accompanied aboveground by the clanging clockwork of laborers trying to rebuild all that they had lost, for lack of anything better to do. Even at their worst, and even if you couldn’t see it, the residents of cities were always doing something.

She kept on walking, slowly picking her way through broken tree trunks and concrete blocks tossed miles from their source while pushing away the mists, Ingrid trailing not far behind. Dust scratched down her throat, propaganda leaflets curled and danced in between the grasping reach of the park’s few remaining plants.

There was a quick shift in the shadow, a twist in the fog. Marie’s eyes darted to it, her legs shifted back to guard her offspring. A twig snapped under the silhouette’s step. There was an exchange of words.

Who are you?

We’re only passing through.

I’ll ask it once more, who are you?

Germans.

I know that.

Refugees.

That’s better.

Are the students in the flak tower?

Yes.

Can we get in?

Maybe.

I’m one’s mother.

And I’m their headmaster.

The two outlines in the dust stared at each other through the flowing smoke and choking soot. Marie noticed the other had a weapon drawn. She rushed to think of something, her mouth repeating the same few phrases over and over while she raked her mind, “I’m one’s mother, I’m the mother of a student, please, just let me in.”

Her desperation seemed to get through. The figure lowered its gun and materialized in front of her as it approached. On his body she saw the gray-green uniform of a Wehrmacht man. On his head was a steel helmet with familiar streaks, familiar scars where the paint was surgically removed via projectile. On his face was the same look she had seen when he had barged into her home, of seriousness, of intense concentration and of past grievances and of ghosts of dead men that flitted about in the space between his skull and his face. He turned his eyes to Ingrid, who clung to her mother’s skirt, scared of the sullen, gun-toting man who stood in the shadow of the concrete leviathan ahead, then back to Marie.

“Hallo, frauline,” he muttered.

The earth trembled and the city shuddered and seemed ready to collapse in on itself, the sound of an explosion following the commotion. The air raid and artillery alarms began to pitch and wail. Workers on the rafters high above ground gathered up their tools, clung to the ropes holding them to the supports of the beast, and hurried to the hidey-holes on various parts of the structure. Most got in. A stray bomb sent one of the wooden footways hurtling to the misty abyss below, some unfortunate souls tied by rope to the supports, their own safety devices choking them to death, their kicking and squirming bodies slowly revolving hundreds of meters above the earth.

The soldier grabbed the two females by the arms of their dresses and began to pull them at a dash.

“We have to get inside before sunrise.”

Another quake, another reverberating blast and a squeal of metal crashing and melting into metal. Marie noticed the sun peeking over the horizon and tried to run harder despite her lack of footwear.

The three made their way through the trees, over the blank landscape, through the bushes that were barely brambles let alone bushes, up to the massive metal doors of the fortress, and, when the monster opened its jaws, the man shoved them both into the shadow and, following them, stemmed the single piercing flow of sunlight into the void with a smash.

--

There was a sound as if the fabric of reality was being torn in two with a jack-knife.

“Shit. Shit!”

“Keep calm. Keep feeding. I’m working the trigger as much as I can here.”

Then another sound, an auditory assault of what seemed like a million men crying out for just a shred of this reality.

“They’re still coming. Gott im Himmel, there’s thousands. So many. Shit.”

Gunner squeezed the trigger of the MG-42, then the ripping sound again. More cries. That’s how it went.

Of course, he didn’t actually hear the screams. The piano chords muted them out.

“Don’t panic. We can’t panic.” It was the third time he had said that today.

There was 1200 rounds per minute spewing out of the flames of his machine gun, Gunner thought. That meant 10 rounds per beat for The Four Seasons Winter Suite at 120 beats per minute: fast, but not so much as to become overwhelming. Just gracefully agile. Beautiful. His mind wandered along the keys of his piano while his eyes watched as he let loose another burst of fire across the bloody river.

Bullets kept the ammunition coming, leading the belts of bullets to their final resting place, located somewhere between a man’s jugular and his pelvis.

“Hey, reload coming up.” Gunner signaled to Bullets to prepare another belt of 7.62x5.56mm machine gun rounds. He did so hurriedly, sweat rolling over his darting eyes and shaking mouth.

“Oh, shit, shit man, shit.”

The two crouched together in a wet and muddy hole on a river bank on the Seelow line, barely settled in before the attack began. The Russian infantry came wave after wave, blasting through the underbrush and crushing entire squads of men under its weight, then, being pinned by the machine guns, was quickly countered by encircling German riflemen. Neither side had made any significant advances that day.

By the time the halftrack arrived the other night, the defending troops had lost the far side of the river, which was crowded with meek, leafy trees, making targets easy to spot and easier to hit due to the lack of sustainable cover. Both sides left massive amounts of dead there, the Soviet medics (because German soldiers were all the medics the Wehrmacht needed) not even bothering to remove the bodies from the firing lines. Chewed corpses lay rotting in the morning mists, their blood coagulating among the puddles and mud, their darkened forms amongst the leaves mistaken for cowering troops. The meat was scarcely left on their bones for more than a couple of hours.

“Be quiet,” Gunner whispered. Bullets had started whining and it was offsetting the cellos.

A stray round smacked into the exposed dirt of the trench and kicked it into Bullets’s face. The boy recoiled with a yelp. Gunner fired again as he fell on his ass and stuffed himself as hard as he could into the far wall of dirt.

“Shut up,” Gunner said. More sound. Interruptions. Make them stop. Shut up. Shut up.

A grenade flew up into the air from the opposite side of the river, detonating mid-throw, the water of the river below it compressing as the force of the little explosive sent tiny bits of jagged metal zinging in any conceivable direction. Bullets shrieked and rolled over onto his stomach, yelling to make the bullets, his bullets, stop coming, to make his grenades stop flying, to make his war stop killing. He was done. Over. He wanted out. Out, like a kid at blackjack. But the war never stopped betting. It was the dealer of the cards, of the bullets, of the grenades, of the killing.

And it always won the hand.

“Make it stop!”

“Shut up.” One of the audience members wouldn’t stop talking.

“I don’t want to die! I want to live.”

“Be quiet, stop talking, Bullets.” The orchestra had lost its place, the conductor was furious, Gunner stopped shooting across the river. He stood up from his seat at the grand piano and let his gun fall into the mud of the trench.

“I want to live, I want to live, live, I’m too young.”

“Bullets, shut the, fuck, up!” He leaped from the stage and walked down the narrow theater walkway and down the messy trench.

“Make it fucking stop! Too young, live, shit. Oh, shit!” The audience member’s eyes grew wider, Bullets’s mouth opened and let forth a scream.

Another grenade exploded, closer. A mortar round plopped into river, spraying water into the air and raining more pleasant miseries on the soldiers.

Gunner was on Bullets now, his strong piano hands curled around his pathetic little throat.

“Shut up! If you’d shut up, maybe they’d stop shooting and you could live and be young and not die and whatever you fucking want if you’d just shut the FUCK up!”

And then it was very quiet in the audience of the beautiful playing hall and in the muddy trench near the river on the Seelow line.

The mad conductor driving the orchestra came over to Gunner the piano player and Joseph scampered through the rotting leaves and dead trees to Gunner the soldier. Both leaders looked down at the audience member.

“Uh,” Joseph grunted. He saw Gunner standing over Bullets, hands gently holding the boy’s shoulders so that his limp body would stay up, and the bullet hole through Bullets’s steel helmet, and the little trickle of red running down it, and the splatter of blood across Gunner’s stunned face as it turned to him and whispered,

“He didn’t shut up.”

Across the fading mists, the silhouettes of medics bringing the dead away could be seen, and the flashes of the last rifles of the morning, and the sole figure of an instrument player for some army, lost amongst the rabble, searching for a gun or a drum, he cared not which.

--

Darkness.

That was all she could see. Black, empty, cold darkness.

She could feel Ingrid on her left, silent, amazed at the pure abyss of it all.

There was a shuffle to her right. Then the striking of a match.

Suddenly, the darkness turned to light, the black into gray, and the empty void was filled with blank concrete and the form of the school headmaster in Wehrmacht uniform. He took an oil lamp down from the Flak Tower’s wall, lit it, and dropped the match to the cold, gray floor.

“Follow me.”

He held up the lamp, revealing the inner sanctuary of the German people.

Stacks upon stacks of ammunition for anti-air guns crowded the bottom floor, men and women and children in ragged, sweat-saturated clothes hurriedly carrying them one by one like worker ants scurrying to appease the queen. Straining to lift their loads, they waddled towards noisy and rusted conveyor belts that led to the roof, stopping only to listen to the pounding explosions above and watch as the bits of ceiling clattered on the stacked shells.

There was a concrete spiral staircase in the corner of the massive factory. The headmaster pointed to it.

“The students are in the barracks, third level.” He sniffed and wiped his nose and scraggly, unkempt mustache with a dirty sleeve. Marie noticed he was incredibly daunting in the flickering of the lamp.

She hesitated for a moment in observation, then turned and started towards the path upwards with Ingrid by her side. She rounded on the man when he did not follow. “Aren’t you coming?” She sounded scared- she knew she was, too, just as much as her daughter.

“No.” He showed them the blood-stained and shrapnel-shorn back of his uniform and began walking away. “I have better things to do.” He turned out his oil lamp with a hiss and was swallowed whole by the darkness.

Marie stood at the bottom of the staircase, little spears of light from cracks in the walls and ceiling shining on the silver steps ahead of her, lost in a world of humanity’s own creation. A little concrete purgatory, the place where the fate of their people would be decided. Hell’s gates or the lowest levels of the inferno? No one knew.

“What an awful headmaster,” she remarked.

“Where’s Gretchen, mama?” Ingrid’s chattering teeth could be heard between her words. “I want to go somewhere else.”

“Come on, she’s up, up.” They held hands and slowly ascended into the abyss.

The stairs were crooked, uneven, too wide at some places and other places not large enough for an entire foot. Someone made this in a hurry. Marie continued on.

Something skittered across the floor at the touch of her toes. She drew back in surprise as the form of a boy grabbed at the syringe before it stopped moving.

“Mine,” it croaked.

His eyes glittered with tears underneath the misshapen and worn blue Hitler Youth cap. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up all the way to his shoulders. A strip of fabric was tied securely around his pale and pulsing elbow.

“Morphine mine.”

Marie pushed Ingrid to her other side and kept walking.

They came to the second level. Rows upon rows of graying and moldy bunk beds crowded the open floor. Boys and men and old ladies curled amongst the few blankets. There didn’t even seem to be that many mattresses. The majority simply sat, sagging into the wire holdings of the bottom bunks, listening to the crumbling and wheezing and death.

One boy stood out in particular, wrapped in a tattered but official school uniform, nose in a book. So high was his upturned collar that one could barely pick out the brown eyes, freckled face, and dirty blonde hair that made him stand out from the others. Marie noticed him from the last time she had seen Gretchen at the boarding school and moved to speak with him.

“Leiben.”

His head popped up. “Hm?” He stood at attention when he recognized Marie. What a gentleman. “Frauline.”

“No need. Sit back down.” She looked at his text. “Studying English?”

“Russian.” His voice seemed distracted as he sat, as if he would rather be doing something, anything, other than this. “Only optimists learn English.” He grinned. “Frauline.”

Berliner humor again. “Of course.” The next set of stairs was across the room. “You know where Gretchen is on the third floor?”

Leiben’s face darkened. “She’s up there.”

“Where?”

“Wherever she wants to be.” He sat down and snuggled back into his Russian studies.

A shift in her hips, a change in her tone. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it means.”

“So you don’t know?”

“She’s on the third floor, I know that.”

“I know that, too, I just want some help narrowing-”

“What?” He threw the book on the floor and jerked his eyes to hers. His neck tensed and the red lines leading to his pupils finally showed themselves. He was on his feet again. “What the fuck do you want from me?” His bloodshot gaze was so fixed on Marie that he almost didn’t acknowledge Ingrid, again using her mother as a human shield. He backed down when he did. “Sorry.” He was quiet. He bowed his head when he started to cry. “I’m so sorry.”

Before he could raise his eyes, Marie had already walked away.

--

Not good, not good, this is not good, Joseph thought, one hand loosely grasping his steel helmet while the other parsed through his sweaty blond hair, spiking randomly into the air like a tree burst. He paced back and forth in front of the halftrack, his mind sweeping back and forth for a solution, in a clearing surrounded by some broken, some burning, some blissfully untouched trees about half a mile from the river. Both sides had begun to regroup after the firing had stopped. That meant accounting for the dead. That meant rationalizing their demise and analyzing how their loss would affect the squad’s efficiency. That meant scrutinizing the process in which the chances of living failed them so that they took a bullet to the head and how you can avoid doing the same, because, hey, as a German soldier, all that was part of your duty, Joseph reminded himself. You weren’t expected to be human and forget about it and push it to the back of your subconscious so that it would only disturb you when you dreamt or got very old and life became a dream. No, that was beyond them. Everything was mechanical, efficient, perfect in nearly every way. Nearly.

Except, of course, something had to be suppressed only to return to the head late at night or late in life. It varied from soldier to soldier. Many people suppressed their memories, some, their loved ones. Sometimes soldiers ended up forgetting their name, where they came from, where they were, their minds decaying from the corrosive gases let off by the thousands of tons of munitions belched out of mouths of the guns, the mortars, the tank barrels every day. For Joseph, he believed that he had tossed his ability to love, for lack of the pesky emotion in his everyday life. Smoker, wise as he was, threw away his ability to relate, to understand other humans. Thankfully, they were all animals here, so it didn’t really matter.

Bullets, fortunately, had been too young to realize that you had to give up a bit to join the German military. Now, Joseph smiled, he wouldn’t be realizing too much, except maybe that the glorious afterlife his propaganda minister had slipped into his ear in a cramped auditorium cluttered with cement fragments wasn’t really there. Just that gray nothingness, the draining of color from life as your eyes dull and the pain trickles away and your heart hits the brakes and you die. A shame, Joseph mused. He shoved the thought to the back of his conscience for later inspection.

For Gunner, though, in exchange for automatonification, he lost something irreplaceable. He could barely function, let alone fight. Somewhere between the recruiting station in downtown Berlin and the dirty little hole he called his trench on the Seelow line, the poor kid must’ve dumped out his soul.

With Bullets’s death, Gunner had finally gone into his shell, or something like that. The kid wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat his rations, wouldn’t respond to any stimuli whatsoever. He had simply plopped himself down in front of an opened box on the side of the clearing filled with ammo belts, rusting in the humid air, and stared straight ahead at the dying world in front of him with his fingers mindlessly flitting back and forth across the air as if playing that instrument, what did you call it, Joseph snapped with his free hand as he pushed along his chugging train of thought, a piano.

Poor boy. Certainly wasn’t his week. First a nosebleed, then this? Joseph chuckled at himself. Had he just thought of having a nosebleed as comparable to a human friend’s death? How scary war was, indeed.

No.

Stop.

Focus.

Joseph stopped pacing for a moment, took a deep breath, and reminded himself of what was important. Nothing but war. Nothing but death. Nothing but reality. He closed his eyes, then opened them, then started to pace again, but just ended up sitting on one of the other ammo boxes littered around the clearing.

This was proving to be a problem. The boy simply wouldn’t break. His ambition had been extinguished, the will to continue was gone. He was as good as another dead body. Hell, if a Waffens SS guy was around, he would be, unless he found himself swimming around in that soup of a brain he had.

Maybe that was the best idea, Joseph thought as he glanced towards his living issue. Just shoot the kid, then it would be over with. No problems, no paperwork. Hm. Joseph’s thumb started to toy with the safety of the pistol he had strapped to his hip.

Do it, they whispered, again and again, each of the three shades materializing around him, their voices like a scratched and shattered record, all separate, all at once.

Do it.

Do it.

End it.

Finish it.

Do it.

“Problem?” Smoker had slipped into the clearing unnoticed, his whisper making Joseph drop the helmet he held in his opposite hand in surprise.

“Christ, you’re quiet.”

“I can be what I want to when I need to.”

“Hmph.” Joseph slowly flicked the bits of mud and grass off his headgear as he wondered what the old man would think of his idea.

“Kid braindead?” Smoker asked. The wisps of grey from his pipe were barely visible among the plumes of black emerging from the fires started near the river by incendiary rounds and the Russian Sapery squads with their flamethrowers.

“Unfortunately,” Joseph admitted. He began to analyze again. “He’s our only machine gunner. Without him, we have no base of fire, no suppressive volleys. We’re losing an entire chapter in the infantry tactics manual.”

Smoker chuckled. “You speak as if we’re the only Germans here.” His arm swept towards the direction of the Field Headquarters among the trees the squad had found that night as the halftrack slowly made its way through the treacherous worn roads. “If you want more men, ask der Unteroffizer.”

Joseph bit his lower lip and looked towards the distant place indicated, then back to Gunner. He sighed. “If they have any, of course.” His hand shied away from his pistol, and he began trudging towards the rows of trunks.

His eyes, though, remained on the broken boy sitting on the ammo box. What went through a crazy man’s mind when his soul is shattered and gone? What do you remember when your memories are burned away? Could you really be called a human being after being through hell like the death of a friend? Joseph wanted to know for when it happened to him.

Smoker shouted something about Stalin’s Organs and a rocket barrage as a piercing squeal quickly tore the silence away. The two ran faster into the forest as the fiery specks rose into the darkened sky and left the clearing with the halftrack and the twisted, burning trees, and Gunner, playing his imaginary piano.