by Ryan Schow
“Heard you could do that,” the girl whispers, a little blood in her mouth. I look at her left cheek where another bullet grazed the skin. It’s bloody, but superficial. Not even deep.
The sharp banging of a gun stock on the girl’s door startles us. Outside, men are shouting orders at us in Russian. The girl tries to speak through the glass, and I don’t understand what she’s saying, but then they’re banging on the glass with their gun stocks, and two of them are climbing on the hood of the truck. Their faces appear in the two tiny squares that are our front windows. They look gaunt, irate. Then it’s just two gun barrels pointing at us.
The first bullets won’t break the windows. Maybe the following ones will. I’m not sure the glass is as durable as the fortified exterior anymore.
“Just go,” I say.
She jumps the truck in gear, as uncooperative as it is, then starts to go. More banging, much harder this time followed by screaming, then finally gunfire. With my mind, I shove the soldiers off the truck. They’re tossed aside like ragdolls.
The truck gathers speed, and just when we feel like we’re clear, there’s a huge explosion at the rear of the truck that lifts the back end about two feet off the ground. The jarring sound and impact has our ears ringing and our senses off kilter. A little blood is leaking from the girl’s ear. She straightens out the truck, and miraculously, the thing continues on in a straight line. A smile breaks over the girl’s face, almost like she’s mystified. It was the same thing with us deflecting that first rocket-propelled grenade.
“This is fortress on wheels,” she says too loud with an unchecked, crooked smile.
For a second, she reminds me of Netty and there’s a deep sorrow in my heart for my best friend. If I survive this, I won’t see her for another seventy years. That’s when it hits me. I’m stuck here. No time travel balls to get me back. My family is unreachable. My friends, not even born yet. The pain of this loneliness is a sudden, crushing force on my heart, a debilitating turn for the worse. Hiding my face from the girl, I turn and start to cry.
I can’t help it.
We slowly work our way along the outer perimeters of the battlefield, driving the injured and creaking truck over and around cratered asphalt, through walls of smoke, past a shelled Tiger Panzer tank with a smoking, flopped over body hanging out of the turret. I can’t stop looking at the dead man.
Is his family alive or dead?
Does he have kids, a wife, parents who will never be the same because their baby is now dead?
The thing about war is it devastates you. It’s breaking things inside me that might not be fixable. I’m seeing things that can’t be unseen. Perhaps it will infect me permanently, these awful memories, all these terrible misdeeds.
We run over a fallen soldier because there’s no way around him. The truck rolls up on him, but the weight crushes him and we drop down. His chest collapses under the tires and I bite a knuckle to control myself. With all the horrors we’re suffering and creating, weight and sorrow cram themselves into my soul, pressing heartily upon me, leaving me feeling like there’s no escape. A few bullets hit the truck, but neither me nor the girl flinch.
We just keep going.
The world is ash. It’s fire. The world is noise and destruction, a graveyard of souls, the air so spiritually polluted with the newly dead and death I literally feel my stomach lurch.
“How much farther?” I ask. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
She’s now driving so fast both my nerves and my teeth are chattering with every bump we take. This can’t be good for the truck, the way it’s speed-wobbling from behind. Glancing over my shoulder, I scan the truck for obvious damage. When I don’t see anything beyond the obvious, my eyes return to the girl. This waif of a thing who appeared out of nowhere, this girl who knows my name and knows I can heal myself, who is she?
Color is returning to her face, but she looks like she’s in considerable pain.
“Who are you?” I finally ask.
“Not now,” she replies, steadfast. We’re bumping down the road. Heading through the wreckage and debris of a recent skirmish. Not saying anything.
We manage to get through the nightmare of invading Russian troops and that’s when the girl descends into a fit of what I’m assuming is swearing in her native tongue. I follow her eyes to a transport airplane gaining speed as it rolls down an extremely wide and perfectly straight road. The cleared street is a good hundred feet from side to side. Maybe more.
She stomps on the gas, growling out bitter words I don’t understand, cursing and driving as fast as the truck will go, but the rear axle finally wobbles so hard it kicks out then snaps. Our big steel ass drops to the asphalt, grinding and sliding us to a stop.
As angry as she is, I’m afraid to ask.
“Who was that?” I finally inquire. “In the plane?”
“Our target,” she cries, hitting the dash with a flat palm.
Reclined back in our seats at what feels like a forty degree angle due to the broken back end, the girl takes a deep breath, pushes her hair out of her face, then flicks her wild eyes at me and says, “That plane, that Junker 52 transport piece of shit, it carries Adolf Hitler.”
Total silence.
“What now?” I ask, deflated.
“Peter Baumgart was contact. He’s the man who has led me to Hitler. Do you know what I must do with man to get this location? To get this opportunity?” she all but screams in mostly decent English. Our failure, the adrenaline rush of being caught in the middle of battle, her being shot…it’s all for naught in her now and I can’t stall her sense of defeat.
I crawl her mind, startle at the dark memories I find of her getting violated over and over again until this SS pilot finally dropped down on the bed, sexually spent. He looked up at her as she shrunk away from him, physical exhaustion and the drain of copulation all over his sweaty face and in his lazy eyes. She is teeming with revulsion, a skinny young girl, all bones and pale white skin. She’s not even hiding it.
This man in her memories was naked with thick, uneven patches of hair all over his chest, groin and legs. When he spoke to her in Russian with his thick German tongue, I didn’t understand, yet somehow I did.
What he said was, “Now, young Daria, I will tell you all about Adolf Hitler.” And then he did. Dragging myself out of her memories, I feel like showering.
She’s just looking at me.
Daria.
“You can see my thoughts, yes? Read my brains?”
“How do you know that?”
Turning away, she says, “Then you know the sacrifices I make.”
Feeling an incredible shame, her young mind focused only on what’s at stake, she’d let herself be ravaged by that Nazi pig night after night.
“That was your first sexual partner,” I say.
“Still hurts,” she mutters, refusing to look at me. Looking at the weapon on the floor, the wood and steel machine gun, she says, “Two magazines?”
Nodding, I show her the weapon’s spare clip.
“Make sure engraved numbers match or gun will not work.”
The numbers on the clips match.
“What now?” I ask.
“The Junker has limited range,” she says, her English clunky, not all the way fluent. “It’s cargo plane and bomber. Baumgart said Hitler is going to Spain. But not direct flight in Junker.”
“Do we know where in Spain?” I ask.
“We will find them there.”
I’m like, so…is that a yes or no? Is my mission belly up here? I start to panic thinking if I screw this pooch sideways, will I ruin my future? Will the world somehow spiral into decay if I don’t pull the head off this fascist cockroach?
Calm down, I tell myself.
The picture of me killing Hitler, it’s not in Spain. So if I kill him there, will it change everything that’s happened to past me and future me? All the possible time paradoxes are starting to bang around in my head, the feeling li
ke white noise on an old TV. Changing the past is me playing Russian Roulette with the world. After a moment’s contemplation, I say, “We need to get to Argentina.”
She looks up at me, uncertain.
“What?”
“This isn’t how it goes,” she says. She holds my gaze long enough to make me worry.
“I know what I saw,” I say.
“What did you see?” she asks, her interest genuine.
“Me cutting Hitler’s head off in the jungle. The caption said it happened in Misiones, Argentina, about ten minutes drive from the border of Paraguay, deep in the jungles at some kind of a makeshift compound.”
The sad thing is, as driven as I am, I have no idea why I’m here. Why I must kill Hitler. This isn’t some sort of joyride for immortal badass girls who can time travel. It’s not the Disneyland of the future. Honestly, why am I here?
Daria is quiet for a long time and it leaves me wondering who she is or how she came to become my official tour guide to the apocalypse. I suppose I could just crawl her brain and get the answer for myself, but for some reason, the thought of that disturbs me. After seeing what she sacrificed to get the location of that plane, after feeling what she gave up to be here for me, I feel I owe it to her to try harder to respect her privacy. But if she doesn’t tell me here pretty quick, honestly, I won’t have a choice in the matter. I need answers.
“How the hell are we going to get out of here?” I finally ask.
“Next flight will leave in two more hours if plane is not already destroyed, but we need to move truck off road or no planes will fly out and history will be ruined.”
She turns over the truck’s engine, but the clunking and grinding of the vehicle is so screeching loud and jarring, she finally stops. The front wheels won’t pull the blasted-apart-rear-end out of the road.
Gingerly she climbs out of the truck, turns and slams the metal door, wincing in pain as she does so. I get out and walk around the back of the truck. The axle is snapped in two and the wheels are at odd, unsalvageable angles. This thing’s not going anywhere.
“We let him get away!” Daria explained, fuming, her little hands becoming fists. Looking at our truck in the middle of a civilian road that’s being used as an undercover airstrip, she says, “We will be blocking all planes from leaving now.”
“Move away from the truck.”
She just stands there.
“Move!” I say, and she moves. Using my mind, connecting my mind to its matter, I lift, then hurl the broken vehicle into the surrounding woods and she stands there in shock.
“I hear you can do that, too, but to see it…” Her voice just trails off.
“Where is the next plane supposed to take off from?”
She points back toward the war zone, to the famous Brandenburg Gate, and beyond that Periser Platz. The Platz is the open square that now looks like an artillery ravaged bone field of smoking death, complete with burnt out tanks, blown up transports and personal security vehicles and a hearty smattering of corpses. One block north, amidst the haze of smoke and dust, stands the Reichstag building.
“I know man who may help,” Daria says. “He’s got plane. Will take time, but he may help us.”
We start down the sidewalk, stepping over the cut and toppled lamp posts.
“Why are they all cut?” I ask. “The lamp posts?”
“Need room for wings,” Daria answers, and I’m assuming she means the planes.
“Are you sure this guy will fly us out?” I ask.
She says nothing.
I suppose that’s her answer.
When we get close enough to the mouth of the city, when we’re facing the six Doric columns of the shelled and shot-to-shit Brandenburg Gate, we crouch among the rubble. Through the low hanging smoke, up ahead on the right and inside the city, is the bombed Hotel Adlon.
I remember seeing pictures of Berlin in history class thinking how absolutely stunning these structures look in modern times. Now, seeing them blackened, pocked with bullet holes and crumbling, it makes me wonder how it ever went from this to that.
Plugging one side of my nose, I blow snot out the other. It comes out black and stringy. Hunkered down beside Daria, I’m not sure the roasted smell in my nostrils will ever come out, it’s that bad. I blow out the other nostril and Daria makes a face.
“Do you even hurt?” she asks me.
The air is hot, not even a hint of breeze. It’s now just smoky, stagnant air. Daria wants to know if I hurt where I’ve been shot.
I shake my head, no, then say, “You?”
She doesn’t say anything. I suppose that’s her answer as well. Never speak of the negative lest you bring light to it and suffer more as a result. This seems to be her motto. Following my lead, she clears her nose, too, blowing snot at our feet amongst the ruin.
Dropped down in the shit but mostly hidden from stragglers and snipers, I’m again thinking, what the hell am I doing here? Future me from the past just shows up, hands me a history book and says, “You’re going back to kill Hitler,” and I just have to do what she says? The bitch didn’t even give me my return marbles.
I’m shaking my head, looking around, seeing the devastation everywhere thinking I was only recently in my bed in Palo Alto. Now I’m in the middle of hell. With a stranger.
As ironic as this sounds, I only have myself to blame. Calling her a bitch is calling myself a bitch. Obviously I did this to myself for a reason.
Daria stands and says, “Let’s go,” and we scurry through the cover of debris, even though most of the troops are dug in further up, killing each other closer to Führerbunker, Adolf Hitler’s last personal stronghold. The place where apparently he didn’t die.
That corpse that was supposed to be him, back in my time, forensics analysts reveal that the body was that of a girl. Not a mass murdering, height challenged Nazi with serious psychological issues and a God complex.
So we’re in the shadow of a building inside the square, waiting for smoke ahead to clear, and as Daria’s scanning the windows for snipers, I’m watching the streets. Searching the low level windows and skeletal buildings. Eyeballing all the places a mop up crew could hide in case people like me and Daria try sneaking up on the Russians from behind.
“Who are you to me?” I ask.
She makes a tsk-tsking sound, and I see how it curls the right side of her upper lip.
“What?”
“You ask too many questions,” she says.
“Why won’t you tell me?”
She turns and levels me with her blue eyes, eyes I now start to recognize.
“You know my grandmother, before the war.”
“What war?”
“The Great Cleansing.”
My mouth falls open in disbelief. I’ve never heard of this war. Could it be World War II, but called The Great Cleansing by the U.S.S.R. in this timeline?
“I don’t know which war you’re referring to,” I tell her, swallowing hard, then coughing up dry, dirty air. I blow my nose again, wipe my watery eyes with my shirt sleeve, then clean the snot off my lip, staying vigilant all the while.
“It is the war you must stop. War where billions die because one group of assholes feel setting off all nukes across world was good idea to save earth.” She’s talking in incomplete sentences, her voice so clunky and rough from smoke inhalation it’s hard to understand her.
Not that it matters. The things she’s saying that I understand, they’ve got my head spinning in circles. It’s all I can do to keep from entering her mind and extracting the information I want on my own.
“How do you know about nukes?” I’m asking. We’re in 1945. The discussion of nuclear technology amongst kids doesn’t really go mainstream for decades. Then it occurs to me. How could I not have seen it?
“Daria, when are you from?”
“Finally you are asking right questions,” she says. “Time to go.”
And before I can get a straight answer, she’s hunched low, r
unning along the walls of buildings and shop fronts, keeping close to cover. The long road is a path of wreckage and death. It’s a cooked tank and killed men. Up ahead, a stray dog is eating the meaty, blown-in-half leg of a German soldier. When he sees us, he turns and growls, his mouth stained red, flesh hanging off his teeth. I slow as I pass by it, unable to help myself. It’s like my mind is winding down to take it all in, yet fighting me because I know I’ll never be able to cleanse my mind of these things.
“Hurry up, Savannah!” Daria harsh whispers, waving me forward.
“I’m coming,” I say, catching up in time for a shot to ring out and Daria to spin around. My eyes shoot open in horror. I freeze. She’s got a huge red bloom just below her clavicle. Her mouth is open, but no words are coming out.
“Anetka,” she finally says, gasping.
A second shot rings out and takes off half her head. The screaming that starts in me gathers power; it starts low then becomes a roar of rage. My mind seeks out the shooter, finds him on top of a nearby building, hunkered down. I drag him off the roof with my mind and he zips through the air toward me. My eyes are now black pebbles of rage, the veins in my neck standing like hard blue squiggles of retribution.
The soldier hits the ground at my feet, hard, bones breaking, skin tearing off.
It’s a knocking at my brain, it’s a karate kick trying to decimate my sanity—the truth of Daria. She is the granddaughter of a friend. Anetka. Netty. My eyes won’t look at her because right now they’re on Daria’s killer. My heart opens wide with pain; the roar is replaced by a hitching sob, which I manage to stop. Lifting the man in the air with my mind, I strip away his clothes. Then the rest of his skin. Then I break him in half, and in half again.
And then the sniper I didn’t see fires his shot and my head rocks sideways, propelling me into a blissful nothingness.
Poop Pilafs and the Wailing Infant
1
When Sabrina Baldridge got done crying, which she’d been doing the last four hours at the thought of her mom being killed so she could thrive in Hollywood, she got ready for the party. There was a vile of cocaine on the dresser. Insurance against her depression. She avoided it. Sabrina wasn’t a junkie, even though Lennox said everyone did it after their first sacrifice. Just to take off the edge. She wasn’t everyone.
