The Fist of God

By M.E. Brines

What if the Second World War wasn't just the largest war in history, but a supernatural struggle between spiritual entities?

It’s 1940 and the fires of war have set Europe ablaze, but America remains blissfully neutral. To please his parents, skeptical Stuart Mackenzie studies to become a minister. He has about as much concern for the outcome of the war as he does for South American sports scores. But his idealistic brother, a former bootlegger with ties to the Purple Gang, volunteers for the Royal Air Force. And when his Hurricane is shot down, Stuart abandons his studies to seek bloodthirsty revenge.

But what he discovers unravels his worldview. Can a confirmed skeptic defeat a coven of Nazi sorcerers on their home ground? What chance will the mundane weapons of the Allied powers have against ancient magic and an artifact said to have slain the very Son of God?

The Fist of God includes the novella The Spear of Destiny, extended to include Stuart's origin and destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.E. Brines
• Release date: May 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476214559

M.E. Brines

M.E. Brines spent the Cold War assembling atomic artillery shells and preparing to unleash the Apocalypse (and has a medal to prove it.) But when peace broke out, he turned his fevered, paranoid imagination to other pursuits. He spends his spare time scribbling another steampunk romance occult adventure novel, which despite certain rumors absolutely DOES NOT involve time-traveling Nazi vampires! A former member of the British Society for Psychical Research, he is the author of three dozen books, e-books, chapbooks and pamphlets on esoteric subjects such as alien abduction, alien hybrids, astrology, the Bible, biblical prophecy, Christian discipleship, conspiracies, esoteric Nazism, the Falun Gong, Knights Templar, magick, and UFOs, his work has also appeared in Challenge magazine, Weird Tales, The Outer Darkness, Tales of the Talisman, and Empirical magazine.

Book preview

Introduction

July 4, 1942 - 0530 Hours

The candle of my life had burned low, and it was only a matter of time before representatives of the state snuffed me out.

Not that I’d actually been sentenced to death. No, technically a death sentence requires an actual trial, which I hadn’t had. After being interrogated within an inch of my life they’d shipped me here to die. I knew too much, too many secrets. Secrets the Reichsfuhrer and his black-robed SS Knights of the Round Table didn’t want known - mystical secrets that would decide the course of the Second World War and the fate of civilization.

But I wasn’t dead. Not yet.

As the first scratchy notes of the recorded reveille blasted out of the speakers I rolled out of my bunk. After a quick trip to the latrine I splashed some water on my hands and face and hurried on my way. It wouldn’t do to be late for roll call. I smiled as I took my place in the ranks. This was going to be the best Fourth of July ever, even if I was the only American present to celebrate. There were people here from all over the world: Frenchmen, Poles, Danes, Germans, Russians, Czechs and Spaniards, even one guy I was sure must be Chinese. But English speakers were rather scarce.

They called us to attention and began to call the roll. As I waited for my number I thought there might even be some fireworks later, if the flying fortresses hit the electrical works upriver. Now that would make a right and proper Fourth of July!

My eyes fixed on the flag waving from the pole in the gentle breeze. The bright red banner looked very cheery in the glow of the early morning sun but I rather thought the effect was spoiled by the large black swastika in the center.

Today was going to be my personal independence day. One way or another by nightfall I would be free of this place, either escaped or dead. Two weeks here was too long for anybody. But at least they hadn’t shoved me into one of the fancy, new showers on the first day, like the poor bastards they were probably getting ready to unload from the trains as soon as they finished calling the roll.

My number was called and I answered. They’d be done soon and would then pass out the work assignments for the day. I nodded to the guy next to me standing tall and thin in his prison stripes. His name was Fritz and he had a six-pointed yellow star sewn onto his striped uniform. With his tall, muscular physique and stubby blonde hair he looked as if he should have been wearing one of the stylish black uniforms of the guards. Unfortunately for him he was Jewish so it didn’t matter what he looked like. And he was the lucky one. His parents and younger sisters had already passed through the showers: a journey of no return.

He usually worked sorting used clothing. I suppose our hosts resold it or pulped it up for paper or something. They were very efficient that way. Nothing was wasted here except human lives. But that was how we had found out the truth about the showers.

The day he and his family had arrived they had been separated on the railroad platform. He’d been sent to this part of the camp. His older parents and younger sisters had been sent to the delousing showers. They’d waved goodbye and parted hoping to meet again later in the relocation camp.

The next day he’d found their clothing in the sorting shed with his father’s Iron Cross that he had won fighting for the Kaiser in the Great War still on the pocket of the jacket.

Fritz and I shared the same bunk in the barracks. That’s how we met. At night we plotted our escape, whispering in low voices so an informer couldn’t overhear us and sell us out for a loaf of bread. Today we were going to make that escape. But it all depended on my work assignment. He always got the sorting shed. The only better assignment was to the kitchens. I think they liked him because he looked so German. That hadn’t been very difficult for him, his family had lived in Germany for five hundred years: a heck of a lot longer than Hitler had.

My duties varied day by day. I don’t think the guards quite knew what to do with me. I was a freak, the only American in the camp. I wasn’t a Jew or a Gypsy or a homosexual or a communist. Sent here by order of Heinrich Himmler himself, head of the Gestapo and SS, all they knew was that I was supposed to die as slowly and painfully as possible. So I usually got hard labor: unloading trucks, cutting wood, mining coal. I really hated that coal mine. I’d only been here a couple of weeks but I’d already lost a lot of weight. It wouldn’t be long before I’d be too weak to escape. That’s why it had to be today.

And, well, I couldn’t pass up the symbolism.

The guard sergeants began rounding up their work crews. Fritz went off to the sorting shed as usual. That was good. It was essential to our plan. Now I needed something that kept me inside the camp. The last thing I needed was another long road march to the wooded hills or to that awful coal mine.

The fat balding sergeant I thought of as Scarface, after the guy in the Dick Tracey comic strip, came down the remaining line of men. I’ll take you, you and you. He pointed to them and jerked his thumb back to where his tall, thin, blonde corporal was collecting a squad of workers. Together they looked like Laurel and Hardy. And between them they were almost as smart.

He stopped in front of me. Ah, the American. He paused a moment for thought. That seemed to take a great deal of effort on his part. Then he poked me in the chest with a meaty forefinger. Get in line, swine. We’ll see how you lazy Americans are at unloading trains. His thumb jerked in the direction of the waiting work detail.

My face fell. The railroad yard was outside the wire. There was no chance I’d be able to wander off from work detail and make it to the sorting shed until the work was done and we returned to the camp. And if it were anything like the wood cutting detail or the coal mine, that wouldn’t be until after nightfall and curfew.

He could read the disappointment on my face and his own lit up in broad amusement. He leaned his grinning face up close to mine and I could smell cheap liquor on his breath even though the sun hadn’t been up an hour yet. I can see how much you like working for me. He snarled. You lazy Americans think you are so special. You’re nothing but a mongrel race with a Jewish cripple for a president. What do you think of that Jew-boy?

He poked me with his meaty finger again trying to provoke me so he’d have an excuse to beat me up. But I could take him even in my current weakened condition. With the techniques I’d been taught there were three ways I could kill him right here and now with nothing but my bare hands. But it wouldn’t be just the two of us, man to man. He’d have a couple of his men hold me down while he beat me senseless with a rifle butt. My escape plan was hanging by a thread as it was. The last thing I needed was a broken bone. But I had to respond or he’d just keep baiting me until I did so I’d just have to watch what I said. He’d been speaking German so I replied in the same language: I’m not a Jew. I’m a Baptist. Not that I’d been to church in years.

He stared at me a moment, then burst out laughing. All right hymn-singer. Get in line. He seemed to find it amusing for some reason. I stepped forward to line up with the others, taking care to avoid a mud puddle left from the rain the night before. But Scarface stuck out a foot and tripped me up and I went sprawling into it anyway, splashing dirty water all over my already soiled prison uniform.

He roared with laughter and pointed me out to the rest of his squad. He really is a Baptist! They all laughed as I pulled myself back to my feet, still dripping and joined the rest of the work detail standing in a ragged formation and waiting for Scarface to finish selecting his victims.

He chose a couple more, kicked them into line and called us to attention before marching us off toward the gate. We passed a pair of prisoners slowly raking the gravel between buildings. They looked like worn scarecrows in their ragged uniforms. We probably did too. After marching past the bleak, unpainted barracks buildings we halted in front of the main gate. Electrified barbed wire hung from ugly metal fence posts. We had to wait a moment under the watchful eyes and machinegun muzzle of a guard in one of the towers while the officer in charge had his men open first the inner, and then the outer gates. A two-meter wide Death Zone separated them: a swath of barren ground where escaping prisoners could be shot without warning should they manage to penetrate the inner fence. Of course, the way some of the guards were, you could end up shot with little or no warning almost anywhere, because you annoyed them in some small way or just because they felt like it.

Marching up the gravel road a short distance to the railroad, a military truck grumbled past in the other direction. The warm summer sun shone down upon us. In the distance I could hear cadence calls as a detachment of guards was marched somewhere.

We followed the line of the railroad across to the other camp, Birkenau, and through a pair of gates made large enough to accommodate entire freight trains loaded with prisoners destined for their trip up the chimney. There was a deserted concrete platform not far from the one I had arrived at a couple weeks before, with several boxcars left alongside waiting for us to unload. I had expected to see the platform choked with refugees disembarking from freight cars and carrying all their worldly goods on their way to being resettled in the East. But the only resettlement they were going to get was after they passed through the showers and crematoria, if the wind was blowing the right direction.

Scarface had us begin immediately unloading the boxcars, carrying the crates to the other side of the platform and stacking them in a neat pile. I guessed we were supposed to load them into trucks but the trucks hadn’t arrived yet. The boxes were of all different sizes, filled with heavy metal castings and stamped Topf and Sons, Erfurt. Some of the larger ones took all ten of us to lift and carry. It was almost as exhausting as working in the coalmine, but at least we were outside in the fresh air.

We labored for about an hour before the trucks arrived. After that the drivers stood around and smoked vile Turkish cigarettes while they watched us load their trucks, so much for the fresh air.

There were a couple of luggage carts on the platform but Scarface wouldn’t let us use them. Some of the wooden crates were impossibly heavy and we were only barely able to lift them into a truck.

Finally we were so worn out we managed to drop the last one. It was one of the largest, bigger than a coffin. It felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. One of the prisoners, a tall, unusually thin (for us) Norwegian lost his grip on a corner. The crate teetered for a second as the rest of us tried to handle the unexpected extra weight. But somebody else lost his grip too and then the whole box went down. The thin pine boards split into kindling when the heavy crate smashed into the concrete platform. One of the other prisoners was unlucky and the crate landed on his foot. He shrieked in pain, an impossibly high note that trailed off into a wail.

In German, I yelled to the others, Quick, help me get it off his foot! We managed to lift the remains of the crate and he slipped his foot out and promptly fainted when he saw nthe mashed and bloody pulp that was left. It more resembled the flat webbed foot of a duck than that of a human.

The others looked on aghast. They knew what it meant. If you couldn’t work you didn’t get to eat. The only hope he had left was that perhaps he might still be useful in some sort of ghastly medical experiment.

But something diverted my horrified gaze: the object that had slid out of the smashed end of the broken crate. Our frantic efforts to free our comrade had dumped the contents of the crate onto the loading dock. Besides a great deal of protective wood shavings, there was a life-sized bronze statue of a naked woman.

She was wearing a necklace of human skulls and several severed hands dangled from her belt. With six arms and a Hindu headdress, her identity was unmistakable; it was a statue of the goddess Kali. Once long ago in what seemed now like another life, I had taken a seminary course in comparative religions and I knew Kali was the Hindu goddess of death. But what was a statue of her doing in a place like this? I mean, I knew there was death here, a lot of it. We were surrounded by it all day long. But why would Nazis bother with something that looked like it belonged in a heathen temple somewhere?

But then the plans I had overheard in Heinrich Himmler’s castle began to make sense. They were actually going to go through with them. This was just the first step. What seemed to me the lunatic scheme of a deranged crackpot was going to result in the sacrifice of millions, maybe tens of millions, and if Himmler carried his insane plan through to completion, the Allies would be certain to lose the war. Backed by the magical power of the forces summoned by his evil enchantment, the armies of Nazism would sweep across the globe defeating all opposition and beginning a new Dark Age, prolonged and made more horrific by an incestuous alliance between modern science and an ancient evil.

The mundane armies of the West could only hope to counter Nazi occult powers with spiritual powers of their own. A couple of years ago I’d have said their proper response was to drop to their knees and petition the Almighty. But after two years of this war, a war that killed my brother Bill, his wife Adele and most of my friends and comrades, all I had to show for that was calluses on my knees -- and my heart.

God didn’t care. If God gave a damn the Nazis wouldn’t have metastasized from a dirty beer-hall to control most of a continent. Bill wouldn’t be dead. And I wouldn’t be stuck in this hellish place waiting to join him. Nope. God was high and mighty in his glorious heaven far and away from the stench of death, the cries of pain.

During my interrogation Himmler had taunted me, bragging about a talisman of power that would seal our doom. But in the right hands it could turn the tide. The future survival of the West, and maybe of civilization itself, depended on me getting that information back to Britain. They had to know about the only spiritual weapon that could balance their hellish enchantment. I might not be believed, but it was the only hope for the Free World. I had to escape. Now more than just my own life was at stake.

My thoughts were abruptly interrupted by the raspy voice of Scarface. "Two of you take that worthless bastard to the infirmary. The rest of you get that, that thing, whatever it is, back in the box and onto the truck. Mach schnell!"

Here was my chance to make my escape. I’d help carry the injured man to the infirmary and then give the guard they’d send with us the slip. I quickly bent to pick up my unconscious comrade but that hateful voice halted me in mid-reach.

Not you, Swine. You broke the box. You can make sure it gets loaded. And if that statue is damaged, I’ll have you beaten to death.

Under the watchful eye of one of the SS privates two other prisoners lifted his limp form and carried him to the infirmary. I figured if he were lucky he’d die of the shock and blood loss before they got him there. He’d certainly never walk again. And here once you were no longer useful you were disposed of. Even an empty Coke bottle had more value. Back home those at least could be turned in for the deposit.

I looked down at the shattered remains of the crate. One whole side was busted out, the boards split under the weight of the casting. Even if we managed to get the statue back into the crate it wouldn’t stay. And every time it fell out it would get damaged more. I looked over to the glowering face of my adversary and addressed him in German.

Sergeant? This thing is not going to stay in that box. Why don’t you let us use one of those luggage carts to move it onto the truck so it doesn’t get damaged further?

He leered at me, displaying his bad teeth. I would have thought the SS would have better dentists but maybe all they knew was how to extract confessions.

Swine! That is your problem. If it gets broken you’ll pay for it with your life.

I turned back to the task but said in a loud voice, Okay, but the Commandant isn’t going to be pleased when his statue ends up with a couple of the arms busted off. Since you’re the NCO in charge he’ll probably take it out on you because I’ll be dead. It gets awfully cold on the Russian Front, don’t you think? I looked back and gave him my own leer.

Raw hatred glowed back from his piggish eyes. After glowering a moment he snarled, Use the cart then, swine.

After much effort and trouble we managed to get the heavy statue lifted onto the cart and moved onto the back of the last truck. Then they drove a short distance away to another fenced compound next to two existing buildings containing the infamous showers. Today the smokestacks stood empty, pointing skyward like monuments to the dead. No smoke belched from the pyres. No trains had come today. I wondered why?

Somebody had to unload the trucks and that meant us. Even though there had been plenty of room in the trucks, they marched us over on foot anyway. When we arrived the trucks were parked in a row by four new buildings similar in design to the other two already in the compound. When I saw the civilian workmen milling about waiting for us to unload the trucks I knew why there had been no trains today.

The Nazis were evil. Across most of Europe they held supreme authority, imprisoning or executing anyone who dared resist them. But they were still ashamed of their crimes. They couldn’t bear the chance any of the German civilian workers engaged in construction might see the crematoria in action and report the truth of what really went on in the relocation camps. But when the civilians finished their labors in a day or two the trains would resume, bringing loads of human refuse to the incinerators.

Scarface marched us over and ordered us to unload the trucks. The foreman showed him where he wanted the various crates placed, but the rest of the civilians wouldn’t look at us. They kept well away, as if we carried some infectious disease.

They knew the crimes we had committed against the State. They were emblazoned on our uniforms. Many of the prisoners had the six-pointed yellow, or yellow and red star that showed they were Jewish. Some wore the red triangles of political prisoners. Some of those were communists. Many were not. I had heard purple triangles indicated Jehovah’s Witnesses, although I never saw anyone with one. One guy had a pink triangle. He should have kept his sexual preferences in the closet, although I heard what he’d actually been arrested for was trying to hide a Jewish family from the Gestapo. Myself, I had a five-pointed white star. Scarface had it made special, just for me - his little joke. According to him, just being an American was a crime.

The guards relaxed while we unloaded. Several lit cigarettes while the others stood around and chatted with the workmen. So we were pretty much unsupervised as we ranged through the buildings of this new complex dropping off the crates of fixtures the skilled civilian workmen were going to install. But even though we were outside the main camp there was no chance to escape. Our striped uniforms marked us even more plainly than the tattoos on our arms.

It was obvious from the layout the Nazis were tripling the capacity of the camp to process prisoners. This was the first step in the plan I had overheard in Himmler’s castle. We were helping expand the existing industrial complex. Not one that turned raw materials into cars or refrigerators or radio sets: one that turned families into used clothing, gold teeth and ashes for soap. The new showers and crematoria would be completed soon and they’d begin running two or even three trainloads of people through them a day.

We placed one of the last of the boxes in the cellar. As the others turned to walk back for the final load, my eye was caught by a toolbox left in a corner by one of the workmen. I waited a few seconds until the last of the others had left, then stepped over to it and opened the lid. It was full of tools of all sorts, hammers, files, screwdrivers, pipe wrenches and such. I knew I hadn’t much time but I dug through the box looking for the one item I knew could get me out of this hellhole. I found one in the bottom. After slipping the tape measure into my clothing, I hurried back to rejoin the others.

There were only a few more crates and we finished much earlier than I had expected. It was only mid-afternoon when they marched us back through the gate to the parade ground before Scarface assigned us to clean our barracks for the rest of the day. Then he took himself and his men off to do whatever they did when they weren’t making our lives miserable. The rest of the prisoners made off slowly for their barracks, but I headed immediately for the clothes sorting shed and Fritz....

Part I: Into the Crucible

CRUCIBLE definition (1) a vessel of a very refractory material (as porcelain) used for melting and calcining a substance that requires a high degree of heat. (2) A severe test. (3) A place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to influence change or development.

I hadn’t always believed supernatural forces existed in an unseen dimension nonetheless as real as a landscape concealed by a fogbank, a dimension inhabited by hungering beings that craved power, influence and control over our mundane world. No, I’d once been quite as scientific and secular as any other modern American. It was a long and twisted path that turned a would-be minister of God into a professional killer and brought me to Auschwitz and face-to-face not only with my imminent death, but also the doom of Western Civilization. And it was my dear brother, Bill, who started me on that journey.

It began way back before the First World War. My parents were Canadian and my father, James Mackenzie, started out as a mechanic at a lumber mill in northern Ontario. Tall and strong, with thick fingers and fiery red hair, his job was to repair the machinery they used to process the big logs the lumberjacks cut out of the forest.

My mother, Marie, was a lithe, dark-haired French-Canadian beauty who worked in the camp kitchen. They met over hotcakes one day and fell in love.

After they were married it wasn’t long before my older brother, William, came along. Shortly before he was born my parents decided a lumber camp was no place for a family with a young child. My dad heard Henry Ford was hiring and paying his workers a lot more than the dollar a day he was getting at the lumber mill. So he loaded up the family and moved to Detroit, Michigan in the United States, the land of freedom and opportunity.

When the Great War broke out in 1914 my brother was five years old and I wasn’t even a glint in my father’s eye. He was Canadian, and a loyal supporter of the King, so when the call went out for volunteers to fight the Kaiser he quit his job with Henry Ford and took the King’s shilling. Three years later he was back home discharged after an enemy gas attack scarred his lungs. Ever after he called himself a fool for falling for the government’s lies. Ever after he always insisted wars were just excuses to distract people’s attention from government corruption and for munitions makers to harvest immoral profits from the slaughter.

I was born in 1918, nine months after my father got home from the Great War. His lungs might have been bad but everything else still worked fine. He got his old job back at Ford and not long after bought a new red brick home on Cruse Avenue. That was the house I grew up in.

My brother was nine years older than I, always bigger and better at everything. My parents had high hopes for him. My Father wanted him to have a good education so he could use his mind to earn a living instead of, trading on the sweat of his brow, as he had his whole life. My dear mother was very religious and wanted him to be a