The dent had me worried I’d permanently beached the car on the fountain. Not so, though freeing myself did mean shearing off most of the paint on that side of the car. So much for the old man’s beloved car.
I rejoined the race to find Liv and Agnes before the Luftwaffe got them. A spur off the roundabout took me speeding into Stoke Aldermoor. Residential. Everything looked the same to me. The headlamps didn’t do a damn bit of good. I needed a bloody street sign. But of course they’d all been taken down as a precaution in case of invasion.
The Rolls Royce made short work of the first postbox I came across. Letters and envelopes went fluttering into the deadly night. I chased them. Another ton of ordnance rained on Coventry while I sifted through the addresses for a clue to my location, and Liv’s. I read by the glow behind me as Coventry burned and dwindling searchlights crisscrossed the sky.
It took five more postboxes, but I found Liv’s street. Question was, where was Liv? I’d passed a few municipal shelters on the way through. Had she scampered to one of the brick bunkers dotting the neighborhood? Or did this place have an Anderson?
I’d expected a terraced house. But this was nicer than our place in London, I was sorry to see. Nicer than anything I’d ever been able to give her. Set back from the road a bit, lined with a little privacy hedge, brick pathway curving through the gate. Cedar shingles, new paint. The kind of place we’d always assumed, wrongly, we’d make our own one day. That we wouldn’t be stuck in Walworth forever. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I left the car running and didn’t bother to knock. Anybody still inside—assuming they’d be that daft—wouldn’t hear it over the whistling and concussion of Hitler’s bombs drawing closer with every second. A gas main went up a few streets over. The explosion slammed me against the door. I tasted blood. Compared to the resulting fireball, the headlamps from Stephenson’s car were a candle flame held against the sun.
“Liv!” I shouted. No response.
The foyer took me to a den. There Agnes’s bassinet lay tumbled sideways on the floor, draped with a swath of pink elephants. I snatched her baby blanket on my way through. The fibers were damp. My daughter had sicked up. Liv hadn’t had a chance to wash out the stain.
“Liv!” Empty house.
Please, God, let there be a garden.
Through the den, through the dining room, through the kitchen. A plate of reconstituted egg had gone cold on the table. Midnight snack? A door beyond the kitchen hung open, spilling light from the house into the rear garden. A breeze pushed on the door and pulled a creak from the hinges. Somebody had come through here in a hurry, reckless with haste.
Then I was outside and sprinting toward the familiar silhouette of an Anderson. The shelter rang like a gong from the pounding of my fists. I must have startled somebody, because my Agnes started to cry. I would know that sound anywhere.
“Liv! Olivia! Open up, damn it!” My ruined throat turned it into the bellowing of a madman.
“Oh, crumbs,” said the voice of an old biddy. Most definitely not my wife.
The door opened. A man squinted up at me. He looked roughly my age, though he wore the years a hell of a lot better. Also unlike me, he wore a clerical collar. I couldn’t see into the dim lamp-lit shelter. He took in my scars, and what could have only been a wild-eyed expression on my face, with an impressive grace.
“Sir,” he said, taking my arm, “you’re safe now. Join us, please.”
Had I been a bereaved congregant, the tone of his voice would have been exactly what I needed. With a gentle tug, he tried to coax me inside. Brave fellow: all this while the whistle of free-falling explosives grew louder and the concussion of bomb blasts surrounded us.
The next hit to the neighborhood knocked us on our arses. Debris like a rain of knives pelted my head and shoulders. It sounded like hailstones on the Anderson.
The vicar jumped to his feet and tried to physically drag me into the shelter. I called for Liv again.
Movement in the shadows. An older lady moved aside, and then there she was, my Olivia, standing with a baby on her shoulder like a disheveled Madonna. She gaped at me.
“Commander?”
*
Reinhardt’s brilliance cast knife-edged shadows in all directions. Every brick in the rubble, every strand of autumn-dry grass stood at the focus of its own spotlight. Heat shimmer rose from his body in waves, distorting everything around him like a desert mirage.
“Raybould. Hurry.” There was an edge to Gretel’s voice. That was new. Marsh didn’t like it.
The zone of heat shimmer expanded around Reinhardt as though he were inflating a balloon. Wider. Wider. Trampled grass flared to ash where his Willenskräfte scoured the earth. The crushed gravel drive became a scar of bubbling slag in its wake. Stray pockets of moonlit snow flashed into superheated steam.
Marsh scrambled for the fresh battery, snatched it, rolled. Glimpsed a twinkling moon. Reinhardt’s wall swept toward them, too wide to dodge.
Gretel held Kammler’s connectors at the ready. Marsh slammed the battery into his harness, hard enough to tear the buckle. She drove the wires home. Click.
Marsh pointed toward the tidal wave of invisible death speeding toward them. “Wall!”
Kammler scowled. Frowned. “W-w-w.”
There was nothing to see. He didn’t understand.
“Wall!” screamed Marsh. His breath no longer steamed in the autumn night.
Nothing. Kammler moaned.
Marsh slapped him. “WALL!” Kammler’s face twisted in confused anger. The night turned warm, too warm, like when he sat too close to the hearth at Will’s favorite pub. Marsh hit Kammler again. “Wall, damn it, wall!”
Kammler flailed at Marsh, confused, hurt, and angry. Marsh gasped at the pain in his ribs when the muscular imbecile flung him aside.
“Mm! Muh!” Kammler howled. “Wuh! W-w-w-!”
His eyebrows came together, his lower lip slid up almost to the base of his nose. It was a frown of sorrow, a scowl of concentration, an expression of impotent rage.
Something rippled around Kammler. The air crackled. But not with electricity … it was the sound of countless little somethings locking into place. The explosion of Willenskräfte would have ripped Marsh to shreds if he’d still been in front of Kammler when the large man finally unleashed his power.
Marsh couldn’t see the barrier that sped out from Kammler’s body, only the way it refracted starlight and the torch-shine from Reinhardt, but he knew it was harder than diamond. Its passage threatened to suck the air from Marsh’s lungs; his ears popped. The earth heaved underfoot. The expanding barrier dug a yard-deep furrow in the earth, plowing aside tons of soil and stone without slowing.
It raced toward the front of ash and glazed earth.
Marsh ducked. Gretel stood to watch the battle of wills unfolding upon the devastated grounds of her home.
Churned-up soil raced ahead of Kammler’s Willenskräfte like water before the prow of a vast ship. It breached Reinhardt’s fire line. In an instant, the cold, moist earth flash-baked to brittle clay and shattered against Kammler’s implacable wall. A thousand dinner plates tumbled down a thousand stairwells, all at once. Marsh clapped his hands over his ears.
Soldiers unleashed a volley from rifles and machine guns. The rounds tinkled harmlessly in midair.
And still Kammler’s barrier moved on. Unperturbed. Undaunted. Untouched by preternatural heat. The heat shimmer became a kaleidoscopic swirl as Kammler forced it back toward its creator. Reinhardt raged within an incandescent halo. The air turned violet from Reinhardt’s efforts to scorch a hole through Kammler’s willpower. Marsh caught a faint whiff of ozone.
Reinhardt flared again and blazed brighter still. It seared green and purple afterimages into Marsh’s vision.
There was nothing the Aryan salamander could do to halt or even slow the relentless advance of the imbecile’s barrier. But Reinhardt would never accept that. No. He’d never back down against a retard. Not with witne
sses around. Marsh prayed for Reinhardt’s pride to overwhelm his common sense. Just a little longer …
He realized that while Kammler may have been mentally deficient, his simplicity of mind was a virtue. He suffered no stray thoughts to confuse him or distract his concentration. He knew only a handful of concepts, and through the power of the Götterelektron, he brought them into being. Kammler was utterly focused, as only a simpleton could be, on the concept of “wall.”
Reinhardt’s fury lashed against it like the impotent fists of a child’s tantrum. The barrier slowed. Wavered.
“Wall!” Marsh’s scream tore something. Bitter saltiness trickled down his throat.
Kammler broke through. Rippling streamers of superheated air splashed across the grounds of the farm. Gouts of flame erupted from everything they touched.
Men screamed. The training field stank of charred pork.
*
Agnes cried. Liv said, “What are you—”
I grabbed her wrist, dragging her toward the door. “We have to go.”
“Sir,” said the vicar, “this is madness. It isn’t safe!”
To Liv, I said, “You’re safer with me.” I pulled harder.
“There’s room for you here,” said Liv. She leaned against my pull, having overcome the initial confusion enough to realize I intended to take her out of the shelter and into the middle of one of the worst bombing raids Britain had yet suffered. I put my free arm around her waist and chivvied her toward the door.
“Charles! Do something,” said the old lady. She sat on a camp stool beside a cot. They’d folded blankets and pillows into a makeshift crib for my daughter. Good people. Their Anderson lacked the mildew stink of the one I’d built.
The vicar blocked our egress. He swallowed. “I can’t let you take the lady. She’s here as our guest.”
I looked him in the eye. “I can’t let you stop me.” I’d gladly beat a man of the cloth, and whistle a merry tune while I left him and his wife to die, if it meant saving my wife and daughter. Perhaps he saw that in my eyes. He stepped aside.
Agnes screamed in our ears. Liv tried to wriggle out of my grasp. But she couldn’t put up a real fight while she held our baby. She trembled against me. I hoped she couldn’t feel the tightness in my trousers. Even now, in the midst of destruction, she aroused me.
“Commander, please!”
I leaned close, like I used to do when I came home from work and kissed the freckles on her neck, and whispered in her ear. “Trust me. I’m here to save your life. And I think you know that.”
I’d thought I could read every nuance of her face, every twitch of emotion, every thought that flitted behind her eyes. But when she turned, she studied me with an expression I’d never known of her. Don’t know what she saw, but the tension in her hips and back melted away as she leaned into my touch.
“We must hurry.” I guided her toward the door. We left the vicar and his wife without another word. They watched us go. He closed the Anderson behind us, and then it was just me, my family, and the Luftwaffe. The bombing was the equal of anything I’d seen in the original history. Gretel wasn’t one for half measures.
Liv let me take Agnes.”I have a car outside. Run!”
She kicked off her shoes and sprinted for the house. I jogged after her, making shush noises to Agnes as I went. A silly thing, I know, but she was my daughter and the sound of her cries hurt me more than all the death and devastation around me.
Liv held the kitchen door for me. Then we were through the house—“No time!” I yelled when she stopped for the bassinet—and out the front. Liv started across the brick walkway, then stopped. I skidded into her. She wavered like a willow tree in March winds.
“My feet,” she said. Far above us, the sky opened up with a high-pitched whistle.
Shards of glass littered the walk. The nearest blast, the one that had knocked the vicar and me to our arses, had blown out the windows. I transferred Agnes to her. She nestled our baby in the crook of her arm.
“Here,” I said. I took Liv’s free arm, pulled it over my shoulders, and wrapped one arm around her back. Like I used to do, when we danced to the music on the wireless. She crouched a bit, bending her knees because she understood what I intended before I said it. My other arm went under her knees. I ignored the flaring pain in my own knee when I took her weight. I tried, but failed, to also ignore the way the hem of her dress exposed her milky legs.
Glass crunched underfoot as I carried my family to the car. I’d carried Liv into the house in Walworth on the day we’d been married. Just like this, though we weren’t also balancing a baby at the time. I know we made Agnes that night. Liv’s hair tickled my face. She sniffed, as though trying to identify a scent.
I wasn’t as strong as I had been in my youth. But there was Liv in my arms, and in that moment I felt as though I could have walked a mile if it meant holding her that much longer. The whistle grew louder but lower in pitch. I winced at the growing agony in my knee.
With shuffling footsteps I cleared the worst of the debris from a small spot on the pavement, then set Liv back on her bare feet beside the car.
Absently, Liv said, “I think I know this car.”
The whistle became a hum, then three separate hums.
I put Liv and Agnes inside, jumped behind the wheel, slammed the engine into gear.
Hadn’t even made it to second when three flashes in the rearview strobed my eyes in quick succession. The bombs fell across the road behind us like a string of pearls. The impacts merged into a single earthquake, rippling the road beneath us and sending the Rolls into a skid. Liv hunched over Agnes, sheltering our baby with her own body. Agnes howled. The car spun.
It gave us a glimpse of the devastation behind us. The first bomb had clipped the edge of the road a few hundred yards away. The second cratered the center of the street, halfway to where I’d parked the car. The third landed in the vicar’s garden. Hot rubble, the remnants of the house and shelter, rained down on us.
Liv gasped. “Oh my Lord,” she whispered. “Deidre. Mr. Murray.”
Don’t think about it, I ordered myself. You aren’t finished. Concentrate on the job.
I laid my hand on the gearshift, but couldn’t get the car into gear. My hand shook too violently.
Five minutes later and they’d be dead now.
“How?” Liv whispered. She was crying.
I shook my head. “We’re not safe yet.” I’m sure she heard how the curling edge of hysteria fluted my voice. No number of steadying breaths could dispel the chilly hollow in my chest. What man wouldn’t piss himself after a bullet parted his hair?
Drive, I told myself. You haven’t beat Gretel yet.
Yet my trembling hand still refused to work the gearshift. Liv saw my struggle. She laid her hand on mine. Together, we got the Rolls into gear.
We drove north, out of the city. The cacophony of destruction followed us through the night.
*
A firestorm engulfed the shattered ruins of the farm.
Good boy, thought Marsh. He put an arm around Kammler, who sobbed helplessly to himself. To hell with the commander, he thought. We’ll cut off his wires. Bring him to England. Find him a home.
He turned to ask Gretel if she had any peppermint sticks. Something soft tickled Marsh’s face. It reminded him of lying in bed with Liv, and the way her hair fell across his face and neck when he nuzzled her ear. The tickle was followed by a metallic whisper, like a knife blade winging through the night to carve apart moonbeams, and ended with a quick wet tearing sound. From Kammler’s direction, something moist pattered against Marsh’s neck.
He turned, thinking the mentally deficient man had spat on him. But a gash had opened in Kammler’s throat. It glistened in the commingled light of moon and fire, like a second mouth vomiting blood. From the corner of his eye, Marsh saw the wound still stretching toward the hinge of Kammler’s jaw. Another spurt.
Blood curtained down Kammler’s throat like a wat
erfall. Wide, fearful eyes rolled back in his head. Marsh danced aside to avoid getting pinned under the burly man.
From beginning to end, the assassination lasted a few seconds. Marsh aimed a kick at the spot where Kammler’s killer must have been standing to slash his throat, but Heike had already moved away.
Shit, shit, shit. Where is she?
Marsh crouched, spun. He searched the ground for signs of movement, signs of footsteps. But the flickering firelight cast irregular shadows across the ground. Heike landed a kick to his temple. He sprawled in the pool of Kammler’s blood. Rolled. Jumped back to his feet.
Blood spatter. She couldn’t possibly have sliced Kammler as she had without being subjected to blood spray. Had that, too, turned invisible when it came into contact with her? Her knife hadn’t become visible when Kammler bled on it.
To his left, a scuffle, like the sound of a boot heel sliding on gravel. Marsh dove aside. A phantom blade nicked his shoulder. He spun, aimed another kick at empty air. The toe of his boot encountered faint resistance, as though he’d brushed Heike, but only just. If he’d hurt her, she didn’t make a sound. He doubted it.
He jumped aside again, and did so every few seconds. An exhausting way to stay alive. Gretel was doing likewise. They moved like marionettes with tangled strings. A chaotic dance intended to confound their assailant.
It didn’t prevent Heike from landing gashes on Marsh’s arms, chest, face. Some shallow, some deep, all painful.
Marsh swung the sack containing von Westarp’s journals in a wild arc. It didn’t connect, but the scuffling of footsteps told him Heike had dodged. He ducked to one side and felt the breeze of a blade passing close to his face. Ducked again and collided with an invisible barrier.
“Ooof,” he said. Heike said nothing.
Gretel came up from behind and kicked at his invisible assailant. Marsh couldn’t tell if the blow connected or not. Gretel dove aside.
He reached for Heike, tried to grapple with her, to pin her arms, but she had already danced away. She’d been trained too well. Her steaming breath should have given her away, but she held it, and only seemed to breathe when Marsh wasn’t looking in her direction. He got a good slash across the forearms for his trouble.
Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) Page 29
