The Sentinel saluted in return. “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer,” he barked out. The Nazi motto. One people, one Empire, one leader.
Her breaths grew tight. At this distance, Zara could see the three lightning bolts printed on the side of his helmet, the symbol of the German Anomaly Division—the most elite, and most frightening, branch of the Nazi military. The division had been the brainchild of Führer Adolf Hitler’s, an entire regiment composed of genetically altered soldiers who could crush their enemies with their super-powered fists. And those fists had changed the world.
Zara’s gaze slunk toward the farmhouse, still unsure why the Sentinel had stopped by. Please don’t be here for a search, she thought desperately. She wished she could warn her uncle somehow—Hide the radio, she’d tell him—but then the Sentinel landed on the field, his boots flattening an onion sprout, blocking the house from her view.
“Your name, girl?” he demanded.
She forced herself to look up at him. “Zara St. James, mein Herr.”
“Age?”
“Sixteen.”
“And where are you from?”
Zara grimaced. She had heard that question enough times to know that he wasn’t asking where she had been born, which was right here in the Shenandoah Valley. He wanted to know her lineage, where she had gotten her black hair and sable eyes in this rural mountain town.
“I’m English on my mother’s side,” Zara said slowly. Her chest squeezed at the mention of her mom, and she wondered where his questioning was leading. “And Japanese on my father’s.”
“The Empire of Japan, hmm?” His eyes skimmed over her sun-darkened skin, loitering over her sweaty, secondhand shirt and drifting toward her hips. His mouth curved into a smile.
A sour taste bloomed on Zara’s tongue. She knew that smile and what it meant. Most Germans sniffed at her “half-breed” stock. She was an Untermensch—a subhuman—like the Polish and blacks and any mixed-race persons, only fit for factory and farm work. But not everyone scorned the color of her skin. There were a few townspeople—always men, it seemed—whose gazes lingered on the shape of her eyes and at the slight curve of her hungry waist. Like the Sentinel was doing now.
Zara’s thoughts hit a tailspin. She could use her fists as a weapon, but that wouldn’t be much against the Sentinel. Or she could scream, but there were acres between her and her uncle. Only the cows would hear her from here.
That left her with one last option, but Uncle Red’s warning drilled through her head: No one can know about what you can do, he had told her countless times. If the Nazis found out, they’d haul you off to one of their labs or a labor camp. Or a grave.
The Sentinel stepped forward, that smile of his arching. Zara’s fingers tightened around her canteen, ready to swing at his head, but then he pulled out a stack of papers from his pocket instead. He tossed one in the dirt.
“An announcement from Fort Goering,” he said, referring to the Nazi citadel a few miles up the road, where thousands of soldiers were stationed. “Pick it up.”
Eyes wary, Zara retrieved the paper and ignored his grin at her obedience. The fort’s soldiers must have been ordered to distribute these flyers across the township; and unfortunately for Zara, the Sentinel had decided to hand-deliver hers. She scanned the paper’s contents:
FROM THE OFFICE OF COMMAND
FORT GOERING, SHENANDOAH DIVISION
EASTERN AMERICAN TERRITORIES
At 1700 hours EST, all residents of the Greenfield Township are required at the Courthouse Square. An announcement will be made shortly thereafter, broadcasted live from Berlin. Attendance is mandatory.
A dozen questions ripped through Zara’s mind. Most announcements from Berlin—treaties signed, battles won—were aired on the evening news reports or printed in the state-run newspaper. Only a handful merited a live broadcast, let alone mandatory attendance.
Zara still remembered the first announcement she had attended, back when her mother was alive. All of Greenfield had met in the square to celebrate the birth of Johann Hitler, the son of the current Führer, Dieter Hitler. The entire Nazi Empire, from Berlin to Brussels, from the American coast to the North African shores, was forced to salute the newest addition to the Hitler dynasty, the great-great-grandson of Adolf himself. Zara’s mother had saluted dutifully, too, but a soldier struck her anyway for wearing muddy boots to such a sacred event. She had apologized immediately, but she never flinched from the hit. Years later, that memory still stuck with Zara: her mother standing tall, the bravest woman in all of Greenfield. The ache of missing her never went away.
Zara wondered what this new announcement would bring. Perhaps Dieter’s wife had squeezed out another child? Or maybe the Führer had taken over the Italian Dakotas? The Italian economy had teetered on the brink of collapse since Prime Minister Benito Mussolini III came into power a decade ago. He may have sold the Dakotas, along with the Canadian lands, for a desperate price.
“Why are you still standing here, little Mischling?” the Sentinel said, cutting into her thoughts.
Zara tacked on a polite smile. “My apologies, mein Herr.”
His jewel-blue eyes looked her up and down. “See to it that you aren’t late. I’ll be watching.”
Her cheeks burned, but she daren’t say a word. Instead, she quickly turned on her heel while the Sentinel launched into the clouds. Only then did Zara shudder.
“Mischling?” she muttered. It was a German term for mixed-blood, usually used like a slur, but the Sentinel hadn’t made it sound that way. Her fingers had itched to slap him, but an Untermensch like her would get jailed for that. Or sent to the Front Royal labor camp thirty miles east.
With another shudder, Zara hurried to the house, abandoning the onions for tomorrow. She leapt over the infant rows of corn and ran past the faded barn that her great-great-grandparents had built before the war. In the early ’40s, the old United States had been a beacon of hope—of freedom so vast it could swallow you whole—but that America had long been destroyed, its cities flattened by the German Anomaly Division. After President Roosevelt was executed in early 1944, the Axis powers had cut the country like a giant birthday cake. The Nazis had claimed the fertile lands east of the Mississippi River while the Japanese took over the West, leaving the Italians with the Dakota plains, a consolation prize for their anemic role in the fighting. Decades had passed since then and the Germans still held a tight rein over the Territories, but Zara yearned for more than a life of hard labor and Heil Hitlers.
One day, she thought, clutching the paper in her hand. One day, her uncle would let her join the Revolutionary Alliance, an underground resistance group that had fought the Empire for decades. It was originally formed by the last remnants of the US military, who had escaped Washington, DC, after Roosevelt’s execution. Back then, its members had numbered in the millions, many of them former soldiers, but with the US military long disbanded the Alliance now relied on civilian recruits, like Uncle Red. And hopefully Zara.
If only she could join the rebels, then she could help push the Nazis back to Germany or, even better, crush the regime altogether. Maybe then, finally, her mother’s death would have justice.
As her lungs puffed, Zara burst through the kitchen door of the run-down farmhouse to find her uncle underneath the kitchen sink, a foot-long wrench in his hand. A water pipe had burst that morning (the second one that month), and he had stayed behind to fix it. Otherwise he would’ve been out in the fields as usual, planting eggplant and digging holes for the cabbage.
“What happened?” said Uncle Red. He set the wrench on the floor and pulled himself up. “Did the cow get sick again?”
Zara peered up into his bearded face. Her uncle wasn’t very tall, but she stood a whole head shorter than him. “The cow’s fine. Here, look at this.” She handed him the notice.
His green eyes, the same color as Zara’s mother’s, flared wide. “An announcement? Now?”
“Do you know what this is about?” H
er voice dropped low out of habit. They never knew who could be watching them. “Maybe the Alliance sent you a message?”
“No, we haven’t gotten a thing since last week.”
“This has to be serious if attendance is mandatory.”
Uncle Red ran a tense hand through his thinning auburn hair. As he neared forty, he seemed to be losing more of it each year. “I know. Remember to stick close to me. The square will be swarming with soldiers. You can’t lose control, do you understand?”
Zara bristled. “I haven’t had an episode in years.”
“It doesn’t hurt to be cautious.”
“I’m always cautious.”
He looked doubtful, but said nothing more about it. “Grab the keys. We don’t want to keep the Führer waiting.”
They climbed into Uncle Red’s ancient truck, a red Volkswagen with an engine like a foghorn. Key in ignition, the truck let out a roar and they rumbled down the mud-caked road, lumbering past acres of corn and leafy beans that the Nazis would later seize to feed the troops at Fort Goering. Every farmer was required to pay a land tax to the Empire, which made Zara’s blood simmer at every harvest. After months of her and her uncle’s hard work, the Germans would take the very best crops and leave them with cornhusks and bug-eaten cabbage. She hated cabbage.
Uncle Red cracked open his window, and the faint scent of cow manure wafted into the cab. “Who gave you the announcement? One of the town magistrates?”
“A sentinel.” The fresh memory of his visit made Zara’s skin crawl. That leering smile of his … “The one who can fly.”
“He’s new, isn’t he? Sentinel Achen, I think. We better move the radio to be safe.”
Zara nodded. For years, they had hidden a small transistor radio inside their henhouse, tucked under the floorboards along with her great-great-grandfather’s rifle and pistol. Every week or two, Uncle Red would use the radio to speak with the Alliance through coded messages. It was the only reliable method of communication they had found to skirt the Nazis’ watchful eyes.
“We should’ve checked the radio before we left,” said Zara as the truck hit a bump. “The Alliance could’ve figured out what this announcement is about.”
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
A thought struck her. “Do you think the Soviets have something to do with this? Maybe they broke the pact.” Back in 1939, Hitler and Stalin had signed the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, which had kept the two countries in a tenuous peace for decades. But in recent years Comrade Premier Volkov had seemed keen on expanding into the borderlands that separated Germany from the Reds. The Alliance believed that a few of those border nations, like Latvia and Estonia, could be sympathetic to the communist cause.
“Volkov wouldn’t act so rashly,” said Uncle Red as he turned onto the gravel lane leading into town. “His own Anomaly soldiers are strong, but they can’t compete against the German Anomaly Division just yet.”
Zara sighed, slightly deflated, and stared out her window at the rolling hills passing by. Her uncle had a penchant for poking holes in her theories, and as much as she hated to admit it, he was right about this one. During the war the Nazis had led the race to create the first super-powered soldier, at the behest of Führer Adolf. Known as the Dresden Study, the German geneticists had plucked test subjects from concentration camps, mostly Jews and gypsies. By 1941 they had unleashed a battalion of bulletproof Anomalies onto the streets of London. In mere weeks, that single battalion had killed off a third of Parliament and flattened half of the British capital before their genes destabilized from the wartime experiments. Nearly all of those first Anomalies fell into comas and died—the Nazi scientists still had their work cut out for them—but the soldiers had completed their mission. Churchill surrendered a month later.
After England fell, the rest of the world had scrambled to their own laboratories. Japan had had an early start—its military had been experimenting on Chinese and Russian prisoners since the 1930s—and its first Anomaly troops, dubbed the Ronin Elite, debuted in 1942. The Soviets followed suit a year later. But the Americans opted to focus on their top-secret Manhattan Project, hoping to fight the Anomalies with an atomic bomb. Their gamble, however, went sour. Before the United States could test their secret weapon, the Nazis attacked the American East Coast while Japan struck from the west. Thousands upon thousands of Anomaly troops flooded the country, crushing the United States under the Axis’s polished boot.
Uncle Red rolled up his window, his jaw visibly tense. “Remember what I told you at the house. Be careful at the square.”
Zara sighed. This again? “I know, Uncle Red.”
A mile later, the truck entered the Greenfield town limits, and the small, sagging houses gave way to redbrick town homes, proudly standing over cobblestone streets. Iron gas lamps lit the clean sidewalks and flower boxes dangled from the windows, popping with pink tulips and cheery daffodils. Zara frowned at the picture-perfect sight.
Only the wealthy could live here. Only the Nazis.
The truck puttered down a side road and halted outside the offices of the old Virginian Post-Observer, long abandoned after the Nazis destroyed its presses. Next door to it, Zara saw the remnants of the synagogue that had been burned long before. It was strange to think about the Jews who had once worshipped there, who had made Greenfield their home. Almost all of them had been shot during the postwar cleansings, although a few had managed to survive by going into hiding or assuming new identities.
Zara’s hand gripped the door handle as she thought about her best friend, Molly Burns, whom she met back in primary school. Molly had been the only one who didn’t care about Zara’s Japanese side. In the hot Shenandoah summers they would spend hours at the Burns pond, and during the fall they would fill their stomachs with fat red plums. But Molly disappeared just after the girls turned thirteen. Her whole family had vanished along with her.
Uncle Red was the one who broke the news to Zara—that years before Molly was born, the Burnses had once been the Birnbaums. Molly’s great-great-grandparents had converted to Protestantism before the war, but the Nazis had discovered their Jewish heritage and shot them all dead, burning their bodies until the smoke cluttered the pale morning sky. Thinking about that day still brought a lump to Zara’s throat. The Empire had killed so many people she had loved. Her best friend, her own mother. Far, far too many.
Turning her head from the synagogue, Zara hopped out of the truck and started for the square, but her uncle caught her by the elbow.
“Keep your chin down,” he said.
His head was cocked toward a half-dozen soldiers patrolling the street for the announcement. They each wore a green helmet and cradled a standard-issue Heckler & Koch rifle. As they drew closer, Uncle Red tilted his chin downward and motioned for Zara to do the same, but she stole a glance at the soldiers anyway. She couldn’t help noticing that some of them were Japanese, proven by the little red sun flags on their armbands. Only full-blooded Japanese were given honorary Aryan status in the German Empire, a nod to the long-standing alliance between Germany and Japan. These soldiers must be stationed at Fort Goering on a military exchange program, a goodwill gesture between the two allies.
Years ago, Zara’s father had been one of these soldiers, too. She didn’t know much about him, aside from the fact that he had filed for an immediate transfer once the girl he had been secretly seeing—Zara’s mother—told him she was pregnant.
One of the soldiers caught Zara’s eye, but she swiftly looked across the street. When she was little and didn’t know any better, she had wandered up to a Japanese captain and asked if he knew her father, Corporal Tanaka. The soldier had taken one look at Zara and said, Why would I know anything about your father or his trash? When he started laughing, she had run away, tears swimming down her cheeks. She realized then how her father must have viewed her. Trash. Litter. Garbage to be thrown away, just as he had thrown away her mom.
“You all right? You’re pale.” Uncle
Red looped an arm around her shoulder.
Zara shrugged and sank against him, his hug reminding her that not everyone had abandoned her. As much as Uncle Red frustrated her, as much as she wanted to box his ears sometimes, he was the only father she had known and the only one she needed.
As they neared the town center, they zigzagged through the crowd of farmers in their sweat-soaked shirts and the iron miners in their dusty coveralls, who had been let out early for the announcement. Zara followed her uncle into a wide, bricked courtyard, commonly known as the square. The Greenfield Courthouse lay ahead of them, a centuries-old building that had once been the pride of the town, with its white pillars and handsome bell tower. But now it was used for official Nazi business, complete with a portrait of Führer Dieter hanging above its doors. Everyone was expected to salute the painting whenever they walked under it, and Zara had always done so obediently, but that didn’t stop her belly from twisting every time. She hated looking into Dieter’s plump face and his ridiculous rectangle of a mustache, the same mustache that his great-grandfather had favored.
“Where’s the painting of Reichsmarschall Faust?” Uncle Red said. He nodded to the blank space next to the Führer’s portrait where a likeness of Reichsmarschall Faust, the cousin of the Führer and the head commander of the Territories, usually hung.
“Maybe they’re putting up a new one.”
“Maybe,” Uncle Red said, although his eyes narrowed and he didn’t look convinced.
Zara pushed deeper into the crowd, murmuring a quick “Pardon me” to the German housewives she bumped into. As usual, the Hausfrauen were dressed in the latest fashions from Berlin: leather riding boots, wide-legged trousers, and delicate blouses patterned with tiny silver swastikas. The women had brought their broods along for the show: stair-step children with cornhusk hair. Since the war, the Nazis had encouraged women to bear large families to spread the Aryan line, and now it was a common sight to see a German mother with five, six, or seven children in tow. They reminded Zara of her neighbor’s brood mares: popping out child after child until their bodies could take no more.
The Great Destroyers Page 31
