The first time Anton Chekov saw her, he had no reason to think she was about to change his life forever.
On the surface, it was a completely unremarkable afternoon. The day was bright and clear, with the slightest hint of encroaching fall in the air as he and his family sprawled out in the park to eat lunch. A solid blue blanket was spread over a swath of green grass, ample room for all five to lounge in the warm sun.
After finishing his second sandwich, Anton leaned back onto his elbows and lifted his face to the sky, his stomach distended before him. At fifteen years old, he already favored his father’s appearance, his body thick throughout, with a uniformity of width that ran from his knees to his shoulders, a square chin, and a hooked nose. Both his hair and eyes were deep brown and a small gap showed between his teeth when he smiled.
Feeling the strain of his pose, Anton rolled onto his stomach and rested his chin atop his hands, inventorying the scene around him. To his right, his parents discussed plans for the afternoon while his younger siblings, Anya and Yuri, finished eating. On his left, a group of children laughed as they chased one another. A young couple strolled hand in hand. An elderly man shuffled by with his miniature Schnauzer in tow.
All the trappings of a picturesque day in the park.
The onset of fall was a welcome change for the town of Heidelberg. The summer had been unseasonably warm for the Bavarian town, seeing abnormally high temperature spikes during the day with little reprieve at night. For many the summer heat had been so oppressive it forced them to alter their schedules, limiting outdoor activities so as to avoid the midday sun as much as possible.
For Anton and his family, being away from the temperate climate of their native Russia for the first time, the summer had been a veritable Hell on earth.
Four months prior, Dmitri Chekov had been named a diplomat to Germany. It was a post none of them were excited about at the time, even less so with each passing day of Adolf Hitler’s meteoric rise to power. Ultimately though, for a man in Dmitri’s position, there was nothing that could be done.
One night the family sat down to eat dinner at their home in Kazan. The next morning, they were bound for Heidelberg.
No further discussion. No opposition of any kind.
The first few months of the trip had been lived entirely in fear, each day spent glancing over a shoulder, always waiting to be on the receiving end of the atrocities they’d heard so much about.
Over time, that fear ebbed to little more than an active awareness as one by one those rumors were dispelled. There were no monsters in the night waiting to devour them, no angry hordes storming the street, ready to purge anybody that might be a bit different from the Aryan model.
By and large, the German people treated them well. There was always plenty to eat. The weather, though hot, was nice. Nobody wanted for anything.
Months passed and active awareness eroded even further into apathy.
The first time Anton noticed her, he didn’t actually see her. Rather, he saw a flash of bright auburn hair as she streaked past the reflecting pond through the center of the park. Full and vibrant, it snapped his gaze up from the yellow leaves strewn haphazardly across the surface of the water, following the unknown figure sprinting through the park.
Slight of build and short in stature, she looked to be about the same age as him, dressed in a nondescript school uniform. A look of pure terror was splashed across her face as she repeatedly cast glances over her shoulder, paying very little attention to the path in front of her.
Halfway across the park she dropped the books she was carrying, the items slapping the pavement in a flurry of loose pages. No once did she slow or make any effort to retrieve them, instead keeping a steady pace across the grounds, disappearing from sight just as suddenly as she’d arrived.
Her entire appearance took little more than an instant.
Confused and intrigued, Anton watched as not a single other person seemed to notice her, nobody even glancing after the apparition that had come and gone. With great effort he rose slowly and dusted himself off, his hands slapping against the canvas front of his trousers.
“I’ll be back. I need to use the restroom.”
Still engrossed in their meal and the conversation it entailed, nobody in his family objected, oblivious to his determination to follow her.
“Don’t be too long,” his mother said without looking up at him, her voice distant. “We’re leaving soon.”
The admonition was no more than out of her mouth, the words barely registering, before Anton set off at a brisk walk. He left the books lying in the dirt, stepping between the scattered pages as he went, cutting a path toward the far corner of the park where she had disappeared. As nonchalantly as his adolescent curiosity would allow, he paused to make sure his family wasn’t watching him before slipping away. Once out of sight he raised his pace to a jog, sweat beginning to dot his forehead.
Two blocks passed beneath Anton’s feet as his breath became labored in his chest. A few cars were parked along the street, a pair of black sedans rolled by, but otherwise the throughway was almost deserted in the early afternoon sun, his panting the only sound.
For six blocks Anton continued on, stopping at every corner to cast a look in either direction, hoping for another flash of color to catch his eye, praying a stray noise would guide his search. Instead, all that found its way to his ears was the faint static of a radio through an open window, an occasional bird overhead, even a few dogs barking in the distance.
Nothing resembling the flight of a scared young girl.
Just shy of a dozen blocks, a full half mile from where he had started, Anton abandoned the search. His lungs burned as they fought for air and his shirt clung to his back, sweat seeping from his body, plastering the cotton material to his skin.
Desperate to leave the warmth of direct sunlight, he hooked a right onto a side street and began his loop back toward the park. Shoving his hands into his pockets he pressed forward, extending one foot in front of the other, his gaze on the buildings rising three stories tall to either side. Paying no attention to the uneven ground on which he walked, he never saw the raised chunk of concrete as it caught the toe of his shoe.
Never had a chance to pull his hands from his pockets as his body pitched forward.
The side of Anton’s face was the first thing to connect with the ground, the rough surface scraping a chunk of skin away from his cheek. After contact, it took a full moment for a wave of pain to roil through his body, his vision blurring, tears glassing his eyes. Bright lights popped in small explosions before him, followed by tiny dark pin pricks, his body laying flat on the ground, unable to move.
For several moments he remained just that way, grey cobwebs nudging into the corners of his vision. He lay flat and let the cool of the concrete seep through his pant legs before working his hands free, grunting as he pushed back onto his knees.
Staining the concrete beneath him was a wet smear of blood, the bright red a stark contrast to the pale gray stone.
Beside it lay the broken half of a tooth.
Feeling another jolt of nausea pass through him, Anton raised a hand to the side of his face and dabbed at the warmth running along his cheek. An involuntary wince crossed his features as more pain coursed through him, his fingers snapping back to reveal dark crimson stains on his fingertips.
Using the tip of his tongue he felt along the front bridge of his teeth, finding the gap where his shattered tooth once was, tasting the metallic tang of blood in his mouth.
“Are you all right?”
The voice seemed to come from nowhere, snapping Anton into a defensive stance, his attention jerked to the right.
There, huddled in the corner of the doorway, peering out at him with large round eyes, sat the very reason he wasn’t still on the blanket with his family. She was crouched low, her body pressed against the wooden frame of the door, hidden from view, with only her neck craned out toward him. “Are you all right?” she repeated.
“I think so,” he replied, his voice sounding a bit distorted as it passed through the broken tooth.
Without another word, the girl nodded before retreating back even tighter into her corner. The shadows of the doorway concealed her tiny frame, though were no match for the shock of bright red hair atop her head.
“Are you all right?” Anton asked, feeling the warmth of fresh blood as it dripped from his mouth, hitting his bottom lip and running down his chin.
“Yes, I am fine,” the girl snapped, finality in her tone.
“Are you sure? I saw you running through the park. You looked scared.”
Again she answered without looking at him. “I said I am fine. Now please, go.”
Anton sat back on his haunches and again touched his face. Fresh drops of blood decorated his hand, dripping down onto the ground below.
“All this happened to me because I was coming to check on you. The least you can do is talk to me.”
The girl continued to scan the street, not bothering to look his direction. “Please. I do appreciate you coming to check on me and I do feel badly about your fall, but you have no idea what’s going on here. Please, for both of us, just go.”
Anton started to reply, but thought better of it. He cast a sideways glance at her and shook his head before rising to his feet, taking a few steps back the other direction. “Can you at least tell me what you were running from? Haven’t I earned that much from you?”
The girl chewed at her bottom lip, her head shifting to eye him from her perch in the corner. “You are not from here, you would not understand.”
Anton attempted to respond, his voice drowned out by the harsh din of a siren. It started low and even, rising with each passing second into an angry wail that filled the street and reverberated off the buildings. As it grew closer Anton pressed his palms against his ears, his face contorted as the pain of his fall and the deafening crescendo erupted in his head.
Turning on the ball of his foot, he saw the source of the noise round into view, a flat-bed truck that pulled onto the end of the street and came to a stop. From the back of it descended a detachment of German soldiers, all in matching uniforms, all staring back at him as they filed out.
“No. No no no!” the girl yelped from behind him.
In a flash her small hand was inside the crook of his arm, her body leaning in the opposite direction, pulling him away.
“Wait, what are you doing?” Anton asked, his arm held parallel to the ground by the girl’s incessant tug.
“You don’t understand. They are who I was hiding from!”
Confusion clouded Anton’s features as he glanced from the girl to the soldiers behind them. “Who are they? What do they want?”
“The SS,” she yelled, her voice bordering on hysterical. “Hitler’s personal police!”
The words were at last what we needed to hear.
Despite a significant height advantage, it was all Anton could do to keep up with her as they sprinted down the deserted street. With each step it became a little harder to stay upright as a maddening dizziness filled his head, his body aching for oxygen.
“Why?” he gasped. “We didn’t do anything.”
The girl offered no response as behind them the SS broke into a run, little by little gaining ground. The lead guard pulled a whistle from his jacket and began to blow wildly, the shrill sound filling the air, mixing with the steady wail of the siren at the other end of the street.
“The park,” Anton said, his voice coming in ragged bursts, his body clawing for air. “My parents…safety…”
Hand in hand, the mismatched pair made the corner and veered to the right, the park, their salvation, just a few blocks ahead. Behind them the guards continued to gain ground, swinging wide around the corner, running hard in pursuit.
As the sound of their footsteps grew closer, Anton threw a frantic look over his shoulder to check their progress.
With his shoulders turned, he never saw the lone SS guard step from the doorway in front of him.
Anton’s opened his mouth to cry out, his head just beginning to swivel forward, as the guard’s nightstick caught him across the bridge of the nose. For the briefest moment he felt the sensation of his feet coming up from beneath him, his body suspended weightless above the ground.
The girl, her hand still clasped in his, did the same as her tiny body rose in flight beside him, his momentum whipping her about. Together they landed in a heap, Anton existing just on the edge of consciousness, barely registering the girl’s weight splashed across him, his own body refusing to move.
A fearful cry rolled out from her as she tried to wrest herself free, her limbs clawing for purchase against his soft form.
“Aw, now isn’t this cute?” the guard asked, mocking in his tone, the club in his right hand, tapping against his left palm.
Just inches from his face, Anton could see tears form in the girl’s eyes. “Please,” she whispered, “we’ve done nothing to you.”
“Since when does that matter?” the guard replied before raising his nightstick and in a move practiced a hundred times before, bringing it down across the back of her head. A thin trail of blood streamed from her skull, running along her hairline and dripping onto the front of Anton’s shirt as the haze started to take control.
A moment later he too descended into darkness, the combined effects of the preceding ten minutes finally too much for his young body to handle.
Chapter One
Boston, Present Day
Liberation Day - A Thorn Byrd Novel Page 2