Orphan Monster Spy

by Matt Killeen

  The boy shook his head. “I’m from Dresden,” he admitted, as if that explained it all. Good, thought Sarah. Neither do I.

  “Well, grab this and pull. On three . . .” Stern took hold of the noseband, and they planted their heels into the mud.

  “One. Two.” They looked at each other. “Three!” They hauled on the bridle.

  The horse screamed and thrashed its front legs, throwing up great sluices of muddy water. Their heels slid out of their footholds as it tried to pull away. After a minute they stopped, exhausted, hands white and raw with effort.

  “Again,” Sarah urged, looking into the horse’s eyes and seeing the panic broiling just beneath the surface.

  “It’s no use—”

  “No, again!” Sarah hauled on the bridle, not knowing now if she wanted the horse free as part of the ruse or because she herself needed it to be so.

  “Wait!” shouted Stern, and he jumped down into the trench beside the beast.

  “What are you doing? He’ll kick you!” The last thing Sarah needed was an unconscious SS guard.

  “No, wait!”

  The soldier busied himself around the horse’s hindquarters, digging through the mud as Sarah stood, hopelessly wet and muddied, stroking its muzzle.

  “This is crazy, huh?” she whispered to the animal in a tone she could reasonably argue was comforting. “If you kick him in the head, I could go home, maybe? What do you think?” The horse whinnied and flicked its ears. “Oh, you’re right, of course. They’d look for me then, wouldn’t they? Fine, don’t kill him, I don’t care.”

  “Try now,” the boy shouted. Sarah took a breath and pulled on the bridle. The horse lurched to one side, and with a scream it took one step up the slope with its free back leg.

  “Yes!” cheered Sarah. “Come on . . .”

  She hauled again, and Stern’s hands closed around hers. The animal inched itself out of the trench.

  “Come on,” they both shouted, adjusting their feet, pulling, stabilizing, pulling again, then finding new higher footholds until finally the remaining hoof was dragged out of the mud. The horse broke into a trot and mounted the crest of the hillock, taking Sarah and the boy with it. He let go, but her hand was caught in the nose strap, and she was carried down the slope and up the next on her back, dodging the pounding hooves, until her hand slipped out from under the bridle. The horse effortlessly leapt over her and was gone.

  Sarah lay in the mud and degenerated into helpless, hysterical laughter—big-belly, side-splitting, couldn’t-breathe-properly whooping cries of pain and joy.

  “Are you all right?” asked Stern. He was covered in mud from hair to boots.

  “Yes.” Sarah giggled. That’s all it took, she thought. A helpful Schutzstaffel trooper to crawl about in the mud for you.

  “Will she be okay?” He tried to help her up, but she slipped back onto the ground through his hands.

  “He. He’s a he,” she declared with certainty. You have no idea. “If he can stay out of trouble tonight, he’ll be fine.” The soldier finally brought her to her feet. He was barely old enough for the uniform, barely old enough for his size, a face of compassion and innocence. Sarah felt disarmed. Transparent.

  They were lit up by the lightning arcing in the sky, a spotlight in a windswept dance hall. The rain eased into larger, messy splashes. Sarah realized her mouth was open.

  “I should walk you home,” he said at last. The thunder boomed dully.

  “Erm, no, I’m fine. It’s not far. I . . . couldn’t show up in the middle of the night with a soldier, could I? My Mutti would be mad.” She laughed, that caustic fake laugh she’d heard from her mother’s friends when she was little. “Go and do . . . the thing you’re doing . . . the thing . . .” Sarah grasped hold of her intellect. You’re going to screw this up, concentrate. “What is it that you’re doing?”

  “Oh, we’re following a criminal who broke into a nearby estate,” he said proudly.

  “Oh! You know who it is, though? You can just go and wait for him where he lives?” she probed.

  “No idea who he is, or where he lives, or what he wanted.”

  “Oh dear.” Good.

  “But we shot him, so he won’t last long.”

  There was a split second where his eyes were those of a little monster. A little monster with a gun.

  “Well, thanks for your help. I have to go, try to sleep before school tomorrow.” She headed back the way she came. So close to freedom and success. Act normal. One o’clock in the morning. In a rainstorm. With the SS. And a horse. Nothing could be more normal.

  Her path was still lit by his flashlight, so he must be watching her. Without the horse or the chase to distract her, fear filled the space.

  Let me go.

  Then everything went black. She looked back to see his silhouette picking through the paddock, the foggy ring of light bobbing ahead of him.

  She started to run.

  From the darkness, there was a loud whinny and snort.

  You’re welcome.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE CAPTAIN WAS unconscious when she got back to him. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, as best she could tell in the dark, but she wouldn’t have dared move him even if she could have. He was hidden and dry, so the barn was as good a place as any. But he was going to need water, food, clean dressings.

  So Sarah went back to Rothenstadt.

  It had taken more than an hour to rinse the blood and mud from her clothes, then longer to find somewhere for it all to dry where it wouldn’t be found. She had swept her muddy footprints from the corridors as well, but the school was so grubby that it barely mattered. When she finally climbed into her cot, she found her heart was beating too fast to sleep.

  She dozed through the next day’s lessons, with the winter light and buzzing electric bulbs cruelly bright to her twitching eyes. She was barely capable of evading the Mouse’s innocuous but probing questions. In the bathroom. Going for a walk. Watching the storm. Couldn’t sleep. Just stepped out. Yes, and my socks. At dinner she was dropping a dry roll into her pocket when she realized her constant companion was watching.

  “What are you doing with that bread?” asked the Mouse, sounding only faintly curious. Not again, thought Sarah.

  “Keeping it for later. I sometimes get hungry.”

  “You could eat it on your walk . . .”

  Sarah swung on the Mouse, but she was already busying herself with the salt.

  “Mouse,” Sarah began after squashing her anger. “Sometimes this place is so . . . horrible, that I can’t be here anymore. Do you understand that? I mean, I’m not leaving. I just need to be outside from time to time.”

  The Mouse pushed an unconvincing vegetable around her plate. “You wouldn’t leave me here, would you? Alone, I mean.”

  Sarah answered immediately, knowing a pause would be damning. “No, of course not.” She smiled. With your eyes.

  “Do you promise?” she pleaded.

  Shut up, shut up, shut up.

  “Yes.” Liar, liar, liar.

  “Here, take my bread,” the Mouse offered. Sarah took it, and the uncomfortable feeling that she was stealing, with a tired smile.

  Maybe I’ll be here forever after all.

  * * *

  • • •

  Although the sanatorium had all the dressings and tools she thought she might need, she was faced with the problem of transporting water to the barn. In the end she resorted to using a flower vase that sloshed its precious contents at every opportunity onto her still-wet coat. The moonless night provided a series of trip hazards and mysterious puddles for her tired feet to find. Twice she found herself in the wrong place and had to correct her course, taking an age to reach the barn, all the time worrying that he’d been found.

  She tried watching the barn from a distance, but there w
asn’t enough light for her to tell if anyone was inside, outside, or surrounding it. Finally, she just walked up to the entrance to find it exactly as she’d left it.

  “Hello?”

  She pushed her way in and tugged the doors closed behind her, pulling a candle and matches from her pocket. With her eyes closed against the flare of sulfur to keep her night vision, she struck the match and waited for the red glow through her eyelids to fade. The barn seemed empty, except for dancing shadows. The candle sputtered and eventually came to life.

  “Captain?”

  “You know, the nurses haven’t been in to see me all day,” a voice croaked from the straw. Inside Sarah a little fire ignited, fed by hope and relief.

  “I hid you very well.”

  “Yes, and now I smell of dung. Thank you for that.” He sounded pitifully weak, but the words were still his. This pleased her, not just because he was alive and she was not alone.

  Sarah knelt next to the pile and brushed the straw from his head and shoulders. He was a sickly white, and his lips were chapped and dry. His eyes opened long enough to look at her and then closed again. She put the vase down and began to unpack her pockets.

  “It makes a difference from the whiff of impropriety, doesn’t it?”

  He tried to laugh, but the sound rattled in his chest. “The girl who ate a dictionary.”

  “A girl who knows things. So unusual. How does the world cope?” She wriggled behind him, and with difficulty she slid her knees under his shoulders. “Hup,” she ordered. He cried out as she pulled his head into her lap. She reached for the vase and tipped it toward his mouth. “Drink.”

  It was a messy process, but he gulped down the tepid water. It seemed to have an immediate effect on him. His eyes opened wider, and it was probably Sarah’s imagination, but the cool blue seemed to gain a spark of life again.

  “You led them away?”

  “Oh yes, I told them, no British spies here. You have the wrong address.”

  “Are they still looking?” He sounded like he didn’t care, but he probably couldn’t.

  “They didn’t inform me otherwise. Drink.” He swallowed another few mouthfuls.

  How will you keep him fed? How will you get him home?

  “They didn’t know who you were, or why you were there,” she explained.

  “How do you know that?”

  “A very nice SS trooper called . . . Sturm, Stern? He’s from Dresden.” The Captain made a curious noise. “I know things, remember? Let me look at your shoulder.”

  The coat pulled away, but the shirt underneath was stuck to the wound by a dark brown crust, along with Sarah’s handkerchief. A giant scab. Maybe. What was the first thing her mother would have done?

  “This needs cleaning. Tell me what to do.” Sarah tapped his good shoulder. “Come on.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” She was flabbergasted. “Were you shot before? Someone you know must have been shot, you’re a gottverdammter soldier. You were in the last war, weren’t you?”

  “I’m not a medic, and yes, I was shot before. There were doctors and nurses, with a good bedside manner.”

  “Fine. They cleaned it?” He nodded. “Then, bandage . . . things? Right.”

  Sarah did not like him not knowing things. He always knew things when she did not.

  She poured a little water over his shoulder and used it to dissolve the crust. He hissed as she began to pull the shirt away. The wound wept blood but didn’t open.

  “There’s a bullet in here, isn’t there?” Sarah demanded. “Does that need to come out?”

  “I don’t know,” he whined, shaking his head.

  “Hey. Stop sniveling,” she barked. “Straight yes or no answer.”

  “I don’t have any useful information for you,” he said, regaining his composure. He winced again as Sarah bathed the wound. She slowly and clumsily tried to bandage his shoulder. He began sweating with the effort of moving and gritted his teeth.

  “Talk to me. Tell me about the Grapefruit Bomb,” Sarah said.

  “What about it?”

  “See, this is the bit where I get you to talk about something to take your mind off what I’m doing. So just . . . things, Captain Floyd. Consider it an opportunity to reveal my ignorance. How does it work?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “So make it simple.” She was the one that needed to take her mind elsewhere. Her dressing was hopelessly amateur.

  “Professor Meitner says, there’s . . . an element, uranium. It’s unstable.”

  “Unstable. What does that mean?”

  “It doesn’t like being together . . . It wants to be smaller, to become something else.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  She just needed him to talk.

  “If it’s hit with a spare neutron, a small bit of another atom, it can split to become two new things.”

  “This sounds very technical. Carry on.”

  “When that happens, it releases a little burst of energy. Like a breaking stick making a sound. Tiny but . . . Jesus.”

  The wound started to seep again.

  “Keep still. Go on.”

  “It also spits out three neutrons. Remember the small bit?”

  “Indeed.” Sarah was mopping up the blood with her skirt. She hoped it wouldn’t show.

  “These extra bits can hit another big bit and make that spit out some more extra bits. They’ll make more and so on in a big chain.”

  “The bits spit, the spit hits, and then the bits spit some more. It’s a tongue-twister,” Sarah chimed in with her mother’s best party voice.

  “Eventually, all the bits that make up the Grapefruit Bomb would be spitting and hitting all at once and—boom.”

  She pulled the bandage tighter, hoping the pressure would help. “Like gunpowder.”

  “No. Much, much more powerful. Millions and millions of times. Are you bandaging me or tying me up?” He winced.

  “Sorry. Enough talking. Now eat.” She unwrapped her meager supplies and tore the bread into small chunks before feeding them to him like a bird. If the wound opened again when she was gone, would the bleeding stop, or would it keep going until there was nothing left? Would she be bringing tomorrow’s lunch to a corpse?

  Kommt Zeit, kommt Rat—you’ll deal with that in good time.

  “Thif breadf is schtale.”

  “Day-old bread is cheaper, didn’t you know? They’d say you’d have to be Jewish to know that trick, but this?” She held up a piece of dry bread. “This is pure Aryan greed.”

  “What’s that?” He looked at the rectangular bundle that was left.

  “It’s a book.”

  “A book?” He started to laugh again, a dry, hacking sound, but he had to stop.

  She bristled at his ingratitude. “I thought you might get bored.”

  An arm reached out of the straw for it and made a hand-clenching gesture. “Mein Kampf?” he said on seeing the book. “I’ve read it; it’s rubbish.”

  “Rothenstadt’s library is very limited.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Sarah was so tired when she got back to the dorm she could barely get undressed. She almost failed to see the Mouse waiting in the dark but nodded in her direction to acknowledge the moment.

  Sarah climbed into her cot. She couldn’t worry about the Mouse. Her mind was already full.

  How long are you going to be able to do this?

  As long as it takes.

  Long enough for him to die or for you to get caught?

  Exactly that long.

  * * *

  • • •

  He was not a corpse. In fact he claimed to feel better.

  “So what’s happening in the war? Why has not
hing happened since September?” she asked.

  Sarah ladled the soup into the Captain’s mouth. The tin container was a real find, but entering the kitchens and seeing how their food was prepared had been the price. Feeling around in the dark for food while the cockroaches played was bad enough, but finding maggots on the ham was nauseating. The soup had been out too long, but it smelled all right. She fully expected it to make a reappearance in the dining hall tomorrow, anyway. One way or another.

  “I’d rather hear about Elsa Schäfer,” he said, the spoon at his lips.

  “You’re kidding, right?” she exploded. “When would I have had time, the energy to do anything about her?”

  “You’re spilling the—”

  “I believe we’re dealing with the results of your little phase of the operation right now. If you want me to stop stealing food for you and smuggling it out, just let me know.”

  She waited for an answer, but he just watched her. Her fury burned itself out over the seconds—it was too exhausting.

  Finally, he spoke. “So shall I eat that food or catch you up on world events?”

  “It’s hard to be superior with soup dripping down your chin. Swallow, then talk.”

  He obeyed. “Well, as of three days ago . . . bad weather stopped the invasion of France. No more fighting this winter. The British were in place by October anyway, makes no difference.”

  “So what will happen in the spring?” Sarah found something unpleasant on the spoon and wiped it off on her sleeve. It seemed strange to be talking about the idea of spring, of the future, when survival meant dealing with one day at a time.

  “Optimistically?”

  “If you like.” She liked the sound of that right now.

  “The Allies will give Manstein a bloody nose in Belgium, and it’ll all grind to a halt.”

  “And realistically?”

  “Guderian is right, and they’ll be too fast and too strong. The British will be lucky to stop them outside Paris while the French are still sitting in their trenches, waiting for the last war to start again.”