The Unstuck Man
He pushes aside a tuft of scrubby grass, and rolls into a dry ditch with irregular stone sides. He lays there for a moment, on his back, the dog standing on his stomach. He takes the brief moment of peace to regroup and collect his thoughts. He removes a small Beretta pistol from a pocket in his greatcoat, flips the safety, and makes his way carefully along the ditch on his hands and knees.
“It does have a certain charm, you know, this ditch,” he told the dog as he crawled, “I mean, it’s nothing fancy, but it is warm, and dry, and I’m sure it’s geopolitically fascinating, if we were to stop and think about it.”
A rifle round passes over his head, making him duck. Crawling isn’t easy, since his pack weighs about thirty pounds, all told. He hopes nobody shoots it. Patching the bed gets old after the thousandth time. After a crawl of about fifty feet, he reaches the end of the ditch some distance behind and to the right of the barn. He climbs up the back of the hill, finds a hole that has been blown in one of the corners by a stray shell. He switches the safety on his berretta, tucks it into a pocket of his coat, and climbs inside.
A dozen Russian soldiers turn and point a bewildering array of firearms at him. They’re standing around a table with a radio and a map on it. Overhead, in the loft, two or three snipers draw a bead on him. The traveler freezes.
One of the Russian soldiers says, “- ---- --- -- ------ ---- -----?”
The traveler gingerly raises his hands, and pulls the earplugs out. He can suddenly hear the dog growling behind him, which would be a lot more helpful if the dog were, for instance, a Doberman, rather than a kind of lopsided terrier mongrel.
“Beg pardon?”
The Russian officer looks annoyed.
“Ятебе, ктоты, должнобыть, мудак?”
The traveler sighs, glances at his watch, and recites the only phrase he knows in Russian.
“Ясолдатсоюзников. Янеговорюпо-русский.”
This means ‘I am an allied soldier. I do not speak Russian.’ He knows similar phrases in German, Japanese, and French.
They obviously don't believe him, which is okay. They aren't really expected to. His garb is... well, it's odd, to say the least. He's wearing a battered, stained British greatcoat, and speaks with an unusual accent that certainly has traces of British in it, but any other details of his person betray the lie: There is the matter of the dog, for instance. Then there is his pack, which contains a rolled up inflatable bed, a small cook stove, a portable still, a German first aid kit, and what is very definitely a Japanese katana. Then there are the cat food cans clearly visible poking out of the pockets of his coat. Then, again, there are the wide array of highly suspect bulges under his greatcoat, which hint at other irregularities in store. The Russians confer hurriedly amongst themselves, not lowering their weapons. The traveler sighs, and sits on top of a crate of ammunition, waiting for them to sort it out. After a while, a tired, reedy little Russian man with wire frame glasses comes forward and talks to him.
“Spreken ze deutch? Francais? English?”
The traveler nods, warily.
“English.”
The man gives him a long, hard look. He looks more like a vagrant than a soldier. His coat is wet at the bottom, his hair is a mess, he has an ear of corn stuck in his pack, and he looks like he hadn’t had a proper bath in some time.
“You’re a British soldier?”
The traveler flips him a salute. Absently, he says
“Paratrooper, RAF 43rd, at your service. Got dropped behind enemy lines, had to fight my way back. Is it okay if I go sit over there?”
He gestures towards a pile of hay towards the rear of the barn.
The translator relays the conversation briefly to the others. After a few seconds, he turns back and shrugs.
The traveler nods, walks to the back, and flops down on the hay stack. The dog comes and sits to his right. He pulls a can of cat food and an army knife out of his pocket, opens the can, and splits it with the dog. The can happens to be in Russian, so the others, all tactics forgotten, watch this with a kind of clinical fascination. After finishing the can, he wipes his mouth, and glances at them.
“You chaps happen to have any fruit? Citrus, maybe?”
The translator confers this to the others. After further debate, one of them walks to a burlap sack in the corner, and tosses him a rather soft orange. He bisects it with his knife, and eats it. Then, discarding the peel, he removes an American GI canteen, takes a swig, pours a little into a cracked ceramic dish for the dog, and leans back into the hay.
After a bit of further discussion, the translator approaches him, and peers at him nervously over his spectacles.
“Okay, they want me to ask you, all bullshit aside, who the fuck are you, and who do you work for?”
The traveler glances at his watch. He still has nearly twenty minutes. He really hopes they aren’t going to shoot him before then.
“I don’t work for anyone. I’m a deserter, okay? Saw my whole platoon get mowed down. Traumatized me. Just wander around now.”
He smiled genially.
“I’m not going to kill you guys! We’re on the same side. Go on, don’t mind me. I think I saw the Germans trying to sneak up the back way.”
That provokes a brief panic. One of the Russians ducks outside and there is a brief exchange of gunfire, followed by some distant yelling. The traveler pitches the can against the wall, and tucks the dog and the dish inside his coat, which has a flak jacket sewn into the lining. Another shot.
“Ублюдок!”
More shots. Silence. Finally, the Russian comes limping back inside, bleeding from a bullet to his shin. The traveler pumps his arm in the air triumphantly.
“Yes! Stick it to the German bastards! Fight the good fight, that’s a good man.”
A shell explodes somewhere close. The Russian soldier collapses against the wall, crying and swearing. A Russian medic hops down from the loft. The traveler closes his eyes. He hasn’t slept in ten hours; first the ocean (three times!), then that cornfield, now this. He’s getting so sick of this shit. The dog whines as another shell goes off outside. He pets it, absently. A bit less than fifteen minutes, now. He sighs. He hates Russia. Backward swamp of a country at the best of times. These are not the best of time. The last time he was here, somebody shot him. Shot. He hates getting shot. He can’t wait to get out, and doesn't much care where he goes next. Even the Sahara is better than Russia.
He hears the doors slam open. The traveler opens his eyes. A dozen German soldiers are standing in the doors, pointing machine guns at the Russians, who swing their rifles back towards them. The traveler shrugs the dog into a harness pocket behind his arm, and reaches into his pocket slowly for the Beretta. There is a long, taught moment of silence.
One of the snipers in the loft fires. Ten seconds later, all of the Russians and most of the Germans are lying on the floor. The translator lies in a heap near the traveler's feet, half of his head gone. The only survivor, a scrawny German kid with some bad acne walks over to the traveler, and points a gun at his face. The traveler smiles up at him. He recites the only phrase he knows in German.
“Heil Hitler!”
The butt of the rifle comes down on his head.
He wakes up. He’s marching, or being marched between dark green tents on the German side. He checks his watch surreptitiously. Five minutes now. His head hurts, but it's not too bad. The bigger concern is the weird, slick feeling that's building up in the air around him. The horizon pulses uncomfortably around his head. He checks the pocket, trying not to make it obvious that he’s lucid. Yes, the dog is still present and accounted for. They took the berretta, though. The sword was still there. The German kid probably didn’t have a pair of bolt cutters on him to get rid of the padlock. He shifts forward, under his own power, now, mostly. He can feel his skin starting to buzz. The ground feels different, too. It feels like he’s walking on soft slush instead of hard-packed clay and rock. The kid behind him must be able to feel it, but doesn’t know what it is.
He is pushed into a tent, and shoved heavily into a chair. His pack digs uncomfortably into his back. The kid passes the berretta to the officer, over the desk, who pockets it. A Nazi officer sits behind a desk. The name tag on the desk proclaims him to be Colonel Rudolf Schmidt. He’s wearing a heavy black jacket, black leather boots, and a black officer’s cap. The traveler takes a moment to appreciate the look. Say what you will about the Nazi’s, they have style.
He smiles at the German officer, and hopes like hell he speaks English. He doesn’t have many rules, but one of them is as follows: Smile at everybody. You only have to deal with them for forty three minutes, and it makes everything go smoother. The air around him has taken on a certain glistening quality.
“Hello, I’m a British intelligence analyst, and I’d like to defect.”
The officer peers at him over the desk. When he speaks, it is in heavily accented but understandable English.
“You are not British. You are also, unless I am much mistaken, very far from being a spy.” He glances at the German kid. “Schießt ihn.”
The German kid produces a pistol from somewhere in his coat.
The traveler sighs, and glances at his watch. Thirty more seconds.
“Hold on, just, look, hear me out. I just need ten seconds of your time. It’s very important that you hear what I have to say.”
He stands up, positioning himself almost exactly five feet back from the desk. His body is humming, now. The air around him feels almost like oil. There’s a sense of incredible pressure building inside him and in the air around him, like he’s about to be flung across the world. Which, of course, he is.
He pauses as long for dramatic effect as he thinks he can get away with, realizes that he’s got nothing to say, and grabs the first thing that comes into his head. With gravitas and deliberation, he says
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”
The German stares at him, slack-jawed. The traveler is into it, now, gesturing wildly with his hands, the picture of a man delivering a message of vital importance.
“Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!"
He reaches up, grabs the earplugs, and stuffs them into his ears. He empties his lungs in a dramatic exhale at the end of his oration. Then, he turns and gives Rudolph Schmidt his best, most winning smile.
The Colonel suddenly seems to snap out of it. He grabs the Beretta out of his pocket, and raises it, pointing it at the traveler’s face. The alarm on the watch dings, once, a crystal clear note. The colonel hesitates. The German kid, who, by now has backed against the tent wall, notices something very wrong with the air around the traveler. A sphere of air, ten feet in diameter, suspended at around the geometric center of his body, has taken on a shimmering, glassy quality. The Colonel’s arm protrudes into it. Inside the sphere, the traveler is still smiling, though blurred. Then, suddenly, the arm, the traveler, and a good bit of the desk are simply gone. There is rather a lot of blood.
The traveler feels a thunderous burst of freezing air, which sends him staggering. He groans and blinks his eyes open, stinging in the cold, under the suddenly bright summer sun. He definitely fell in elevation, and he's somewhere very cold and very dry. His ears pop. The Colonel’s arm lands on the ground a few feet away with a meaty sound, along with a chunk of wood from the desk and what looks like the end of the nametag. The traveler retrieves the Beretta, which has the safety on, and glances around. A few pounds of Russian soil are piled around his feet. Beneath is the hard packed permafrost: Antarctica. He sighs. He hates Antarctica, but not as bad as Russia. At least people don't try to kill you, here. For starters, what people? He does a cursory check for any convenient towns or naval bases on the horizon, just in case. Nothing but snow and ice that stretches away in every direction. The blood from the hand is already freezing to the ground.
He works efficiently. He pulls the dog out of the greatcoat. It stares at him reproachfully, hopping on the ice. He pulls the bedroll out of his pack, doesn't inflate it. There's a bullet hole, and it's worth more as a blanket at this point, anyway. He sets an alarm for thirty five minutes, rolls himself and the dog up in the oil cloth, stuffs his hands into his pockets, and goes to sleep. He's gotten quite good at going to sleep under conditions a lot worse than these. It's cold, sure, but there's dry land, it's quiet, and there's not much wind. It'd take hours for the temperature to kill him out here. He dreams of banana milkshakes. He hasn't had a banana milkshake in three months.
The alarm wakes him up. He pulls his hands out of his pockets, collects the dog, and tucks it into the pocket of the coat. It's not much fond of the pocket, but has grown accustomed to it. His fingers are cramped, and his face is rough and numb from the cold. Fortunately, he can feel the air starting to hum and pulse. He rolls up the bedroll, hooks it into place behind his shoulder. He checks the earplug, does a little dance in the freezing air, and glances at his watch. Five seconds. He takes a long breath in, and empties his lungs completely. It's a trick he learned early on. Ruptured lungs are no fun at all, if you jump ten thousand feet in elevation with compressed air in your chest. The watch dings. The bubble of greasy, crystal air around him vanishes. There's a very faint thunderclap of air slamming in to fill the void. Aside from a very shallow, perfectly smooth crater carved out of the ice, the hand, the debris, and a small amount of Russian soil, the plain is, again, undisturbed.
The traveler lands in the ocean, this time. It's either night or late evening, he isn't sure which. He starts to sink. Fuck. He should have taken the time to patch the mattress. He frees the dog from the coat. It bobs to the surface and paddles in circles in the water. He fishes a tube of model airplane cement out of the pocket of his coat, and a small square of nylon. He finds the bullet hole, patches it, and uses the hand pump in inflate the bedroll. Once it is a serviceable raft, he climbs aboard, and lifts the dog onto his lap. The oilcloth mattress dips considerably in the middle, but holds up, which is important when the water is cold enough to kill you in minutes. It's not now, but sometimes it is. Actually, it's kind of pleasant at the moment.
He dangles his feet in it to warm them off after the fierce Antarctic chill, and considers the weather. It's fairly warm, maybe getting to be fall, though. Must be near Hawaii. Pity he couldn't have landed on the island proper, he knows a place that serves a good banana milkshake. He catches ten minutes of sleep, and wakes up feeling better. A thunderstorm is moving in, his knees hurt, and the dog is whining.
A light ran begins to fall, and he tucks the dog under his coat. He can feel it coming. His skin prickles, and feels blurry. The sea gets choppy underneath him. His stomach clenches unpleasantly, as the bed bobs up and down under him. The waves are getting higher.
The rain is coming down quite hard now. The water drops away underneath him, and he and the raft fall three feet, which nearly knocks him off the thing. The dog yelps. Rain sleets down, getting in his eyes, soaking his hair. He looks outwards. A dark column of boiling clouds stands out on one horizon. The seas have turned the color of volcanic glass underneath him. He clings to the inflated bed with one hand, cradling the dog with the other. The air around him warps, and distorts. The sea beneath him begins to sizzle along the boundary of the bubble. The tension builds and builds and builds, and then, suddenly, he's gone. The rain fills in the hole where he used to be after no more than an instant, and the storm continues on schedule, short only a few gallons of saline.
The traveler falls. He toppled backwards about five feet, toppling off the inflated bedroll, and lands on his ass on the asphalt, hard. A fair amount of seawater tumbles down around him, running out across the pavement. The traveler climbs gingerly to his feet, pulling the dog out of his coat. He drops it onto the ground. It lands and shakes itself, hair flapping in limp rags around its body. The traveler deflates the bedroll, folds it up with practiced care, and hooks it over his shoulder. His greatcoat is still wet, but the sun is hot and all of his equipment is already drying. He brushes his hair out of his face. There are two or three layers of salt drying on it, and it's quite unmanageable.
The traveler wipes the seawater out of his eyes. The dog is furiously trying to lick the salt out of its coat. After standing there for a while, he drags his fingers through his hair, and tries to figure out where he is. He takes a few minutes consulting a homemade laminated chart and doing some arithmetic. After a minute, he looks up. A car careens around a corner in both lanes. A pretty girl turns to yell at it. He nods triumphantly and stuffs the chart back into his coat. Late spring, good climate, beautiful women and the world's worst drivers. This can only be France. He smiles at this. He likes France. The women, the climate and the food. He hasn't been to France in some time. The last time he'd managed to track down a newspaper in French, it'd said that the Germans had taken it. He can see the difference. There are some posters up in German and French, which he can't make heads or tails of, but the typography is nice. There are also a couple of police officers on the corner with swastikas. He heads in the opposite direction with considerable haste. Another one of his rules: Do not fuck around with military police.
He walks until he finds a small home with all the lights out. He produces a lock pick from a pocket, gets the door open in a couple of tries, and goes inside. He shuts and locks the door behind him. After a bit of exploration he locates a bathroom with a shower. He sits down, and carefully begins disassembling his gear. The coat, though comfortable, is padlocked onto his body in several places, to ensure that it can't be easily removed if he is arrested. He enters a different combination for each one, removing first his pack, and then his coat. He now stands wearing nothing but a nightshirt, blue jeans, and a solid pair of combat boots.
He removes even these, prying his feet out of the boots with difficulty. His body is scarred, muscular, and filthy. He has two bullet scars in one shoulder, a ragged scar down his stomach where he was stabbed by a Japanese soldier, and a number of minor cuts, burns, and scrapes. His right arm is shaped oddly from being broken in three places. His left thumb and wrist are covered in little worms of scar tissue, and his ring finger has a fused middle joint. His nose has been broken, probably more than once. His right ear is missing a piece. He's got a scar under his right eye. He notes several fresh cuts on his legs, and disinfects them with iodine from the medicine cabinet.
He folds the coat, which is stiff with age, patches, and salt, against the toilet, throws his underclothes into the bathtub, and climbs in after them. He checks his watch. Twenty two minutes. He stands under the hot jet of the shower, scrubbing grime and salt and some blood off of himself. By the time he gets out, he feels like a new man. He pries a window open, and hangs his clothes out to dry, taking a moment to thoroughly wash his underwear. He then stuffs his coat into the shower, going at it with a bar soap with a grudge. The dog climbs in too, and he spends a little attention on it, too, getting the larger mats out of its hair, and most of the salt and grease. The great coat gets marginally cleaner. He rinses his socks, which disintegrate to rags as he does so. He settles for washing the mud, cowshit, and rocks out of his boots and removing a pair of backup socks from his coat. He puts his shoes back on. He closes the medicine cabinet, combs his hair in the mirror, leaving the iodine bottle sitting in the sink.
He produces a battered toothbrush from one of the pockets of his coat, and brushes his teeth from a tin of baking powder. After rinsing, spitting, rinsing again, he straightens up, and put his clothes on. It's hard to do so. It feels enormously freeing to be walking around carrying only himself, without the thirty-pound dead load of the coat and gear. He sighs. This temptation is why he doesn't bathe often. He pulls the coat over his shoulders; pad locks the internal harness onto his body; puts the pack on, locks it down, puts the dog into the pocket. He into the kitchen. He checks his watch. Four minutes. He can feel the air getting tense and slick around him. Barely enough time to stock up on food. He goes into the kitchen, and finds the pet food. Just dry dog food. He sighs. He prefers the taste of cat food, and the stuff never goes bad.
He checks the refrigerator. There are a few bananas, which he takes, and half of a pork chop. He splits the pork chop, passing half back into the coat for the dog, and eating the other half with his bare hands. He decides to check the cabinets for beef jerky or canned fruit. Maybe there'll be oranges. He hasn't been feeling well lately, and is worried about scurvy. He turns. The front door is open. He steps towards the cabinet, opens it, starts scanning. The front door is open.
The front door is open.
He freezes, hand halfway into one of the cabinets. He stands very still, listening. There is a long, long moment of silence. The door hangs open across the living room, light streaming in. A fly buzzes over the stove. The floor creaks behind him. He starts to turn. There's a loud, brutal yell, and something comes charging towards him out of the corner of his eye. A glass wine bottle breaks over the back of his head, and a weight slams into him, sending him skidding. It grabs his hair, slamming his head into the hardwood floor.
"Get off! It's only your shower!"
He rolls over, and she punches him in the nose. She's quite an attractive girl, if a little thin. She's in her mid twenties, probably, and her eyes are blazing, her red hair in disarray around her face. He thinks that she looks quite pretty, and then she hits him in the face again, spraying blood, and his mind get back into the game. He elbows her in the jaw with the efficiency of someone who's spent a lot of time fighting. Her head snaps back, and she loses her balance.
She yells at him as he rolls off. The air is humming around him, now, and he can feel the floor blurring under his hands and feet as he rolls over and runs clumsily towards the door. Her voice is thick, and she sounds somewhere between pissed off and scared shitless.
"Qui etes-vous, connard!? Que fais-tu dans ma maison?"
He almost reaches the door when she lands on his back for a second time, arm around his throat in a credible choke. The tension in the air around him has reached its peak. The alarm on his watch rings. The dog in his coat, now squashed by her weight, growls. He takes one more step and, with scarcely a sound, they are gone. Somewhere, off in the distance, a cat yowls, hungrily.
II
The traveler and the girl pitch forward into the water with a mortar thump of decompression. He hasn’t had time to put his earplugs in, and his ears twinge painfully. He gets a tremendous feeling of pain in his joints, and his chest feels like it's going to burst. He feels her stiffen from mild decompression sickness, then grab him harder.
She is still clinging to him, arms around his neck, fingers digging in. His head slips under the water, and he begins to struggle. For a moment he thinks she is going to drown him, but then her grip relaxes, and he bobs to the surface. He rescues the dog from his coat with one hand, blowing snot and seawater out of his nose with the other. The dog bobs growling to the surface, and begins sneezing furiously. He turns to look at her and she hits him again.
“Ow! What the fuck?”
“Espèce de fils de pute! Qu'avez-vous fait?”
“Yeah, well, fuck you too, French girl.”
He shakes his head, rubbing his eyes and feeling the wound on the back of his head from where she hit him with the wine bottle. His nose is still dribbling blood. He shakes his head. Oh lord; this is truly a fuckup of epic proportions. A thousand years from now, they’ll be writing poems about this shit. They’ll do epic fucking murals, with bass reliefs. She’s still babbling at him.
“Dieu, où diable sommes-nous? Où avez-vous me prendre, salaud? Qui êtes-vous, SS? Gestapo? Bordel de merde, tu es un démon ou quelque chose?”
He shakes his head. French lessons a decade old shout feebly at him from the far recesses of memory. He makes an effort.
“The fuck? Gestapo? No! Wait, hold on, just - slow down, girl – Damn it, um, plus lentement, plus lentement s'il vous plait! I have, a, um, a condition, a maladie! J'ai une maladie!”
She pauses, and stares at him without saying anything for a long moment. He tries to figure out how to explain the details of his condition, and finally settles upon.
“Ma maladie. Um, Je, je voyage- voyage, um, places? Je ne peux pas le contrôler. Um, Je ne peux pas l'arrêter. Je- je n'ai pas l'intention de vous amener.”
It's not perfect, but it will have to do.
She stares at him coldly for a moment longer, and then, seeming to have gathered her thoughts, she raises one hand, and flips him the bird.
“Fuck you, espèce de fils de pute.”
He winces. He knows enough playground French (not to say playground English) to know exactly what that means. She holds eye contact for another second, then breaks away and begins doing a decent breast-stroke. He squints outwards. He can make out, shrouded in fog, the shape of a beach some distance off. He does some quick mental figuring. It looks like about the same time of day it was five minutes ago, maybe a little later. He must've jumped in longitude but stayed on roughly the same latitude. That would make this the cape of Africa, or an island thereabouts.
He thinks back to high school geography classes, trying to figure out how far Africa is away from France. Next to him, the dog sneezes again and stares dourly at him. It never did like the ocean. He starts to leave her to her fate, even turns and swims away a few strokes – then stops. God damn it. He turns around, treading water.
“Hey, French girl, come back! Reviens ici!”
She calmly ignores him.
“Hey, I’m serious. Do you even know what you’re swimming towards? This is Africa.C'est l'Afrique. Have you ever been to Africa? It’s worse than Russia, and I’ve been shot in Russia.”
She does not respond.
“Hey, I know you speak some English. Arrêt pour une seconde. Look, do you want to get back to France or not? France. Tu ne veux pas revenir en France? I can help you, you crazy bitch.”
She ignores him. He sighs, loudly. After a long moment, the traveler sets off after the girl. After the first hundred meters, two things become clear: first, that the traveler is a stronger swimmer than the girl; second, that the girl is not dragging thirty pounds of dead weight around on her back. The girl maintains a steady breast-stroke. Behind her, the traveler, puffing and straining, gains very, very slowly.
The dog makes steady circles around him. The traveler keeps swimming. He’s never liked swimming, but has become good at it, mostly out of self defense. If you pick a random point on earth, odds are, it’s somewhere in the water. He keeps his nose above water, and keeps his breaths even. He has no idea why he is going to so much trouble for the girl. He doesn’t know her, certainly doesn’t like her. It isn’t his fault she caught a ride. Well, mostly not his fault, anyway. What kind of person tries to strangle a robber, anyway? In what country is that considered a sane reaction?
He begins to feel the scritch of gravel under his feet. He comes stomping out of the surf onto the beach a dozen meters behind the girl. She’s abandoned the long skirt somewhere, her wet blouse and leggings hang off her body like old skin. Her shoes are gone. She walks out, surveying the low grass, the scrubby hills, and the hot sun bearing down on her head. She sighs.
“Merde.”
She starts walking.
The traveler drags himself out of the surf, water rushing out of hidden pockets and rags in his clothing as he rises. He checks to make sure his waterproof rubber bag is still intact, and then begins to scan the horizon nervously. South Africa is not a friendly place. He tries again.
“There isn’t any food here, French girl. Vous allez mourir de faim. Look, you can die here or you can talk to me. Your call.”
She rounds on him.
“Listen, you sack de merde. Vous avez volé et enlevé moi, salaud. Robbery! Kidnapping! Tu comprends ça?”
He shrugs.
“Nobody’s perfect.”
She glares at him.
“Vous allez pourrir dans une prison nazie, jusqu'au jour de votre décès, si j'ai mon chemin.”
He shakes his head. He didn’t catch all of that, but he did get ‘Nazi’ and ‘prison’ and ‘rot,’ and gets the gist.
“Look, I’ll end up somewhere in Europe eventually. I can drop you off near France. I’ve got a little money, you can buy a bus ticket back.”
She blinks. He sighs, and tries for a translation.
“Um, je vais revenir en, um, Europe par la suite. Vienws avec- viens avec moi si vous voulez vivre.”
She thinks about this for what he feels to be an unreasonably long moment.
“Merde. Fine”
She sat down on the beach, staring at him expectantly.
“Eh bien? Partons.”
He sighs. This is why he stopped telling people. Well, that and that they tended to try to lock you up or shoot you.
“It doesn’t work like that. It’s every forty three minutes. Toutes les quarante-trois minutes.”
She laughs bitterly, staring down at the sand. Her hair is drying in the sun. She really is quite handsome. She’s got dark, tangled red hair and a fair complexion.
“Quarante-trois... Merveilleux.”
She slumps backwards onto the beach, the hot sand sticking to her arms and clothing. The dog has curled up in the sand at the traveler's feet. He rubs its head. It stands up, scratches some fleas, and walks over to the girl who pets it reluctantly, as though concerned that it might be diseased. After a long, contemplative minute, she turns and frowns at him, suddenly curious.
Quarante-trois minutes. Quarante-trois... Always?”
“Oui.”
She seems to consider this.
“Sleep? Comment peux-tu dormir?”
He sighs. His head hurts, and his nose is still bleeding. He wipes it on the back of his hand, and decides to tell her the truth.
“Not well.”
She gives him a long, hard look, and then relaxes a little.
“You deserve it.”
He isn't really sure what to make of that. They sit there on the beach for a while longer, listening to the surf. After a long moment, he speaks.
"Do you speak any English? Aside from swears, I mean.”
"Oui. Some. Votre français est catastrophique, by the way.”
He gives her a wounded look, then freezes. It’s coming. He can feel the air starting to hum and thicken around him. He picks up the dog. The girl sees the bubble forming around him. She takes a step back. He smiles at her.
“It’s alright. Ne vous, uh, inquiétez pas. Come on, girl, the train’s leaving! Viens ici!”
She takes a breath, and strides forward into the bubble, breaches it. Her hair coils around her head in waves like she’s underwater. Something like electricity curls in her face and arms. The traveler pushes his earplugs in, and gestures at her. She sticks her fingers in her ears. He exhales dramatically, and she imitates him. Around her, the bubble begins to grow opaque. The air hisses like a glass frying pan. A few flecks of sea foam sizzle off it as it suddenly hardens, looking like hot, greasy quartz.
The stopwatch dings. There’s a thump of collapsing vacuum, and then a long silence. After a silent moment, the sound of the surf returns, the noise crashing over a new crater in the sand. After a moment, a strong gust of wind sends a cascade of sand running down, filling it in. Somewhere a long way off a seagull cries, and the surf continues pounding on the beach.The traveler is faced with a wall of white. Thick, heavy snowflakes are already sticking to his hair and coat as the first gust of freezing air hits him. He tucks the dog into its pocket automatically. The traveler shifts his weight, and a few inches of sand under his feet slide away, and he loses his balance, tumbling backwards into the snow. He glances around. The snow is coming down in sheets, and there is already easily a foot of the stuff on the ground. It’s in his collar, in his boots, in his pants. He shivers in the sudden cold. He can barely see twenty feet in any direction. Inside his coat, the dog whines. He looks around for the girl. She’s standing in the snow. Her clothes are thin and still wet and rough with sand. She's shaking from the cold Her breath curls in shaky wreaths around her head, and her arms are wrapped around herself. He stares at her for a long moment, and then comes to a conclusion.
“You’re going to freeze to death.”
“Oui. Ideas, smart guy?”
He takes his boots off, and gives them to her. She tries to say something, but is shaking too badly, already. After a moment’s thought, he pulls the deflated bedroll off his shoulder and passes it to her. She wraps it around her shoulder. A nasty little wind has picked up. Suddenly, he turns and looks at her.
“You know, this is the first forty four minute conversation I’ve had in a long time.”
She ignores him, shivering, trying to stretch the oilcloth further around her. He can see snow sticking and freezing to the wet cloth on her body. He dances in his socks in the snow, still looking at her. It’s not enough. She’s still going to die. He could survive forty three minutes like this with his gear. He has, many times, but she’s going to die if he doesn’t come up with something better. He scans the horizon for anything that he could burn. Nothing but dead wheat fields. He wonders where he is. Clearly winter, but there’s no telling for sure where.
He catches a glimpse of something out over the dark fields. He stares intently out to a spot in the black and whirling grey snow. There again – a flash of lessened darkness, far out across the dark cornfields. He gestures at her to follow him. She snorts icy air, but stomps after him. The boots flop around on her feet. He walks in bare socks in the snow, toes freezing together. His breath comes in short, hard gasps, the freezing air driving cold razors into his lungs.
She follows behind him, shaking, silent. He keeps turning to make sure she hasn’t collapsed. As they walk through the walls of falling snow, the glimmer matures into first a pinpoint, then a halo, and finally a tiny square window of light. They reach a barbed wire fence. With shaking, numb fingers, the traveler unlocks the katana and chops through the wire. Ordinarily he would have climbed over, but he’s not sure she would make it. He hooks the katana back onto his back but doesn’t lock it down. The walk the last fifty feet to the farmhouse.
The girl knocks on the door. They wait a long, long moment. The dog shifts uncomfortably inside his coat. The traveler starts to fumble in his pockets for his knife or a scrap of wire. He’s not sure he can pick the lock under these conditions, but he’ll be damned if he’s not going to try. Then, suddenly, there’s a click of a lock, and the door is open. An old man stands in the dark living room inside, looking out at them with some confusion.
“Can we come in?” He stares at them for a long second, and then turns and gestures inside.
“Come on. It’s freezing out here.”
The traveler notes the accent and relaxes. Of course. He’s in Canada. He’s going to be fine.
They step into the house. The bare wooden boards creak under their feet. A thin, reedy glow spreads from a candle in one window. They curl up shivering on a broken tweed couch, while the old man scrapes some ashes around in the fireplace, pushes a few snow-soaked logs into it, and drizzles it with lighter fluid. He stands up, and takes a book of paper matches off the top of the fireplace.
The traveler has removed his socks, which have frozen stiff with cracked snow. His feet are red and numb and his veins stand out blue against the pale skin. He hopes he isn’t going to lose any toes.
The farmer lights a match. The hot orange flare sets deep lines in his face, and they get a good look at him for the first time. He’s fat and tanned and bald, with a round head like a potato and short beard that looks like dead grass. The match goes to the lighter fluid, which flares and spits, steam and smoke curling away from the wet logs. The girl huddles close against the small heat. She’s shed the oil cloth and the boots, and her clothes are stiff with frost against her skin. In a low, gravelly voice the farmer speaks.
“You can stay here until morning. Look, I gotta ask, how the hell did you folks get out here? The roads have been down for hours.”
“We were hitchhiking, and we got robbed. They dumped us on the side of the road, and I guess we got lost. Thank you so much.”
In the fireplace, the logs begin to catch, flames licking up the bark, water sizzling on the bricks. The girl pushes her feet nearly into the fire, trying to warm them. The traveler gently reaches out, and pushes her feet back slightly. He has burns on his arms from the same thing. The farmer jerks his head at her, still speaking quietly.
“Your friend is awful quiet.”
"She doesn’t speak English.” “
Ah.”
The farmer stands up, and walks down a long, dim hallway to a closet. There are squeaking, thumping noises. When he returns, he has a warm white blanket, which the traveler takes, gratefully. It smelled of dust, and he curls the thick cloth between his fingers. He sets it down, and they curl together in front of the fire, wrapped up in the blanket. After a minute or two, the dog comes out and curls up on the traveler’s stomach.
The farmer brings them cups of hot tea. The traveler smiles at him, genuinely grateful. He feels the air around him waver, but he can’t tell if it’s from the heat of the fire, or something else. He can’t bring himself to check his watch. The farmer nods at them, but the girl is already asleep. He turns, and walks down the hallway towards his bed.
The fire is really starting to burn, and it’s dim and quiet, and the blanket is hot around his body, and he can feel his eyes feeling thick and heavy. He sets the tea down, out of range. He looks at the girl, feeling the air starting to thicken around him. Her hair, finally dry, is curled around her ears. He suddenly realizes that he isn’t going to wake her up. He compromises with himself, and reaches into his pocket for his wallet. He finds some American dollars, counts out enough to pay for the damage to the floor and the price of the blanket, folds it up, and throws it into a corner, outside of the bubble. He gathers up the oilcloth mattress into his arms.
The dog whines and rolls over. He considers trying to rapidly write a letter of thanks, but decides against it. He curls up against the girl inside the blanket, enjoying the feeling of the heat against his skin, and the peace, and all of a sudden there’s a soft note of his watch chiming, and they’re gone.
A few boards fall onto the ground in the middle of the street, covered in a thick cotton blanket. The edges of the blanket have been trimmed off by the border of the bubble. The traveler blinks out of his reverie, and is nearly run over by a horse cart. He jumps up, suddenly, glancing around. An Asian man stares at him with naked shock from a horsecart. He shakes the girl awake, who jerks awake. He propels her off the main street, rapidly realizing that she’s still dressed in a dirty blouse and cotton leggings, which is going to be a problem. The dog pads along behind them.
They make their way into a dim alley. He glances around. No cars, lots of Asian people, signs in pictographic language. He squints upwards. It’s summer, but overcast. Could be China, he can find out for sure later. The first priority is to do something about the girl. His normal policy in foreign countries is to keep his head down, but the way she’s dressed and her hair are going to cause problems. He picks the dog up and tucks it into his coat, then rolls up the oilcloth and tucks it into his pack. She’s hissing at him.
“Get down! Il s'agit de Nanjing. Les Japonais s'en emparèrent. You’ll get us killed, vous sac de merde.”
He blinks. He needs to try to find newspapers more often.
“The Japanese invaded China? When?”
“Shut up!”
She glances at him.
“Knife. J'ai besoin d'un knife.”
He reaches into his pocket and removes an army knife. He takes a long look at her. She still doesn’t look good, but she seems to have mostly recovered from her brush with hypothermia. Really, aside from the enemy soldiers, a country in the middle of summer could be worse. He hands her the knife. She turns around, flops her hair over her shoulder, and hands him the knife.
“Cut it.”
He hesitates.
“Really?”
“Maintenant!”
He begins to cut. He’s not very good at it, but manages to reduce it down to a rough red halo around her head. It’s not pretty, but it’ll serve. She glances around. “Je vais avoir besoin de quelques vêtements.”He stares at her blankly. She nods across the street. There’s a store window lit up. He blinks owlishly at her. She sighs in exasperation.
“Les vêtements du magasin. Clothes store. Moron.”
“Oh.” He considers for a moment.
“Stay. Rester. I’ll be right back.”
She shouts something after him, but he doesn’t catch it. He crosses the street to the store, and goes inside. Along a back wall, he finds a decent white dress, and a veil that obscures the face and hair. He doesn’t have any Chinese money, so all of this vanishes into his coat, along with a leather hat, which he rolls up. He's stolen a lot of things before, but never actually had the need to try women's clothing. He follows his usual shoplifting routine, and walks quickly and steadily out the door. He steps out into the street, and begins walking back towards the alley. There's a commotion across the street.
Looking closely, he notices some military police standing around a dumpster in an alley, arguing heatedly. They look Japanese. He feels his stomach clench, hard. He gropes in his pocket for the Beretta, and then realizes what he’s doing. Not going to happen. It's been fun, French girl, but not that fun. Well, it's too late to turn around now. He puts the gun back into his coat, fixes his eyes on the horizon, and starts to walk right past them. He’s nearly past the first shop when an arm grabs his coat, and drags him into the alley directly behind the one the police are in. The girl stares at him.
“Cette ruelle, idiot.”
He feels like somebody suddenly let the air back into the world. He slumps backwards against the alley wall. After a moment, he gets his bearings again, and begins dragging clothing out of his jacket. She puts the clothes on hastily, making sure that none of her hair pokes out. She makes a credible Asian woman, so long as nobody looks too closely. The traveler reaches into his coat and unrolls the hat, which accomplishes much the same effect.
They walk, shoulder to shoulder, past the military police. From this angle, the traveler notices that they are arguing over a map. He glances at the girl. Her face is white, and her hands are shaking. His sense of relief fades, suddenly. He hustles them past and around a corner.
They duck into a small restaurant. He’s trying to figure out how to order food with hand signals, when she orders two cups of soup in decent Mandarin. Voice low, he leans towards her.
“Chinese? You speak Chinese?”
She meets his eyes calmly.
“Oui.”
He shakes his head. Unbelievable. And then it starts to happen. He hurriedly finishes his noodles, palms a cup for the dog, throws some German money onto the table, and they hurry out onto the street. The woman won’t be able to bank the money, but that’s okay, it’ll only be thirty seconds, now.
There, in the street, back to back, the wristwatch dings, and the two of them are gone. A few minutes later, the restaurant owner stomps out into the street, brandishing a handful of crisp new Reichsmarks and shouting loudly in Mandarin. He trips in a new pothole.
With a quiet thump, they settle. The traveler glances around mechanically. They’re about half inside a wall. A nearly perfect circle of stone has been obliterated around them. The traveler hurries out from under the wall in case it collapses. They’re in a factory of some kind, probably a steel mill. It looks abandoned. The traveler lets the dog out of his coat, which curls up in a spot of muddy sunlight.
The traveler wanders over to a window, and peers through it. The pane is nearly opaque with years of grease and dust caked onto it. He pulls his hand inside his sleeve and breaks out several panes, peering out into the daylight. It’s a little chilly outside, but daylight- probably around noon. There isn’t much outside, just blue skies and corn fields. He can see some mountains in the distance; they’re quite pretty.
“Europe, I think,” he says to the silence behind him, “I can drop you off here, if you like. I see a road, you might be able to hitch back to France. I’m not sure exactly where we are, I’m afraid. It might be a long ways.”
He gets no response. He turns around, and sees the girl sitting on a stack of rotten wood, shaking and pale. He’s been in warzones, a lot, and it takes all of about two seconds to identify the symptoms of shock. She doesn’t even look at him, and he suddenly realizes she must’ve been running on panic mode for the last three hours. First she was mad, then she dying of hypothermia, and then she was in enemy territory. The adrenaline must finally be wearing off.
He sits back to give her some space. She has a number of excellent reasons to be mad at him, and he doesn’t want to exacerbate things. After a while, he unbolts a door, and walks out. He goes to the street. After about five minutes, a car comes along. He waves it down, and it stops. The driver, an aging, pale man of about forty leans out.
“Hallo, muss eine Fahrt?”
The traveler sighs. Fuck, he wishes he spoke German. He manages to scrape together,
“Sorry. Bekümmert. Fehler.”
He smiles apologetically, and waves him off. The driver looks a little puzzled and drives off. The traveler is about to write it off and go inside, when he notes another car coming. What the hell. He flags this one down, too. The driver, a man with a thick dark beard looking slightly like Marx leans out.
“Quelque chose que vous avez besoin?”
The traveler relaxes, a little. His French is a little better.
“Oui. Um, Quel est ce pays?
”Suisse. Pourquoi?”
“Switzerland? Merci. Uh, Mon ami et moi avons perdu un certain temps. Nous ne savions pas où nous étions.”
The driver nods, and after being assured that they needed no further help, drove off. The traveller returns to the factory. The girl is still sitting there. She’s stopped shaking, mostly, and she’s found a stick. He walks closer to see what she’s doodling in the dirt. It’s math. It looks like she’s trying to work out how long it’ll take for them to wind up in France again. She looks up at him.
“Seven ninety six. Seven hundred et ninety six sauts.”
The traveler does some mental arithmetic. One every forty three minutes meant about thirty jumps a day, which meant it’d be about a month, give or take a bit, before the odds of them ending up in France again became remotely likely.
He sighs, and sits down next to her. He reaches into his coat pocket, and pulls out a can of cat food and a knife. She stares at him as he opens it. He starts to eat it with the knife, and she grabs his arm like he's insane.
“Dites-moi ce n’est pas la nourriture pour chat!”
“It’s not so bad. Portable, stays fresh. Tu en veux?”
She wrinkles her nose.
“Nothing else?”
He shrugs.
“You eat what you have.”
She looks at him for a long time. He finishes about half the can, and tosses the other half down on the ground. The dog pads over and finishes it. He scratches it behind the ears, and tries to figure out what to do. He can’t take a month of this. She’s nearly got him killed three or four times in as many hours. She’s going to die or get him killed. Besides, she bugs the crap out of him.
“We’re in Switzerland,”
He hesitates, and then amends, “Suesse.”
She looks surprised.
“You can get back to France from here. You should be fine.”
There’s a long silence. She stares at the empty catfood can, seeming to be working something out.
“What happened to you?” she asks, suddenly.
The traveler sits there for a long moment, staring out at a wall. After a long, long time, he speaks.
“There was an accident. A while ago, there was an accident. Uh, Ill y avait une erreur, I guess. I went on a jaunt and never got back. It was just for a little money, you see. The Austrian was so sure the machine was safe. You’re eighteen, you’re stupid, you make one little mistake…”
He sits there for a moment, trying to figure out how to translate this. He finally settles on this:
“J'ai fait une erreur. Je suis venu en vrac. Maintenant, je flotte juste.”
She looks at him for a while, and then nods. He shakes himself, and picks up the dog.
“Come on, let’s get you a ride home.”
They walk out to the car. The traveler digs around in his coat, and produces, after a moment, his gun and a handful of reichsmarks, which he gives to her. They walk out to the road, and wave down a 1939 Ford Coupe. The door opens, and the driver sticks his head out. He smiles, and says,
“Quelque chose que je peut faire pour vous, les gars?”
His accent has an interest twang to it, but he seems nice enough. She looks absolutely relieved. She snatches her hat off, and beams at him.
“Bonjour, monsieur, pouvez-vous me donner un tour dans la ville la plus proche?”
He nods, smiles broadly.
"Oui, oui! Je peux faire cela.” “
“Super. Merci.” She is very nearly jumping for joy.
She turns towards the traveler. Sarcastically, she curtsies deeply.
“Eh bien, M. Blanc, qu'il a été gentil et tout, mais j'espère que cela ne vous dérange pas si je souhaite ardemment que nous rencontrons jamais.”
He shrugs. Something was bugging him, her fairly reasonable distaste for him aside. He has developed a pretty keen sense of something being a little off; it’s a must with his lifestyle. Right now, it’s itching insistently.
He turns to her. He decides to tag along, just for a bit.
“Dite, j’ai un certain temps. Ne vous pourriez, si je accompagner un peu?”
She shrugs. The driver looks reluctant, but nods. He gets in next to her, and they avoided looking at each other for the first half mile. He sighs. He is going to need to get out, soon. He is almost sure that something isn’t right.
The driver speaks
“Dites, vous les gars arrive à parler anglais? I thought I heard an accent on you.”
The traveler suddenly places his accent. American. What the hell is he doing in Switzerland? The girls speaks up, looking the driver in the eye.
“Oui. Um, yes. Un peu.”
He nods. The traveler meets his eyes.
“Yes.”
“Well that’s just dandy. You know, I’ve been stuck in Switzerland for a while now. Once the war started, it was tricky getting out. You kinda start to miss the language, you know. Say, now, what’s your story, folks?”
Before she could speak, the traveler interjects,
“We were tourists, we’re stuck here, too. We’ve been out camping for a few weeks now. I can’t wait to get home and let the family know we’re okay, we kind of got lost.”
She seems a bit surprised, but doesn’t comment.
The man nods.
“Say, son, can you do me a favor?”
“Sure. “
“Could you just lock the doors? The latches have been busted for, hell, years now, and sometimes they pop open. Miss, verrouiller la porte, s'il vous plaît.”
She nods, and they both reach over to lock their doors. The air around the traveler is starting to get oily. The driver doesn’t notice, yet. He seems distracted. The driver nods pleasantly at them. He turns and reaches to does something in his glove box that isn’t quite visible. As he does so, he says.
“You know, I’m really sorry about this. I don’t mean to impose, but…”
And then there’s a gun in his hand, pointed at them. He smiles pleasantly.
“Now, son, if you so much as twitch for that hinky Jap sword, I’ll smear your brains all over this here back seat, you get me? Girl, get your hand out of your pocket. I don’t know what you’ve got in there, and frankly I don’t care. Now, girl, there’s some rope under the seat. You’re going to tie up your friend here, thoroughly, and then I’m going to pull over, and you and I are going to take care of some business."
She stares at him with no comprehension.
"Eh, right. Attachez-le. Il ya corde sous le- holy son of a fuck, what is that?”
The car begins to fishtail wildly. The bubble reaches a crystalline sheen, and the traveler suddenly realizes that he’s about to go at thirty miles an hour. He does the only thing he can. He buckles up, puts one arm around the girl, and sticks the other into his jacket around the dog. The driver, gun hanging limply in one hand is staring slack jawed at the bubble around the traveler. He’s mostly inside the bubble, but he’s not wearing a seatbelt. The traveler suddenly begins to laugh and laugh and laugh. Furious, scared, and confused, the driver points the gun at him. The tension in the air reaches an unbearable climax, and the watch dings, and suddenly a few bounds of scrap metal are skidding and bouncing down a country road.
There’s a soft whirring noise as the headlight bounces to a stop, and the last tire rolls into a rock. Two legs, neatly severed at the knees roll into the weeds off the shoulder. A while later, another car rolls right on by.
There’s a long flickering moment. Broken glass pours silently past the traveler’s face. A fragment of splintered desk flies past the window. Turning shadows play on the inside of the car. There’s an impact and his head whips around a dangerous orbit. His foot grinds nastily into something with an awful crunching noise. A wall of black comes hurtling towards him on the right.
Stop.
Nothing
Restart.
The air smells like saltpeter and fumes. The traveler cautiously opens one eye. Gray smoke and crushed metal greets him. He shifts slightly in his seat. Broken glass is sprayed over the lapels of his coat. A hard shard of metal is buried in the carpet next to his ear.
Something wet on the side of his head: blood. He opens his other eye, and looks around. Inside his coat, the dog whines and makes a bid for freedom. He rolls over in his belt, broken glass crunching. He undoes the belt buckle with difficulty, and looks around the inside of the car. The passenger side is pointed at the ceiling of what looks like some kind of financial building. Most of the engine block is just gone, and what’s left is jacknifed into a structural support, which is partially bowed over, causing the ceiling to slope at a dangerous angle.
Office workers are lying all over the place. He gets onto his hands and knees and looks at the girl. She’s unconscious, thrown against the front seats, but not out of the car. His hand is still curled up in her jacket. With effort, he extracts it. She doesn’t look like she’s dead. She’s breathing, at least. A fucking office building. Of all the places to jump dragging a car, a fucking office building? Sometimes random chance has a sick sense of humor. He tries to focus, tries to breathe. His lungs hurt. He shifts his weight, and an intense pain in his foot rises into his awareness. Focus. Can’t think about that now.
Focus.
Her neck is fine. A cursory inspection reveals no head injuries. He reaches for his canteen, and dumps the last of his fresh water onto her face. She stirs. The dog nuzzles the back of his leg. He pets it absently, silently urging her up. Her right ear is bleeding, and it occurs to him that he can’t hear anything. He reaches up to his own ears, and feels gingerly. No blood, but they’re ringing. As he straightens, he feels the familiar ache in his joints. He must’ve dropped a thousand feet, easily. He glances around, trying to figure out where he is. Clothing doesn’t tell him much, there’s too much smoke in the air. His ears are ringing too badly to catch any scraps of language.
The girl is up. Not steady, but up. They crawl out of the tangled remains of the automobile and move away from it as quickly as possible. His foot hurts. There’s a hot little knot of wrong at the end of his leg and it spasms with every step, sending little stabbing pains up his leg. A wave of nausea rises in his throat as he takes a step. A dozen scared eyes track them as they limp. Nobody attempts to intercede. The traveler figures they have about thirty seconds before brains kick in, and people start to act like people instead of rabbits.
They make it to the stairwell without incident. His hearing is coming back a little. He can hear the crackling of fire. Near the wall, they find the Swiss driver. He’s pinned under a desk thrown by the car. There’s quite a lot of blood running out from under the desk, and he seems only half lucid. He’s saying something to the girl that the traveler can’t quite make out. He glances up at the French girl, and somehow she’s got his gun. Before he can work out what to do, there are two muffled thumps and the driver’s face caves in on itself in a crater of blood and skull.
She pockets the gun, and walks calmly into the stairwell. He hustles after her, dragging his foot. They hustle down several floors, and duck into an empty room off to the side. The lights are out. He just stands against the wall for a moment, breathing hard, while the dog hurries in and begins to sniff around the perimeter.
Now what the fuck was that about? He shakes his head, and inspects the French girl. She’s got a look of cold satisfaction on her face. Not a trace of guilt. He shakes his head Not his problem. He has a policy against killing people unless they really, really deserve it. Well, he supposes the driver sort of did. He stops himself. Again, not his problem. This murder is on French girl’s conscience, and she seems to be coping just fine. He needs to focus, needs to focus. He notes a window at the other end of the room.
Ignoring the throbbing pain in his foot, he stomps across the room to the window. It is of vital importance that he work out where he is. He stares out at the city outside, a modest metropolis in the thrall of late summer. He can see some architecture that’s definitely German, lots of domes and spires. Well, that’s something. If the girl ditches the veil and keep that damned hair out of sight, she can probably pass for a good frau. The traveler is confident in his ability to pass for a vagrant anywhere on earth.
He turns around to look at the room. The girl has settled in a pile of dirty clothes and elbows near the door. The room is an industrial library, of some kind. The walls are lined with shelves of boxes filled with paper. At the far end there’s a window and a desk. He sees a little box of children’s toys on one corner. He turns to a shelf to his right, grabs one of the boxes off the shelf, and tips it onto the floor. Clues. Something. He is very definitely not thinking about the crushed- about his foot. The traveler thumbs through documents. A book falls out. It’s a French-German dictionary. He sets it aside, and keeps looking. The ringing is starting to fade, a little. His ears have started to hurt in earnest. He finds a paper, and lifts it. The header says ‘Dresden Keramic Corporation.’
He nods. Dresden. He’s been to Dresden before, before the war. Beautiful city, nice people. Should be reasonably safe from the fighting. He turns around, and hears the girl say something. He turns and squints at her.
“What?”
“Je l'ai dit, why the fuck can’t I read this?”
She’s holding the dictionary in her right hand, and staring at him with emotion somewhere between accusation and terror. He groans, inwardly. He was really hoping she wouldn’t have a chance to find out about that. He sighs.
“Nous voyage par effet, eh, ‘quantum tunnel?’. Le-”
She’s staring at him blankly.
He tries again.
“Have you ever noticed that we always land on our feet? Nous débarquons debout?”
She nods, slowly.
“Well, um, I took this stuff, we called it Philadelphia Oil- a drug, I guess. It keeps me that keeps me a little bit out of sync. Um, Je suis un peu hors de la synchronization? Well, it needs a metal barrier to tunnel through, and there’s a lot of metal in the earth’s core, so the iron in the mantle produces a caged tunneling effect, um, uh. Actually, you don’t need to know any of this. One second.”
He walks over to the desk in the corner, reaches into the toy box, and produces a shiny tin soldier, about an inch high. He hefts it in his hand as he limps back, and settles onto the floor in front of her. He puts the soldier down. He reaches into his pack, and pulls out a dirty leather glove, which he sets next to it. The dog walks up and begins sniffing it, and he pushes it away. He extends his fist, and sets the soldier on the top of it, just over the little hole between his curled thumb and pointer finger. He looks at her and holds her gaze.
“Tel est le monde.”
He opens his fist a fraction, and the toy shoots down the length of the hole. He clenches his hand at the last second, catching its head. The tin soldier now hangs suspended from the other side of his hand.
“You see? We travel through the earth in straight lines. We should be upside down when we jump, but we aren’t.”
She nods. He hopes she gets this. He sets the soldier down, and picks up the glove. He hangs it upside down between his thumb and forefinger. He taps it.
With his free hand, he reaches into the glove and tugs it inside out. Frayed leather seams stick out.
He glances at her to make sure she’s following.
“I think your head travels a little faster than your feet, so, um, Il est debout. Droit est désormais à gauche. You get reversed. Right becomes left.”
She blinks.
“As a result, reading text gets a little tricky. Also, you’re probably left handed now. Don’t worry, it’ll reverse again next time we jump. If we have to leave you on an odd jump, don’t worry about it to much, it’s pretty easy to learn to read backwards.”
She glares at him.
“Vous alliez me dire à ce sujet - quand?”
He shrugs. She shakes her head.
“Fucker.”
He closes his eyes. He can’t deal with this.
“Look, just, deal with it, okay? Jesus, French girl, I could have left you to die in the ocean, do you know that? Do you know how hard it is to deal with you? Can you even understand? God, I need to sleep.”
She stares at him blankly. He gives up and gets to his feet.
“Fuck. Never mind. Come on. The police will be here soon. Nous avons besoin de courir.”
He takes a step towards the exit, puts his weight on his foot. The world goes gray around the edges, and all the air goes out of his body. He drops to his knees, wretches, puts his hands out to brace himself. The girl is standing behind him. She hooks her arms under his, and pulls him backwards. He drops hard onto his back, held up by his pack. The dog is around his legs, sniffing and whimpering.
The French girl pulls his boot off with exceptional care. He struggles into a sitting position, just in time to see his foot. It’s – well, it’s pretty bad. One of the toes is bent at a weird angle, another is swollen, and the middle toe has a white ridge of bone protruding. Something heavy crushed the boot, broke the toes, tore the skin open in a few places. The whole end of the foot is covered in blood and grease and dirt.
She shakes her head. She extends a hand towards him.
“It’s fine. I’ve got it.”
“I said, I’ve got it.”
He grits his teeth, and picks up the bottle, which has spilled onto the floor. He grabs a cotton rag from the medical kit and begins, carefully and with shaking hands, to wipe some of the grease and blood away from the wound. The girl is looking at him, annoyed. She’s inspecting the foot.
“Ces pieds doivent être fixés.”
The traveler ignores her. This is as clean as he can get it, without risking shock. He reaches into the kit again, and pulls out a red tin, in English, labeled Sulfanilamide. He opens it gingerly, pulls out a small white paper envelope. He tears the end off, and pours it onto the wound. It burns, but not as bad as the alcohol. He can hear authoritative voices a long way off, at the edge of his hearing. They don’t have a lot of time.
“Okay. I’m good. Let’s move.”
She shakes her head.
“Bon Dieu, tu sais que ce n'est pas assez bon.”
He sighs. He’s going to go into shock. He can feel it. But, fuck, she’s right. The toes need to be set and splinted as quickly as possible. He reaches down, very carefully, to one of the toes, and gives it a gentle pull. The pain takes everything. He drops back onto his pack, eyes unfocused, sweat standing out on his forehead. He tries to see what’s going on. The French girl is shaking her head. She picks up a pencil from the desk.
He wants to –needs to- do this himself, but just now he’s too busy trying not to pass out to resist. He lets her push the pencil into his mouth. Reaching downward, she grabs his toes. She looks up and makes eye contact with him.
“This will hurt.”
She yanks on the broken toes as hard as she can. The traveler screams, and then the world goes spotty and quiet, and the darkness in the corners of the room closes in on him.
There’s a long, timeless moment of peace, and then he realizes that he’s running. Somehow, the French girl has got herself under his shoulder, and they’re running down some alley. She must be stronger than she looks. He looks around. They’re still in Dresden, he couldn’t have been out for that long.
He takes some of the weight himself, and she looks at him. He tests his stride. The foot is still intensely painful, but it’s no longer critical, just background pain. He wonders what she did to it while he was out. They come to a large, busy street, and he gestures that they should stop. He collapses against a dumpster, and pulls his boot off. The toes have been splinted with the pencil, broken in the thirds, then wrapped in gauze and taped.
It’s not an expert job, but it’ll probably heal alright. He suddenly feels a horrible jolt.
“Le chien, le chien! The dog, where’s my dog?”
She reaches into his coat, and pulls the dog out from under her arm. He grabs it happily, holds it to his chest, and then sets it down. It begins to sniff around the garbage and pees in a corner of the alley, but never travels more than ten feet from him.
She looks at him. He looks at his watch. Still thirteen minutes until jump time.
She nods. He considers.
She’s on him in a second, gripping his lapels, shoving him backwards into the wall.
“Vous ne me laissez à Dresde,” she hisses at him, then turns away and looks around the corner.
He stands stock still against the wall for a moment.
“Okay. Fine. It was just a suggestion. No need to get touchy. It’s quite a nice city, if you get to know it.”
“I’m hungry.”
He shrugs, apologetically.
“All I’ve got is cat food and some old bread.”
She holds his eye.
“I’m hungry.”
He nods, slowly, and reaches into his pocket, groping for a can and his knife. With some effort, he opens a can. He spoons some onto the cobblestones for the dog, takes a few bites himself, and hands the can to her. She scoops some out with her fingers, tastes it gingerly. She looks surprised.
“Ce n'est effectivement pas terrible.”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s just tuna. Kind of bland, but you can live on it.”
She doesn’t understand him, but that’s okay. Even a little bit of food in his stomach is helpful. He can feel a little clarity coming to him. He pulls his boot back on, and reaches for his canteen. It rattles in his hand: empty. Right. That is a problem. Well, he can deal with it later. He carefully hooks the canteen back into place. He shakes his head. He’s tired. Ever since Frenchgirl showed up, his sleep schedule’s been completely out of whack. He needs to focus on taking care of himself, as soon as he can get rid of her. Sleep more, maybe see if he can steal a bottle of multivitamins soon.
He shakes himself. He’s drifting off. He needs to address something else. He looks at the French girl, who’s finished the catfood. She’s perched on the edge of the dumpster, scanning the street. She’s looking at a large, fancy-looking church on the other side of the street. He decides to get it over with.
“Hey, um, French girl. Can I have my gun back, please?”
She stares at him for a long moment. She produces the gun and holds it in her hand for a long moment. The small black gun shines in the sun. Then she passes the gun back to him. He checks the safety (it’s on), and slips it into the correct pocket.
Now that he has the gun, he looks at her.
“You know, you really should stay here. Believe me, you’re safer here than you are with me. It’s not a bad city, really.”
She gives him a look that could freeze water.
“Vous n'avez aucun problème, me laissant avec les nazis? None?”
“The Nazi’s, the Russians, the English. What the hell do I care? It’s not important. The way I see it, the important things in life are a bed, a friend,” he nods at the dog, “and the next meal.”
She gives him a look.
“There’s a war on.”
He shrugs.
“Not my war, not my problem.”
She looks at him with disgust.
“People are dying, you sac de merde.”
He looks at her in wounded surprise.
“People die all the time. I’ve been fed by Nazi’s. I’ve been clothed by the British. Both sides have tried to kill me on numerous occasions. You want me to say that one is worse than the other? No. That’s not a road I’m going down. You shouldn’t, either. It’s not your concern. One side will win. Life will go on. You should really stay here.”
She stares at him, gives him the finger, and turns away.
The dog knows it’s coming, and curls up at his feet. The girl notices it, and after a moment’s debate, walks over to him. She stands back to back with him. He can feel her shoulders digging into his, can feel the tension in her back. And then his watch dings, and they’re gone. After a moment, the bells of Dresdner Frauenkirche strike the hour.
A wall of water rushes up at him. A taste of warm saline: ocean. He bobs to the surface. The dog is already there. The girl is treading water not far away when he breaks the surface. He pulls the bedroll off his back and begins to inflate it. After a moment, it’s sufficiently inflated to roll himself into. After a moment, the girl stumbles up onto it beside him, dangling her feet in the water. The dog climbs up onto his chest. The girl is sitting off to one side, and it’s tipping the bed, sending little jets of water down his back.
“Lay down, you’re tipping the raft.”
“I’m serious. Sleep. You don’t know when you’ll get another chance.”
After a long moment summing up her options, she lays down, her back to him, and mutters.
“Essayez quelque chose, et je te casse autres orteils.”
He winces. His foot is still killing him.
“Got it. Go to sleep French girl.”
He starts to close his eyes, and then has a thought. He reaches back, and unhooks the still from his pack. He tilts the lense at the top so that it catches the sun, then screws the canteen into the hose coming off the side. He dumps the tray under the water, filling it with saline, and then sets it between his legs. It sloshes with each movement of the waves. With the sound of the ocean still in his ears, he closes his eyes and sleeps.
He wakes up to the sound of the alarm going off. Oh fuck, he forgot to set the timed alarm before going to bed. The French girl is throwing him off. He gets ready to run if he has to. The bubble hardens and suddenly they’re gone. A few drops of boiling surf, suspended on top of the bubble, falls and splash into the ocean with a hiss.
They land, with barely a thump, in the ocean again. It’s colder now, and night, but they’ve mostly dried by now, and it’s not too bad. He sits up to check on the dog, then lays back down. The French girl stirs, turns towards him, asks sleepily.
“Où en sommes-nous?”
“It’s alright. Go back to sleep.”
She seems to realize how close her face is to his, rolls over with a sniff, and goes back to sleep. After a moment to check the amount of water in the canteen (it’s nearly full), so does the traveler. This time he sets the alarm. It wakes him up five minutes before the next jump. He gets up, tucks the dog into his coat, and makes preparations. He doesn’t wake the girl.
He takes his boot off his good foot, and shakes a handful of pebbles and grit out into his hand. He shakes the grit out from between his fingers, until he’s left holding a dozen small stones. As the bubble hardens and begins to sizzle in the seawater underneath him, he rubs the dog’s stomach and tosses a pebble at the bubble. The bubble blurs the horizon into rags of daybreak and grey clouds. The hot ozone smell comes off it in waves. He can feel the oil cloth running under his ass as the waves push the wavering particles against each other. He feels hot and tired and dizzy and not quite real.
He exhales slowly, and then throws another pebble. It passes the barrier with a burnt grease hiss. He throws another, while a fleck of foam boils away on the top of the bubble. He’s almost out of pebbles by the time he jumps.
The sleeping mat crashes to the ground with a rush of spreading seawater. The traveler is prepared this time, and lands on his feet, sending a shudder of pain up his leg. The girl gets a little wet, but recovers nicely, landing in a low crouch. The dog simply waits for the raft to settle, and then trots off. The traveler glances around hurriedly, already packing up the bedroll.
There are sidewalks, well maintained. Somewhere in the first world. He sees a church with a cross on top. Well, that narrows it down considerably. A gust of cold air hits him. Flat blue horizons, barren trees, Christmas lights under the noontime sun overhead. The traveler smiles. He’s always liked Christmas. Then he laughs, because he suddenly realizes that he’s back in America. The French girl looks at him with some alarm. He grins expansively, cold air stinging his cheeks.
“Welcome to America!”
“Juste ce dont j'ai besoin.”
He ignores her.
“Let’s go get a hamburger, with fake cheese and grease stains on the bag. You need to taste an American hamburger. God, I’ve missed hamburgers. Oh! A banana milkshake, with frost on the glass. It’s been so long since I’ve had a banana milkshake…”
He takes off, still talking to himself. She is shocked to see real tears of joy in his eyes. Now she’s staring at him with some genuine concern. After a brief moment to read a street sign and make sure her body is correctly aligned, she chases after him. The dog is well ahead of her.
He finds what he’s looking for after a couple of minutes. It’s a diner, off to the side of the road. It’s not a particularly nice diner. Part of the sign is broken, displaying, simply, an F. There’s a picture of a stoned looking boy in red shorts carrying a hamburger by the door. He nearly runs inside, shouting grandly back to her.
“Viens, mon amour! Le ciel vous attend dans le hamburger!”
She sighs, and follows him. They step into the diner. The dog keeps it’s head down and stays out of sight. The diner is empty, it must be well after lunch. A family sits in the booth towards the back. The traveler walks up to the counter and gives the man an expansive smile.
“Two cheeseburgers with bacon if you have it, two banana milkshakes, a bag of French fries. Pronto, please, I’ll be leaving town in,” he checks his watch, “half an hour.”
The cook gives him a dour look.
“You can’t have that dog in here.”
The traveler gives the dog a fond glance, and shakes his head.
“It’s alright, we’ll take it to go.” He taps on the counter impatiently with one hand. The cook gives him a look.
“You can’t,” he says with a slow drawl, “have that dog in here.”
The traveler gives him a hard stare.
“Listen, friend, if we stand here and argue about this, I won’t get my food, and the dog’ll stay in here longer than if you just gave me my food. So, turn around and go get me some food, and we’ll be out of each other’s lives as soon as possible.”
The cook shrugs.
"No dogs. There’s a sign. Get the hell out, and come back without the dog.”
The French girl takes a step back. The travelers eyes have gone very, very hard. His voice is very low, very cold. .
“Do you know what I’ve been through since I last had a banana milkshake?”
He leans in close, eye to eye with the cook.
“I have been stabbed. Shot. Exploded. Arrested by Nazi soldiers. Set on fire. Concussed. I have nearly frozen to death. I have been in a car crash. I have nearly drowned. I have fallen off of a cliff.”
He leans forward into the cook’s face, breath blowing his nose. His hand snaps out and grabs his apron, lifting him onto his toes. His voice drops to an icy whisper.
“I have subsisted on catfood and beef jerky for three fucking months, while acting as God’s personal punching bag. And now, I want a milkshake. So if you think for one moment, one single second that you are going to stand between me and my food, well, you are a sadly mistaken.”
The cook is straining to get away, eyes bulging in his skull.
“Do you understand me, you little insect? Shut up. That wasn’t a question. Now, if you don’t get me my food, hot and promptly sometime in the next minute and a half, I am going to take this sword, and I’m going to cut your damn lungs out. Look at that family over there in the corner. Imagine those little kids going home tonight with the image of your hacked up corpse burned into their brains. Look at me. Look at me. I am a goddamn crazy person. Now, I’ve got twenty minutes left. Go. Get. Me. My. Milkshake.”
And then the cook is gone. The traveler has dropped him. He lands on his butt, scurries backwards, turns, and vanishes with a bang of double doors into the kitchen, and there is a tremendous clatter of a very fat man careening around a small space in mortal terror. The traveler sits down heavily on the barstool and pats his lap. The dog hops up into it. He spins around a few times, gives the family in the corner a friendly smile.
The French girl is still staring at him. Very quietly, she sits down next to him, with all the care of a dynamite manufacturer. He nods at her.
“You’re going to love this. There’s nothing like an American hamburger.”
After a moment’s thought, he shouts into the kitchen.
“And it better not be burnt!”
This results in a further clatter. The traveler turns to the French girl, who is still wavering between intense irritation and fear. She looks at him, thinks for a moment, and then manages.
“Vous ne pensez pas qu'il va appeler la police?”
The traveler takes a moment to interpret this, then shrugs.
“He probably already has. Don’t worry, we’ll be out of here before they arrive. This is Ohio, I think. Have you ever been to a police station in Ohio?”
He leans over the counter to shout something else, when the cook comes running back through the door with two paper bags, which he throws down on the counter. The traveler checks the bags to make sure he got the order right, then he fished out his wallet, and finds some American dollars. He throws a ten dollar bill on the table.
“That should just about cover it. Thank you sir, and have a lovely evening.”
The cook just stares. The French girl tugs on the traveler’s arm. He turns, and sees flashing lights outside the building. There’s the sound of an abbreviated siren. The traveler sighs.
“Come on.”
He picks up the bags, under one arm, tucks the dog under the other, vaults over the counter, and runs. The French girl sighs, and follows him. They burst out the back way into a fenced in little lot. The traveler tucks the dog into his coat, hops onto the dumpster, and vaults over the fence with the ease of someone who spends a lot of time running away from people who want to kill him. He turns to help the girl over. She lands easily next to him, turns and says,
“Which way?”
He points, and they run. They get most of the way down the streets before the air begins to go opaque and blurry, and sizzle like frying stone. Then, where the two people and the dog were standing on the street, there isn’t anything. After the thump of collapsing vacuum, a man who happened to be standing on the curb might think he heard a distant whisper, echoing back through the curled knots of space. He’d be wrong, of course, but if he did hear a few whispered words, they would be these:
“Oh god. We’re here.”
Author's Note:
The 'concept credit' is a new category I've added for when the core story concept is not mine. I have several friends who will, with minimal provocation, either say 'hey, wouldn't it be cool if...', or help me brainstorm through an existing idea. They will be credited like this from now on.
This story is an experiment on my part - it's the first time I've tried a serial. This one is about 4000 words, which'll be about par for each part. There will probably be at least six, and they'll come out every few weeks with regular stories in between. If the reader response is sufficiently positive, I may begin to develop them alongside the Thursday stories, or find some other system.
I hope you enjoy this little experiment as much as I did.
A.
ADDENDUM: My French/Russian/German is notoriously weak. If anyone who actually speaks these languages notices any embarrassing errors, don't hesitate to browbeat me for them.
Author's note:
Here is part two, done ahead of schedule. If you're totally lost, scroll back up to the top of the page. If you're reading this for the second time after following the above advice, I'm afraid you're on your own.
This one was a little different than the last one. For one thing, 70% of the dialog was in French, which I don't actually speak, which was a challenge. Second, there's the interesting challenge of introducing new readers to the premise without boring old ones.
Those with a good eye will also note that I changed the name. This is because 'the disappearing man' is more or less impossible to Google and get anything useful out. I've also changed the relevant image, since the last one was awful.
To reiterate my above warning, I don't speak a word of French, so all of the French dialog is basically best guesses, some hasty flipping back and forth in a French-language dictionary, and a healthy dose of borderline-retarded machine translation. So, if you actually speak French, first I apologize for my crimes against the language, and second ask that you kindly email me to let me know what I messed up and how to fix it.
One final note: the advertising. My Project Wonderful application finally came through, so I'm trying it out. I'm also testing out Amazon Affiliates links. I get paid a little bit every time somebody clicks through and buys a product via that link. I've put some of my favorite books down there in the hopes that if you like the stories here, you'll also like the ones down there.
Until next time,
A.
IV
He gets to the shed and sits down. He suddenly realizes that the French girl isn’t with him. She’s still standing on the spot they’d appeared on, now covered with a hundred severed stalks of dead grass. She’s looking around, eyes damp. She looks at him.
“Oh god. We’re here.”
He stares at her, and then waves her over impatiently, pointing to the guard towers. She seems to snap out of it, and rushes over to him. She’s staring around wide-eyed.
“J'ai entendu des rumeurs. Je pensais qu'ils étaient couchés.”
“Do you know what they do here?”
He shrugs, and takes a bite out of the hamburger. The taste of warm meat, cheese, bun washes over his mouth. He sinks back into the dirt, eyes closed, just savoring the taste. She doesn’t say anything for a long moment. He sighs heavily, swallows, and opens his eyes to see what she’s doing. She’s staring off into the distance, where a thick plume of smoke is erupting from a low brick building. Something is blowing past her face. Snow. Warm snowflakes settle on his face, his coat. Only snow isn’t warm, and this wasn’t snow. He coughs, and holds out his hand. A handful of ashes collect in his palm.
Almost pleasantly, as though in a dream, the French girl is talking.
“Birkenau,” she says.
He shrugs. The word means nothing to him. The whole field has taken on a surreal aspect, a snowstorm in summer. Somewhere, off in the distant, a hard alarm rings, and people begin to pour out into the fenced off areas. They were uniformly gray people, dirty people. A prison for the poor? The traveler is about to ask what’s going on, and then he remembers the banana milkshake. He tears off a piece of burger for the dog, and drops it. The dog snaps it up. He pulls out the banana milkshake, takes the lid off, and takes a long pull.
He just sits there for a moment, savoring the taste. He starts to cry. He is the happiest he has been in three months.
“It’s the simple things in life you treasure,” he says to nobody in particular.
He opens his eyes, and sees that the mass of grey people is encroaching upon them. He catches a nasty smell, and suddenly realizes that the building they’re behind is a toilet, and all of these people want to use it. He turns to the French girl, and pushes a paper bag towards her. She doesn’t even look at it. There are tear lines on her face. She won’t stop staring at the crowd of people.
He pushes the bag towards her more insistently.
“French girl. Snap out of it. I don’t know what’s going on, and honestly it doesn’t matter. I don’t have a lot of catfood left, and you need to eat something substantial or else you’re going to pass out from hunger, and I’m going to have to carry you.”
She spits, and steps away from him. She sits back against the shed with a thump that draws a small crowd of the gray people around the back of the shed to stare at them. They’re dressed in a stunning mishmash of clothes, many of them grand in their day, now bleached and dirtied into the same tired grey wrappings. He catches a glimpse at some of the faces, and sees the dead eyes, the sunken cheeks, pale skin. These people are starving. Why are these people starving? Germany’s economy is bad, sure, but even with the war it’s not this bad.
He shakes himself, and realizes that these people might well kill him for his food. He gropes in his pocket for his berretta, and turns to shield the food. He takes another bite of the hamburger. There are ashes on it. He turns slowly to look at them, mouth full, their flat eyes looking at him without even a shred of curiosity. They probably don’t even know that it’s food. He swallows slowly. He takes another bite, chews it slowly. There’s no taste to it all, just ashes. God damn it. He sighs.
He drops the half-finished hamburger into the bag, puts the lid back on the milkshake, and pushes it into the hands of the nearest woman.
“Here.”
As he watches, the woman, who has a deeply lined, almost comical face with large ears, sticks her hand hesitantly into the bag, pulls out a french fry, and eats it. The others gather around. A hundred nibbles and sips later, and all the food is gone. They stand for a moment longer, and then disperse. The traveler and the girl and the dog are alone behind the shed. The traveler stands up, suddenly.
“Well fuck this.”
He stomps towards a nearby fence.
The French girl stands up, and shouts after him.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t fucking care. I’m getting out of this fucked up, dysfunctional country if I have to walk.”
He gets to the fence, and begins inspecting it for structural flaws. The dog paces behind him, whining for more hamburger. His foot sends little shivers of pain up his leg with every step. After a long silence, the French girl walks up and comes after him.
“Vous pourrez les sauver, tu sais. Quelques-uns. Deux. Trois.”
He turns and looks at her. He suddenly looks very sad, and very old. She realizes that he has grey in the stubble on his face.
“Which ones, French girl? Which ones do we take? Do we draw straws? And what about the rest? Do you know what starving people are capable of?”
She holds eye contact for a moment, and then turns and takes a step back.
“Je suis désolé. Au revoir.”
She takes another step back. The traveler looks at her.
“Don’t even. Do you know what they’ll do to you when they catch you?”
Another step.
“Come on. Stop it. I’ve got a good knife, and this is really shitty wire. I can have us out of this place inside ten minutes. You really want to die in this hellhole? What do you intend to accomplish?”
She turns to go. He can hear her footfalls on the dry ground. He turns to say something else, and then an area of ground to his right explodes in a plume of gravel and dust. There’s a crack of a sniper rifle.
The girl freezes like a rabbit under high-beams, glancing around. The traveler is already running for cover, chain-swearing under his breath.
“Goddamnfucksonofabitchwhyaretheyfuckingshootingatme?”
The dog is standing behind him. He picks it up, and tucks it into his coat. The girl is still there, scanning the horizon for the source of the noise. A wave of nausea hits him. He fights it down and shoots at her as loud as he can. He shakes himself. What’s going on with him?
“MOVE.”
She seems to suddenly realize that she’s under fire, and scuttles for the cover of the bathroom stall. He glances around. A group of starving prisoners are standing some distance away. They don’t seem overly concerned by the gunfire. He’s not entirely sure if that’s a good thing. He nods to the girl.
“Sur le compte de trois, se déplacer. Essayez de vous perdre dans la foule. Ils ne vont pas tuer les prisonniers. Eh bien, au moins, pas tous.”
She stares at him in naked disgust.
“Oh, nous sommes désormais utiliser des boucliers humains? Man, vous savez bien comment montrer à une fille un bon moment.”
He shakes his head. She doesn’t get it. She’s not living in reality. They are going to kill her. The watch on his wrist says they still have to hold out for fifteen more minutes. He turns, and whispers in a low voice.
“Se taire. Un, deux, trois ... Aller!”
He half drags her out from behind the shed, following a zigzag pattern to confuse the gunman in the tower. His foot aches with every step, and his breath catches in his chest. With any luck, his sniper rifle doesn’t have a decent scope. A slug impacts the ground a half an inch from his foot. Ah hell. A second later they’re in the crowd. He hears more shots, but they don’t come anywhere near him. The crowd seems to finally react to the gunfire, and begin to surge away from the open ground backwards the brick buildings. The traveler and the girl keep low and travel with them. As soon as they’re out of sight of the tower, the traveler turns towards a barbed wire fence. He can feel the blurry sensation under his feet. It’s early, but – yes- doable. He can get through the fence without cutting it. It’s probably aluminum wire, aluminum was always good. The girl, though – the girl would probably die in the attempt. The dog might make it, but as for the girl: no. He will need to find another way.
He unlocks the katana, and begins to cut. He breaks a few wires, and he and the girl squirm under. He hates to do this as it blunts the blade, but this is sheer necessity at work, and the blade can suffer. On the other side, he stomps on the wire to try to disguise the break, and nearly passes out from pain. Other foot next time. He felt bone rubbing that time, and a horrible wet feeling. He’s almost afraid to look at the foot. Later. Now, they run.
They dart between brick buildings through the compound, the thump of heavy boots never far behind. The traveler keeps his head down and just runs. He’s not confident of his ability to bullshit them. He really needs to learn German, if he can find a book. He keeps running, feet pounding on the ground. His breath is coming hard, and he feels dizzy and weak. What the hell is going on. After a moment, the traveler finds an unlocked door. He and the girl duck inside, shut the door, and stand against it, breathing hard, until the boots pass.
He turns, and investigates the space he now finds himself in. It’s a large brick building. Surprisingly clean, looks almost medical. Two large rectangular tanks sit against one wall. At the other end, there’s a desk, and two large tables, separated by a sheet of stainless steel. A man lies on one of the tables, bathed in light the color of a torch shown through clenched fingers. The traveler feels a sudden chill. Oh no. No. No no no.
The French girl is talking to him, but there just isn’t room right now. He walks across the room to the box, and opens the lid. There’s a man inside. His head is shaved, and he’s strapped down to a stretcher. There’s an oxygen tank, and a glass jar filled with dirty silver smoke, trailing up to a ventilator. Along the sides of the box, the Tesium light boxes are lined up, shining on his body. The traveler stares down as the man in the box takes another breath of aether and oxygen cocktail. He shudders. A patchwork of subcutaneous light spreads through his chest and, a second later, sparks spread through his major ventricles, pooling in his heart, and then go out. He gives a muffled scream. For a second, he nearly looks translucent. Then the light is gone, and he shudders back onto the stretcher with an audible whimper, and coughs up blood into the mask. After a long, long silence, he takes another breath, and the process begins again.
The traveler glanced towards the desk, rigged with a set of dials. A cooling cup of coffee sat on top of it. A stubbed out cigarette was still smoking in the ash tray. The traveler turned towards the door at the far end of the room. Open a crack. The traveler gropes in his pocket for the Beretta. The dog growls. The French girl speaks.
“What is this?”
He shakes his head.
“This? This – I don’t know. It’s not good, though. I think they’re trying to develop aether lamps. I wonder how they found out about QT.”
She stares at him.
“Never mind. Comes on, let’s see if we can’t break some stuff.”
He pulled the aether mask off the man in the box, removed a knife, and cut the leather straps off his body. The man makes no sign of moving, just lies there panting. The traveler systematically begins smashing the Tesium lights, extinguishing the weird glow.
His hand slips under one of the lights, and the traveler’s face contorts in pain. Thick, pasty purple bruises spread across the skin, and blood wells under the nail beds, turning them an ugly redding black. His skin rips in several places. He gives a muffled scream, and jerks his hand back. With his right hand, he picks up a metal hammer from a workbench a few feet away, and awkwardly smashes the remaining lights, keeping his hands out of the light. He feels dizzy, and it’s not just from the hand. He has an awful, hot, sick sensation. He’s sure he’s running a fever.
The French girl stares at him.
“Holy shit. Qu'est-il arrivé à votre main?”
He shakes it off.
“Long story. Come on, éloignez-vous le masque, le, um, aether, est une chose mauvaise.”
She takes a step back. He holds his hand, tries to flex it. The bones aren’t broken, but the tissue damage is extensive. There are numb patches over a lot of it, and the bruises are getting darker. It looks like it was crushed by an industrial press. Well, can’t worry about that now. He loads the Beretta into his right hand, and aims as best he can at the door. It’s close now, very close. She turns, and looks back in the direction of the camp.
“Nous pouvions encore sauver quelques-uns. A few. Il est encore temps.”
But the bubble is already forming around him. He points the gun at the door and smiles at her sadly.
“No, we can’t.”
“Alors je suis désolé. Si vous ne partirez pas, je le ferai.”
She turns away from him and begins to walk towards the door. He stares after her, and watches the air around him start to go opaque. He says, quietly.
“Eh bien, alors je suis désolé aussi.”
And then he’s running. The door slams open behind him. He turns and fires three shots from the pistol. He doesn’t see if any of them hit. He’s on the French girl in three strides. As she starts to pass out the door, he tackles her and the bubble sizzles. A second later, they’re gone. The doctor in the corner, gut shot, stares down at a handful of blood for a long moment. He hears the boots of soldiers coming down the alley. He inspects the man on the table and the hole in the wall near the door. The doctor smiles and spits blood.
“Ich wußte es.”
“Espèce de fils de pute! Vous n'aviez pas le droit de faire cela!”
Her open palm hits his face with a hard meat sound. That’s alright, the traveler is no stranger is being slapped by women. Trying to bed a woman within forty three minutes of meeting her is hazardous, though he’s gotten rather good at it out of necessity. Then the French girl stomps on his feet. The pain sort of whites everything out for a couple of seconds. He hits the ground, and she brings her knee up into his jaw, which causes his teeth to knock together like pebbles.
With a push, he gets her off him, and lies there for a moment. She wanders off and sits down on a rock. The traveler focuses through the pain and shouts after her.
"I saved your life. You don’t think they would have tortured you to death? They’d be breaking out the hot needles and pliers by now.”
With some difficulty, he stands up and dumps the dog out of his coat. It licks his right hand, which tingles unpleasantly. He pets it with his left, then reaches into his coat, and produces a rubber bag, from which he extracts a crumpled piece of paper and a pen. He sits down and writes awkwardly for a while. Then he folds up the paper, slips it into an envelope, and reseals everything into the rubber bag.
He looks over at the French girl. She’s still sitting on the rock. With some care, he begins to limp over to her. He still doesn’t feel well. He feels hot and sick and scared. He shakes his head. He’s scanning the horizon. He isn’t sure where he is. They’re in hills, with thick dark forests. It’s early summer, maybe. Germany, still? Could be a part of Russia. This day just keeps getting better. Another wave of nausea hits him, and he nearly throws up. Beads of sweat stand out on his forehead.
He gets to the girl, ignoring the wet feeling in his boot, and realizes that her shoulders are shaking. The French girl is crying. He sits down next to her and looks out at the horizon. Neither of them says anything for a long while.
“You are a Jew.”
“No.”
“You don’t have to lie to-“
“Not Jewish. Romani.”
“Oh. You don’t look it.”
“Oui.”
She doesn’t look at him. He continues to stare out at the horizon. After a moment, he adds.
“You had family there.”
She doesn’t so much as move.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Thanks.”
And that’s really all there is to say. After taking a drink of water, passing the canteen to the French girl, and looking around for any trace of civilization, the traveler decides it’s time to tend to his wounds. He’s very worried about the foot, and he’s feeling sicker by the minute. He pours most of a packet of sulfa into his glove, and pulls it onto his injured, swollen hand with some difficulty. Then he pulls his boot off with his good hand, and looks at the foot. It’s not good. The toes are swollen, and there’s pus. The smell is less than pleasant. The French girl looks at the foot, and wretches.
“Fuck.”
The traveler pulls out his knife, and sets to work draining some of the pus from the foot. Then he packs it with more sulfa, sterilizes it with alcohol again. He really doesn’t have a lot of hope though, the wound is clearly infected, and it’s getting worse really fast. He’s already been feeling the symptoms, and it'll only get worse over the next few hours. With his luck, the hand will go too, and then he’ll really be fucked. Back in the old days, at the lab hospital, he’d seen a case of blood poisoning. A chill hits him, then a wave of heat.
The French girl looks at him.
“I’m sorry about your foot.”
“Thanks.”
He tries to re-wrap the toes. A breeze touches him, and a wave of cold washes over him. His arms clamp involuntarily to his sides. The adrenaline is wearing off, and shock and sepsis is kicking in. He shivers, then feels hot, then shivers. He tries again, trying to tie the knot around the toes with shaking fingers. He drops the rag.
“Wait. Qu'avez-vous fait là-bas. Avec le hamburger. Je vous remercie pour cela. Cela voulait dire quelque chose. It was good.”
He smiles, and slips off the rock. He pulls himself back upright. A sudden feeling like a punch in the guy reaches him, and his stomach lurches upwards. He shudders, and vomits up hamburger and banana milkshake, which slicks down the hill. The dog runs up and growls, then barks. A cold sweat stands out on his forehead. The French girl comes over to him. She tears a rag from her skirt, and soaks it in water. She wipes his face off with the rag, and then re-binds his toes.
They sit there for a long time, her talking to him in French. He doesn't catch much of it. He just lets the words rush over him. He throws up again. Then his watch dings, and they’re gone. After a while, a fly finds the traveler’s hamburger, and enjoys it immensely.
Part V
Title.
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Sorry to anyone who actually read this. Getting the adds to target on a site like this is... challenging.
Sorry to anyone who actually read this. Getting the adds to target on a site like this is... challenging.
Author's Note:
Here it is. Sorry the formatting's a bit wonky, and it's short, it's final's week and I really should be doing schoolwork.
Here it is. Sorry the formatting's a bit wonky, and it's short, it's final's week and I really should be doing schoolwork.