“They’ve split the prisoners into two groups to ensure they can’t all rush the guards at once,” said Chou, “but look at the guards, they’re too relaxed. These are soldiers who are used to being in charge of prisoners they know won’t resist. They’re not expecting a fight.”
“Do you see our people?” Freuchen asked.
“There,” I said, keeping my voice low so it wouldn’t carry. “In the second group. Toward the rear, I think I see Edward. And that might be Oliver and Sarah with him, it’s hard to be sure from here.” My heart gave a little jump when I spotted Albert lying with his head in the lap of a woman who surely had to be Evelyn. “Yes, I think I see everyone… except for Benito.” The man Wild Bill said had led the Germans back to the garrison was nowhere to be seen.
“He could be in the other group,” Wild Bill said.
From the edge of the forest, hidden from our view until they stepped into the clearing, came two more soldiers. One of them was tall and wore a crisp looking uniform with a peaked cap, his trousers tucked into knee-high black leather boots. He was obviously an officer. The second was another soldier, and he dragged the lifeless body of a man behind him.
“Oh my God!” I hissed. “They shot that man. They just shot him.” I felt a surge of horror and revulsion rush through my body.
“That’s the scar-faced son of a bitch who murdered Brute,” said Wild Bill, pointing at the soldier dragging the dead man behind him. “I’d recognize him anywhere.”
The scar-faced soldier dragged the man’s body over to what I had taken to be just a pile of rocks near the first group of detainees and unceremoniously dropped the body next to it. I squinted to try and get a better look at who the dead man was and sucked in a deep breath as I suddenly realized that what I had thought was a pile of rocks was something else entirely.
“Those are more bodies. They’ve been executing prisoners,” I whispered.
There were at least five dead bodies in the pile, limbs twisted and stiff; men and women. While our horror at the realization that these bastards were murdering prisoners in cold blood sunk in, the Nazi officer strutted along the edge of the group holding our people. As he walked, he slapped a pair of black leather gloves against the palm of his left hand. He stopped abruptly and pointed at one of the prisoners cowering on the ground before him. The scar-faced soldier waded into the group and grabbed the woman the officer had pointed at and pulled her roughly to her feet. I saw Edward struggle to get to his feet, but one of the other guards stepped up behind him and cracked him on the shoulder with the butt of his rifle. Edward collapsed to the ground again and stayed there.
The scar-faced soldier pulled the struggling woman out of the group to where the officer waited, presenting her to his superior as if she were up for auction.
“Dear God!” Freuchen hissed. “Is that…?”
“We have to move, now,” Chou snapped and instantly began scrambling down from our hideout, closely followed by the men.
I remained where I was for just long enough to see Evelyn’s struggling form as she was dragged kicking and screaming into the trees.
Eighteen
Throwing any reserves of caution to the wind, I sprinted down the side of the mountain after Chou. She had already reached Silas. Panting for breath, I ran to her side in time to hear Chou tell the robot, “You have to go now, Silas. Quickly.”
“Of course,” Silas said. He turned, and with quick loping steps, covered the hundred or so feet to the edge of the forest. We ran after him. Chou angled to the left, darting between the trees. She stopped several trees back from the edge of the clearing in a position that placed us between the two groups of prisoners.
Chou turned to Wild Bill, “I need you to provide covering fire for me,” she said.
Wild Bill nodded, grabbed his rifle and levered a round into the chamber, then bent low at the waist, ran to a line of trees capping a nearby hillock.
“Cover for what?” I hissed.
Chou ignored my question. “Stay here,” she ordered. She turned to Freuchen, said, “Come with me,” then the two took off through the woods, winding through the trees in the direction our people were being held. Suddenly alone and completely out of the loop of what was happening, I turned back to face the clearing just in time to see Silas step out of the forest and into full view of the Nazis.
The response to his sudden appearance was, initially at least, shocked silence.
Silas walked closer, raised a hand in greeting and I recited the first few words of his now familiar salutation, “Welcome children of Earth—” The rest were drowned out by panicked yells, screams of fear and surprise, and gasps of amazement from the Nazis and prisoners alike. The three stormtroopers guarding the group nearest to Silas dove for cover, the three others guarding the second group reacted similarly a second later.
And then everything went to hell.
Five of the prisoners from the group closest to Silas jumped to their feet and dashed for the woods.
One of the stormtroopers, a grizzled-looking soldier with a week’s worth of blonde stubble on his jaw, pointed his weapon at the back of one of them and pulled the trigger. Bullets tore through the man, sending gouts of blood into the air. He crumpled to the leaf-strewn ground as though his soul had been ripped from him.
Silas froze as the violence unfolded around him.
The Nazi continued firing, cutting down another two people in as many seconds. Several of the prisoners who still sat obediently on the ground flopped over sideways or screamed in pain as stray bullets from the soldier’s automatic weapon slammed into them.
His synthetic voice ragged with horror, Silas yelled, “No! What are you doing? Please, stop… stop…”
I stifled a gasp of horror as a woman dressed in a peasant’s woven blouse and skirt staggered backward, three red spots suddenly appearing on her chest, raked by a burst of gunfire. She collapsed motionless to the ground. Another man spun and dropped, blood streaming from a leg wound. He began to pull himself hand-over-hand toward the nearest tree for cover.
Quickly, I scanned the rest of the camp. The Nazi officer and the soldier with the scar were crouched behind a tree, less than fifty feet from where I hid. Kneeling next to the officer, his pistol pressed against her temple, was Evelyn, her pale face speckled with dirt and streaks of blood. I felt a surge of anger well up inside me when I saw the skin around Evelyn’s left eye swollen shut, hidden beneath folds of bruised skin. The bastards had beaten her!
All three were oblivious to me, their attention focused on the violence unfolding in the clearing, their mouths simultaneously falling open in disbelief when they saw Silas.
Thankfully, the other stormtroopers seemed too shocked to decide who to shoot: the fleeing prisoners, those who still cowered on the ground, or the huge mechanical man who had suddenly walked into their camp.
Silas did something I never expected; he rushed the Nazi shooting the prisoners. The soldier’s face paled as he saw the huge golden robot bearing down on him. He swung his machine-gun in Silas’ direction… and fired a sustained burst at the robot until his magazine was empty.
Small dents appeared on Silas’ chest, and I heard the ping of bullets ricocheting away. Silas reached the man and slowed to an almost instant stop.
“No,” the robot said, his voice pleading. “You must stop this carnage.”
The stormtrooper stumbled backward ten feet, fumbling another magazine into his weapon. He raised his gun and fired another burst of automatic fire into Silas, adding more dents. Then the air was suddenly filled with thunder as more Nazis opened fire on the robot.
“No!” Silas bellowed. “This is not a part of the plan.”
He bounded across the space separating him from the Nazi, reached down and yanked the machine gun away from the soldier’s hands and tossed it away. The weapon skidded to a stop about ten feet from me.
“This is not a part of the plan,” Silas repeated, enunciating every word as if speaking to a child.
>
The stormtrooper stood as stiff as a petrified tree. Silas loomed menacingly over him. And even though he had no face to express it, I swear I could feel the disappointment and anger raging through the mechanical man’s circuits.
“You were all chosen for a reason,” Silas yelled, standing erect, looking at the clumps of humans scattered in disarray around the clearing. “You are the only hope humanity has to—”
The rest of the stormtroopers opened up on Silas again.
Bullets zinged through the air as they bounced off the robot’s body. I ducked down as one thudded into the trunk of the tree I had hidden behind, sending shards of bark into my arm.
When I looked up again, I spotted Chou. She’d circled to the rear of the clearing until she was behind the guards. Now she raced out of the forest toward the furthest stormtrooper guarding Edward and the rest of our people, all of whom had thrown themselves to the ground when the shooting started, their faces pressed into the grass.
With five paces left between her and the guard, Chou leaped into the air, her right hand held above her head, and I saw the glint of the dagger she'd taken from the swordsman she'd killed. She brought the knife down with the force of all her weight behind it, driving the ten inches of blade into the Nazis’ neck up to the hilt. The man crumpled instantly to the ground, trailing an arc of blood as he dropped.
Chou grabbed the dead man’s machine gun and tossed it to Freuchen who was running from the trees toward her. He caught it deftly and ran to the group of captives. He knelt, but didn’t fire, so as not to draw the other guard’s attention, I presumed.
While Freuchen watched over our people, Chou was already rushing toward the next stormtrooper who she quickly dispatched with similar economy as the first. She was bearing down on her third target when I heard four fast single shots ring out one after the other. Two more Nazis dropped, shot by Wild Bill, one of them was the stormtrooper Silas had just disarmed. The man spun away as if he had been punched in the face, splattering blood across Silas as he fell lifeless to the ground.
Movement in my peripheral vision pulled my attention back to the officer and Scarface; they were on the move… in my direction. Scarface grabbed Evelyn by her forearm and dragged her toward the tree I was hidden behind, running in quick bursts from tree to tree, cover to cover.
A short distance from where I lay, the ground formed a natural concavity, and the two men pushed Evelyn toward it. They dragged Evelyn down into it with them and lay still, completely invisible to anyone who hadn’t seen them on the move.
“Stop!” Silas pleaded, his eye-bar shifting quickly left and right across the unfolding carnage.
I think I was probably the only one who heard him because the world was chaos now; tendrils of smoke from the automatic weapons drifting through the air like lost spirits, people screaming in fear and panic, the smell of cordite mixing with the stench of terror. The wounded cried out in pain, and the dead added their own coppery smells. Machine gun fire crackled through the air and in between came the random snap of Wild Bill’s rifle, as he targeted the remaining Nazis.
Chou’s next target must have sensed her approach because just before she leaped at him, the stormtrooper turned and dove away, bringing his machine gun up. He fired a short burst at her, but Chou dodged at the last moment, rolling to her right. There was no cover for her to hide behind, so the second she hit the ground, she was up again with that amazing almost inhuman agility she possessed, just as another short burst of gunfire smacked into the ground she had momentarily occupied. The soldier’s magazine now empty, he ripped it out and dropped it to the ground and fumbled for a fresh magazine from his belt.
Chou, seeing her chance, lunged at him, her knife curving upward. But the stormtrooper was fast too; he dropped his weapon and pulled a wicked looking dagger from his jackboot, slashing the air in front of Chou, missing her by what must have been a hair’s breadth. Chou brought her right foot up and kicked the man in the solar plexus, sending him staggering backward, then she leaped inside his guard and dropped to avoid a meaty fist aimed at her jaw. As Chou hit the ground, she swept her left leg around in an arc across the dirt and knocked the stormtrooper’s feet from under him. He slammed into the ground, his head smacking so hard I winced, and before he could have realized what was happening, Chou was on him. She brought the blade up fast and hard into the soft flesh of his chin.
I looked away, not willing to watch this man’s ugly death. When I looked again, the soldier lay spread-eagled on his back, blood pooling around his shoulders, his head tilted in my direction, sightless eyes staring at me accusingly.
The Nazi officer watched Chou from the safety of his hiding place. My breath caught in my throat as Scarface began to raise his machine gun at Chou, but the officer pushed the barrel of the gun down. He shook his head. It was obvious to me he saw the writing was already on the wall for his men and was hoping to go unnoticed long enough that they could slip away into the woods unnoticed.
Silas was moving again, bounding across the field before throwing himself between one of the remaining Nazis and a group of cowering people just in time to take a burst of automatic fire that would have cut them all down.
Chou started to run at the soldier while Silas stepped in closer to him, completely blocking the view of his intended victims with his metal bulk, focusing the soldier’s attention completely on him.
“Stop, please,” Silas begged. “You must stop this madness.”
I wasn’t sure if Silas was talking to the Nazi or the rapidly approaching Chou. Either way, it didn’t slow Chou. She stepped up behind the stormtrooper, grabbed him under his chin with her left hand, pulled him backward until he was off balance, then drove the blade of her knife into his back with three quick, vicious jabs. I felt myself about to vomit, fought it back long enough for me to bury my face as close to the ground as I could to ensure Evelyn’s captors would not hear me.
The fertile scent of the forest, wood, and brier, pungent wet moss and lichen, filled my nostrils. I allowed myself a few moments to simply ignore everything happening beyond this tiny little bubble of false safety I found myself in. My heart thudded against my ribs like a crazed rabbit caught in a trap. Even allowing for how I got to this world in the first place, I can honestly say I’d never been so frightened in my whole life. I took three deep, slow breaths, held the last one for a few long moments then exhaled.
That Chou was capable of such unerring, precise acts of brutality wasn’t what made me throw up. It was the cold precision with which she set about carrying out her murderous task. That and the knowledge that at some point in the future of humanity, from my perspective at least, someone had gone to the trouble of hard-wiring how to eviscerate another human into her genetics so successfully that her body seemed at its most perfect when it was occupied with the act of taking a life. Even in the far-distant version of the future Chou came from, there was still a need for murder. And my friend was very, very good at it. That all of the destruction and bloodshed she was capable of seemed so incongruously out of place with the beautiful vessel that carried out these acts of death, made it all so much more obscene.
The sound of shooting had stopped, I realized, almost as abruptly as it had started, replaced now by the pained cries of the wounded and dying, and the pathetic whimpering of men and women who had survived the attack unscathed. I raised my head slowly and looked into the clearing.
Silas moved to each of the many bodies that lay strewn across the clearing. He stopped at a wounded man who had been among the first to be shot. The man was terrified, digging his hands into the dirt as he tried to push himself away from the robot. I couldn’t hear what he said to the wounded man, but it didn’t seem to do any good, the man continued to back away. Silas followed him.
Edward helped Albert to his feet as Freuchen rushed to them. Edward embraced Freuchen then began urging everyone else in his group to stand up. I saw Bull, Jorge, Oliver, Sarah, and Tabitha. They all seemed unharmed. Caleb, Evita, and
Jacquetta were in the other group but were making their way over to join the rest of our friends. Caleb was being helped along by the two women, who supported him as he limped toward Edward. Caleb’s left pant leg was stained with blood, and someone had wrapped what looked like a scarf around his thigh to slow the bleeding. Chou hugged Albert tightly, then began to encourage everyone to follow her in my direction… right toward where the two remaining Nazis hid, the officer’s pistol still held to Evelyn’s head.
From my vantage point, I saw the Nazi officer tap his subordinate’s shoulder, then nod in the direction of Chou who was backing up toward them, urgently beckoning to any of the captives not from the garrison to follow her and our group to the cover of the trees, oblivious to the trap she was walking herself and them into.
If I yelled a warning, the Nazis would open fire immediately, and it was almost a guarantee that they would hit Chou and some of the other captives. They would, I was sure, also immediately shoot Evelyn. There was only one way to stop this.
Carefully, I crawled from my hiding place on my belly, pulling myself hand-over-hand toward the machine gun that had landed a few feet from me earlier; I could see its black outline still propped against the roots of the tree where it had fallen. I glanced in the direction of the two Nazis; their attention was entirely on Chou and the civilians, waiting for them to reach a spot where they would be nothing more than target practice for the experienced soldiers.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I reached out my arm and managed to touch the grip of the machine gun. Crawling forward another two inches, I was able to wrap my fingers around it and pull it to me. I had never fired a gun in my life, not even a pistol, so my entire knowledge of how to shoot came from cop shows and watching Bruce Willis in Die Hard on TV at Christmas. With the gun in both hands, I began to crawl commando-style through the leaves toward the two Nazis, hoping their attention remained focused on Chou and the approaching survivors long enough for me to get close.
The Paths Between Worlds Page 24