Hitler's Tomb

By Charles Ynfante

HITLER'S TOMB. The story takes place today. It happens in an isolated mountain in the American West. A vacation resort is on that forested mountain. Many people are there to relax. But a strange fog has formed everywhere. From out of the fissures of the mist come Things from the deep past. These Things are Hitler's minions. The people in the resort do whatever they can to survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Ynfante
• Release date: Nov 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215336823

Charles Ynfante

Charles Ynfante acquired a Ph.D. in history from Northern University Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona.  He was a Fellow at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. He has authored numerous books of fiction. He was a participant in Hollywood motion pictures, television, and theater.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

1945. United States. Utah. Wasatch Mountains.

Gerhardt Kroeger had questioned the Nazis in front of him. They did not answer. The Fascist regime had been powerful on their minds. They kept silent.

They were bound, chained. Captured at the end of the War by the Americans. Before the Russians could capture them. They had been questioned, drugged, hypnotized, tortured, and blackmailed. Family, mistresses threatened. The three hundred Nazis still had not answered any questions or cracked under pressure.

The Tomb was far underground. In a concrete bunker built especially for them.

But there was another special Nazi. A prized one.

Adolf Hitler.

When the Allies had raided his bunker, in the last darkened hour of the Third Reich, the world found out that the Fuhrer was dead. Hitler had been killed. His body never found. The top priority of the United States Government was to capture him, dead or alive. He was captured dead. Incessant shelling, the Allies and Axis Powers closing in. In the final frantic moments of the Dark War, United States Marines crashed in and stole his body. Hustled it out of the bunker, out of Berlin, out of Germany. All this in a matter of brief hours.

The body left behind was not Hitler’s. But an imposter. In the final terrible moments of the war, no one would be able to identify the imposter as Hitler’s because of the corpse’s disfigurement. Bullets, bombardment can do that to a body.

However, Hitler’s closest friends and advisors, the prisoners now in the power of the United States -—closer than his closest friends and enemies -—were now prisoners. Including the dead Hitler. The United States wanted to know everything about he and they, especially how they thought and why, and what they had fantasized about the Fuhrer. The United States wanted to know so that Nazi atrocities would not happen again. But all efforts to extract knowledge from the prisoners ended in failure.

Gerhardt Kroeger, the lead interrogator, was disappointed. He looked at his wards wearily. He removed his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes with tired fingers. He put his glasses back on and stared at them.

Like you all, Kroeger looked at each individually, I am from the Reich.

The prisoners did not respond. Ignoring him.

Like you, I am only following orders. He whispered this to his captives. My orders are now from the Americans.

His fellow Nazis -—Kroeger had once been one of them -—sat stone-faced, eyes focused front, without regard to their condition or The Tomb.

Their glances did not waver. Not even to the hermetically sealed metal tube holding their beloved Hitler. Now dead. The tube was on a heavy-duty table, on wheels, at the far side of the interrogation room.

Through his thick eyeglasses, Kroeger looked at each Nazi in the line, chained, shackled. His contempt was obvious. He said quietly to the group:

You have failed me for the last time.

He raised his arm above his head and snapped his fingers. Guards from the dark corners stepped forward.

Prepare them. Kroeger said gently. He took off his glasses, wiped his watery eyes again, and replaced his glasses.

The guards took the group to another room, the Preparation Room. Still no reaction from the Nazis.

The War had ended badly for the Reich and their beloved God, Hitler, who lay prostrate within the tube on a wheeled steel table nearby.

The American guards took the Nazis into the Preparation Room. Each Nazi was laid on a steel table, each still shackled hand and foot. A special team awaited them. A special team of ten people.

Gerhardt Kroeger, standing at the entrance of the Preparation Room, said to them, to himself, but to no one in particular.

The Third Reich was to last a thousand years.

He turned, slumped-shouldered and disappointed, and left the Preparation Room.

The special team of ten began to do its duty. The duty was to preserve as many of the three hundred Nazis as possible. At some future time, science would be able to access their brains and remains to find out more about them. But this was still 1945.

Slowly, with the delicacy of preparing a meal for a Royal Pope, the Special Team began to wrap the Nazis in special heavy gauze. Each Nazi would now become a mummy, as if created in Ancient Egypt.

Each Nazi, who had been stone-faced and silent, watched in terror at what was happening. They had been drugged to remove body movement. But their eyes still moved in panic. Finally, a reaction. But too little, too late.

The heavy gauze came around their bodies, again and again, again and again. Like the ancient Egyptian mummies. The gauze tight like thick ropes. Around their faces, throats, bodies. The Special Team making sure their prisoners were wound and bound. The breathing of the Nazis stopped. But not before their last moments of muffled gags, chokes, and stifled pleas. But that was too late.

Each mummified Nazi was wheeled into an inner vault. One day, if ever, they would exhumed for further study. The Preparation Team left the three hundred Nazis, and their beloved Hitler, in a tightly sealed stone tomb where they would remain for decades, if not forever.

Those who had been involved in the capture of the Nazis in Europe, their transport to America, interrogation process, including Gerhardt Kroeger, were later executed in secret by the United States. No trace was to remain of The Tomb either through witnesses or any map. What had happened in that valley within the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, was left forgotten.

The database of this episode was over-lain by the Bombs, Cold War, Korean and Vietnam Wars, and other endless crises.

The United States Government had lost track.

Until the earthquakes.

CHAPTER 1.

Present day.

Derrick Holmes had finished his shift as the assistant custodian at the Overlook Resort in the mountains of Utah. He had been on the job three months and had finally learned how to be on his own with the responsibilities.

It was a Saturday night, a little after midnight. He had put away his mop, vacuum cleaner, and squeegee for the windows. He was hot and tired.

He walked outside for a smoke. The screen door squealed shut behind him. He stopped and lit his cigarette, cupping his hands against a breeze. A breeze was not unusual at that time of year—-late March—-it was the kind of breeze it was. Hot. Hot like a forest fire might make. That kind of breeze in the mountains of Utah in mid-Spring should not have been there.

What the hell? He muttered to himself. He was hot from work, and he did not want to be hot outside when, by rights, it should have been cold.

He turned his back to the breeze and lit another cigarette. The small flame burst out, igniting his cigarette. He toked hard and long. The rushing smoke into his lungs was full and satisfying.

But he did not want to be next to the parking lot with its lights, where he might be seen enjoying his break. That might be misinterpreted as not doing his job. He needed the job. He had to save money for a new car. At least a used one. He walked farther out, to the edges of the lot, and beyond into the trees.

The thick darkness there on the edge of the resort was inviting. The Overlook Resort was located on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a deep valley. This is why it was named the Overlook. At that hour of the night, however, he could see nothing. Nevertheless, he knew the area fairly well, from working at the resort for three months. He settled himself against the trunk of a tree. He smoked his cigarette, trying to cool down from the chores of his custodial work.

But this damn hot wind! It's not supposed to be warm out here!

He understood that Climate Change, Global Warming, was making havoc with weather patterns. But what he was experiencing went beyond those crises.

While he was distracted with this unwanted thought, a Fog, distant at first but moving in swiftly within the air currents of the mountain and valley, drifted in.

What?

Derrick Holmes had wanted to come out and enjoy a smoke on the only break of his work shift. He wanted a clear sky, which is what the forecast had predicted, so that he could see the stars.

Now, that damned Mist has to come back here again.

The Fog had ruined more than one night for him. He could not relax. He stood up, threw his smoke away, and watched resignedly as the murky Cloud rolled in.

It was only then that he realized something. Something that should have been obvious to him earlier. The night was moonless. Yet, how could he see a Fog rolling in? He blinked. Once. Twice. Slowly, he realized why.

That veil is glowing, man!

What he stared at resembled a local version of the Aurora Borealis, or the Northern Lights. But there's no way that can be visible from here. No way.

The Fog and its glowing grew thicker.

For a reason he could not grasp, Derrick grew frightened. His adrenalin kicked in. He tried, however, to quell his uneasiness. He tried to dismiss what he was seeing as something due to his inexperience at being in the mountains for only three months.

But he had experienced dense ground-hugging clouds before, and it was nothing like this.

The white gossamer glowed radioactively. It shimmered. It wavered. It glistened like the perspiration on the skin of an apparition. More than that, however, the Fog began to striate: vertical lines, black against the glowing softness, undulated. Then from out of the fissures something dark and ominous moved.

-—what the—-

He saw the colors red, white, black. The fabric was decayed, rotten. But he still clearly saw what it was.

Nazi flag? What the hell is that doing here? With that Thing?

He failed his history class at the community class he attended. But if there is one thing he did know and remember was the Nazi flag.

He stared in disbelief.

More than one hulking figure from the fissures now formed with the rapidity of liquid black mascara running down the scaly cheeks of a crying witch.

Derrick Holmes would have bolted except for the fact that the glowing Gossamer was hovering over the valley -—well beyond the edge of the cliff. He had to be imagining all this. He had to. He feared that he had breathed in too many cleaning chemicals earlier. Or that he had mixed chemicals he should not have. He had been warned about that in the training videos. Mix bleach and ammonia and you could die in an enclosed space. He believed, however, that this was more reality than hallucination.

He momentarily thought about telling someone -—anyone -—about what he was seeing, experiencing. But what was he going to do? Wake the boss? The owners? He'd lose his job for sure.

He left the edge of the cliff, where the blackness was thick among the trees, and hurried toward the lit parking lot.

Yet, just behind him -—close -—he heard the howl of a whisper and twigs breaking. No! There had been no wild animals at the outskirts of the Resort since he had taken the job. He did not want to look around, but he had to. When he did, he saw the creature illuminated by the weak arc lights of the parking lot. Had he had time to live, he still would not have had the words to describe what he saw. He did not even have time to scream: the thing had ripped out his throat and then ate his trembling body.

CHAPTER 2

Gwendolyn Easton was looking forward to a good, relaxing vacation. She had worked hard for the past several months, piecing together information from the Human Genome Project. She was the director of Crim-Vex, a startup business she began in order to search for the cause and cure of criminal behavior. She and her staff had put in many intense months of hard, over-time hours. She had decided on the spur of the moment to shut down the operation of her business to give her crew a rest. She realized that this was no way to run an organization she was thinking about putting on the stock market as an initial public offering. However, she had decided long ago that she was not going to treat her employees like prisoners on a chain-gang. That is why she was going to shut down her business. At least partially. She allowed those who wished to continue working to do so, because she realized that working on this cutting edge would be what some of her workers wanted to do. Also, once the business went public, there would be stock options that would make all of her employees wealthy. Nevertheless, she was going to take a two-week vacation. Unknown to her colleagues and employees, she had put in more time than they on research, running the business, being a grunt on the network circuit, and self-aggrandizement in advertising.

Besides, Covid 19 and the other viruses had made the past several years an unwanted bother. The virus had waned with vaccinations. But Climate Change and Global Warming would not be tamed as easily.

She turned over the day-to-day operations to her vice-president, Yolanda Ortega, until she returned from vacation.

Are you still going to the Overlook Resort in Utah? Yolanda asked.

Yes. I'm really looking forward to spending time in the mountains there, meditating, relaxing, eating, and lounging.

Sounds yummy.

Gwendolyn smiled. Her bobby-boy haircut glistened beneath the fluorescent lights.

I've heard of the resort, but I've never been there.

The Overlook Resort, for the most, is forgotten by the harder-core tourists. It's small, quiet, out of the way, and no reporter would ever think of looking for me there for an interview or questions.

Yolanda smiled. Her black hair, tied neatly behind her, hung thick and heavy.

Of course, Gwendolyn said, I'm making an exception to my isolation by giving you permission to call me on my cell phone if anything of extreme importance comes up. And I mean, only if anything of extreme importance comes up.

Understood. Yolanda hugged Gwendolyn. You've been working too much, and you really need to get away. I'm happy for you.

Business is terrific and it's going to get better, Gwendolyn remarked. But I don't think being gone two weeks is going to derail the progress we're making here.

No, it won't.

When I get back, I'll invite you and Chad over and bore you both with all kinds of boring photos of my vacation. Chad was Yolanda's husband.

Yolanda laughed. We'll look forward to it.

Well, then, ta-ta.

Bye, Gwen. See you in two weeks.

Gwendolyn Easton left her Crim-Vex’s office suite, taking the elevator down to the first floor, five levels below.

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Across town, in the Star City suburb of Aspen, Nick James was helping his twelve-year old son, Jason, to pack. They were both going on vacation to the Overlook Resort in the mountains of Utah. They were going to bond because Nick's wife and Jason's mother had died after a prolonged battle with Covid-19. Nick wanted his son and himself to find support in each other, the meaning of each other, by having old-fashioned fun. Nick had plans to do some light hiking and camping with his son, without the distractions of city life. Nick, a high school physical educational teacher, was taking advantage of Spring break, the last week of March, to be with his boy. Nick realized that he had to be with his son to help with the child's grief. The time they would spend in the mountains would be quality time.

Jason had not given away his emotions one way or the other. After his mother had died, he was stoic, behaving as he always had: the co-captain of the track team and the target of more than one pretty cheer-leader. Nick, however, did not want to take chances where a teenager was concerned. Nick was sensitive to the fact that kids could appear fine on the surface, but that beneath the calm were the confused and chaotic emotions of a young child. Nick did not want to face the reality that children were capable of suicide.

Well, scamp. Are you ready? Nick asked his son, placing his hand on his shoulder.

Jason shrugged and nodded noncommittally as teenagers sometimes do.

I really been looking forward to this time with you, father said to son, and I can't wait to get started.

He