“Yes, go back!” hissed another of the old den, a last scowl at the closing door. “Go back and guard us from the crazy people! Let the enemy come and take our lands but keep us safe from the crazies!”
The junior froze at the door.
“Come, now!” demanded his senior, sensing something dangerously imminent. He heaved once more at the door. “Now!” The night air swooped in like a vacuum, sucking out the warmth in a great, gasp. “Don’t think, Felix! Do as I say!” he ordered, this time touching his hand to his sidearm.
The young guard swallowed. He nodded and adjusted his coat collar. He stepped toward the open door. But then, in a last defiant hesitation, he suddenly pitched hard into his senior, knocking the man off-balance and out onto the icy walkway.
The door slammed shut. The lock clicked.
The move was so unpredicted that there had been no time for the stunned senior guard to react. He rolled off the icy sidewalk and scrambled to his feet. Like an angry bull against a gate, he slammed, but the door was locked from the inside. A sickening indignation flooded through him as he realized that his junior comrade had just committed the unthinkable. He had disobeyed a direct order. The ramifications would be swift . . . and severe.
Inside the pub, time had stopped. Even breathing came as an awkward intrusion to the silence which had engulfed everything. All motion had ceased under the dim light of fire. All were statues . . . and all instantly sobered.
The banging on the door and the shouting voice of the senior guard outside reverberated throughout the small room, rattling windows and jolting the empty glasses on the tables. Yet no one heard a sound. Every eye in the room was focused on the young guard, or more specifically, on the pistol he had leveled at them.
“Now you will listen to me, old fools”, he growled, hands shaking so violently that an accidental discharge of his Lugar was a distinct possibility. “Crazies, you say? You think we are guarding the chemically poisoned? The insane and mentally spoiled from acts of war?” He made a sickening sound from somewhere deep within his throat. It garbled out in a grave chuckle. “You think the Fuhrer would allow any capable German soldier, at this crucial time, to forfeit his duty to fight on the front lines?” He continued, tuning his aim.
Every eye was welded to the round black hole at the end of the barrel. The old circle could have been wax figures had it not been from the betrayal of pulsing veins on their wrinkled foreheads and streams of sweat running down their fleshy faces.
“It was the ale speaking!” hissed one of them, finally, his front teeth missing and gums gnashing out his slur of words. “You must ignore old Jaztuss,” he went on, motioning toward his frigid friend. “See how drunk he is. He meant nothing!”
The other men nodded, nervously mumbling their consensus.
“No!” retorted the junior. He winced oddly, and glared with desperate eyes. He touched at an ugly dark-bluish area on his forehead. A recent bruise, perhaps? As he did, his expression returned, his countenance, aware. “I will tell you the truth. I will tell you why I walk those hated walls every night and all of day. Why I freeze in the frigid air and rub at my swollen hands, bleeding from the dog’s leashes.” He looked away for a moment . . . a last hesitation. “Crazies, you say? No. No crazies in that clinic. I wish it were the insane and mindless, the diseased and polluted. I would know what to do then.” He shook his head and closed his eyes as though a battle raged within him. “No. No crazies. Children are what we guard. Jewish children. But not like any you or I have ever known. No. These are different. They have been altered, changed . . . turned into mind controlling monsters! I have felt their power myself. She took my thoughts. I saw her in my mind, like a ghost, staring at me. Just staring at me! Now they make voices to scream in my head! No one believes me. My own comrades tell me I lie, that I just want to leave, to get away from the project . . . the—.” He broke off suddenly and wrapped his hands in a vice-grip around his head. “Soon it won’t matter,” he forced again, his tone beaten and uncaring. “They will become so powerful that nothing can stop them. They will knock down the walls and kill everyone.”
The old men’s faces had turned from fear to a strange look of confusion. They glanced oddly amongst themselves as though in a stupor. The man has gone insane then, they thought collectively, or worse. Perhaps he had contracted some virus? Had he been tainted by the very chemicals which had infected those who were locked up and sequestered behind the GGRC walls?
Finally, one of the group spoke. He had intelligent eyes, although icy and subtle, but he appeared to be more sober than the others. “I was in my fields that night, nearly three-years ago, looking for a lost calf. I saw those trucks come in,” he paused, “and I saw what was unloaded.” He turned his gaze on his companions. “I have never said a word to anyone since, but that night I saw the march of children.” He lifted a chin to the air, and glared brazenly back at the guard. “What has been done to these children?”
The junior turned away.
Silence followed as all pondered on strange words and unthinkable declarations.
“Terrible things,” the soldier muttered. “Perhaps we deserve their wrath.” He turned a beleaguered face back on the stunned group. “You have all been deceived. The clinic is a tomb for the genetically altered—the Furrier’s prize. Hitler’s last hope is harbored within their blood. They are priceless to him . . . and a curse to those of us who must guard them.”
The old coterie stared—some in a look of comprehension, but most in a dumbfounded gawk of disbelief. Could it be true? Were there children behind those walls? And if so, what was being done to them? Something horrific, no doubt . . . enough as to drive a young SS soldier mad. Unimaginable atrocities? Was it possible? Jewish or not, they were still children.
At that moment, a loud crash came from somewhere in the back.
No one had noticed in the heat of the hostility that the banging and shouting from outside had stopped. And now, from the shadowed back entrance, stood the senior guard. The door had been kicked open wide, creating a dark, cold background to his silhouette. His hat was gone and the frigid air breathed though is hair, moving it oddly in the silent thick of the tavern. His face was red from frost, his eyes watered from the cold, and his expression was one of absolute ferocity. “Felix!” he growled, pointing his weapon at the insubordinate junior. “You have said too much! Shut your mouth and come with me! You are a traitor and under arrest!”
It took only seconds for the dazed junior to realize what he had done. His face blanched to a dead white as blood drained from his placid features. He had taken an oath of secrecy, but in his foolish fit of rage, had broken it. He would unquestionably be executed for his loose tongue.
His eyes betrayed his last thoughts. The curtain closed; his stage fell dark. This was his finale. The young guard closed his eyes and fell back into the wood chair like a rag doll. He exhaled a long, tormenting breath. The last he would take. He lifted his gun to his head. A final, fleeting look of exoneration flashed in his eyes. And then he pulled the trigger.
“Felix! No!”
The words were drowned out by the gun shot. The young soldier was dead before his body hit the ground.
Chapter 5:
Zen heard a voice cry out in a garbled, pitiful wail: “Ruthanne! Take my hand! Run! Run!” He lunged from his bed. His clothes were wet, his heart was pounding. Only then did he realize that the words were his own. He shivered and quickly blinked the moisture from his eyes. Another dream, he slowly comprehended.
As he looked around, the darkened outline of solid walls brought a vivid reality: he was still in his cell. Zen’s eyes shifted immediately to Ruthanne’s slab. He sighed in relief when he saw the outline of her tiny body. He went to her side and rested his hand gently on her back. Yes, she was breathing. He was surprised that his cries had not awakened her. But then again, her day had been exhausting, both mentally and physically. She always slept deep after experiencing a thought-intrusion episode. He touched her h
air softly, “dream well, little sister,” he whispered.
Ruthy was more like a shadow then flesh and blood. Zen looked down on her dark, natural curls and thought how wonderful it would be if that soft hair could be washed, combed and put up fancy—something bright and flowing. He closed his eyes and tried to remember her as she once was.
In the encampment, his mother had tried to keep Ruthanne’s hair and clothes looking as decent as possible. It had been a mother’s desperate strategy, and perhaps a fool’s last attempt, but it was all the woman had left. An illusion that somehow one of the female Nazi administrators, or perhaps even an officer, might see how lovely the child was and take compassion on her. They couldn’t be cruel to a child so fair, could they?
As a baby, Ruthanne had caught the eye of many a friendly passer-by who had stopped on the street, in the park, or even in a busy shop aisle just to fuss over her as if she were a rare and remarkable doll. She had been a doll. Perhaps that was the reason that years later in those terrible concentration camps, their mother had secretly yearned for a miracle; a fleeting hope that even the infamous Nazis might see the child in a different light. Perhaps some terrible event—sickness, accident or even a reprisal of war—had taken their own small child. The paternal longing for a child, regardless of race or culture, taken tragically early, never fades, never relinquishes in its torment and pain. This minute flame of hope both fueled and plagued their mother with an impossible optimism, Ruthanne, as lovely as she was, would charm them. Even the despised racial hatred must acquiesce to such beauty as her child, her Ruthanne. Wouldn’t it? Yes. There must be a hundred reasons for removing such a child from the filth, disease and depravity of the camps. But in the end it had been a fool’s hope after all; a mother’s fantasy spawned from love . . . and desperation. For all that was noted of Ruthanne, and the other children for that matter, was that they were Jews.
Zen gritted his teeth and fought back the sudden nauseating repulse that gripped his stomach. Compassion! he thought angrily. How could his mother have even considered such absurdity? The Nazis had shown compassion all right. The night they dragged her from the arms of his father at the encampment; the night she had screamed and fought desperately to hold onto him. But they had gun-butted her, and when his father had rushed to catch her fall, they shot him dead. Zen had watched it all. After that, his mother had wanted to die, and soon got her wish. Just two days later. She was systematically executed, shot alongside Aunt Vella in a filthy pit dug up on the hill past the North tower. At least that’s what the Nazi matron had told him. But then she had said a lot of terrible things. Zen shivered as he recalled the horrible woman. She was as malicious as she was ugly, with hateful eyes, and rotting teeth. She spat out saliva with every despicable command and shrieked like a banshee when upset.
The last time Zen had heard her shrill voice was that terrible night. You get to leave the camp, she had said, her breath smelling of something rotting and dead. She had grabbed him and his sister by the arm and pushed past the other sleeping children. You are lucky children, she had repeated, over and over again. Lucky children. She had continued the awful phrase right up until the moment she forced them into the back of a military transport truck. Her voice had continued its ugly cadence even over the deep roar of the motor as it drove off into the night. Twenty-two children from the encampment—including Zen and Ruthanne—had been packed in the rear of the vehicle like cattle. Others were also picked up and taken on the fated caravan . . . en route to the GGRC encampment.
Zen closed his eyes even tighter, willing the terrible memories to fade, to dissipate into oblivion, to wash away with his tears and evaporate on hot cheeks. Why couldn’t he forget these things? Why did the memories come in the night hours, like specters to haunt and torment him?
A sudden rumble belched beneath the cell floor and shook the ground. The commotion wrenched Zen instantly from his despondent reverie. The clinic rattled and quaked until the air hung thick with dust and debris. Then as quickly as the anomaly came, all fell silent again.
“They are getting closer.” Ruthann’s soft voice caught Zen off guard. He wheeled quickly in her direction. She was sitting upright now. Her face was unnaturally calm, as if surrender had finally taken all the fight out of her.
“Yes. We don’t have much time.”
Zen knew very well what harbored in the distance and shook the ground like a great beast clawing its way up from hell. He knew what was coming; what dark of night could not conceal and what could not be silenced. The Allies approached, coming to crush the Nazi pigs. But when? Time was ticking down, the sands nearly spent. Would there be anyone left to set free when they arrived? It was a tormenting question, one which clung to each of the young captives like a knife to the throat. It hovered in their optimism and taunted their aspirations.
“We must find a way, Ruthy. We have to get out and free the others. We must disarm the explosive before the Allies enter the clinic.”
“How, Zen?” she questioned in a hopeless tone, much too adult for her tiny figure. “With all of our abilities, none of us can alter matter.” She sighed and lay back down on the hard cot, starring silently upward into the darkness.
In the distance, the sound of war crept nearer. It howled out like never before, spitting and growling as it shook the earth.
No wonder the guards were terrified, thought Zen. They were running out of time. The Allies were so near now, so close he could taste freedom. He could almost smell the clean air, feel the sunlight on his face, see the blue of the sky, and orange of dusk. He could almost feel his legs running long and hard through the open fields of grain, through damp grasslands and meadows. He could just hear the birds, frogs and the sounds of livestock in the fields. But what Zen longed for more than anything else, what drove his hopes and forbade his surrender, was to see the faces of smiling, friendly people. And most of all, to hear their laughter. Oh, to laugh, he thought. To throw his head back and hoot until his sides ached. He had nearly forgotten how. A scant grin stole onto his lips. To be so near freedom. To burst above the surface and gulp sweet air, only to sink down again into drowning depts. Was perdition more than this?
They say that the truth can set one free. But for Zen and Ruthanne, the truth brought only a sickening apprehension. They, alone, knew what the GGRC administration had planned for them and the other surviving children.
Ruthanne had seen the plot. In the mind of the soldier, she had watched it conceived and put into action by the clinic administration. In those short awful moments, she had been overwhelmed by the vast amount of information concealed in the guard’s memories. Among this reservoir of garbled data pouring into her head, she had filtered through the man’s thoughts like a clock speeding backward in time. It had not taken long for her to find the event she was looking for—a secret meeting held just days prior in a conference room on the top floor of the clinic.
Ruthanne had stood as a vicarious specter, a witness to what had already transpired. The girl re-experienced the event just as the soldier had days before. She saw, heard and perceived with more understanding than he had at the time the meeting took place. She witnessed the GGRC collaborators, along with their Nazi puppeteers, orchestrate and plan the evacuation of the complex, and its ensuing destruction. In the blink of an eye, she obtained a perfect knowledge of what was to come. There were no questions, no lack of understanding. She knew every facet of their scheme, and comprehended it perfectly. She saw every probability. The strengths and genius of it, the weaknesses and flaws. But the awful fact was that the odds were good, good enough for the ominous plan to work. And it was simple. Too simple, really, for the end of such an egregious project; the finale of what was once Hitler’s greatest expectation for his genetically perfected, his prodigious posterity that was to carry on for a thousand years.
There was to be an explosive device, monolithic in charge. There would be nothing left of the clinic. The detonation was intended as a cleansing, a boiling away of all and any ev
idence. The chemical composition of the charge far exceeded mere destruction and devastation. The shockwave would even carry to the boarding towns, damaging many of the older structures.
It was to be a time-based detonation, set to do far more than simply kill Jewish children and eliminate a building from ever having existed. The administration’s gratification would demand the death of military men, soldiers of the invading Red Army. The bomb would have to be timed to allow maximum enemy penetration, and therefore maximum casualties.
The Red Army would enter the clinic and begin a search. They would be thorough, going deep into the stomach of the structure. The Russians had a reputation as notorious scouters and culled carefully through the enemy’s captured spoils. The trigger would be as simple as a trap-cord, tripped by opening the door to the building’s center archive vault—an information goldmine for the allied forces. Once tripped, the elusive device would begin its countdown to destruction. Exactly ten-minutes later, the bomb would detonate. It would be a blood bath.
The guard’s knowledge had come as a tremendous amount of bad news for Ruthanne to absorb, and more importantly, to convey accurately. But she had recapped the experience with astounding exactness. Zen had mechanically absorbed every word and had instantly began his calculations. Well, most of them. He had decided against calculating the odds. He knew they weren’t good, but he certainly didn’t want to know what they were rounded down to six decimal places.
“We will find a way, Ruthy,” he said in a voice strangely optimistic. “As soon as the Nazis abandon the building, we will find a way to get free and warn the Allies. Thanks to you, we know their plan. We know their tactics.”
Yes. They knew what was to happen, but knowledge is only as good as the ability to act upon it. There were still so many obstacles. The most disconcerting was the bomb. Simply knowing where the explosive was did not assure that they could ever get to it in time, let alone access and disarm it. But they had been lucky. The man whose mind Ruthanne had accessed, had fortunately spent a great deal of time in this secret record depository—the GGRC archive. In fact, she had easily mapped the schematics out and placed them to memory.
Of Salt and Sand Page 6