My Immortal The Vampires of Berlin

B
Y
L
EE
R
UDNICKI

Published by
Broken Ocean Entertainment
11901 Santa Monica Blvd., #521
Los Angeles, CA 90025

All of the characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any and all references to any government, school, military units, intelligence agency or law enforcement personnel are purely fictional and for entertainment purposes only.

ISBN 978-1-4507-3191-1
© 2010 Lee Rudnicki
All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America
First Edition – July 2010

For my friends and family

Lee Rudnicki is an entertainment attorney, motion picture producer and writer in Los Angeles, California. For more information, please visit http://
www.drumlaw80.com

Creative Consultants – Chris Nalls and Rumiko Ono

Graphic Design (book) – Dennis Mancini

Music (
As the Blood Flows
) – Trip Device

Graphic Design (web) – Leo Guzman

Editor – Kaleigh Woods

Photography – Lee Rudnicki

Special Thanks – Chris Rudnicki, John Rudnicki, Ko Mori, Maria Kabanova, Maureen Rudnicki, Scott Gorden and Uta Arning

“I warn the generality of readers, that this present book will seem to them only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the last.”

- D.H. Lawrence
Fantasia of the Unconscious (1930)

Hi there. Welcome to
My Immortal: The Vampires of Berlin
. As you will soon find out, villains and heroes come out of the most unlikely places in this story. In fact, two of the heroes are in the
Wehrmacht
. Yes,
that
German army.

The difficulty in using two German soldiers during World War II as protagonists, of course, is that doing so potentially raises all sorts of moral and political issues.

Please know that as I write this, I am profoundly aware that there is nothing in the world I can tell my German and Russian friends—or anyone else for that matter—about World War II that has not already been said in thousands of well-written articles and history books.

Along those lines,
My Immortal
is not a history book — it is a supernatural adventure tale that is set during the Battle of Berlin. Conceptually, the setting is very similar to being on the Titanic after the ship hits the iceberg. There are no underlying political statements or moral judgments to be gleaned from these pages and there is no disrespect intended towards any government, country, person, religion, school or entity that is depicted or not depicted in this book.

The sole and exclusive exception to the foregoing rule is the Nazis. For the record, I have nothing good to say about the murderous bastards and
My Immortal
does not glorify their crimes in any way. The Nazis do, however, make the perfect villains for a supernatural adventure tale; that is the role they are called upon to play here
.

The acknowledgements are at the end, but I would like to use this opportunity to thank my wife Rumiko for her patience and understanding during the many hours that it took to write this novel.
Domo Arigato, Rumi.
I love you.

Now, without further adieu ...

P
ROLOGUE

In April 1945, the Second World War was coming to a bloody end for Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

As the Red Army encircled Berlin, the Nazis broadcasted a curious radio message. They threatened that if the Russian forces were not immediately withdrawn from German soil, a secret weapon “more powerful than the sun itself” would be unleashed upon them. The message ended with an ominous warning: there will be no survivors.

Allied intelligence intercepted this message and concluded that the Nazis had a nuclear bomb. They also believed that Hitler was about to use this weapon against the Soviet 8th Guards Army, which was positioned in and around Berlin.

President Roosevelt notified the Kremlin of this analysis, but Stalin elected to continue the assault on the German capital. Meanwhile, his generals quietly braced for the possibility of casualties on an unimaginable scale.

On 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler ordered the weapon, code-named Tristan, to be utilized against the Soviet Red Army. It is not known why these efforts failed, but shortly after giving the order, Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide.

Over the last sixty years, there has been a great deal of speculation about the miracle weapon that had Adolf Hitler so convinced he was about to win the war.

To date, every American president since Truman has precluded any legislative or judicial inquiry into Operation Tristan on the grounds of national security.

1

As the sun broke through the clouds, a young mother knelt down next to a baby carriage. She pointed to the sky to show her child the sunlit cross that appeared each day on the steel bulb on the television tower. Berliners called the mysterious optical effect “the Pope’s revenge,” a tribute to the communists’ failed attempt to purge Christianity from their lands; futile efforts that included the application of various chemicals to the silver tower to try to eliminate the cross. The city had seen some very difficult days, but God had apparently not forgotten about Berlin.

Professor Gerhard L. Richter III emerged from Berlin Cathedral behind a group of giggling Italian tourists and squinted in the sunlight. Professor Richter looked every bit the part of a mad scientist—wild hair, thick glasses and an old mismatched plaid suit that didn’t quite fit. An untrimmed gray beard bristled from his face, which matched the hair that sprung from his ears. A handwritten price tag hung from the sleeve of his jacket.

Richter’s investigation had begun two weeks prior, at a small overgrown airstrip in the Czech countryside. After examining the rusted hulk of what had once been a Nazi transport plane, he ventured into Prague, where he carefully retraced the soldier’s footsteps. The Czech Secret Service had not been amused by his attempts to access Heydrich’s secret room in Prague Castle
.
He didn’t get in, but they couldn’t hide it forever. He would see to that.

After Prague, the professor took the train north to Berlin, where he again walked the same path as the two men had done so many years ago. The culmination of his journey was Berlin Cathedral, where they had found the young girl, once upon a time. The crypts were exactly as they had been described in the dossier, but the entrance to the tunnel that led to the Neptune had long since been bricked over, as he knew it would be.