by Tom DeLonge
I couldn’t see where the charge went, but it must have caught the fuselage of the Messerschmitt a glancing blow near the top, because there was a flash and a plume of orange, but the plane kept coming. As it outran the cloud of smoke, I could see, in the floodlights, where the roof behind the cockpit was scored with a ragged—but superficial—tear. Roberto had missed.
Now the flakpanzer came to life, creaking and groaning as the gunner swung the turret round and opened fire with all four cannon so that tracers flashed towards where the resistance fighters and Mrs. Habernicht crouched in the undergrowth. The sound was like bombs going off beside me, and the blaze from the muzzles—fire and lightning mixed—was blinding. Trees snapped and exploded, cut in half as the shells tore into them, and Roberto—the only one I could see—dropped under the raging hail of gunfire.
I did not consciously decide to run at the tank or scale its hull, burning my hand on the exhaust pipe. I did not consciously choose to haul myself over the angled box of the turret sides. I do not believe I could have consciously shot the gunner down, but he saw me and he let go of the cannon grips, snatching for his machine pistol, and I saw in his eyes what he meant to do. I saw anger and hatred and maybe fear as well. Above all, I saw purpose, deliberation, the same kind of intent that had looked down the barrel of an MG 42 from a watchtower and cut my brother down. I pointed the revolver at his chest and fired.
Just once.
It was enough.
I dropped the pistol, hands shaking, wondering vaguely if the men in the tank below me realized what had happened. As I paused, momentarily entranced by what I had done, the first gigantic Messerschmitt pulled hard up over the end of the runway and roared directly overhead so that I ducked, hands over my face as it arced into the night. Despite Roberto and however many of the others who were dead, and despite anything I had done, it escaped. But there were two more, one of them already on its way.
The dead gunner was already half out of the seat, so with effort, I pulled him clear and took his place. Then I swiveled the turret a few degrees around until I saw the nose of the second aircraft just as its front wheels left the concrete, and I squeezed the trigger. The cannon shells raked the belly of the craft, and it juddered uncertainly, continuing to climb but wounded now. I kept shooting, shouting incoherently, tears rolling down my cheeks, awash in grief and horror and a terrible kind of joy I never want to feel again.
The massive plane limped up into the night sky above me, but it was barely above the trees when it began to tip to one side, stalling, falling, and then the sky flared once more, and what was left of it plummeted into the woods. I stared vaguely toward where it had gone down, absently wiping the tears from my eyes, and realized that I had heard movement from below. The tank’s belly hatch had opened.
I snatched up the fallen machine pistol and peered over the canted walls of the turret. Three men scrambled out from beneath the tracks at the rear. One of them had an automatic pistol, and he rolled to his feet sighting along the barrel at me. I saw the surprise in his face, the doubt when he registered the machine pistol, and then, without a word, he dropped the gun and raised his hands.
I was too scared to trust him. My trigger finger twitched. But I took a breath, and in that moment, I saw that he was only a few years older than me. He looked pale, frightened. Of me. On instinct, I nodded toward the tree line and motioned with the gun. He and his fellows turned and ran into the darkness, not speaking or looking back, hands clasped behind their heads.
I watched them go, then got back into the gunner’s seat. There was one more plane to come, but when I looked at the runway, it wasn’t the Messerschmitt barreling towards me. It was the armored car, headlights blazing.
My fingers felt thick as I fumbled for the trigger mechanism. In that split second, I felt the staccato thud and rattle of machine gun rounds kicking off the sides of the tank as the armored car’s weapons blazed. The shield around the AA mount buckled and popped as two holes punched through only inches from my shoulder.
Stricken with terror, I dropped from the gunner’s seat and hugged the decking as round after round punctured the pulpit and ripped through the air above me. The metal shredded and tore, lighting the darkness around me with a frightful brilliance matched by the deafening roar of the gun and the clanging of its shells. Overwhelmed, my senses fogged. I was too scared to weep and lay flat, eyes shut, waiting for death.
And then there was another sound behind the others, a bang, deep and close and loud, after which there was a sudden silence and the light changed, flaring red and yellow, the air stinking of oil and smoke. I waited for more cannon rounds to come streaming into the AA pulpit from the armored car, but as the stillness stretched on, second after agonizing second, I rolled cautiously onto my back and, very slowly, lifted my head just high enough that I could see through a hole torn by the cannon fire. I saw flame and movement, and I heard voices calling, and not in German.
I sat up, peering over the savaged rim of the AA gun shield, my eyes prickling in the smoke. The armored car was burning, its turret crumpled impossibly. Behind it, hulking in the firelight, was a tank from which men were clambering. I knew its shape from the secret broadsheets which had been smuggled round the ghetto, though I had never seen one, the distinctive sloping armor which had given the Nazis such an unwelcome shock on the fields of Kursk. It was a T-34. And now I could hear the voices of the troops as they rounded up the German survivors, and there could be no mistake.
It was the Russians.
19
KATY
New Mexico, July 1947
KATY DIDN’T MIND THE DESERT. IT WAS WEIRD, LIKE another planet, but after the rubble they’d left behind, thousands of miles away, she could see the bright side. The only thing that was hard was the language, and the way some of the kids at school looked at her. Her English was okay. Her father’s was better—perfect, it seemed to her—but then one of the boys in her class had told her the sign that had gone up in front of the house across from the playground that said, “Krauts go home” was supposed to be about her.
The idea meant nothing to her, at first, because she didn’t understand it, even though the boy had whispered it under his breath without looking at her, his face flushed, which meant he thought it was true. She’d gone home and asked her father about it, and her father, who was good at explaining things, told her that some people around here didn’t feel good about them being there, because this new country had been fighting Germany, their former country, for so long. Katy pointed out that that had all finished ages ago, but her father had smiled, in that way of his that showed he wasn’t really happy, and said that it was only two years ago. Two years seemed like a long time to Katy, her father said, but to grownups, it was no time at all.
This was a worrying thought, all by itself, an idea as strange as the desert where it never rained and the birds and animals were unfamiliar. How could two years be no time at all? Was time as different here as its strange birds and lizards? Might she wake up tomorrow to find that a year had passed? What then? Would she grow old and weak, like the dark-skinned lady with the eagle face who sold blankets and jewelry by the side of the road just outside town?
She lay awake, her knitted dolly with the yellow wool hair in her hands, wondering, studying the wrist watch that had belonged to her mother, staring at it without blinking to see if the hands moved faster than they ought to. If her mother was here, she would explain it, but her mother had been in Dresden when the bombers came. It was just Katy and her father now, alone in the desert, where time moved faster and you didn’t talk too much in case people heard and figured out where you were from.
Kraut.
It was a nickname, her father said, from sauerkraut, but that didn’t make sense. When Maggie Philips said it, while they were lining up for assembly, Katy had explained—quite politely, she thought—that she did not like sauerkraut and never ate it. Her mother used to make it for her father, she remembered, but you couldn’t buy it in
New Mexico, so even her father didn’t eat it anymore.
There were lots of things her father didn’t have anymore. Perhaps that was why he seemed so sad. Of course, Katy knew that his sadness wasn’t really about such things—sauerkraut and forests, castles and beer and the other things he talked about—but she was sure, in her heart, that if he could have them, he would feel better. Not about Dresden though. There was nothing that would make him feel better about that, and she had learned that it was best not to try.
She gazed at the ceiling one night, then told Hella—the yellow-haired doll—that she would speak to Mrs. Simms at the grocery store about ordering something her father would like. Not sauerkraut. Not beer. Some kind of sausage, perhaps. Her father liked sausage, the way they made it back home. There might be a way to get it.
Pleased with the idea, she rolled onto her side but had not fallen asleep when the phone rang. It rang for a long time before she heard her father half-falling out of bed and running heavily down the stairs, muttering to himself in German. He answered the phone in English, because that was what you had to do here, and then he went quiet for a while. When he spoke again, he sounded excited and a little confused, and it struck her as strange that he was speaking German again.
She got out of bed, taking Hella with her, and moved onto the landing so she could see him through the banisters, pacing up and down the hall as he talked. He was smoking, and the cigarette in his hand seemed to tremble very slightly, as if his whole body were cold. He turned suddenly and looked up, as if he had been thinking of her, and she saw the strange look in his eyes. She wasn’t sure what the expression meant because she had never seen it before.
He finished the conversation and said to her—in German, “Get dressed, little Katy. We have to go out.”
Katy stared at him, disbelieving. It was nighttime. She should be in bed.
“I have to go out and I can’t leave you here alone,” he replied. “You can bring Hella. Put on your dress and shoes.”
Katy left the house after dark for the first time since those late night trips to the shelter two years ago, which had seemed so long ago, until she learned that time moved faster here. She asked where they were going, but her father just said, “Work,” and hurried her into the car. Sometimes, when he wasn’t too sad, they sang old songs in the car, but not tonight, perhaps because it was so late.
She had never been to her father’s place of work, so she was surprised by how far it was, and she slept for part of the way, waking when someone shone a flashlight into the car and asked to see papers. It was a soldier with a gun and a helmet. Katy, who did not like soldiers no matter what kind of uniform they wore, kept very still and tried not to meet the man’s eyes.
It felt like her father was being tested, like at school when they showed you the words on a card and you had to read them in front of everyone in your best American English, but if so, it was a test he passed. They were allowed to drive into an area with a lot of square buildings, lit with lights on high stands, dazzling lights that made the ground as bright and clear as lunchtime, though the sky above was black. Her father took her hand. She was surprised to note that his was sweaty, though the night was cool. He squeezed her fingers reassuringly and she smiled at him to make him feel better.
Pulling up beside their car where they’d parked was a pickup truck, its bed carrying a big, shiny balloon made of something like the foil wrapped around chocolate bars. There was string too, and some kind of big wooden box bound with pink tape that looked like it had been put together in someone’s shed. Maybe it was a school project: a basket that you fastened to the balloon to see how high it would go. Something like that. The driver looked to her father, then threw a shiny cover, big as a rug, over the back of the truck before driving off.
Inside the building, there were more men in uniforms, and more questions, some of them directed at her. No one seemed to know what to do with her, but her father explained—five or six times in his perfect English—that he could not leave her at home. She had to stay with him.
“And anyway,” he said, “who is she going to tell? She’s a little girl, for God’s sake!”
That meant he was serious. He did not say “God” unless he was very serious. Or sad.
But they wouldn’t let her in so her father stopped her at the door.
“I need you to wait here now, Katy,” her father had said, glancing over his shoulder, as if there was something there he desperately wanted to see. “Just for a few minutes.”
“I want to see,” she said.
“Maybe later,” he replied. “But for now you must be patient and not come in. Is that clear?”
“Yes, father,” she said, not happily. She turned away and began to walk in the direction he had nodded, but as she heard the door behind her open she turned and looked after him.
Her father was showing his papers again while other people took flash photographs and whispered to each other. The room beyond the door was so big that it wasn’t really a room at all, more like a space with walls and a roof, big as a football field. Maybe bigger. In the middle, under multiple floodlights, more men stood with guns, guarding a strange metal object that flashed under the lights. It was big, like a giant’s cake pan that had rolled off his table and landed upside down, and part of it was broken.
She stared past the soldiers and the men in white coats, but then the door closed again and she was alone.
It seemed like he was gone a long time, though she couldn’t be sure because of the way the time ran differently in the desert. Her feet got tired from standing, and she sat down on the chilly concrete. Once he came to check on her, his face still pink and shiny with strange emotions, and someone gave her a chair, and that was all she remembered.
She woke up in the car, a mile from home. The sky was still dark, and her father was very quiet and thoughtful, but not sad. Not angry. When they reached their driveway, he turned off the engine and sat staring at his hands on the steering wheel, not looking at her, unaware that she was awake. When she spoke, he jumped and looked surprised. Then he took her in his arms and carried her inside. He clutched her tight to him as they walked so that Katy, a little frightened by his love, asked nothing about where they had been or why.
When they were in her room and she was sitting on her bed, he hesitated in the doorway, looking at her.
“No piano lesson for you tomorrow,” he said. “Get into bed.”
“But I have to go to my lesson,” said Katy. “The teacher says so.”
“I will speak to the teacher, little Katy,” he said. “You have had a very tiring night and you need your sleep.”
“I don’t want to,” she said. “I’m not sleepy.”
She was, but she didn’t want to say so. She didn’t want him to leave. His peculiar excitement, the place with the soldiers, and the cake pan all made her feel strange, and she didn’t want to be left alone in the dark, though she couldn’t think of how to say so.
“I’ll sit with you,” he said. “And look. I brought you a present.”
She snuggled under the thin blanket, face open and attentive to what she was going to get. From his pocket, he drew what she first thought was a candy wrapper. It was balled up tight, a little screw of paper, so that her excitement at being given a present disappeared, and she gave him a crestfallen look. As she did, he opened his hand and something remarkable happened. The patch of foil sprang open and went perfectly flat, showing not so much as a wrinkle in its surface.
Katy gasped, delighted, and put out her hand to receive it. Her father gave her the thin piece of foil and she gasped again as it pulsed with a soft blue radiance that spangled like water. It gave off enough light that she could see her father’s eyes in the darkness. He reached out cautiously and touched his hand to hers, whereupon the bluish glow became pink as dawn. He let go, watching the light change back to blue, and his face was unreadable once more.
DAYS LATER, AFTER SHE HAD GONE BACK TO SCHOOL, THE schoolyard was abuzz
about a crash. The newspaper showed the men in uniform with what they called the recovered debris. It was a weather balloon, the paper explained. It looked like the bits of wood and foil she’d glimpsed in the back of the pickup truck. Her father told her she wasn’t supposed to say anything about it, and that she should forget, because the crash was not something worth remembering. But Katie remembered, and if she ever felt herself doubting what she had seen, she would take out the piece of strange metal foil that glowed when she touched it with her skin, and she would remember the look in her father’s face, a mixture of delight and anxiety, confusion and horror.
20
ALAN
Dreamland, Nevada
THEY DIDN’T CALL IT AREA 51. NOT THE PEOPLE WHO worked there. They called it, appropriately enough, “Dreamland.” It was a maze of blank corridors and windowless rooms, every door fitted with combination locks and badge-reading scanners. Armed guards stood at every corner and did not speak, such that Alan sometimes got the impression he was the only real person there. The truth was that they were just people who knew and did their jobs, unfazed by the strangeness of the place. Posters on every other wall read, “If you see something odd, don’t wait: Report it!”
That ought to keep everyone busy, Alan thought.
Alan had been there a week, but for all its otherworldly interiors and the desolate exterior landscape, nothing so far had matched the excitement of that first five minutes. He still didn’t know what exactly he had seen. His questions had been met with a disinterested silence. His glimpse of the ship had been little more than the reward he’d needed for resigning his commission as a Marine. That done, he’d immersed himself in a world of books and computer tutorials so abstract in their applications that half the time, he didn’t know if he was learning to fly a plane or operate a high-tech washing machine. He read passages and filled out questionnaires, but there was frequently no clear relationship between the two, and often nothing about planes or flying at all. By the third day, he began to suspect it was all a test, or a bad joke at his expense, and that none of it really meant anything at all. The fourth and fifth days, he spent in a completely unremarkable classroom with a guard on the door armed with a purposeful looking M-4 carbine. He studied logs and tables, charts and diagrams, and from time to time, an instructor who did not give his name came in to talk him through the next pages, speaking in a steady monotone. Alan took multiple-choice tests late into the night, after which he was escorted to his quarters to sleep, until it all began again the next day.