The ground shook, then shook harder, the earth screeching and keening as I ripped it apart. Thunder pounded against my ears as mountains tore and rocks slid and tumbled down their broken sides. One wall around the palace shuddered and fell, slamming into the side of the castle, breaking into pieces and falling through the castle’s thick wall. The break in the world scurried past mountains, dry lands, and all the way around until it finally met me at the shore. And then, finally, the land dropped, and water rushed up around it, plunging it down. The world turned into a dull roar.
I was not strong enough to submerge the entire kingdom. Many would likely die by the time the spells finished. But it was a small price to pay. A good half of the kingdom, those who survived, would remain on dry land. The rest would sink into the sea, becoming what the sailors feared when they told their stories.
Sirens. Merfolk. Evil, soulless beings that killed sailors.
A heavy lump settled in my heart. Regret. I should have sent Morgan away, but I needed her with me. Needed to know she still loved me.
Triton gagged and let out a harsh, ragged scream. His body, along with that of everyone else, was changing. Their lower forms glowed softly and I heard pops as bones broke and reformed. Blood stained the water. I gritted my teeth as I felt the changes in my own body. Morgan cried softly, and I gathered her into my arms, brushing her hair with my fingers.
“This is necessary,” I murmured. “I am so sorry, my love, but it must be done.” I didn’t cry out, but fed my pain into the magic so the spells would complete themselves. Since I’d set them earlier, all preparation done, I didn’t need to concentrate quite so hard. I could focus on Morgan as she changed into a beautiful little siren girl. She went limp in my arms, her breathing irregular but slowly evening out.
My heart stuttered, stopped, and my vision went black for an eon before my heart began beating again and sight returned. I still held Morgan, unconscious, in my arms, and I hugged her to me as I looked around, admiring the destruction and what was left of the buildings in the distance, now devastated by the salty water. The world had changed. The world, as Triton knew it, was over. My father rose in the water, his green tail flapping around as a newborn babe waves its uncoordinated limbs. All of the soldiers were floundering, and they were barely breathing, their former instinct to hold their breath. But they had no need of that now. The gills on their necks would help them breathe.
Father’s kingdom was ruined. He would rebuild, but it would take a long time. It would be a great distraction while I set my plans in motion. And if what I saw was to come to fruition, I needed to prepare. My father would never know what hit him.
I floated easily in the water on my eight legs, and I swam away, carrying Morgan gently in my arms.
Thirty years I would have to wait. I had plans to make and put in place. But I knew for certain that my father would always remember.
A Day in the Life
James R. Tuck
The mud under these boots smells like desperation.
Something rumbles behind me and I wish it were thunder. It’s not; the sun beats down like a pale, thin hammer from a clear sky, but if it were thunder then it might rain and wash the stink back down into the hole it’s wafting from, to cut some of the stench of diseased and unwashed humanity sweating under their labor.
Then again, nobody here uses the showers by choice.
Heh.
So I stand in the sun in a dark gray uniform that covers everything but face and hands with a ten-pound rifle trying to break the collarbone of the body I’m wearing with its weight.
I hate this condition of my nature. This...limitation.
It sits on my neck and it chafes, riding me like a cruel master with a razored whip and a moon-eyed, milk-skinned submissive at his ‘mercy.’
Safe words are for pussies.
Heh.
“Sturmmann Von Erich! Pay attention!”
The voice cracks across the pit, rolling over the exertion of the people shoveling mud into buckets to make the pit deeper. They are silent in their dingy striped uniforms; the only noise coming from the hole is a chorus of shuff and clop from dirt being moved, nothing enough to dampen or muffle the harsh bark from the human across from me, dressed like I am dressed, carrying a similar gun as this body.
I remember that today I am subordinate to others.
It chafes.
I look where my doppelganger points. One of the internees is crawling up the side of the pit. Thin fingers scrabble in the mud, digging deep to pull her up the slick wall. None of her fellow prisoners dares look or watch her climb. No, they keep their eyes down and their arms moving. I walk over to the edge. The boots I wear shine above the mud, the leather polished to a mirror gleam, trousers tucked smartly into their tops. I sigh softly. These people do know how to coordinate an outfit.
The woman reaches the top and hangs there, arms over the edge, fingers staked into the earth on each side of my feet. She hangs and looks up at me, eyes glowing out of her skull. I can see where boys would have followed her home, calling out compliments, trying to get her attention. Deprivation has carved her beauty to razor sharpness, giving her collarbones like lightning and skin as pale as milk. Hair the color of roasted almonds peeks around the edges of a scarf made from a scrap of pajamas, feathering along her jaw line. She stares at me, not blinking.
“What are you doing, fraulein?” I ask.
“I need water.” Her voice is strong still, coated with a chewy accent. Russian.
I search the memory of the body I’m wearing for the right answer. “Water break has already happened. We will tell you when it comes again. Go back to work.”
Her hand clamps my boot. Mud smears across the leather. I can almost hear the grit as it scratches the polish, feel it like nails on a chalkboard. “Please...” She says the word and I can tell how hard it is for her to do so. “It’s not for me. Just a mouthful.”
Over her head, in the pit, a form huddles in the center of the workforce, hidden by their movement—except she has caused me to search for it. I think it’s a man, but it might be an older boy; it’s hard to make out with these mortal eyes. The only thing clear is the convulsive shudders that run through the body as it tries to fold inside itself. I look back down at the woman hanging on the edge of the pit.
“He has a fever. He’s suffering.”
I don’t know if it is the situation or the pleading that fills her eyes with agony.
Calling on the muscle memory of Sturmmann Josef Von Erich, I unsling the rifle, sight, and fire.
The huddled human jerks in reaction as the bullet slams into it, the small wad of lead immediately changing shape and trajectory on impact, slewing sideways, churning through meat and viscera, the shockwave of it causing enough trauma to stop organs already weakened from overexertion and undernourishment. The internees quit shoveling, dropping to their knees in the mud at the crack of the rifle shot. Blood begins to darken filthy gray stripes as the man ceases moving at all.
The woman looks up at me as I put the rifle back over my shoulder, settling it into the sore groove it rests in against Von Erich’s collarbone. Her eyes shimmer in the sunlight, tears trapped in sunken hollows under them like ponds in the forest. She takes a deep breath that pulls her face into a grimace with its force. Her features stay that way when she says the words.
“Praise be to God.”
I put my boot on her face and push her back down in the hole.
***
It’s cold in the room. I can see Von Erich’s breath, my breath today, wafting from my mouth. These buildings, the ones for the internees, are uninsulated, letting the night cold in between cracks and gaps in the slipshod carpentry of the place.
Carpentry.
Bah.
Memory roulettes around. One thing the guards here do on cold nights is give a handful of blankets to each room.
They are too small to share and not enough for everyone. They then take bets on which prisoners will be strong enough to get one.
Von Erich doesn’t like this. It makes him uncomfortable as someone who grew up with too many brothers and not enough blankets, but he never protests.
The chair is hard under me. It’s a different sensation. I’ve managed to put this day off for so long this time. Once a year, HA! fuck you twenty-five hundred times over.
Noise.
They’re coming.
It grows louder as it draws up to the door.
I don’t move. Waiting.
They bring her in, the woman from the pit. Held between the hands of two guards—Schutze is their rank Von Erich’s mind shows me—she walks in with her head down. Water drips on the floor, marking her footsteps with rims of dark moisture on the rough plank flooring.
I ordered her hosed off before being brought to me.
One of the Schutze snaps into a sharp salute, jackboot heels clapping together, hand stretched out between us. “Strummann Von Erich!” His voice matches the crispness of his salute. “The prisoner you requested.”
I nod and stand. “She is cooperative?”
The salute falls. A smile crawls across the Schutze’s face. It makes his cheeks bunch around his beady eyes. “Like a meek little lamb, Herr Von Erich.” Memory clicks and I see that Schutze Klein enjoys transporting and retrieving female internees. They normally arrive with more bruises than they had when called.
I nod again. “Then you may go.”
Another salute snaps toward me. “Yes, Herr Von Erich.” He leers at the woman. “Enjoy yourself. We will be just outside the door should you require assistance.”
“I will be all night. Attend your other duties.”
They do not need to hear this.
Shared leers, two sharp nods, and they leave. The sound of their boot heels on the wooden planks beats out the rhythm of their retreat as I study the woman in front of me.
Her face is still turned to the floor, dark hair nearly black in the single, yellow incandescent light. It hangs over her eyes. I watch a single louse cross the part in the middle and burrow under the wet tresses. She doesn’t reach to scratch it.
Scratch.
Heh.
She shivers in the dingy gray pajamas she wears. The material is thin and hangs on her frame like a sack. I can see the silhouette of her body through it. It has also been pared down by the meager rations given here, burnished by starvation and labor into a hollow version of fitness. She has a figure now that millions of girls will develop mental conditions to replicate in four decades.
“What is your name?”
“Hadassah.” She answers me, but speaks to the floor.
“Is that a family name?”
“No. My babushka was Jewish. She chose it for me.”
So it is from history. I remember her namesake. What a plan-spoiling little bitch.
I make the first strike. “So it is your grandmother’s fault that you are here.”
She shakes her head, wet tresses swinging. “My babushka did not load me in a train car at gunpoint. That was someone like you.”
Grandmother knew something when she picked that name.
This Hadassah shifts from one bare foot to the other and shivers. I can read the line of her shoulders; they hold in them the same stoicism that is almost genetic in her people. This place has damaged her, but she isn’t broken. Not yet.
Good.
“Why did you say that to me earlier?”
For the first time her eyes move up from the floor. Slowly climbing my uniform they rise, inch by inch, until they land on Von Erich’s face.
“You.” It takes nearly a minute for her to say the one word.
Her eyes narrow as she thinks. I know she remembers the incident, but I watch her carefully replay each of the few words she spoke out loud during our exchange. She licks chapped lips before speaking. “Andrei isn’t suffering anymore.”
“No he’s not.” A smile twitches Von Erich’s lip. I switch tactics. “Who was he to you?”
“My brother.” She blinks and one tear trickles down her carved cheekbone.
I stand, pulling a packet of Overstolz cigarettes from Von Erich’s pocket. I shake one out and put it in Von Erich’s mouth, using the Zippo given to him by his cousin who took it from an American soldier he killed. The cigarette is shit but it tastes better lit from a dead man’s lighter. I inhale the sweet smoke of the spoils of war and blow it out through Von Erich’s nostrils to swirl around Hadassah.
“Take the chair.”
She hesitates. I know she’s exhausted. She has to be. I’ve watched her work all day and watched how little food they gave her, but still she wants to rebel, to say no. Her spirit is still strong.
Good.
After two almost-starts she moves and sits in the hard chair.
Even better.
I walk around her, enjoying the cigarette. The warmth pulled through Von Erich’s throat, wet crackling into his lungs, blowing smooth and cool with a touch of menthol through his nostrils. “Tell me about your brother.”
“No.”
No hesitation. I have found her backbone.
“Was he a good boy? A troublemaker? Did he catch the girls’ eyes, or did he pull their pigtails and make them all cry?” Inhale. Exhale. “Tell me, was he weak? Perhaps a little slow?”
“I’ll do what you brought me here for but I won’t talk about him.”
“Oh really? And what do you think we are here to do?”
“This isn’t the first time a guard has brought me to this place.”
I look and I can see it. She would be one of the more attractive internees in this crop. More so, she has spirit and that—forcing someone with that kind of...light inside her to do things she finds reprehensible, that would be an aphrodisiac to some of the sadists here.
I feel the draw of it.
I could use Von Erich’s body to break her a little more. I could use her body to run out the clock on my time here and leave Von Erich, simple, married, closet-moralist Von Erich to return in mid-ravishment and absorb the full guilt of what his body had done in his absence. But I am better with my tongue than that.
“I want to talk.” I step closer to her. “I want the answer to my question.”
She looks up, not leaning away even though I stand well inside her personal space. “I answer your question and then what? You do what you brought me here for anyway?” She shakes her head. Her hair has begun to dry, becoming slightly frizzy waves that look softer than brushed cotton. “No thank you. Do your worst. I will not talk to you.”
“If you engage in honest conversation with me, I will not harm you in this room.”
Her eyes narrow. “Then where will you take me?”
Ah, she is a smart one. Not smart enough to realize she’d entered negotiations, but clever.
“If you answer my questions then I will see you back to your quarters physically unharmed by me or your former escorts.”
“That’s very specific.”
“I cannot be responsible if you trip or receive a splinter from the flooring or any of the other random harms that could befall you out of my ability to control.”
She nods as if this makes perfect logic. “Will you answer my questions in return?”
“If that is your price.”
“Truthfully?”
“Absolutely, fraulein. No lie will pass these lips.” Inside Von Erich I thrill at her choice of words. If she’d chosen the word ‘honestly’ I would either have to abandon this game or reveal entirely too much about the condition I am in. ‘Truthfully’ I can work around.
She looks at me a long moment, dark eyes shrouded in the shadows on her face. “I agree.”
“As do I.” The air crackles slightly a
s the deal is sealed, a frail echo of static electricity to mark the occasion of a binding. I relish the feeling of it brushing Von Erich’s skin as it travels, jumping from wool fiber to wool fiber in his uniform. “So mote it be.”
Silence falls into the room.
The cigarette has gone dead, cherry black and cold. I put it to Von Erich’s lips and inhale. The cherry flares orange and the first draw of smoke is stale and bitter before the menthol mellows it. Inhale. Exhale. We look at each other.
“What is your question?”
“Questions, fraulein. We are having a conversation.” I stub out the now used-up cigarette on the wall, scrubbing all the fire into blackened ash. “You may go first as is a lady’s prerogative.”
She puts thin arms around herself, hugging against the cold, and straightens in the chair. “I did go first. What is your question?”
See? Clever.
But a deal is a deal, especially when you make it with me.
“Why did you say that thing to me earlier when I shot your brother? I have no remorse about that, so that you know.”
“I didn’t say it to you.”
The laugh that bursts out of me takes me by surprise. “You were speaking directly to God?” I chuckle again. “Oh, you arrogant creature.”
“I speak to God all the time since coming to this...place.”
Now this is interesting.
“Why do...”
Her hand flies up, palm out toward me. “You just ask two questions. It’s my turn.”
Oh. Cleverer than I thought.
The desire to rub Von Erich’s palms together with excitement makes me itch. To keep from this I put them in his pockets. “Go ahead then.”
“Why did you shoot Andrei?”
The Big Bad II Page 11