“Not until you give me what is mine,” the maniac causing her pain muttered. “I will kill him if you don’t.” His grip tightened around Aiden’s throat as he lifted the boy into the air.
“I didn’t see it when…when we came here,” Kimberley stammered. “You must…must believe me!”
“You lie, bitch! Where is it?” Carl Bain shouted. “Where is my package?!”
“I–I don’t have it!” Kimberley cried, tears flooding her eyes. “Please, don’t…don’t kill him.”
“You will all die now!” Carl Bain growled, lifting Aiden higher as he tightened his grip on the boy’s throat.
Aiden’s face turned blue.
“You’ll kill him!” Rachel screamed. “Please don’t!”
“You’re all dead already!” the furious Carl Bain whispered. He heard a strange sound behind him and turned to see what had made this noise.
The blast pushed him and his infernal masters out of the Library of Scrolls at the same time another explosion rocked the pagan building’s higher structures.
The white book fell back freely, down to the floor. It landed beside its current Bookbearer.
Only the noise of the leaping flames could be heard in the library.
Nanu held up the wooden cross a bit longer before dropping it in death. She had retrieved it with her failing strength from within the cloak of a dead Christian lying beside her.
“The book is dry!” Rachel discovered, dragging herself towards it. She picked up the reed pen and grabbed Aiden’s hand. “Hold Kim,” she told him.
They disappeared as Carl Bain and his masters reappeared in another part of the burning library. The American hustler surveyed the destruction he’d brought upon the Christians and pagans by the might of his newfound power and cursed softly.
He gave chase.
Chapter 13: Germany
KIMBERLEY woke up with a start, her right hand feeling her left shoulder for signs of injury. Her eyes tried to accommodate the single light bulb shining down from the ceiling through apertures created frequently between two faces she saw staring down at her. These faces were familiar ones and this knowledge made her feel better. “Where’re we?” she asked.
“No idea, Kim,” Aiden said. “Good that I’m no longer wearing a skirt, though.”
“Very funny,” Rachel said.
Explosions went off outside, far away from the room. Machine gun fire followed these loud noises. Kimberley sat up from the bed she’d been lying on; a Victorian-styled one with high poles at the corners. “Must we always show up in a war zone?” she grumbled. “Those sounded like bombs, and gunfire.”
“What must we do now?” Aiden asked.
“The Bookbearer should know,” Kimberley said, turning to Rachel.
“We–We will find one of Father’s friends here,” Rachel stammered. She seemed frightened by the explosions rocking the vicinity. “Hopefully, this person will tell us what we must do with the white book.”
“And how to stop the Gray Ones,” Aiden added.
“We can use an ankh like we did in Egypt,” Kimberley pointed out. “They’re scared of that symbol.”
“We don’t have any, remember?” Aiden said.
More explosions and machine gunfire.
“We could make one,” the sergeant continued. “Using wood.”
“We don’t have the time?” Aiden objected. “And the materials?”
“We could draw them,” Rachel suggested.
“And where’s paper and pen for that?” Aiden asked.
“Some…Somewhere around?” Rachel thought. “Or on the book’s pages?”
“First, we have to go outside,” Kimberley said.
“Too dangerous,” Rachel said. “We should remain here.”
“We need to know where we are, girl,” Kimberley told her. “We won’t know if we don’t look around.”
“Rachel’s right, Kim,” Aiden decided. “What if we look around in this room for clues first?” He didn’t like the thought of going outside.
“Nothing in here,” Kimberley said, looking around her. “Nothing, but old boxes and…and this bed.” The room had the wooden bed as its only furniture. Kimberley’s younger companions stood beside two of the six wooden boxes lying around. “Wonder if there’s anything in those boxes,” she thought out loud.
Three new explosions rocked the distance and the two kids drew closer to the bed. The gunfire stopped.
“What now?” Aiden asked in the silence that ensued. He turned to look outside from a window and realized there was none. “Okay, who forgets to put windows in a bedroom?”
“Depends on what this place is used for,” Kimberley reasoned.
“Could be a prison,” Rachel whispered, standing beside Aiden.
“Oh, please,” Aiden began.
Kimberley sighed. “Only one way to find out,” she said, getting up and reaching for the only door in the room. “Locked,” she announced moments later while shaking the door’s handle. “Means we’re prisoners.”
“Not good,” Aiden said. “We can still leave with the book, right?”
“What’s with the boxes?” Kimberley asked again. “Let’s open one.” Her young companions had already done that. The crate they chose contained only a peculiarly red flag with a funny black cross in the middle. Kimberley’s face lost all expression. “Christ,” she muttered.
“What’s wrong, Kim?” Aiden asked her in surprise.
“That’s a Swastika,” his police companion told him. “Could mean only one thing with certainty. This is…”
They heard heavy footsteps and the door burst open. Five soldiers stared into the small room. These men had the American flag sewn onto the long sleeves of their jackets.
“Quick!” their sergeant snapped. “Out the door if you want to live!”
“Okay,” Kimberley said.
One of the men pulled Rachel out of the room, her precious book clasped underneath her right armpit.
“What’s going on?” Aiden asked, stepping forward like his younger companion.
“They’re coming, serg!” a voice called out from behind the soldiers.
“Collins, Danny, cover us!” the sergeant yelled back at this person, taking Rachel’s free hand as Aiden and Kimberley followed behind the little girl through the door.
The machine gun fire resumed ahead of the party as they hurried away from the room through a passageway. A yelp and a thud prompted the men to ready their firearms while approaching an exit door on the building.
“Medic, Danny’s down!” someone shouted near the exit and Kimberley frowned.
“I can shoot, you know,” she told the sergeant.
He handed her his sidearm.
Danny lay near the exit, and Collins covered him, releasing bursts of gunfire from his M1 Garand rifle while dodging the return fire that smacked into wood and ricocheted off concrete all around him.
A medical officer knelt beside Danny as Kimberley joined his colleagues in taking up positions behind the door and a nearby window. Their combined firepower pushed the opposition back behind some trees in the courtyard spread out before the exit door.
“We’ll move out in twos,” the sergeant said, taking aim with his rifle and pulling the trigger. A scream at the other end of the large court greeted his effort. “Those waiting should give covering fire.”
The man holding Rachel sprang out from the door, shooting sideways as he hurried along with the little girl. Next, Aiden briskly followed another soldier, bullets zinging past his stooped figure. Those behind concentrated their gunfire on the trees with varying results. Kimberley’s marksmanship remained excellent and she felt pleased with herself. Her shots took out four enemies before she raced out of the building with the three men carrying the wounded Danny.
The others gave covering fire from four Jeeps packed beside the buildings. The peculiar design of these military vehicles strengthened Kimberley’s shaky assertion that the book had brought them into World War II.
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br /> “Where are we going?” she asked the soldier sitting beside her in the last Jeep.
“Back to our lines, miss,” the man replied her, shooting at the receding enemy as the vehicle sped off.
“Are we behind enemy lines?” she wondered aloud.
“Yes,” the man replied, curiously looking at her. “Didn’t you know?”
“Of course, I did,” Kimberley lied. “Just trying to confirm that. Thanks.” She noticed that the other men in the Jeep were throwing glances at her. “We just–just didn’t know where we were,” she added.
“Yeah, sure,” one of the soldiers in front said. “They must have covered your eyes before bringing you here. Good that we found you three when we did. Nuclear experiments never go well for test subjects.”
Kimberley frowned. Maybe touching the man beside her would help her realize whose life she’d taken up, yet she hesitated. “What do you mean, exactly?” she asked the soldier in front.
“Ever heard of the Alsos Mission?”
“She’s not been debriefed, Johnny,” the Jeep’s driver interrupted.
“Right,” Jonny said, turning to Kimberley. “HQ will give you details when they decide you should know, miss.”
“Am I a spy?” Kimberley wondered.
“You don’t know, miss?” Johnny seemed surprised.
“Maybe she’s still dazed by the torture they gave her, Johnny,” the driver reasoned. “She’ll come round once we get to HQ, but right now we need to keep a lookout for Germans out there.” The soldier scanned the landscape to his left as the vehicle raced on. “We aren’t out of the woods, yet.”
Kimberley touched the private sitting beside her and the needed information flooded her head. The man stared at her. “It’s cold,” she told him. “Sorry.”
The weather had actually turned cold, and Kimberley realized what this implied.
“Someone’s on the road!” the radio beside the driver crackled.
Kimberley saw the man step onto the middle of the road before the first Jeep speeding ahead of the group. Aiden was in that Jeep. “No!” she yelled before the first Jeep’s rare sprang up into the air, its occupants falling off like toy soldiers dropping from an upturned toy car.
“Number one’s under attack! Take evasive action!” the radio coughed out even as the driver swerved to the right, avoiding the Jeep in front by inches. He screeched to a halt and everyone scrambled for cover beside the car.
The lone German standing in the middle of the road shot the first Jeep’s occupants where they lay, one after the other. Kimberley and the soldiers from the remaining three Jeeps opened fire on him.
“What the hell?” Johnny complained beside her. “Nothing’s getting to him.”
“He just stands there,” another soldier added.
“Like he’s wearing something bulletproof,” their sergeant deduced. “Maybe we could wear it down, though. Keep shooting!”
Kimberley aimed for the German soldier’s forehead. When the bullet deflected off nothing, she looked more closely at the face underneath the helmet.
Carl Bain.
“Not again,” she muttered.
“What?” Johnny asked her.
“It’s not his armor,” she said to herself.
“What?”
Before Kimberley could say something, she saw Aiden get up from the ground and fall back again after the enemy pointed the pistol at him. “Oh, my God!” she whispered.
Aiden had been shot.
“Aiden!” Rachel screamed behind the second vehicle, getting up only to be pulled back down by the soldier holding her. Their assailant noticed this reaction and briefly turned to Rachel’s direction.
“You’ll get yourself killed, girl,” the man with Rachel warned her, but she wasn’t listening. She turned to Kimberley.
“We must do something, Kim,” she cried, staring at her fellow time-traveler.
Kimberley nodded, but remained transfixed. She saw the pool of blood spreading underneath Aiden and wondered whether she was dreaming.
It was no dream.
The man with the Luger stepped around the upturned Jeep in front of the column, his invincibility demonstrated by the bullets bouncing off his body, limbs and head. He shot two more US servicemen before turning his side arm towards Rachel’s distant position.
“No!” Kimberley shouted, seeing the impending disaster.
Carl Bain fired two shots in quick succession. Shots that careened off the white book’s protective dome, which materialized in the nick of time. This icy sheet quickly enveloped the last two vehicles and everyone behind them, the reason for its sudden appearance visible high above the road for all to see.
All except the dead.
“My God!” Johnny cried, looking around him and upwards. “What’s going on?”
The Gray Ones had almost swarmed out the Sun’s light with their number, putting those below into an environment of forest-like shade.
“It’s the devil, that’s what!” Johnny’s sergeant cried a few feet away.
“Yeah,” a fellow private lying next to the sergeant said. “Satan’s come to collect his own.”
“And we’re all going to hell ‘cause of these damn Krauts,” another private complained.
In addition to the goings-on outside the infernal dome, many of the soldiers kept turning to stare at Rachel’s book owing to what it had achieved for them a few moments ago.
“And what’s with the book, miss?” the US Army sergeant asked Kimberley. “Some kind of new German weapon you were protecting?”
“No, of course, not,” Kimberley said, her eyes fixed on Aiden’s still figure across the road. “You don’t have the slightest idea what it is.”
“I know your little friend over there had it with her when you three were in that holding cell,” the sergeant pointed out, “so figured they knew you had it with you, and must have decided to leave it with you.”
“I’m not a double spy, sergeant,” Kimberley said, her teary eyes still on Aiden’s body stretched out on the dusty road behind the maniac now trying to break the dome with shots from his Luger.
“Whatever you are, Alsos leadership will be very interested in that book, or whatever it is,” the US Army sergeant said. “And I must get it to them.”
“Pray we leave here alive first.”
Carl Bain stopped shooting and walked over to the third Jeep, behind which crouched the female police sergeant and three US soldiers. Kimberley looked up from inside the white book’s cursed dome as the tenacious man approached her.
“Stop shooting!” the US Army sergeant with Kimberley ordered his men. “Conserve your bullets.”
“About time you did so, Sergeant Bradley,” Carl Bain told him. “Even though your weapons are no match to the power behind my invincibility,”
“H-How did you know my name, mister?” The sergeant and his men wore no tags. “Lucky guess,” he scoffed.
“What do you want?” Kimberley asked the maniac standing outside the dome. She spoke another foreign language.
“You know what I want,” he replied in the same language. Sounded German.
The American soldiers could only look on.
“I don’t know what you want,” Kimberley said.
“Give me the book, and my package,” Carl Bain said. “Haven’t you gone through enough trouble for that little box, already?”
“Can’t give you the book, you know that,” Kimberley said, shaking her head. “And I don’t think I still have your package.”
The American outlaw smiled. “You can do better than that, sweetie,” he said.
Kimberley frowned. “You don’t believe me.”
“Your friend is still alive.”
“What?”
“Your friend is still alive,” the German officer repeated in English, turning away to walk back up the road. “I’ll kill him this time if you don’t comply with my demands.”
Kimberley started. “Aiden.”
“No, please don’t!
” Rachel cried.
“He’s threatening you?” Johnny’s face reddened. “Sniffling Kraut! Just wait till I get you!”
“Nazi scum!” another soldier behind the last Jeep shouted.
“Give me what I want, girl, or I’ll kill him this time,” Carl Bain repeated, pointing his Luger down at Aiden. A pool of blood had spread out underneath the boy’s right arm and the American hustler shifted his left foot in order to avoid the fluid staining his polished boot.
“Give him his package, Kim!” Rachel cried. “Don’t let him kill Aiden.”
“You know he wants the book as well,” Kimberley started.
“Just give him one, already,” the little girl cried. “Aiden’s life is at stake here!”
“Okay, okay,” Kimberley agreed, reaching into her inner jacket pocket and hoping she still had the little silver box after their last time travel. What she found there in addition to the box filled her with renewed hope. “Come and take your package,” she told Carl Bain.
“Very good,” the man standing over Aiden said. “You’ve changed your mind.”
“Yes,” Kimberley agreed, smiling sheepishly.
Carl Bain returned his gun to its holster, grinning. “You see, it’s not so difficult, eh?”
“Yes,” the Portwood police sergeant said. “It’s not so difficult.”
“Can you tell us what’s going on, miss?” Sergeant Bradley demanded.
“It’s a long story,” Kimberley said. “You’re never ever going to believe me.”
“Then I guess we will have to force it out of you once we get to HQ,” the US Army sergeant grumbled.
“Where is it?” Carl Bain asked Kimberley when he got to her position.
“I’ll give you your package for the boy’s life now,” Kimberley said. “Later, you will talk to the Bookbearer about the book; heaven knows I’ve tried about that.”
“Deal.”
“Take it now.” She stretched her hand out of the white book’s magical dome and placed something on the palms of the man’s gloved right hand.
Carl Bain’s expression quickly changed and his face became contorted in pain. “You bitch!” he snapped. “What did you give me?”
The White Book Page 16