Hybrid Fiction, Issue 2

THE BLOOD PLAGUE OF PRAGUE

By Andrea Kriz The tank’s been impaled I see as I step up on its hull. Spikes twist above me, their blackness tinged crimson by the dying sun. They pierced clean through the thickest part of the armor— armor I’ve seen stopping artillery shells, rockets—these things. They forest the entire square.

Worming over a bicycle here, upending a telegraph pole there. Across the cobblestones, a tram ripped free of its wires teeters on its side. Through its creaking, a slow drip. More of the sludge, half-hardened, flows down its seats and through its doors.

“A survivor of the plague,” Doctor Engel explains beneath me. “His body’s reaction—was disturbing to say the least.”

My reflection stares back at me from the nearest spine. Skin nicked by razor, the hooded eyes of a man kept awake a week straight. By orders that came for me just as I’d finished my last assignment in the wastes of the Russian front. A dossier that contained only a few cryptic sentences and a ticket to Prague. The entourage met my train at an outskirts station. Drove me up to a fortified Castle overlooking the city and refused to let me leave my quarters until today.

The last time I saw Doctor Engel, I was on the verge of death. I can’t say I’m delighted to meet him again, especially under these circumstances. But beneath its bandages, my right arm twitches of its own accord. It reaches toward the sludge.

“Don’t touch it!” Engel says a bit too late.

I tear off my glove, hurling it away. The muck eats away the leather like acid. I suddenly notice a total absence of life in the vicinity. It’s summer. But no birds sing in the leafless trees.

Only the knot of soldiers assigned to us whisper, shifting their rifles uneasily.

“This is all blood?” I ask. “From one survivor?”

Engel shakes his head. I peer down the turret and as my eyes adjust to the dimness, make out a splattered pair of goggles, the green-grey shreds of a Wehrmacht uniform. This spike didn’t erupt from beneath the tank—but from within.

“These were our soldiers,” Engel says. “And the civilians too.”  A case of hemokinesis. I’ve fought those with the power, of course. It’s an ability that often arises in those of degenerate blood. To the extent that the SS dedicated an entire security division to their disposal in the occupied territories. Hence, my presence here. My services have been in high demand since the invasion of Poland, the start of the war, a few years ago. Much to the chagrin of my parents—hunters trained in the old ways who turned up their noses at working with the Nazis—I quickly rose through their ranks. There was no work left for me in the Black Forest after all. Our ancestors had all but purged that region of beasts. Only leaving a few tribes deep in the wood for us new generations to hone our skills on. Those savages usually Hybrid Fiction March 2020