The Sausage Man Cometh

 

He sat at the back of the large tent, hiding in the glum light and keeping a low profile. The air was thick with the cigarette smoke, damp sweath and stale beer breath of Oktoberfest; the most dangerous place for a sausage man like him to be in. He wished for the thousant time that he was somewhere else, that what had happened had never come to pass. But it had and now he was here. Besides, there was no way that he would back down now. He’d done to much – he’d cast the die and the Rubicon was crossed.

They had led a quiet life and he had been foreced to go out of retirement, to get her back. Like the plot of some god-damned action movie from three decades ago he tought as his fake mustasch was drying on his sausage face. He was nursing the huge stein in front of him, taking another careful sip of Spaten beer so as to not dull his edge. He was going to need it tonight.

Or had the butcher’s apprentice in Werfen lied to him earlier that day? The boy had been terrified and in pain when he spilled the beans ”They took her away already, The Collonel’s men were here. I’m not supposed to know, but I overheard them when they were putting her in their Jeep, they said that they were going to... enjoy her company at the reunion dinner at Berghoff tonight” after that he’d passed out from the pain and fear. He’d left him alive, but barely. He was not going to talk to anyone else any time soon.

A loud sound like someone reaming a moose with a pinecone brought him back to the present. The ompa band and dance troop’s performance had started. Young, hard bodies clad in dirdles and lederhosen twirled around the circle in the middle of the tent while the guests seated at the long tables along the walls looked on and clapped their hands in rythem with the tubas.

He scanned the faces around him again, most of them young and distincitvely arian but at the honour table there was the old guard and their wives. The elite of the SS youth brigade, or at least what remained of them. Not much of their youth left, but the flame of national socialisem burned sputtering and back in their old hearts.

When the dancing had come to its end the tall wizzened man in SS regalia stood up, assisted by his barrell chested aid. He clapped his long, clawlike hands and thanked the entertainers, with a lecherous gaze sweeping over the freuleins.

”Welcome meine freunde! Tonight we gather here to celebrate the 75th aniversary of our society, the Nue Thule Bruderschaft” applaeuse rised from some of the younger, drunker gustests and were met with a smile meant to be fatherly but which did not reach the cold lizard eyes. 

”We have selected the location of tonight’s festivities as it is a sacred place, where arians have met and feasted since times imemorable. And how they feasted! The beer flowed like water in the Rein, the women were like hinds in the Bavarian forest and the meat, the meat! It was filled with the lebens kraft that our ancestors were deprived of by the great jew!”

The crowd started heiling in a frenzy.

 

***

 

They ate like pigs in the stie around him. The smell was sickening. He had been too late. This was his wife, the love of his life, the mother of their children. And they were eating her. Something snapped as a red mist fill his vision and he started to move, in the same underwater way one move in nightmares.

He stood up in the full height of his sausage body and wiggled his lower torso, moving himself across the dance area towards the honour table. The waiting staff in their traditional Oktoberfest dress passed him on all sides while he was making his way over, over towards where the Collonel was now sitting, sausage grease running down his wrinkled chin. White stubbles that had been missed by his aid while shaving him poked out through the thin film of greas. His wife’s greas.

Their eyes met.

The Collonel started to adress him, his aid attentaive at his side, ready to lay down his life if that of  his commander was threatened. ”Can I help you broter?” asked the Collonel in a lilting voice, as the realisation that something was wrong started to reach his old nazi brain.

The fake mustach dropped on its own. Their eyes did not leave eachother.

”I see that you have done it. You’ve finaly done it.” he said, looking the Collonel dead in the eye. A sign of recognition started to spread like a stream of cold water over the old man’s face as he sized up the sausage man in front of him. They had met before, in one of many earlier lifetimes.

”But, herr Wurst, I told you in Bosnia that I was going to have your wife. And now I have. We’ve all had her!” The aid started laughing nervously, but getting more confident and mocking as the laughter spread from the honour table around the tent. Like an old rattlesnake the Collonel pulled his Luger from its holster under the table and aimed it at the sausage man’s long torso. ”And now, mein herr, it is time for us to say Guten Abend.” He fired the pistol several times, without flinching and with the cold blodedness of an experienced executioner. The smoke of the antiquated parabellum rounds hung in the air together with the rolling laughter. As it died down and the smoke cleared the sausage man was standing there just like before. Nor he had flinched.

”I’m all lips and assholes, asshole”

The Collonel first eye his pistol and then the perforated but still intact sausage body standing in front of him, a look of disbelief on his face. Guns were not made to destroy huge cylinders of low-quality-meat and thickeners, they were made to kill beings that had organs and arteries. The sausage man had neither.

With a flick of his long thick body he flung himself over the table, slapping away the aid like a bear slaps a salmon out of a stream. His body hit true and crumpled the Collonel agains the tent post behind them. The post and the nazis spine snapped, the roof of the tent started to come down as it collapsed over the screaming guests who were trampling eachother to get out.

 

***

 

The panic and confusion was absolute and the fire that had started to spread from the knocked over table lamps did nothing to calm the situation. Soon it would all be on fire, and anyone left inside would be grilled the same way his late wife had been. The sausage man’s sillhouette in front of the fire was the last thing that the ones lucky enough to escape saw. Sausage skin glistening in the light of the rising flames as he bent down over the mangled but somhows still conscoius Collonel.

”Tell your Fürer hi when you see him in hell!” The Collonel sputtered blood between his broken lips as the sausage man scopped him up and flung him into center of the flames. If he said anything in response it was lost to the frenzied crowd as they ran for safety, out in the dark fields on the mountain slopes surrounding Hitler’s long since demolished summer home, Berghoff.