by Ryan Schow
One or two more shots like that and this whole place is going to collapse on top of us.
Trembling fingers yank my shirt closed, but it won’t stay shut, so I hop off the table, which causes the girl to push herself further into the corner. She lowers herself to a squatting position, wrapping her arms around her knees.
“We need to go,” I tell her. She doesn’t move. I smack the hat off her head and she yelps. Dragging her up by the hair, she stands, turning her face from me. Fretting.
When I bumped off her thoughts moments ago, I realized she was with those men, that she hadn’t wanted to stop them from playing with my girl parts. It almost didn’t matter that she hoped it would mean they’d stop playing with hers.
Part of me is thinking girls have to stand up for each other no matter what while the more reasonable side of me is saying. Occupied-Germany-circumstances aren’t the same as free-America-circumstances.
“Do you understand me?” I say, my voice nearly a shout over the noise outside.
She doesn’t understand; she doesn’t move.
My fingers find her chest, start undoing the buttons on her shirt. For a second I’m wondering, what am I doing? She pulls her shoulders inward, not wanting me to take off her shirt. To steal it. My God, am I really stealing this girl’s shirt?
Yep. I am.
The tank in the street outside fires again and a section of the outer wall buckles and falls away, casting spears of daylight upon us. Above us, surface cracks appear and concrete dust shakes into the air. A chunk of the ceiling drops. The girl takes a breath to scream, but my hand clamps her throat, pins her against the wall. There are soldiers tucked along the sides of the tank. They’re Russian by their jackets and helmets.
“Stop fighting,” I growl at the girl. She’s clawing at my arms now. Dammit, I need to go! Now. But there’s no way I’m going after Hitler with my tits hanging out. It’s just not civilized enough for war.
I’ve got half her shirt off when I hear the soldier speaking at me. He’s stepped through the hole in the fallen away section of the building’s wall. He’s appraising the ceiling, then he’s all eyes on us. I turn toward him. He’s got his pistol aimed at me. A second later his head snaps sideways, half his skull caving, half of it showering out the side.
The girl gasps.
Tears stream from her face and she can’t stop quaking with fear. She doesn’t know what I am, but she’s terrified I’m going to squash her head, too.
If she doesn’t give me her gosh damn shirt, I just might. She finally stops fighting me. Lets me have it. I put it on, and even though it’s a touch too big for me, and rank with body odor, I’m not complaining. At least I can leave this place with my dignity in tact.
The tank outside thunders back to life, surging forward.
The girl is just standing there, looking beaten and scared, her eyes averted. She won’t look at me. Her bone thin arms are covering a pair of large German breasts held in place by the saddest looking bra I’ve ever seen. This is no Victoria’s Secret push up bra. It’s no miracle bra. There’s no underwire in this thing that looks made of t-shirt material and every bit as dirty as her face.
God, these barbarians!
Leaving her behind, I stalk through the rubble, sneak up to the new hole in the building and peek outside, into the street. The Russian man I launched out the window lay on his side, curled in a fetal position in the dirt, moaning. Another soldier is standing over him, looking at his blown out eyes in wonder.
He sees me, turns his rifle on me.
My hand is up before his trigger finger can react. The weapon is torn from his hands, spun around and flung at me. I catch it, aim it at him, and he gasps, completely dumbfounded.
Just so you know, I’m kind of a badass.
Even in war.
While his eyes are flashing wide, I squeeze the trigger and a red circle appears in his head. He crumples over dead. Up the street, the assault wave continues. It’s an alleyway of smoke with random orange fires, maelstroms of dust and burning debris. The grimy air sticks to the lining of my throat and lungs like paste, and for a second my stinging eyes start to burn.
Hand over my mouth as clouds of smoke blow over and past me, I gaze down at the man who had his hands on my breasts. Lifting the gun to his head, I pull the trigger and he stops moving.
“Unbelievable,” I say, thinking about what he’d done.
A trio of shots ring out, but they aren’t meant for me. I move for cover anyway. Moments later, a black haired girl comes sprinting after me, unarmed, frantic.
“Oh my God,” she says, out of breath as she reaches me, “I’ve been looking all over for you! What happened?”
She’s a cute thing with a blocky Russian accent, brilliant blue eyes, dark hair that looks bottle black. Blond roots are just starting to show. This has me wondering what the hell they use to dye their hair in times like this. Motor oil? Sludgy grease?
It dawns on me for the millionth time that I’m in freaking Berlin, in 1945. This is my first time-traveling adventure and it’s not only surreal, it’s scary as hell. What am I doing here?!
For a second I start to panic, to hyperventilate.
But then I’m looking at the Russian girl, wide-eyed, speechless, wondering what she’s doing out in this nightmare unarmed and looking for me.
“We have to go, now!” she says, looking around, practically manic. “We are late!”
2
The girl grabs my hand and drags me across the street to an abandoned truck, although calling it a truck doesn’t seem to do the small tank-like fortress on big military wheels justice. The girl hops up onto the truck’s metal step and hauls open a door that looks made of double-plated steel. Climbing in, she turns and says, “Get in! Hurry!”
Behind me weapons fire in a rat-atat-tat staccato, the bullets tinkering off the door where the girl climbed in. She ducks down, wrestles the heavy door all the way shut. It slams closed so hard it’s like a shotgun blast on impact. I spin around to a group of soldiers sprinting after us and the utility truck we’re apparently stealing.
Damn.
Muzzle flash readies me. My instincts flare. Pushing my will upon them, four of the five buckle over in the road holding their guts while the fifth soldier empties his clip into his comrades’ backs. They all pitch forward. Dead. The offending soldier’s mouth drops open. He’s looking at his machine gun like it fired on its own.
No, you Russian asshat…that was me controlling you.
The air is now all but black with smoke. I’m about go for the truck when a lobbed grenade bounces into the road near the downed soldier. Beside me, the truck’s engine roars to life. The grenade explodes, sending pieces of the soldier flying at me. Gunfire erupts as I scurry around the blast-furnace-looking front of the truck.
More gunfire. A hail of it hitting everything around me, then me.
The plink, plink, plinking of bullets smacking the truck and digging into my back doesn’t exactly thrill me. The pain bites down hard, slowing my body. The damage is astonishing. It’s like a white hot poker niggling into your skin. On a scale of one to ten when it comes to me crapping my pants, chances are pretty good that—
The girl is screaming through the opened passenger door for me to hurry up as an artillery round hits a nearby grouping of soldiers hunkered down behind a blown-in-half utility vehicle just like the one we’re stealing. I’ve been shot, I want to say, but I don’t. It’s only a couple of bullets, so I tell myself to grow a sack, to press on.
The soldier who shot his comrades got hit hard with the grenade blast. He’s now just half a torso and a nearby leg. Two more soldiers hop out of windows and jump in the street to block us. I’m having a hard time breathing. These lungs of mine are a heady whistle. My hand pushes the door open wide enough to climb in even though it feels heavier than I expected.
“Run them over,” I manage to say. But in my mind, I’m thinking, this is madness!
The girl grinds through the
gears, trying to stick it in the bottom forward gear; the soldiers open fire. Behind them, two men in combat coats and helmets roll out a two-wheeled mini cannon and turn it toward us. Instead of getting in the truck like I should, I manage a meager breath, pull up my proverbial bootstraps, and set my sights on that grisly looking weapon. The two men firing on the truck turn on me, but my mind works instantaneous.
Their bodies turn inside out in a flood of meaty, red ruin. By now my eyes are surely black, the veins on my neck and face standing hard and blue.
I must look like a nightmare.
My hand raises and the big gun on the axle and two big wheels fails. The men pull out pistols and I fling them away with my mind. We’re twenty feet apart. Despite the burning in my back where my body is healing, my strength is returning. Connected to the paralayers of the most threatening man, synced up with the Bluetooth version of him, I clench a fast fist and finish with a subtle turn. The man on the right, his head caves in, his brains squishing out from under the rim of his helmet. The man on the left reels in horror, then turns and runs, diving into an open doorway.
Behind me, the girl in the truck finally lands a gear.
“We have to go NOW, Savannah!”
There are two dead men at my feet, both with machine guns still hot from the action. I reach down, grab one of the guns and a spare drum magazine loaded with brass colored rounds. My back is still a hornet’s nest of fire wasps, but things in me are returning to normal. More shots crackle in the air. I duck as a nearby round explodes in the dirt way too close to my feet for comfort.
The clink, clink, clink of a grenade bouncing past my legs grabs my attention. I kick it into a building beside me, just not far enough. I’m attempting to dive into the truck when it explodes, hurling me half into the open door of the getaway truck, and halfway hanging out.
My ears are ringing and there’s all kinds of pain in my kidney and along the back of my head. Stomach on the seat, by God’s will alone, I manage to pull half my body up inside the truck. The girl starts to drive, even though I’m partly hanging out with my shins bouncing off the hard metal edge of the truck’s open door, which is now slamming my calves.
“That was close,” I feel myself wanting to say, but the words sound miles away, the ringing in my ears too loud. Then something sharp nips into my back and I’m stilled from the pain. I’ve been shot again. Would anyone judge me if I start crying? I think it’s started because the fear and adrenaline in me is barking so hard it’s turning the meanest parts of me soft.
The girl has me by the shoulder of my stolen yet durable shirt and she’s pulling on it, grunting and yanking at me. Trying to haul me in the truck. We’re weaving our way out of this terrifying mess, but hell has opened up around us. Somewhere in the back of my mind I know I need to get all the way inside the truck, if anything to shut the door and not get shot anymore.
Seriously, though…what good is a fortified castle if the drawbridge is down and the castle gates are wide open? That’s what this is, a fortress with a welcome mat and an open door thanks to yours truly.
A searing flash of heat rips up the length of my back, centering on my bullet wound and the shrapnel cuts in the back of my head. The girl reaches over with both hands, letting go of the controls and with a righteous grunt, drags me in the truck. Bullets are smacking against the reinforced metal plates so hard, sitting inside, it’s like listening to marble-sized hail drilling a tin roof.
It occurs to me the door is still not shut all the way, but mostly because I’m inside and the muzzle of a rifle is now shoved in the opening. A flash of fire. A deafening staccato of gunfire cutting through the dull, ringing in my ears.
The girl screeches, ducks down. More muzzle flash. Bullets are now pinging and ricocheting around inside the truck. One of them hits the girl. She jolts hard. Stiffens. The look on her face says she’s used to pain, but not this kind of pain. I turn and use my mind to slam the metal door on the gun’s muzzle. It bends, but doesn’t flatten.
The truck jumps a curb, smashes a toppled light pole, then drives over two bodies and puts a tire or two on a wide berth of concrete stairs. Suddenly, I’m all eyes forward. With each bounce of the truck, my body feels hammered and undone.
The girl steers us off the concrete stairs then spins the wheel and we pull into an opening between two buildings. Foot on the gas, we’re going again. That’s when a rocket-propelled grenade comes whistling at us, skips off the side fender and blows a hole in the concrete building beside us.
Both of us gasp, then look at each other in surprise.
Yeah, that was lucky. My hearing is fast returning, the pitch of the ringing fading with each passing moment. I’m not so sure our luck will prevail though.
“Back up!” I scream as bullets pepper the truck’s hood and small, double-thick windshield.
She jams the truck in gear (her driving is like listening to bolts rattling around in a blender), finally seats the reverse gear, then stomps on the gas. The truck jolts backwards, skittering hard as it winds up, but another rocket-propelled grenade is heading straight toward us and this time I’m sure it won’t deflect off a fender. Using my mind, I veer it off course at the last second and it sticks the building beside us.
The explosion launches debris at us, blasting the heavy truck up on two wheels. By now we’re moving though! The truck drops back down on all four wheels as it launches out into the open plaza. My driver, this young girl, she’s cranking the wheel as hard as she can for having been shot. That’s when we crash. Everything just comes come to a sudden, jolting stop that sends me over the seat and halfway sprawled into the back of the truck. Apparently we crashed backwards into a blown up, smoking tank neither of us saw because both of us were panicking.
The truth is, as tough as I used to think I was, I’m hurt and gripping. Nearly shitting myself with fear. We’re smack dab in the middle of one of World War II’s bloodiest battles seven decades in my past and none of this is lost on me.
It’s still so surreal.
If my memory serves, the Russians are about to overtake the stronghold of Berlin and Hitler is about to suicide both himself and Eva Braun, only that’s history’s biggest lie because Hitler never committed suicide. He didn’t die in April, 1945.
Yeah, that was news to me, too.
That sadistic motherfucker escaped. Plowing through my more sticky emotions, all I can think is this one thought: I have a chance to kill Hitler.
No, I have to kill Hitler.
A thrill shoots through me, makes me feel like what I’m doing…it’s me. Yes. This is me at my finest.
3
Beside me, the Russian girl is cursing, fighting the gears, half whimpering against the pain in her side. She finds the gear and we’re chugging off again, moving through a storm of gunfire and small artillery fire. It’s hard to see out the front windows because there’s no real windshield. It’s just two small squares of bullet-proof glass with metal shutters propped open in front of them.
“You alright?” I ask the girl.
Her face is pale, her blue eyes dimming. Her hair hangs damp with sweat, her face a smear of blood when she turns to me.
“You’re shot,” I say.
“You are healing,” she mumbles. “I am not.”
When we’re clear of the most dangerous part of the battlefield, I say, “Stop the truck.”
She keeps going.
“Need to get you to airstrip,” she says, her hair hanging in sweat-soaked strands. “Need to see Peter Baumgart. SS pilot flying Hitler out of Berlin.”
“You’re not going to see your next ten minutes if you don’t stop the…whatever the hell this thing is. I need to look at you. You need help.”
The pillows of smoke and constant rattle of weaponry is now behind us (for the most part), but that doesn’t mean we’re out of danger. This only means it’s mostly white noise now. Moving closer to the girl, I’m reaching into her with my psychic feelers. She turns to me, blue eyes dopey, jaw sla
ck, face losing color by the minute.
She pulls the truck to a stop.
Closing my eyes, working my way through her system, I find the damage. The pathway of destruction is hot, clear; there’s a bit of internal bleeding, but it’s clotting so hopefully it won’t be a problem. Of course, I could be wrong and she could bleed out.
Maybe she’s already bleeding out.
This pretty girl who saved me, this brave little Russian who can’t be more than ninety pounds and fifteen years old, she’s about to die.
Mentally, spiritually, I begin to repair the damage to her body by simply envisioning her body healing itself the way it knows how. I’m not sure this will work with me feeling so weak, but it has to! Somehow, I give the healing order a boost. When I was deciding about dying or coming back to the living, the Reptilian from Dulce appraised me like this, but in a different capacity. It’s how I saw Cameron, how I saw the Abby imposter, how I saw Sensei.
The Reptilian—the thing that was neither human nor alien—I was just a spirit hovering over him. Not sure I was even alive. Maybe I was just out of my body, but I’m sure it was more.
Still, the thing put a single, impossibly long finger into my skull, located my problem, then told Delgado how to deal with it. For whatever reason, I feel this working now. It’s like the healing talent is a warmth inside me. A fullness that must leave me for her.
I feel her body responding, growing lighter with strength as opposed to heavier with fatigue and the onset of death.
Directing the blood back into the system of ruined arteries and veins, closing up the wounds, I try cleaning the blood on its way back into the bloodstream, but it’s too contaminated. It’ll have to clean itself. The body can do that. She’s going to be really sick while this happens, and maybe she’ll have clotting issues I will have to help her with too, but for now she’ll live.
