by Mike Nappa
“So I’m predictable, so what? What’s that got to do with ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ on my voicemail?”
Dr. Smith smiled at the countryside ahead of him. “Where is your cell phone now?” he asked.
“In my pocket.”
“Exactly.”
The crushing realization hit Trudi like a waterfall of guilt.
“You tracked my cell phone. You triangulated our position when I turned it on back in Atlanta.”
“Of course, my dear. There was no need to hurry because you were transmitting your location to us at all times. All I needed to do was get you to turn on your cell and carry it with you. I believe ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ was successful in doing that.”
“How did you know I’d keep the phone with me?”
“What is your occupation, Ms. Coffey?”
Trudi found this man’s superior attitude maddening, mainly because it appeared he actually was intellectually superior to her. That was really annoying.
“Detective,” she said through clenched teeth.
“And what do detectives do but solve mysteries? It’s almost an obsession with people who go into that business.”
“So you gave me a mystery, an inexplicable nursery rhyme phone message,” Trudi muttered ruefully, “knowing I’d keep it close to me until I could solve it.”
“And knowing that your possessive nature would prevent you from telling your ex-husband about it. But don’t feel bad, Ms. Coffey, everyone is predictable if you know something about human nature.”
“I could’ve turned off my phone at any time,” she muttered.
“Yes,” he said, “you could have. But you didn’t. In different circumstances, you might have turned it off, yes. But you couldn’t this time, not while the mystery still lingered inside there. That’s not who you are. This is your neurosis, it is what makes you a good detective. So I took advantage of it. There is no shame in this for you. It is just the way of the world.”
Trudi had no answer for that.
They arrived at Truck’s farm in silence. Trudi struggled with the guilt of knowing that she was responsible for giving away their location to Dr. Smith, and also with the knowledge that if they were to escape alive, she’d have to get over that guilt and concentrate on the situation at hand.
Waiting at the entrance to the bunker were two other mercenaries and one more ATV. Dr. Smith left Trudi tied to the vehicle while he went over to talk to them. They seemed agitated about something, and Trudi noticed Dr. Smith frown. He left them and came back to the ATV. He motioned to his other soldiers. They cut Annabel loose and brought her to him.
“This one”—he nodded toward the girl—“will not cause us any more problems, am I right, meine Tochter?”
Annabel shook her head and looked at her fists. “I won’t cause problems,” she said. “Will you let Trudi go now?”
“Not yet,” he said. “But it’s nothing for you to worry about.” He nodded toward Trudi. “Take her and secure her inside the bunker. Then return here to me.” Brown Head and Blondie jumped to obey. They took no chances. One held her at gunpoint while the other cut her zip ties off the ATV, then tied her hands behind her back.
“Wait a minute,” Trudi said. “Dr. Smith—”
He waved a dismissive hand in her direction. “Don’t worry, Ms. Coffey. We still have much to discuss. But for the moment I must take care of other matters.”
Trudi felt the world closing in. Once she was trapped inside the bunker, her options for escape would be next to nothing. She’d be lost underground, without hope.
“She was just trying to protect me,” Annabel was pleading now. “Dr. Schmitzden, please, just let her go. She’s not part of this. She doesn’t even know.”
“Ruhig sein,” Dr. Smith said. “Quiet, child.” He put a hand on her head, a motion that suddenly brought to Trudi’s mind the image of Annabel restraining the German shepherd by putting a hand on its neck.
The two mercenaries started dragging Trudi toward the tunnel. Brown Head held her arms behind her, twisted to the point of pain, while Blondie remained a few feet away with his gun trained expertly at her abdomen. A thousand thoughts flitted through her mind, but Trudi couldn’t come up with any reasonable plan of escape.
Is this it for you, Tru-Bear?
“Don’t worry, Annabel,” she called out behind her. “These goons can’t do anything to me. Just be brave, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”
Annabel didn’t answer. Trudi strained her ears to hear, but the girl remained silent. As she neared the tunnel entrance, Trudi heard Dr. Smith speaking to the three remaining soldiers.
“Hill is still at large in the forest. He’s been joined by another Special Forces operative, and they’ve already killed some of your comrades. Hunt them down until they are dead. Burn their bodies. Geht!”
Trudi glanced up to see the three mercenaries jog to their ATVs and prepare to leave.
So her ex-husband was still alive, and he’d met up with The Mute after all.
Samuel, she said to herself, I hope you know what you’re doing.
40
Annabel
I’m watching them two soldiers drag Trudi down to my bunker, and I keep saying to myself, Do something, Annie-girl. Do something! But what can I do? I’m just a kid, an eleven-year-old girl. I ain’t Truck. I ain’t Dog. I ain’t even Trudi Coffey.
Johannes Schmitzden barely looks at me, but I know he’s not letting me out of his sight, not ever again. Especially not now.
“Hill is still at large in the forest,” he tells his soldiers. “He’s been joined by another Special Forces operative, and they’ve already killed some of your comrades. Hunt them down until they are dead. Burn their bodies. Geht!”
The Mute, I say to myself. The Mute is with Samuel Hill. They’ll help me. They’ll help us. If they can stay alive.
I shake away that last thought. The Mute’s good at staying alive. It’s what he does. He will come. I force myself to believe it.
When the mercenaries are gone, Dr. Schmitzden finally turns his full attention to me.
“Sie sind eine harte Mädchen zu finden, meine Tochter.”
You are a hard girl to find, my daughter. My mind translates it without trying.
“You’re in America. Speak English.”
“I see Steven Grant did not teach you proper manners.”
“His name is Leonard Truckson.”
“Was.”
“What?”
“His name was Leonard Truckson.”
Johannes Schmitzden is staring down at me with a curl in his lip. He wants to hurt me now, to prove he is my prōtos. I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. After a moment, he relents.
“You are a hard girl to find, my daughter,” he says again. “But patience and diligence always win in the end.”
The soldiers who took Trudi down into the bunker return. They stand nearby, waiting for orders. Dr. Schmitzden takes my arm and pulls me toward the tunnel. To the soldiers, he says, “Guard the entrance. I have work to do.”
The soldiers don’t question the command. They follow us to the tunnel and take up positions at the opening while we go down the narrow stairs into the shadowed underground. The air is dry now, still, with a smoky aftertaste. Dr. Schmitzden stands a moment at the base of the stairs, and I see admiration in his eyes.
“Your Leonard Truckson was a resourceful man,” he says. “A worthy adversary.”
“Uncle Truck was somethin’ more than a person like you could even imagine,” I mutter.
“Uncle?” Dr. Schmitzden raises an eyebrow. I don’t say nothing. I think maybe I already said too much. When he realizes I’m done talking, he jerks his head forward.
“Let’s go,” he says.
There’s not room for both of us to go through the narrow tunnel side by side, so Dr. Schmitzden pushes me forward and then follows barely one step behind me. We go down through the wide loops, winding down, down, down. I start to feel claustrophobic i
n here again, making it hard for me to breathe, almost making me long for the open space of the bunker ahead. Finally the dirt floor levels out and the path straightens. Twenty feet down, I see the narrow steel door, left open.
Home again, I say to myself. It almost makes me laugh.
Once inside the door, I see Trudi sitting on the floor next to the bunk beds. Her hands are zip-tied low around one of the beams on the underside of the bed. Her hair is mussed, and I think there’s a new shiner forming around her left eye. She grins at me.
“Glad to see you could make it,” she says through a cut lip. “Though you could have left your monkey at home.” She wrinkles her nose like Dr. Schmitzden has a bad smell on him. A tiny laugh escapes me without permission. Dr. Schmitzden just frowns and pushes me toward the table.
“Sit,” he says. “Setz dich.”
I take a place at the table, sitting on the far side so I’m facing the door. Dr. Schmitzden is looking around, taking stock of the bunker. He’s clearly impressed.
“How long were you supposed to stay down here?” he says. I shrug. “A while, I think,” he says, answering his own question. He walks slowly around the room, checking out the supplies on the shelves, pausing to look at the book titles there too. He taps at the Bible and nods. Then he peeks a head into the outhouse and comes out nodding. He don’t bother going into the second opening in the wall.
“A well?” he asks me, pointing toward the other wall. “That’s what I’d do.” I nod, and he seems pleased. “A worthy adversary,” he says to no one. “A shame your ‘uncle’ had to die before I could meet him properly.”
“A shame that anyone had to die,” Trudi says from the floor. “Maybe you can tell me, Dr. Smith, what is it about this girl that makes her so important to you? Makes you into someone willing to kill just to get her?”
Johannes Schmitzden lets his gaze settle on my face. There’s a little smile at the corner of his lips, an expression that reminds me of a man from Peachtree who made his living selling collectible coins.
“He wants to eat my blood,” I say to Trudi. “He’s a Blood-Eater.”
Dr. Schmitzden snorts. “I have been called by that crude name,” he says, lips still smiling at the corners. “But I don’t want to eat your blood, meine Tochter. Your blood is toxic when ingested orally. It must be mitigated with beta blockers and injected directly into a vein. Or didn’t you know that?”
“What are you talking about?” Trudi says. “What does her blood have to do with anything?”
“He’s a Blood-Eater,” I interrupt.
“What the girl means,” Johannes Schmitzden says amiably, “is that I am a high priest in the Order of St. Heinrich von Bonn.”
Now it’s Trudi’s turn to snort. “The Vampire Sect? They’re just a myth, a wild story used in the Middle Ages to scare German nobles into rebelling against the popes in Rome.”
“Oh, Ms. Coffey,” Dr. Schmitzden says, “I assure you the Order of St. Heinrich von Bonn is quite real, and it has been for more than a thousand years.” Now he looks at me. “It’s time, my dear. Please try not to cry out.”
He extracts a black zippered wallet from his inside pocket. He opens it and pulls out a long syringe needle, along with an empty glass vial and a glass slide. Trudi looks confused, like she’s trying to recall something she learned in college, something she thought was unimportant at the time but now wishes she’d studied more closely. Johannes Schmitzden takes my arm. His eyes dare me to struggle, but I know if I do, he will hurt me, or Trudi, or both of us. I close my eyes and brace for the needle. I avoid making a noise when he inserts it into my vein. I hold very still until he’s finished.
“Okay,” Trudi says, sounding alarmed. “This is just nonsense. What are you doing to her? The Blood-Eaters are a myth. A crazy cult. They supposedly were relic hunters and magicians, people who tried to work sorcery with bits of remains from ancient saints and such. You’re saying that’s you? And that Annabel here has something to do with that?”
“Impressive,” Dr. Schmitzden says as he releases my arm. He presses a small cloth on the spot where the needle sucked my life. “You know more than most about our religion. But you must stop using that crude name. It’s improper and derogatory.”
Trudi is openmouthed. Dr. Schmitzden assumes a professorial air as he continues working with the vial of my blood. First he peers closely into it, as if trying to read a secret message in the dark, purple-red fluid.
“The Order of St. Heinrich von Bonn,” he lectures, “has its roots in a Brandenburg monastery over a thousand years ago. It became a repository for holy relics, a place to keep fine artifacts of religious mysticism.”
“Like what? Bones of saints? Splinters from Jesus’s cross?”
“Yes, those things and others. Mostly, though, the reliquaries at the monastery contained bits of holy men. In 1096, the abbot of the monastery became ill. No amount of medicine or prayer could effect the head monk’s healing. And so the brothers turned outside the church for answers.”
“Druids.” Trudi is apparently remembering her mythology studies.
“Druids.” Dr. Schmitzden nods like a professor giving a gold star to a student. He now lays out a cloth on the table and puts the glass slide on the cloth. Next he reaches back into his black zippered wallet and pulls out another small vial, this one filled with a clear liquid.
“The Druids showed the monks how to harness the power of the relics in their care, how to unleash the spiritual world into the physical.” Dr. Schmitzden arranges the glass slide to receive a drop of my blood.
“Relic worship? That’s your thing? Isn’t that missing the point? God is the miracle worker, not some dead man’s bones.”
The crazy man ignores Trudi, continuing his story as if uninterrupted.
“The head priest was cured. Of course, when he reported his cure to Rome, he was executed for witchcraft. And then, by decree of Pope Urban II, the Order of St. Heinrich von Bonn was condemned and ordered to disband. Rome sent men to kill the renegade monks, but they didn’t send enough. With help from the Druids, the remaining priests stole away with the relics and continued to create their new religion in the forests of eastern Germany.”
“So you combined mystic Christianity with relic worship and Druid sorcery, and bam! A thousand years later you need a little girl’s blood? You are insane.”
“And you are an ignorant infidel,” he says.
“So I guess we’re even?” Trudi says. “Oh yeah, except I’m not sucking blood out of little children for kicks and giggles, so maybe I’m still ahead.”
Trudi winks at me, and I can’t help but smile. I know this woman must be scared, but she’s doing everything she can to keep me from being scared too. I find that I love her for this.
Dr. Schmitzden ignores her. Instead, he carefully lets two drops of blood spill onto the glass slide, then he sits back and sighs.
“This girl’s blood is more than you would believe possible.”
He removes the stopper from the vial of clear liquid and lets a drop of that mingle with my blood on the glass slide.
“See for yourself.” He says it breathlessly, like he’s waiting for a miracle. On the glass slide, there comes a hissing, then a faint whiff of burning. It only takes a few seconds, and the chemical reaction of my blood and the clear liquid is complete, a combustible boiling that seems strange and otherworldly. In only a few moments, the blood and liquid have evaporated completely, leaving only a thick black stain on the glass slide. Even Trudi doesn’t know what to say.
Dr. Schmitzden smiles and looks at me like he’s found a chest full of pirate treasure.
“Good. Good!” he says. He claps his hands. “We are not too late.”
He looks at me with hungry eyes.
Suddenly, I feel cold.
41
Trudi
Trudi heard the blood burning before she understood exactly what was happening up there on the table.
Did that blood just ignite? she wond
ered. This is getting crazier and crazier.
She looked at Annabel and saw the girl’s somber face return. The child shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.
Dr. Smith carefully deposited the glass slide in a poly bag. Then he raised the vial of blood to his face and sniffed it. He was apparently happy, and Trudi guessed that being happy made him conversational.
Just keep the old man talking, Trudi told herself. Keep him talking until you can think of something to do.
“What do you mean, ‘We’re not too late’? Too late for what? Are you going to eat her blood?”
“Of course not,” he said absently. “Did you not see what just happened? This girl’s blood is toxic if swallowed. The first person we tried that on nearly died. He convulsed into an epileptic seizure and then fell into a coma. We were never able to wake him.”
This guy really is a Blood-Eater. Or at least he thinks he is.
“After that, we tried smaller doses. Same result, except that some of the later ones woke from their comas.” He stared appreciatively at Annabel. “For the ones who awoke, the miracle happened.”
Trudi didn’t know what to say. She followed Dr. Smith’s line of vision over the table until she came to Annabel. The girl was looking down, avoiding Dr. Smith’s gaze. She caught Trudi looking at her in her peripheral vision.
“He thinks,” Annabel said, “that my blood can bring miraculous healing. That it’s somehow medicine for sick people.”
Dr. Smith beamed. “Your mother told you this?” he said. Annabel nodded. “You must tell me how. Does she visit you in the night?”
Trudi wanted to interrupt but found she wanted to know the answer as well. Weren’t Annabel’s parents dead? Killed in Iraq, that’s what she’d said. Isn’t that why Truck adopted her?
“No,” Annabel said. “She left me a book.”
Dr. Smith’s eyebrows zipped upward as if pulled by a fishing line. “Really?” he said to her. Then to himself, “Interesting.”
Trudi decided she didn’t like the direction this line of conversation was going. It seemed like Annabel was about to reveal a secret she didn’t want to let out.
