by North, Geoff
“But your actions still brought you back here. What kind of father would you’ve been to Kay with that temper of yours all those years ago…with all these ideas of a fair new world now? No. I was right not telling you about her.” Sara crossed her arms over her chest. She had won the argument in her mind, but her heart was still torn.
“Freeda’s dead. Lode and his followers killed her husband a week later.” Lawson watched what little color was left in the woman’s face drain away. Even after all their years apart she was still beautiful. He wanted to reach out to her—to take her in his arms and feel the warmth and softness once again of the only woman he’d ever loved.
“She was my best friend growing up—my only friend. It hurt so bad when Rudd gave her away that year her grand-father lost the challenge…gawdamn Rites.”
“Them Rites is what brought the two of you together again year after year.”
Sara slung the sack over her shoulder and the two walked slowly towards the other practice bout that had begun in an eruption of cheers and cursing. As upset as she was, Sara knew she would have more work in the next few minutes and hours to come. “Freeda introduced me to the wonderful art of healing by patching you back up.” The way she said the word wonderful came across as anything but wondrous. “I’ve learned plenty since—tended to a lot of sick and wounded people, but no one had the touch like her. I hate the Rites, but I’ll miss her visits.”
They didn’t bother pushing through the back of the crowd for a better look at the fight. When it was over, the people would move on to the next one, leaving Sara with room to patch up the loser. In some ways the preliminary contests were as bloody as those where men were pitted against each other to the death. There were no rules.
Lawson had to shout over the roar of the crowd. “I won’t be walkin’ away from the challenge tomorrow, Sara. I’m too old and battered to fix up… They’ll bury me out here.”
“I’m sure you still have a dirty trick or two to use. I wouldn’t be surprised to see you stumbling back to Burn in a few days on crutches.”
She tried sounding optimistic for Lawson’s sake, but he could see the hopelessness of it in her eyes. “If you can, watch out for them two brothers I dragged into this. Raise ‘em into men.”
“Is that everything? I’m not quite finished raising our daughter yet.”
The crowd made a collective gasp of disbelief and started to curse. They moved on in search of a third match. The two fighters had tapped out simultaneously after a brief bit of contact, and had both been disqualified from competing further. Cobe, Willem, and Trot hung back and saw the lawman still deep in conversation with the woman. Cobe rolled his eyes and pulled the other two after everyone else. Tog and Remee followed obediently, their clubs trailing behind them in the dirt.
“I’m sorry,” Lawson said. “It’s askin’ plenty after not being in yer life for so long.”
“Don’t you start apologizing now… it’s too late for that.” Sara didn’t need to tend to the men that had just fought. Neither one of them had a mark on them, save the minor scratches on their hands and knees from falling against the ground. They looked at the lawman’s pulverized face and scurried off ashamedly into the throng that had abandoned them. “I’m not prepared to look after two boys. I’ve got my hands full looking after an entire town of scrapping men. I don’t need to see them become a part of all that.”
“They’re Freeda’s.”
Sara turned her face up to the cloudless sky and groaned. “Shit…I thought the one with one arm looked familiar.” She closed her eyes and considered things for another half minute. “I’ll look after the boys. I’ll see them become men…I promise.”
“That ain’t all I need you do.”
She sighed. “Of course it isn’t.”
“We found something in the west…deep underground. People from a long time ago are startin’ to wake up.” Another fight behind them ended and the men gathered round cheered. One of the combatants had strangled his opponent into unconsciousness before he could tap out. He’d kept on throttling the man until he was dead. “It was my fault. I never should’ve taken the boys below. The people—the things living there… They ain’t like us anymore.”
“People waking up underground? What are you talking about?”
A booming voice called out, instructing the men back to work. The morning preliminaries had come to an end. Lawson saw Lode working his way down from the boulders. “When the Rites are over, you have to leave. Promise me you’ll take Kay and the boys and leave Rudd.”
“Leave town? Lawson, what trouble have you kicked up this time?”
Tog and Remee were returning with the others. Lode was pounding across the levelled earth towards them. “You think the Rites are bad? Folks ‘round here ain’t seen nothin’ yet. They’re coming, Sara…the folks from Big Hole are comin’ fer all of us.”
Chapter 40
Lothair knew the place well. It was different, as places in dreams always are—familiar though not quite the same—but it still felt like coming home. He was walking along the underground hallways beneath Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Few people outside Nazi Germany’s expanding borders knew the camp in Oranienburg existed, and even fewer were aware of the experimental hospital located thirty metres beneath the barrack huts.
This was the place where he had conducted his experiments on children from the summer of 1942 until spring 1945. His name wasn’t Lothair Eichberg back then. He was Gernot Penzig.
This isn’t the middle of the twentieth century. It’s 3066…This place no longer exists.
But he was here. This was Sachsenhausen—only different.
Lothair (Gernot?) studied the back of his hands as he walked. These were definitely Gernot’s hands—long, slender fingers, skin with color. He ran them through his hair and giggled. I haven’t had a full head of hair since I was in my thirties. He didn’t need a mirror to know it was jet black. He was young again. He was young again.
Why do I feel like this? Why do I feel?
It was a tight sensation balled up at the top of his stomach. Excitement. Elation. Joy.
I’m human again.
He could hear the steady tap-tap-tap of his shoes along the floor. He looked down and saw them—shiny and black, the laces tied in perfect little double loops.
Where am I going?
He passed by familiar doors without slowing. These were the rooms where Gernot had conducted his work. Hundreds of youths had been led down this corridor by reluctant guards to see him. Very few left alive. It wasn’t guilt that kept Lothair from entering the familiar offices and laboratories now. He still felt that he had only been doing his job—that he had been fulfilling a noble, scientific task.
Jenny. I’m looking for my great-great granddaughter and her mother. They haven’t been honest, and I’m going to find them…see what they’ve been up to.
Lothair had a better sense of where he was trying to get to. The long hallway would end at a steel door. Behind the door would be a set of stairs leading up into an aboveground officers’ latrine. But it wasn’t a latrine. It was a secret exit leading out of the underground installation that remained locked from the inside. So where was the steel door? Why was the hallway so long?
Dreams are like this. His shoes continued tapping along the tiles. They’re familiar but confusing. The door is up ahead. I will find it.
Lothair started to run. The doors on either side of him became a blur.
Too many rooms. They have to end. I have to find the door. I need to find the way out.
The corridor stretched ahead of him without any end in sight. It made it seem like the walls were closing in—that they had become alive and were slowly preparing to crush him. He knew it was a dream, but still Lothair could hear the moan rising in his throat as he sucked in a great lungful of air. He was going to scream.
One of the hallway doors on the left opened further ahead and Lothair’s scream was choked off. He stopped running. A small boy, no older than seven or
eight years, stepped out into the corridor and faced him. All he wore was a diaper. The cloth sagged between his frail legs, filled with urine and stinking of excrement. He had a guilty, long face, and there were black patches on his cheekbones where the skin had frozen away.
“I’ve been waiting like you told me, Dr. Penzig…”
Lothair remembered all of the names of the children he’d worked with. “Anatoly.”
“I’ve been waiting for a very long time, sir. I waited on the table like you told me for years. I’m sorry I disobeyed… It was so cold. I can’t feel my feet anymore.
Most of the boy’s toes were gone. All that remained were little black stumps. Anatoly shuffled towards him leaving tracks of dead skin behind. “I waited and waited and waited. I can’t wait anymore. I want to go home, Doctor…I want to be with my parents.”
“Do you know where that is, Anatoly? Do you know where home is?”
He held his hand up to Lothair. The tips of his fingers were missing up to the first set of knuckles. “I think so…but I’m afraid.”
Lothair took the little hand in his. It felt like holding dry ice. Anatoly led him down the hallway and the steel door appeared. The boy peered up and through the small glass window set into it. “I can see the sun.” There had been no window in the door that Lothair could remember. They shouldn’t have been able to see the light of day from here. The Russian child tugged at his hand insistently. “We can see what we want to see here. I don’t have to be scared anymore…now that you’re with me…I’m not alone.” Even in a dream the child’s innocence remained pure. He had no clue what Gernot Penzig’s goals had been in the nineteen-forties. He trusted the doctor. He was an adult.
Lothair looked for the handle that should’ve been there but wasn’t.
“Push,” Anatoly said.
Lothair pressed his free hand against the door and it opened. They walked together, side by side, hand in hand, up the narrow stairway. “You said that you were afraid, Anatoly. Are you afraid of me?”
“I’m not afraid of you, Doctor. You gave me candy that first time we met.”
He looked down into the boy’s brown eyes. Most of his hair had fallen out, and the trails of snot trailing from his nostrils and down the sides of his mouth remained frozen. Still so trusting—after all this time. Lothair did something then that he hadn’t done since he was Anatoly’s age. He began to cry.
They stepped out onto green grass. Lothair shut his eyes in the sun’s glare and heard Anatoly squeal with warm delight. A light wind fell across Lothair’s face and he could smell flowers. Somewhere behind him Lothair heard doors opening. A flood of frozen, dead children were leaving their rooms and rushing up the stairs. They pushed by him, escaping the dark, and fleeing into the light. There were hundreds of them—laughing, crying, and free.
Lothair spotted Anatoly in the crowd running across a playground. He fell into the arms of a woman. A bearded man was with her, and he hugged the woman and Anatoly together. Anatoly turned back and saw Lothair. He waved with a hand now complete with all of its fingers, and smiled. His face was clean and glowing, his complexion pink and healthy. The boy was saying something to Lothair—mouthing two words over and over.
Thank you.
“No!” Lothair shouted. “Don’t say that to me! You don’t understand.” Even after all of this, he still felt he’d done what was necessary in the name of science—but he definitely knew these children shouldn’t be thanking him for it.
Anatoly and his parents turned into three wisps of white smoke and disappeared into the breeze. Children all around him were finding mothers and fathers. Loved ones left waiting for centuries were reunited with their sons and daughters. One by one they all blew off into the wind until Lothair was left alone, standing in an empty space of grass surrounded by see-saws, slides, and swing sets.
But he wasn’t alone.
At a picnic table sitting next to a series of rubber tires hanging from ropes were Edna and Jenny.
“Took you long enough to find us,” the younger girl said. “Where did all those kids go, Lothair? Did your life’s work just vanish in the wind?”
The guilt was pushed back. It was difficult for Lothair. He hadn’t experienced emotions such as regret and remorse in over a thousand years, and even then—as a younger man—they never came all that easily. He ignored Jenny’s comment altogether. “Edna…You look quite well here. My surgery inside your head seems to have done wonders.”
“I’m whole here,” she answered. “We all are.”
“We’re human again,” Jenny said, “no thanks to you.”
Lothair continued ignoring her. He didn’t want to give the smart-mouthed girl any sense that her opinion mattered. He studied their surroundings. The empty canvas swing seats were still swaying gently back and forth—the chains holding them up squeaked in need of oil. A circular wooden platform where children had once spun around rocked in the wind on a loose bearing at its center. A wide groove in the dirt below the outer edge had been worn away by thousands of pushing feet. “This isn’t just my dream anymore, is it? I’m no longer at Sachsenhausen.”
“You’re nowhere near Germany,” Edna said. “We’re in a school playground outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I sent Jenny here one summer to spend time with relatives when I was busy with work.”
“Our relatives—more Eichbergs?”
“Stropes. Michael’s parents.”
Lothair sat at the far end of the table on the same side as Edna. “Why are you here now?”
Jenny pictured the subterranean chamber where she’d first found her mother in dream. The rows of cryogenic tubes and the things waking inside terrified her still. She blocked the image from her mind. “This is a nice place. I feel safe here…Or at least I did.”
Lothair stared at the girl. He had seen something—a place. A single word flashed in his brain. “What is a cryer?”
Finally Jenny had nothing more to say. She looked down at the table, trying to break the intrusive hold her great-great grandfather suddenly had on her.
“Leave her alone,” Edna said. “She doesn’t know anything.”
“Oh, but she does…you both do. There are no secrets here, are there? Our minds, our thoughts…they become one, don’t they? I see what you were up to, Edna.” His arm snapped out and he grabbed her around the back of the neck. Lothair forced Edna’s face into the table. “Show me everything, dear. Show me more.”
“You bastard,” Jenny screamed.
She tried pulling his arm away, but Lothair pushed her away. More images became available to him. “Not yet—not until I know everything there is to know about the secret installation. Oh my…illegal experiments…involuntary test subjects. You truly are an Eichberg. Where is it, Edna?” He was behind her now with both hands at her throat. He pounded Edna’s forehead into the table surface. “West…it’s out west. Where?”
Pain shot up Lothair’s leg. He looked down and saw Anatoly again. The boy was digging his way up through the grass and had sunk his rotting teeth into Lothair’s ankle. His eyes were gone. The sockets were now filled with soil and wriggling worms. More hands broke through the earth around Lothair. Small, grey fingers clutched at the air. A dozen frozen children climbed out of the dirt and clawed their way towards him.
“You’re doing this,” Lothair shouted at Jenny. “You’re bringing them back!”
“I can get inside your head just as easily as you get in my Mom’s.”
Lothair released his great-granddaughter and the dream ended. He opened his eyes and saw the collection of skulls Gertie had hung about the interior of her tree home. He crawled out of the roots and went to the opening.
Colonel Strope was standing outside, his powerful, scarred arms folded over his chest. “Is everything alright?”
Lothair saw Jenny under the tree with her mother. The girl’s head lifted, her eyes looked dull and sleepy. She saw him and scowled. “Everything is good, Michael. It’s amazing what a simple nap after a millen
nium of staying awake can do for a person.”
Chapter 41
Sara had been wrong about one thing that day. She had believed there would be no meal served in her home that night, but here they were, gathered around the operating-supper table. She could have never guessed they would have company. Lawson sat at one end across from her. Cobe and Willem sat on the side to his right, Trot and Kay to his left. Sara’s daughter was scrunched up close to her mother, putting as much space between her and Trot as she possibly could. The girl wouldn’t make eye contact with the lawman—she couldn’t even turn her head in that direction.
“I ain’t sat down with folks for a good meal in an awful long time,” Lawson said. He sopped a piece of brown bread around the remaining stew in his wooden bowl and smiled gratefully at Sara. “Makes me think I missed out on the better aspects of life.”
“Some life,” Sara said quietly. She offered Cobe another cup of water.
Trot asked if he could have more stew. He shoveled the first heaping spoonful into his mouth and started talking between chews. “Thank you for cleaning up my ear, and the cream for my hands. I feel much better.”
“You’re welcome,” Sara replied. “I hope you don’t make a habit of following after Lawson. Sliding down metal ropes and tangling with inbreeds out in the Dirty Hills…You’ll all end up getting killed with him around.”
They all stopped eating. Even Trot looked mournfully down into his stew. Tomorrow night at this time the lawman would more than likely be dead. Cobe, Willem, and Trot all realized their time was nearing an end as well.
Lawson pushed away from the table. “If you’ll pardon me.” He went to the window and looked out into the night. Lode was leaning against a hitching post on the other side of the street staring back at him.
“I’m sorry,” Sara said. She stood up and started clearing the table. “You’re all safe here. You can get a good night’s sleep, and tomorrow…well that’s another day, and we’ll figure something out when the time comes.”