American Reich

by Pliss, Todd

  “Not yet. Not in the middle of New York. I’m looking for an field or something. Maybe an interstate.” Wayne again attempted to break loose of the F-343. The horsepower of his weak engine, unfortunately, was no match for it.

  A loud screech and a horrific bump shook the small propeller plane. The left wing bent significantly from the impact of the deliberated collision. In an instant, Wayne’s plane, with an out of commission wing, spun from its level position with the Earth’s surface to an off centered seventy degree angle. With its right wing almost lateral to the ground below, it quickly lost altitude as gravity sucked it down.

  To keep from falling out of the airplane, Wayne and Linda clutched hard at their seats. “We’ve gotta jump,” Wayne hollered.

  Linda glanced down. “Oh god. Oh god. I don’t know if–“

  “Yes, you can, damn it! We made it this far. There’s nothing to it. After you jump,” Wayne pointed to her parachute’s rip cord, “pull this cord. Now come on, JUMP!” he pressured. “The plane’s going to crash.”

  Linda inhaled a deep breath, “Here goes nothing!” She lept from the cockpit. Wayne immediately followed her.

  They plummeted through the atmosphere downward to the polluted planet below. Linda looked around as they fell, mesmerized by the sight.

  “Pull your cord,” Wayne screamed at her as loud as he could with the wind rushing by his face. Stunned, Linda yanked on her ripcord and her chute was released. Wayne jerked on his cord, too. They proceeded to gently glide toward the Hudson river. The echoing boom of a small airplane crashing into an office building and bursting into flames rang out.

  “Land this aircraft at Karl Goering airport,” Sergeant Rangsdorf, who had seen the refugees’ chutes open, instructed his pilot.

  “They think they have nine lives,” he gritted his teeth, “but that will soon change.”

  The Doenitz River, named for the Grand Admiral of the Reich Navy during the war and the head of its successful, deadly U-boat campaign, was silent except for fresh, tiny air bubbles that rose to its surface, and the rustle of two rather large pieces of umbrella shaped nylon fabric floating on its water. Two people surfaced, gasping for air.

  Wayne spat out a mouthful of brownish liquid. “See new countries, or the countries that you thought you knew, learn new languages, get killed,” he sardonically said. “All you have to do is call Doctor Hoffmann’s time travel services.” Eyeing the murky river that he dog-paddled in, he observed, “Well, this river is just as dirty under Nazi rule.”

  “I actually jumped out of an airplane. My first time in an airplane, no less.”

  Wayne said, “You did great, Linda. Except you should have pulled your cord quicker.”

  Linda ignored him, “We’re sitting ducks here. Let’s head out.”

  The two of them struggled out of the water with their chutes. They bundled them up and began to wring the polluted water out of their clothes.

  “I need to get to New York Uni-,” Wayne stopped and corrected himself, “the Center of Aryan Studies.”

  “This city’s going to be crawling with Nazis after our little escapade,” Linda said. “Trust me – it would be way too risky to go anywhere near there now. I know a place where we can hide out for the night.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Wayne stated solemnly. “I don’t want to wait; I can’t wait. What I have to do is too damn important.”

  “Are you sure that Hoffmann lady will be there?”

  “I can figure out how to work the time machine, if I have to.”

  Linda looked at his wounded right shoulder, swelling badly. “You need to have that taken care of,” she said.

  “I’ll worry about it later,” Wayne stubbornly insisted.

  “It’d be best to stay off the city streets as much as we can,” Linda gave in and sighed. Her feet started to walk along the riverbank. Wayne trailed close behind her.

  They had only made it half a kilometer when the bright illumination of a helicopter searchlight cut through evening sky and enveloped them. “This way,” Linda trotted off, away from the shore.

  The fugitives meandered their way into the dim, shadowy city streets. The helicopter kept a close tab on them with its spotlight.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” Wayne asked.

  “All too well,” Linda replied. They moved deeper into the maze of concrete and steel mountains. The building exteriors were adorned with fat, colorful balloons strung together like precious necklaces of pearls and banners with propagandized slogans, such as the one that read: THE FUTURE-FREEDOM, FATHERLAND, BLOOD AND SOIL! The abundant swastika flags were softly caressed by the limp spring breeze.

  Wayne leaned his body against the wall of a brick building. “Hold on,” he said, rubbing his throbbing shoulder and trying to breathe. He was lightheaded from adrenaline crash and exhaustion. “Why all this parade crap?”

  “Tomorrow’s some bullshit holiday,” Linda said. “Victory Day. It’s nothing more than the Nazis telling themselves how great they are. We only need to go a bit further.”

  The searchlight lit the former slave laborers up like a pair of well-decorated Christmas trees. Sirens could be heard in the distance, headed closer in their direction.

  “This way,” Linda said and directed Wayne down a narrow, quiet street lined with small shops. The searchlight persistently followed. The owners had long since gone home to their households; most had closed shop early in preparation for the next day’s big celebrations. Linda stopped and nodded at a manhole. “That’s where we need to go. Create a diversion while I remove the cover.”

  “What kind of diversion?” Wayne, still feeling dizzy, asked.

  “I don’t know. Run around or something. Then, once I’m in, join me as soon as you can.”

  Wayne, thinking fast, moved quickly down the street and flung his left arm in the air to get the attention of the helicopter controller. It worked. The bright spotlight kept on him like a cat on a mouse. He rolled his body under a parked Volkswagen, part of it shrouded, even with the powerful illumination that sliced through the sky, in pitch blackness, thanks to the shade thrown off by a nearby tall building.

  Linda, having slid off the heavy manhole slab, lowered her body rapidly into the ground.

  “I’m in, Wayne,” she said with just enough volume necessary for her partner to hear.

  Wayne crawled out from underneath the vehicle on its dark side. The searchlight stayed fixed on the Beetle. Wayne ran to the manhole. He entered its opening and slid the manhole cover back in its proper place just in time for Gestapo vehicles to pull up.

  Pliss / Reich

  CHAPTER NINE

  Linda led her partner through the network of numerous drainage tunnels that made up the dreary, almost lightless, extensive sewer system of New Berlin City. It was a sewer system that had been newly built in the late 1940s after the old, American one had been destroyed in the war. The population of a city of rats called it home. Wayne and Linda came upon a large crevice, with a diameter wide enough to accommodate an average sized human, in the muddled, rocky ground. Linda got down on her hands and knees and, in a creeping motion, began to move through the crack.

  “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Wayne asked. He was feeling claustrophobic.

  “I practically grew up here,” Linda said, her voice muffled since her head was already on the far side of the crevice.

  Wayne unwillingly crawled into the hole, also. Halfway through it, he became stuck. “I can’t move anymore,” he fretted.

  “Suck in your gut,” Linda advised.

  “It is sucked in,” Wayne said frustrated.

  Linda gripped each of his calloused hands. When she pulled on them hard, the pain in Wayne’s right shoulder intensified. He wiggled his torso, the minute amount that he could, against the hard surface that surrounded him. Linda pulled harder. He broke free of the crevice’s clutch.

  They stood on a dilapidated platform in what was once a part of the famous New York Cit
y subway system. An aged Metropolitan Transit Authority train, at least half a century old, laid in silence on its tracks, partly covered in rubble. Human skeletons, wearing their outdated clothes from a bygone year, littered the area. A newsstand, once an outlet of free press and free speech, sat unguarded. A dusty sign, which had so often greeted freshly arriving passengers, hung from the ceiling by a lone wire and read: 26TH STREET.

  Wayne took a good, hard look at the scene before him and had to hold back his tears. Witnessing the subway in its current, sorry state, he felt a bizarre sensation of isolation and loneliness come over him as he stood where he had so many times previously in his life during the afternoon rush hours, mobbed by strangers.

  “You know,” he said, “it’s ironic. I was never really crazy about New York the way some people were. I always complained about the noise, the crowds, and the crime. But now I would give anything to be able to stand in a crowd of New Yorkers watching the Macy’s Day Parade. Hell, I’d even sit through a Yankees game.”

  Wayne picked up a yellowed edition of the New York Times. He read from its front page, “As a result of Germany’s continually devastating attacks on U.S. military bases, including the site where the United States allegedly had the atomic bomb in development, the United States is trying to maintain some form of defense around the country while the Japanese continue to conquer more lands in the East.” He looked at the date of the newspaper. “March 30th, 1947.” Wayne threw down the paper. “Can you believe that this is all my fault, Linda? Can you believe what I have done?”

  “Let’s keep moving, Wayne.”

  “Linda, do you really believe my story? I know that you said you did, and I couldn’t have gotten this far without your help, but it’s odd. Why do you believe me? Or are you just humoring me?”

  “Let’s walk a little more, Wayne. Then we’ll talk.”

  Wayne stuck his hand in his pocket and ran his fingers along the vial of crystals. It gave him some comfort, at least.

  Linda jumped down onto the rusted railroad tracks. Wayne followed close behind as she skirted around part of the caved-in roof and continued down the dark, endless tracks. Wayne remained silent, and in a near state of shock, as they proceeded through the war ravaged subterranean world. They climbed over a derailed Long Island Railroad train car. They moved onto a platform, passing a sign that read: UNION STATION. Wayne observed one skeleton “resting” against a wall with a cup in one bony hand beside it a cardboard sign that pleaded to passersby: BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?

  As they inched along on scaffolding above a station stop, Linda slipped. Wayne, feeling as dead as all of the skeletons he had been observing, helped her up. They crawled through a subway tunnel, barely passable due to the twisted wreckage of it rubble. Hardest of all for Wayne, was walking through a train that had the skeletal remains of a full batch of passengers intact on it. Most wore the business suits that they had on when the “big one” dropped.

  Wayne thought of all the people that he knew who routinely used public transportation to get back and forth from work and school. A cold shiver shot up his spinal cord. On the train, a poster with a picture of a white bearded Uncle Sam advertised to the masses: BUY WAR BONDS, DO YOUR PART TO DEFEAT THE NAZIS.

  They soon came to a small, enclosed area. Linda begun feeling around for something near the wall. Within a minute, she had found what she had been seeking – an old kerosene lamp. She lit it, shedding an eerie orange light on the tiny area “decorated” with the makeshift furniture of a couch made from train seats pushed together and an ancient mattress resting on the floor with a thin, blue blanket full of holes on it.

  “Cozy little area,” Wayne said. He attempted, unsuccessfully, to lighten up the mood when he asked, “Did you do the interior design work yourself?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” Linda replied in an earnest manner.

  “Well, it’s nice enough,” Wayne said. It was nicer than Hollenburg anyway.

  “Nice compared to the ghetto. I found this area down here by accident when I was a child; started crawling through pipes, the sewers, anywhere I could escape the ghetto. And then, one day I crawled through a sewer pipe and it kept on going and going, until I ended up down here.”

  “Don’t the Germans know about this area?” Wayne sat down on the homemade couch.

  “Most of them aren’t even old enough to remember the war. This place has long been forgotten. Probably considered by those who do remember it as just a casualty of the war. Let me have a look at your shoulder.”

  Wayne, barely able to move his right arm without pain, slowly tugged his shirt off. The tissue around his shoulder had swelled considerably. Linda took her knife and sterilized the blade by holding it above the kerosene flame. Wayne, wincing at the sight of the cutting tool, queried his new doctor, “You ever do anything like this before?”

  She answered, “I’ve done my share of treating wounds, delivering babies – you name it.” Linda started to cut the bullet out, making her patient flinch.

  “So, what do you do around here?” Wayne asked attempting to occupy his mind with something other than the sharp pain he was experiencing in this shoulder area.

  “I like to meditate. And read. I found a bunch of pre-war magazines and books down here. I like to read about how the world was before the war and about what it was like to live in a democracy. Also, it’s interesting to me to read about the different places around the world that I would’ve loved to have seen. But most of all, this has been a place to get away from the crowded ghetto and spend some time alone. Everybody needs that now and then, I think.” Linda made a deep cut in her patient’s shoulder. Wayne screamed.

  “Hold still,” Linda requested of him. “You’re the first person that I ever brought here. This place has always been my little secret.” She held up the lead slug. “Got the bugger.” She grabbed a rag, a brown shirt from a long time past, and bandaged the wound.

  “I’m glad that’s cover,” Wayne said with relief.

  Changing the subject, Linda said, “My mother used to believe that she possessed special powers.”

  “Special powers?”

  “Psychic powers.”

  “Psychic powers, like ESP?”

  “Yeah, like that. She would have what she’d call visions and then she would sketch pictures of those visions.”

  Wayne yawned, “That’s some weird shit.”

  Linda went to a tall stack of worn reading material in a corner of the confined area, and, from the bottom of it, slid out a small purse just as worn as the books and magazines that it sat underneath. From the purse, she pulled out a handful of old drawings, done in pencil, and flipped through them. She pulled one out.

  “There is one sketch she drew that I thought of instantly when I first set eyes on you.” The penciled sketch, on notebook paper tinged with the yellow of time, showed the face of a young man that was a near perfect mirror image of Wayne’s face. It was a crude drawing, but not without artistic merit. On the top of the page, letters had been scribbled in a sloppy handwriting that formed the words: THE SAVIOR.

  Wayne looked at the sketch, but wasn’t impressed, “I’ll admit it; that’s quite a coincidence.”

  “I don’t think it is a coincidence,” Linda said defensively. “My mother was positive that a man who she had seen in a vision – a man who would look like this – would one day come along and change the world for the better. And I think that the man in this picture is you, Wayne. And when you told me your story, it all made sense to me. You are here for a reason, Wayne Goldberg.”

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” he shrugged. “I do know that I’m exhausted, though, and I need to get some sleep.” He sprawled his body out on the well-worn mattress, “It’s not exactly the Hilton, but it’ll have to do.” He shut his eyes.

  Linda turned off the kerosene lamp and laid down on the mattress beside Wayne and ran her fingers gently over her guest’s forehead, “Wayne, what is a pimp?”

  Wa
yne opened his eyes, surprised by the question. “Why do you ask?”

  “You said something about a pimp on the plane. I’ve never hear the word before.”

  “It’s a, well, a...” Wayne fumbled for words, “a type of person, in a way. A sleazy type of person.”

  “Do you know any of these kind of persons?” Linda asked.

  Wayne chuckled, “Me? No, I don’t know any pimps.”

  “You are a very handsome man, Wayne,” she said as she continued to stroke Wayne’s forehead and hair.

  “Uh, thanks,” he responded to be nice.

  “You were in Hollenburg a long time. Did you miss being with a woman?”

  “A certain woman, yes.”

  “That Lauren you told me about?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Lauren isn’t here,” Linda whispered tenderly in his ear, “She might not be in this world at all.”

  “I guess not,” Wayne answered.

  Linda moved her hand from his forehead and began to stroke his thigh. “So why don’t we make the best of the situation?” She kissed Wayne lightly and affectionately on the lips.

  “I am very flattered, Linda – and tempted,” Wayne said mildly. “But I can’t. Tomorrow, I’ll go to the lab and undo all this mess. It would feel too much like cheating.”

  “Ah. Okay.” She abruptly stood up.

  “You have to understand...”

  Linda didn’t want to hear it, “Shut up and go to sleep.”

  Wayne sighed and rolled over.

  The train tracks of the former New York Metropolitan Transit Authority hibernated throughout the night, in their perpetual silence, like two huge dead snakes, the same way they had been for forty-eight years.

  Wayne, after sleeping uninterrupted for half a day, awoke to the sight of Linda reading a book on her makeshift couch. It was a tattered hard-covered copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

  “How long have I been asleep?” Wayne asked.

  “I don’t know. A while?” Linda kept her eyes fixed on her novel. Rejection never was easy for a person to have to handle.