Dawn of the Living-Impaired

by Christine Morgan

  Each girl was expected to make her own bed, and keep herself and her belongings tidy. They all had uniforms very like the one Untergau Wegener had been wearing when she greeted them: white blouses, dark blue skirts, black neckerchiefs and shoes, but instead of hose they wore cuffed white socks.

  The food wasn’t quite as good as Mutti made at home, but it was healthy and there was always plenty of it. More sweets would have been nice, but those were saved for special occasions and extra rewards. Other rewards included being allowed to go horseback riding, or stay up past lights-out, or listen to the radio.

  To think, she’d been upset about going away to summer camp! To think, she’d almost cried, and Mutti had to tell her to be brave, her good brave girl, hugging her and promising that it’d be all right. She’d been worried about being alone, and now she had dozens of new friends and big sisters.

  Most of all, she had a new very-best friend in Helgie. Who was really Helgemunde, for her grandmother, but who’d want to be called Helgemunde all the time? Ugh. Helgie was here because her mother and father both worked double shifts in the factories most of the time, and got a subsidy to help afford sending her to camp.

  Untergau Wegener could be stern and strict, but she could also be nice. She wanted them to grow up to become the kind of fine, strong, self-reliant young women who would be a credit to their families, their country, and their heritage. They had a responsibility, she told them. A great and important responsibility to the future.

  Also, she carried packets of lemon drops, and would hand them out as treats.

  *

  The time had come. He could endure no more of it.

  No more of the soldiers, going around as if they owned the village. No more of the ‘true’ German families brought from the cities to take over the farms. No more of the Hitler Youth girls that the camp sent to help educate them.

  No more. Just no more.

  Jakob had hoped they’d give up, abandon this plan, and go away. He’d known it a vain hope, but he’d hoped it all the same.

  His efforts to discourage them had little effect, or were dismissed as accidents. What could a single man do against so many, without being discovered?

  He dreamed of picking them off one by one, taking them by surprise, overpowering them, throttling them, crushing in their skulls with heavy stones, throwing their bodies into gullies layered deep with decades’ worth of fallen leaves.

  But the soldiers were armed and alert, diligent in their duties, for all that they were far from any active battlefield or front.

  Then he’d hoped that Hans, and his uncles, and others of their displaced neighbors, would see the error of their ways. They would return, and join him in reclaiming their land, their homes.

  That hope, as well, proved to be in vain.

  Better, he finally decided, that it all be destroyed.

  And was there any way more fitting, than to do it by using their own weapons against them?

  Jakob waited all night in the woods, readying himself, mustering his nerve.

  Just before dawn, he crept through the cemetery. He paused only long enough at the graves of his parents and grandparents to beg their forgiveness for what he was about to do, though he was certain they understood.

  At the back of the church, all but obscured by weeds, piled junk, and old lumber was a warped wooden door set into the banked earth, at an angle. The Nazis either hadn’t noticed it, or deemed it not worth bothering with.

  The door, once uncovered, pulled open with a rusty groan. He descended into dank, cobwebby darkness that smelled of mildew, vinegar, and decay. A flickering match let him pick his way through a warren of discarded furniture, shelves of books and hymnals swollen fat from the damp, and sprung rat-traps pinning carcasses like twisted rags of matted fur.

  He paused at the foot of the stairs, listened, heard nothing, and proceeded up. The steps creaked, and he realized he might have a problem if they’d thought to install a new bolt on the other side.

  They hadn’t.

  Jakob shook out the match, able to rely now on the pale morning light coming in through the tall, narrow eastern windows. Instead of pews, it shone on stacked crates, barrels, boxes, drums, and metal canisters. Some of the words on the labels were strings of chemical-sounding words that made no sense to him. Others – oil, grease, solvent – brought a grim smile to his bearded, dirty face.

  When he and Hans had been boys, their father took them along to help a neighbor blast a stubborn boulder out of his field. Their Uncle Franz hadn’t been a farmer, but worked the mines and quarries, and would talk for hours over his beer.

  Those experiences, and stories, might not have made Jakob an expert on dynamite. But, he reasoned, he knew enough to get the job done.

  *

  Eggs, toast, and porridge with raisins filling their stomachs, the girls of Grünfeld camp went about their morning chores and exercises beneath a pink-streaked silvery-blue sky.

  Birds twittered in the treetops, fieldmice scampered in the grass, a deer grazed daintily by the orchard fence, and ducks paddled across the lake.

  Then came the explosion.

  Like a thunderclap and a landslide and a roaring train and a bomb blast, all in one.

  The ground trembled briefly underfoot.

  After an instant’s shocked silence, all the birds launched themselves in wheeling mad flutters up and away. The ducks, too, flapping faster and faster to lift from the water. The deer vanished in springing bounds.

  The younger girls were in the vegetable garden when it happened. They all turned as one. So did the girls supervising them, and the ones who’d been going for a health-run, and everybody else.

  Windows opened. Heads popped out. Girls rushed from the kitchen, dishrags in hand, soap-suds to their elbows. In the stable, girls tried to soothe startled horses. In the barn, girls yelped as cows kicked over their milk-pails.

  More explosions followed, smaller ones, milder, an irregular stuttering fusillade. Like firecrackers, like pine knots in a campfire, like popcorn or chestnuts, pow-boom-kabang.

  Untergau Wegener burst through the front door and onto the porch, two teachers with her, all of them holding guns.

  They looked north, in the direction of the village.

  It was about two miles away by the dirt road, but much less than that on a path that cut through the woods and over the footbridge that spanned a chuckling creek.

  As part of their service, the girls went there to help the new families settling in, and to cheer the community by organizing choir concerts and parties. That was always great fun and they all enjoyed it … especially the older girls, like Marlene, who got to dance with the garrison’s soldiers.

  Now there was a big fuming cloud of smoke rising over the trees. A billowy grey-black column, sooty and gritty-looking, but also tinged a nasty yellowish-green. Flames wavered in it. Sparks whirled. Something else blew up with a loud hollow buwhoom.

  A bell clanged urgent summons, the stark iron bell on the porch. Untergau Wegener began barking orders.

  Everyone raced to obey. Older girls herded younger ones toward the house. Within minutes, they had gathered in the dining room, the only room large enough to hold them all at once. The tables were only half-cleared from breakfast, and brooms leaned against the walls.

  A babble of nervous voices – were they being bombed? was it the Americans? – cut off when Untergau Wegener came in. She told them that, as far as she knew, no, they were not under attack, they were not being bombed, no British or American planes had been spotted nearby.

  Her best guess was that there’d been a mishap at the supply depot … or perhaps sabotage. For now, they would stay put, stay inside, and stay calm.

  “Be brave,” Klara whispered to Helgie, who nodded, chewing on the end of a braid.

  “Trudi and Lisbeth are riding to the village to see what’s going on,” Untergau Wegener continued. “Nora will be organizing volunteers of ages fifteen and older for sentry and watch duty. Every
one else, finish your house-chores and then you may read, study, or socialize quietly among yourselves until we have more information. Yes?”

  “Yes, Untergau Wegener,” they replied in unison.

  She gave a satisfied nod. Her cool blue gaze moved over them in thoughtful evaluation. She hesitated, pressing her lips into a tight line, and glanced toward the windows in the north wall.

  The smoke-cloud had flattened and spread, that nasty yellow-green color making the sky look the way being sick felt. They’d learned about mustard gas and phosgene and other horrors in their lessons; some of the girls here had aunts or sisters in the League who’d had to be given gas masks when they went to help settlers in a place called Hegewald.

  Untergau Wegener drew a sharp breath and nodded again, decisively. She added, “Those of you who’ve earned marksmanship badges, please accompany me to my office.”

  *

  Jakob sat up, pushing aside chunks of debris.

  His head felt stuffed with cotton and buzzing, drilling brass bees. He couldn’t hear anything past that buzz. He couldn’t feel anything but numbness, even as he saw himself moving, even as he knew that he was not paralyzed.

  He had expected a noise, some fire.

  This …

  Where the church had been …

  Split timbers and pieces of masonry jutted at odd angles from blazing rubble that seemed simultaneously piled and caved in. Bricks, shingles, burning embers, and shards of glass had sprayed everywhere. Some still rained down; he saw it thudding down all around him, though he could neither feel nor hear it.

  Smoke and flame churned high. More metal drums burst like bombs, showering fuel in a fiery rain.

  In the village, soldiers ran back and forth. Jakob presumed they were shouting, but he couldn’t hear that, either. The blast had deafened him, as well as slapping him halfway across the cemetery, with its concussive force.

  He saw sprawled bodies, clothes scorched, skin blackened, motionless. He saw people – the interloping would-be farmers, as well as soldiers – limping, bleeding, wounded. Women sobbed and children wailed, but Jakob still could not hear.

  Sensation began to return to him, a tingling of pins and needles. He worked faster to uncover his legs. He should have been well away into the woods by now, hiding. If they found him, they’d shoot him. He was sure of it.

  More smoke, sickly-colored vapors, did not so much waft out of the wreckage as seethe from it, seeping low and thick and heavy, rolling over the contours of the ground like a slow wind, or current of cloudy water.

  The shrill buzzing in his ears and head faded into a rushing sort of echo. It occurred to him that the sickly-colored smoke, flowing downhill, bending the grass and wildflowers before it, was headed toward him.

  Hadn’t he said something to Hans about poison gas? Those canisters, the ones labeled with such incomprehensible strings of words, what had been in them? What had been released when they ruptured? What was in that unholy mixture of chemicals now coursing steadily this way? The stories from the front, the images in the newspapers … hideous agony and blisters, the flesh sloughing off limbs like melting wax …

  The gas reached the old stone wall. It permeated the cracks. Dammed, it deepened and built up until it spilled over, then flooded out among the tombstones, spreading, sinking.

  Movement in the fog caught his eye. A rat, he saw, struggling clumsily, almost dragging itself by the forepaws with its head hunched to the side. A scrawny thing, little more than fur and bones …

  Fur in shedding patches, mangy, matted … bones showing through it … poking and splintered. It couldn’t be alive, hurt so badly. Why, even its eyes were gone, blinded sunken sockets.

  He saw another, trap still clamped to its broken neck, hitching along with a grotesque humping gait.

  The rats couldn’t be alive? No, they couldn’t, and they weren’t. He remembered the carcasses he’d seen in the church cellar –

  Jakob managed to get to his feet before the encroaching greenish tendrils reached him. He took a single step, tripped over a tombstone, and fell headlong into the gas. He flinched in anticipation of soul-rending pain –

  That wasn’t.

  The gas didn’t sting, didn’t burn, didn’t feel like anything but a chilly miasma coating his skin.

  Nor did it reek of mustard, chlorine, or other violent stinks. It smelled … almost sweet … he thought of his grandmother making doughnuts …

  He pushed himself to his hands and knees, breaching out of the layer of murky gas. Wisps of it ran down his arms. He coughed.

  The first rat, the one with its head lolling, bit him on the wrist. That, he felt. Blood trickled down his hand.

  Then the earth around him, the earth covering the graves of his parents and grandparents and ancestors dating back three hundred years, quivered and upheaved.

  The dark soil crumbled as bony fingers thrust up through it.

  *

  The horses returned at a gallop, each burdened with a passenger, in addition to Trudi and Lizbeth. The passengers were soldiers, one unconscious, the other clinging weakly to Lizbeth, both with their uniforms blood-stained.

  Girls ran for stretchers and first aid kits from the nurse’s office. They moved tables to clear space in the dining room and set up cots. The ones Untergau Wegener had armed went to join Nora’s sentries on watch, alert.

  In the hectic moments that followed, Klara recognized the second soldier as the same one who’d patted her on the shoulder as she’d moved toward the truck.

  Marlene knew him. His name was Erich, she said, Erich Löwe. The other was Glaussen, she thought.

  Erich Löwe was white-faced with shock, babbling.

  “… the gas … the dead … keep getting up … shot them, had to … shot Mertz and Bauman … the cows the dogs the rats, them, too, it’s in them … the head, got to … the head, the brain … look out for the gas … coming … hungry … Ritter torn apart, torn to pieces … had to shoot Mertz, would have killed us, tried to kill Glaussen … bit …”

  Then he, too, fell into unconsciousness.

  Trudi and Lizbeth, meanwhile, spoke in overlapping staccato as they made their reports to Untergau Wegener. They’d gotten close enough to the village to see that apparently the church – being used as a supply depot – had exploded and burned, the fire spreading to engulf other buildings.

  “—injured or dead --”

  “—people everywhere, even animals --”

  “—complete panic and disaster --”

  “—smoke, and the gas --”

  “—strange fog, low, not rising but spreading along the ground --”

  “—didn’t think we should get any closer --”

  As they’d been trying to decide what to do next, they’d encountered Löwe and Glaussen stumbling down the trail, wounded and coughing. So, they’d hauled the soldiers onto their horses and ridden back as fast as they could.

  Untergau Wegener snapped her girls to attention and began issuing brisk orders. The gas masks were to be brought down from the attic, more first aid kits and medical supplies gathered, same for relief packets of water and emergency rations, the horses moved to the barn in case they needed to convert the stable to a field hospital, and so on.

  They sprang into action. The younger girls helped fetch and carry boxes and bottles and folded sheets. Klara, remembering Löwe’s previous kindness, brought Gerte from the shelf above her bed and set the doll beside him on the cot.

  The nurse turned from Glaussen, shook her head at Untergau Wegener, and drew a sheet over the soldier’s head. It settled onto him.

  “Nerve gas?” asked Untergau Wegener.

  “Hard to say. He also lost a great deal of blood.”

  “He was shot?”

  “No. Cut, maybe stabbed? I would almost say he was bitten by animals.”

  “And the other one? Löwe?”

  “Uninjured. The blood is from other sources. He has no gas burns or blisters on his skin, but whatever he inha
led … it would help if we knew what they’d been storing.”

  A flurry of alarmed cries interrupted whatever the Untergau had been about to reply. Lizbeth, coming back from the barn, had collapsed on the porch, where she twitched and convulsed.

  “She’s having a seizure!” The nurse ran out there. “The gas, she must have been exposed! Where’s Trudi?”

  “The horses!” someone cried from the direction of the barn. “The horses are sick! They’re fighting! Attacking each other, and the cows! It’s like they’ve gone mad!”

  “Masks on,” Untergau Wegener commanded. “Everyone who’s had contact with the horses or these men, wash your --”

  “Untergau Wegener?” ventured Helgie, in a very worried voice. “Should he be getting up?”

  Klara looked at Löwe, but Löwe was motionless except for the faint stirrings of shallow breaths.

  On the other cot, the sheet covering Glaussen slid away as he sat up. He moved with jerky, awkward motions, shifting his legs over the side.

  “But he’s dead,” Marlene said.

  Groaning, he tottered to his feet. He did look dead, his features slack, his eyes half-lidded murky marbles.

  “Stand back, girls,” Untergau Wegener said.

  Glaussen took a lurching, staggering step. The Untergau extended an arm, setting the heel of her hand to his chest to stop his advance.

  “That’s far enough, soldier --” she began.

  He grasped her wrist, pulled, and sank his teeth into the meaty part of her forearm, like a man biting into a chicken leg. Blood squirted. Girls screamed.

  Untergau Wegener hissed with pain. She drove forward, hard, slamming the man against the wall, pinning him there with her arm braced solidly in his gnawing, chewing mouth. With her other hand she snatched the pistol from her belt. She jammed the barrel between his eyes and blew out the back of his head in jellied clots of brain, bone, and hair.

  He dropped at once and did not move again.

  More screams and cries erupted outside. The girls who’d been standing watch started shouting that people were approaching, coming across the north field, and that some kind of smoke or gas was blowing this way, as well.