Read Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy for Free Online

features, gaunt cheeks. He no longer thought of himself as a person, as a thing capable of projecting a reflection. It seemed now that he was more simply a figment in other people’s imaginations. He was here because they needed to believe someone like him would be here. They read what they wanted into him.
     
    He followed his routine, removing and hanging his jacket over the mirror and placing his boots in the hallway for shining. Outside the window the upper limbs of a swaying oak tree played in the wind while the rain fell, heavier than before. Bruning turned up the heat in the rooms and sat on the bed, which offered up a muffled shriek of springs in protest.
     
    Directly in front of him, where he had placed it moments ago without a thought, was his holstered pistol, hanging casually off the back of an old wooden chair less than two feet away from his head. It hung there, silent and heavy with fate.
     
    Trying to empty his mind of the images he found behind his eyes, Bruning sat for a long time.
     
    After a while, something in the room changed. Slowly Bruning leaned forward on the bed as the wind shrieked outside. As if of its own volition, his hand found its way to the reassuring butt of the pistol. With a slow, dull hiss, the Walther slid from its holster like a snake shedding its skin.
     
    Bruning held the gun in his hand for a long time, considering it as one would examine an interesting artifact, turning it over to mark all the defects and imperfections, the scratch marks which set it apart from others of its kind. When he had first practiced with the pistol at officer school in Bad Tolz, an unreasoning fear of the gun had risen in him that the device in his hand had been designed simply to kill. It haunted his progress through the program. The gun seemed to have a life of its own. Sometimes when it jumped in his hand and threw a smoking shell to the ground he found himself watching it and not the target.
     
    But now the pistol was nothing. It was just a machine designed to kill human beings, just as he himself was a machine designed to kill human beings. They were finally equal. After all this time and hardship they had found their peace.
     
    Something else seemed to move the events in the room, and his arm curled slowly, bringing the gun up to his head gracefully, until the barrel pressed into his forehead. The cool metal at his temple talked to him of undreamt freedom and rest. It was good there, he thought, it felt something like coming home after a long day.
     
    When he closed his eyes and slipped his finger past the trigger guard on to the trigger, Bruning saw the blackboard at Bad Tolz. The instructor counted through the diagram of the mechanical elements of the Walther P38 performing their intricate dance. Each component useless in and of itself, together they offered a way out for so many, a doorway through this pain and misery—they were beautiful, really. He could never forget their reverent sequence: trigger, sear spring, hammer release—
     
    The knock on his door rattled it in its frame.
     
    Bruning held the gun to his temple one moment more, feeling its reassuring weight, before placing it carefully back in his holster. A sick thrill ran through him as he stood and walked slowly to the door.
     
    “Who is it?” Bruning was startled by the calmness of his voice.
     
    “Oberscharführer Weber, sir.”
     
    “A moment.” Bruning recovered his jacket and buttoned it up quickly with practiced ease, opening the door slightly first to check the identity of his caller. Weber’s face was pale and his eyes weary with too little sleep. He smiled while Bruning looked him over, a rickety, uneven grin which looked manufactured through sheer force of will, as if it had no real reflection on his inner workings at all. He had seen such smiles before, many times. Bruning opened the door wide for the man and buckled his belt on, making sure his holster remained open—just in case.
     
    “Sit, please.”