The Last Survivor (A Wilde/Chase Short Story) by Andy McDermott Read Free Book Online

Apartments lined it – but which one held his wife?
    Faint daylight came into the hallway through the gaping doorways. All the patches of illumination were steady – except one. A shadow drifted across the hazy light from the sixth door along, at the end of the passage.
    ‘Wait here,’ he told Natalia. ‘I’m going in.’
    ‘You promised your friend that you would tell the police if you found Nina!’ she said, somewhat accusing.
    ‘Yeah, but I didn’t say I’d do it straight away, did I?’ He gave her a quick disarming grin, which vanished as he became all business, ready for action. ‘If we wait for the cops, he might hurt Nina – and our baby,’ he explained. ‘I’m not gonna let that happen. If I wave like this,’ he held up his left hand in a particular gesture, ‘then call out to him, try to keep his attention. Otherwise, stay back and keep quiet.’
    ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
    ‘I’ll work that out when I get there!’
    He began to creep down the corridor. A look into the first apartment revealed that what he assumed would be the lounge of the finished residence was about twenty-five feet long, the windows in the far wall. The diffuseness of the moving shadow in the hall made him suspect that the Nazi was at the other end of the sixth room. It would take a couple of seconds to reach him – too long against an armed man.
    But there was something else: a narrow gap running from floor to ceiling in the side wall, a stack of rectangular ductwork sections ready to be installed nearby. He could see what he assumed was the neighbouring apartment through the opening, which was confirmed when he reached the next door to find a mirror image of the first flat. The third apartment also had a hole in the wall …
    A plan was already forming by the time he passed the fourth door. He slowed, listening to the sounds from ahead. A man was grunting with exertion, something heavy scraping over the concrete floor—
    ‘You don’t have to do this!’ Nina’s voice again: pleading, fearful.
    Eddie felt a fear of his own. Whatever the Nazi was doing, it was about to come to a fatal conclusion. He looked into the fifth apartment. There was another narrow gap in the wall, as he’d hoped. He glanced back down the hallway, seeing Natalia peering worriedly after him, and gave her his signal before ducking into the room.
    ‘You don’t have to do this!’ Nina said, with growing desperation. Kroll had forced her into a corner by the windows, keeping his gun in one hand as he used the other to pull down more electrical cables from the ceiling. He had spent the last few minutes winding the various lengths around each other, forming a crude rope … the end of which he had just tied into a noose.
    He shoved the crate into the middle of the room, then stepped up on to it to hook the rope over a metal pipe. She saw a chance to knock him down from his perch while he was preoccupied—
    The gun locked on to her before she had even completed the first step. The Nazi’s expression made it clear that while he wanted to fulfil his more grandiose plan, he would still simply shoot her if necessary. ‘Get back,’ he growled. She retreated.
    He let the noose drop from the pipe, then secured it about six feet above floor level. A chill ran through Nina. She was five and a half feet tall. The ceiling was not high enough for the fall from the crate alone to kill her; Kroll meant for her to strangle to death with her feet kicking helplessly mere inches above the floor.
    Just as his father had intended in Argentina. A nightmarish flashback: hate-filled faces screaming at her as the noose was tightened around her throat …
    The horrifying vision vanished as Kroll jumped down from the wooden box, replaced by one smaller in scale but no less terrifying. The makeshift hangman’s rope dangled from the ceiling, waiting for her. ‘Come here,’ he demanded.
    ‘Screw you,’ she said, trying to sound defiant, but her voice