“Oh my God, I always thought some of those stories were just rumors.”

Zane shook his head. “The inmates were his guinea pigs to experiment on as he wished. Cruelty was part of the program. At the beginning, he tested the threshold of pain a man could endure, applying injuries upon injuries, cuts, burns, and whippings to determine what the human body was capable of enduring. The experiments were more cruel and brutal than anybody could have imagined: bone, muscle and nerve transplants from one prisoner to the next—without the use of anesthetics; freezing experiments to figure out when hypothermia set in, and at what body temperature it was irreversible.”

He felt Portia shiver next to him as if she physically felt the cold he was talking about.

“The head injury experiments were among the most savage: prisoners were strapped to a chair, and sustained repeated hammer blows to their heads. The screams were bloodcurdling, and the results inevitable: irreversible brain damage and eventual death.

“Müller went through hundreds of prisoners. They were disposable. When he breached a threshold, killing a test subject, he called for the guards to bring him more from the other barracks. There was limitless supply. Each day, more came in trains, herded in like cattle. Buchenwald wasn’t an extermination camp, but the prisoners outside the research barracks died just as quickly as those inside from the experiments, and those working in the armament factories from sheer exhaustion and malnutrition.

“Eventually, Müller had enough data to take the tests further. He knew the limits of how far a human body could be taken before it would give in to death. But he needed more. He injected the prisoners with different compounds, testing what would allow them to endure more pain, live longer, or make them stronger. All so he could advance the Reich’s racial ideology: to create a master race, humans who were superior to others, so they could rule the world. As many died from the injections as from the beatings and other injuries.”

Portia let out a sigh. “How could those poor people even survive for as long as they did?”

Zane glanced at her for a moment. “I wished so many times to die then. But I wasn’t that lucky.” Neither was his sister.

“They did the same to the women. Even now, I can't get the screams out of my head. Rachel’s screams. She was sixteen then, and her life was over before it began. Knowing what she went through, hurt me more than what they did to me. And I was powerless to stop it, powerless to help my baby sister.”

He took a steadying breath, trying to lend his voice the strength it always lost when he thought about his sister.

“The experiments, of course, led nowhere. The entire program was a failure, but Müller wouldn’t give up. With every month that passed, his desperation to reach his goal manifested itself in more and more brutality and cruelty... Müller’s face had turned into a mask of madness, his eyes often wild with obsession, his hair in a constant mess because he couldn’t stop raking his fingers through it as he contemplated his next move and thought up new ways of advancing his so-called research. Then one day in the winter of 1944, the solution fell into his lap.

“Just as Hitler was obsessed with the occult, Müller too believed in the supernatural, as did the men who worked for him. There was a strange occurrence in the camp one night, and guards investigated. They found a man feeding off some prisoners. Drinking blood. Later I found out from a local prisoner who was in the barracks with me that there had been rumors about vampires in that region, but those had been dismissed as stories to scare unruly kids.

“They managed to trap and capture the vampire. When they brought him to the medical barracks, chains as thick as my wrist wrapped around him, Müller couldn’t have been more ecstatic.”

“How? A vampire would have been much stronger than those humans.”

Zane nodded in agreement. “The vampire killed several of the guards before the others could overpower him. It turned out that he was near starvation himself and too weak to fight them any longer.”

“What happened then?”

He put his hand over hers and squeezed it. “Terrible things happened, baby girl. Things nobody should have to experience.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“A vampire,” Müller echoed, his eyes wide with surprise.

From the treatment chair he was chained to, Zacharias witnessed what would become the turning point in Müller’s research.

Immortality suddenly within his grasp, the evil doctor approached the creature. He looked human, except for the large fangs that protruded from his mouth, and the hands that looked more like the claws of an animal than human fingers. His body gaunt, his cheeks hollow he appeared starved, almost as starved as the prisoners in the other barracks. The snarls the man-beast released as he fought against the heavy chains the guard had wrapped around him, reverberated against the walls of the barracks and woke the test subjects in the nearby cells.