Blood of Vipers Read online

  She spoke to her father. “Vater says fifteen kilometers.”

  “That far? Fifteen kilometers is what? Nine miles? That’s a long time to steer clear of your friends with guns.” He turned it over in his mind. “No choice, I guess. We’ll make a run for it, and then hide until night.”

  “And we must worry about the Tiefflieger, too.”

  “Tieff-what?”

  Her father made buzzing sound like an aircraft and then held out both his index fingers, pistol-style, and let out a machine gun rattle.

  “Ah. I don’t think the... Tiefflieger are going to bother us today. Not with the Russians breathing down our throats. Come on, let’s move it.”

  #

  Minutes later, Cal found himself wedged between an empty trunk, two sacks of potatoes, and another of onions, with clothes smothering him from above. Hans-Peter grunted and picked up the handles of the cart, which he dragged around the back of the house and toward the main road.

  Soon, Cal heard the sound of other refugees. They trudged along, coughing, and speaking quietly in German. Dozens of voices, perhaps hundreds. The clomp of hooves every few minutes, and the crunch of wheels, but mostly feet. He pictured the sluggish current of refugees in his mind’s eye, imagined the target they would present to a callous pilot like the Brit in the Spitfire yesterday. Or to the vanguard of the Soviet army, hungry for revenge for the brutal actions of the Germans on the Eastern Front.

  He was uncomfortable back here, feet tucked up, the wool blankets smothering him in the rising heat of day, the oppressive smell of onions, and the wooden wheels jarring on every rock and rut. The pace was maddeningly slow; from the sounds of it, the river was flowing around them, passing them. About an hour later, the wounded caught up to them—women moaning from the backs of creaking carts, a child screaming and a mother trying to comfort.

  “Mein Gott,” Greta muttered after the child had passed. Then, in a low voice in English, “You are better in there. The things I am seeing. You cannot imagine.”

  Cal could imagine plenty of awful things, lying beneath the blankets, with only dim sunlight and shadows breaking through to where he hid. And a few minutes later another cart passed, this one filled with several screaming children. The conversations of the refugees died until it was out of earshot.

  And then Cal heard a sound that chilled him even more than the cries of the wounded. A truck came rumbling from the west, moving opposite the flow of refugees, toward the front. Even before he heard the man shouting and yelling, he knew they were German troops.

  A horse clopped, then stopped with a snort. A man’s voice called down in German. Hans-Peter answered back, his tone timid. A response that sounded like an order. Someone grabbed the handcart, twisted it sideways, and dragged it toward the side of the road.

  7.

  Cal drew his Colt .45 as they dragged the cart toward the side of the road. The Russian rifle lay by his side. He would sell his life dearly. And drag out the gun battle if he could. Maybe in the chaos Greta and her parents could escape into the crowd.

  The cart dropped to the ground again and the blankets settled around him. A touch of breeze on his face and a crack of light through the blankets. A figure in a gray uniform moved through the sliver of light and Cal caught his breath. It was Little Hitler.

  The SS officer shouted at Hans-Peter, who answered back in a compliant tone. Cal moved his head a fraction of an inch, and they came into view. No sight of Greta or Helgard.

  To his credit, Hans-Peter stood straight in front of the Nazi, even though it made him look down at the shorter man as if with an insolent manner. He offered papers, and then turned his gaze straight ahead. The other man looked at them, let out a single bark of a laugh, and tossed the papers to the ground.

  Cal guessed the papers were Hans-Peter’s permission to stay with his wife and daughter, instead of throwing away the life of the sole remaining male of the family. Bad eyes, and all that. Those were yesterday’s orders, the other man seemed to say. Today you die for your country.

  Confirming Cal’s guess, Little Hitler snapped an order and a younger soldier came forward with a jacket and one of the long pipe-like antitank guns Cal had seen at the last village. What was it Greta called them? Panzerfausts. One shot and then you tossed aside the launch tube.

  While the officer shouted at him, Hans-Peter stripped off his brown farmer’s coat and put on the gray jacket given him. While he buttoned it up, the younger soldier showed him how to pull the lever on the panzerfaust to ignite the propellant. Cal wasn’t sure, but he thought the young man might be the same one who had escaped from the fight with the partisans at the ruined castle.

  No sign of Helgard or Greta. No protests as their husband and father took his single-shot weapon and stood at attention on the road, forehead bandaged and bloody, yet ready to march back the way they came to die or face capture by the end of the day. Or sooner, when the Nazis discovered the living contraband the farmer had been hiding in his handcart.

  By now, the women would be lost in the crowd. They might escape. That was something.

  More men appeared on the road. Cal knew he should shrink back into the blankets, before

  someone glanced at the abandoned cart and noticed the eye staring back at them, observing. But he was transfixed by what he saw.

  Men kept coming. First five, then ten, finally two dozen or more. Old men, bandaged men, boys as young as eleven or twelve. Little Hitler lined them up, shouted at them to stand straight, had his young adjutant give them gray jackets and weapons: panzerfausts, rifles, a pistol to an elderly man who was missing one arm from the elbow down. He needed help buttoning and buckling his jacket.

  They stood at attention while more men arrived. An airplane roared overhead—the engine told Cal it was a Russian Yak-9—but the men didn’t flee the road, and the plane ignored them. A distant explosion rolled through the air and made the ground shudder. Gunfire in the distance. The thump of mortars. And still Little Hitler waited while men and boys joined his slowly-forming company.

  Damn him, what is he waiting for?

  Any moment and the battle would be upon them.

  It was another twenty minutes before Little Hitler decided he had enough. There were several dozen new conscripts by now, gathered by two other soldiers who came and went. Whenever the pair left, only the single officer and the young soldier remained to keep them in line. Why did the newcomers obey? There was no point in this, no final defense to throw back the enemy. Every one of them must know that by now. Americans poured by the hundreds of thousands across the Rhine and through the heart of Germany. The Soviets surrounded Berlin, bombarding it with artillery and Katyusha rockets. A seething mass of troops gathered for the final, bloody assault.

  It was so simple. Stop fighting. Just stop. Throw down their weapons and return to their families. Why wouldn’t they do it?

  Little Hitler strutted back and forth in front of this final reserve. He barked orders, commanded them to stiffen their resolve and do their duty. Cal didn’t understand a word, but the meaning was as clear as if he’d spoken German since birth.

  Now listen up! Last defenders of the Reich, protectors of the realm. They are monsters you face, not men. Beasts whipped forth from the pits of Hell. Show them no mercy, for they will show none to you. You are all that stands between the Aryan race and final destruction. Now go, march forward for glory and honor. For the Führer!

  Little Hitler snapped the disgusting Nazi salute and the men did their duty and responded in kind. They marched out of sight of Cal’s peephole. Last in line was Hans-Peter. He stared at the boots of the man ahead of him, shoulder slumped under his panzerfaust, as if he were carrying the weight of his own coffin. A moment later he was out of sight.

  The officer and the younger soldier turned to the handcart, as if only now noticing it by the side of the road. Cal shrank back within the blankets. His hand tightened on the pistol. He was dead anyway, so it was Little Hitler first, no matter what. With any
luck, the man would meet his eye in that split second before the bullet took him in the chest. And he would know that the American pilot had got the best of him.

  But they didn’t pull back the blankets. Instead, they grabbed the handles of the handcart and gave it a push. The wheels resisted, then rolled backward, picking up momentum. The cart bounced on a rock, shimmied to one side, and flipped over. The empty crate slammed into Cal’s ribs and the lip of the cart came down on his thigh. He flinched in pain.

  He’d only half flown out of the cart, and with blankets and clothing on and around him, he could scarcely believe his luck. He was still covered. They hadn’t even searched the contents of the cart. Yesterday they would have, no doubt. No time today. Not with the enemy only a few miles up the road. The only thing Little Hitler and his pals cared about was rounding up every male in the mass of refugees—young, old, infirm, injured—pressing a weapon into their hands, and moving them out to slow the enemy juggernaut a few more minutes.

  Cal remained motionless. He couldn’t see or hear Little Hitler, but he didn’t think the man had marched to the front with the new recruits. Instead, he guessed the officer and his adjutant had remounted their horses and ridden back up the column of refugees to gather more boys and old men. And somewhere nearby would be more soldiers, moving supply carts with uniforms and weapons. He didn’t dare climb out.

  But he didn’t dare stay under the cart, either. A shell exploded a few hundred feet up the road and women screamed. A heavy machine gun started a long, angry snarl and the small arms fire was nearer now, no more than a half mile distant.

  But the clothing muffled sound, and he had a hard time deciphering everything he was hearing. A clank and a rumble. Some thumping explosion, either close and small or distant and massive.

  A hiss, like a rush of gas, and then an explosion up the road. A panzerfaust? If so, then the battle...

  Even as this thought came into his head, shells rained down on his position with a sudden fury. Something thudded against the overturned cart, followed by a low moan on the other side. Other feet pounded down the hillside and past him.

  Cal couldn’t stand another moment. He tucked his legs underneath him and heaved. The cart flipped onto its side and he squirmed out.

  A massive black tank with a red star painted on the side inched down the road above him, not more than seventy yards distant. Rolling west along the road, it crushed overturned carts beneath its tread, and flattened dead and dying bodies. The machine gunner atop swept his gun back and forth across the road. Half a dozen dirty, exhausted-looking Russian soldiers walked in the protective shadow of the tank, and occasionally lifted their rifles to fire past the tank at targets farther up the road.

  Cal prepared to dive back behind the overturned cart, but at that moment one of the soldiers turned in his direction, casually watching the women and children fleeing in screaming terror from the battle on the road. He spotted Cal, pointed, and shouted.

  Cal lifted his hands. “Amerikanski!” His voice sounded hoarse and weak against the clank and roar of battle. “I am an Amerikanski! Don’t shoot!”

  The machine gun atop the tank swung in his direction. Light flared from the muzzle.

  8.

  Bullets tore into the overturned cart and chewed up the dirt around him.

  But the same moment the machine gun began its attack, light flashed against the front of the tank and there was a thumping explosion. The tank shuddered, and the machine gunner atop flinched back behind the blast shield.

  They must have seen that Cal was unarmed, because their attention turned to the attack from the front. Their guns snapped at the unseen German attacker.

  A man suddenly leaped out from some hidden spot, armed with a panzerfaust. It hissed and the projectile on the end zipped forward and detonated against the front of the tank, which shook again, but didn’t stop rolling. The German soldier fell under a flurry of bullets.

  Cal didn’t wait to see what happened next. He left the Russian rifle and joined the women and children fleeing from the road across the unplowed fields. Screaming, injured civilians lay scattered across the ground, while dozens more pushed and shoved to get free of the mob. Young girls, women dragging children. A shell landed in their midst with an ear-shattering explosion, and sprayed a geyser of dirt into the air.

  A woman fell in front of him, back a bloody mess. He kept running and leaped to clear her body. As he did, he saw her baby, dropped to the ground and rolling away from its dead mother. He twisted midair to avoid coming down on its head.

  The baby looked up at him as he regained his balance. A girl, no older than three or four months, eyes wide, too stunned to scream. Uninjured. A bit of milk sat at the corner of her mouth, as if she’d been nursing only moments ago, before the terrified flight from the road.

  If only he hadn’t noticed the milk. Why did he have to see that?

  The ground shook again and a shadow darkened the sky, the Yak-9 roaring back overhead. Before he could give it another thought, he grabbed the baby and tucked her into the crook of his arm like a fullback scooping up a football. The baby found her voice.

  But he scarcely noticed the screaming above the din and through the thump of his own pounding heart. A shell exploded nearby, and the concussion threw him to the ground. Somehow, he managed to cradle the baby as he fell. When he got up, the world sounded distant, like he was listening to the battle from the bottom of a drum.

  Even carrying the baby and hobbling on a weakened ankle, Cal quickly outpaced the refugees. And soon, the battle itself. He kept running for another fifteen minutes, pushing through hedgerows and windbreaks, until he crossed into another farm and found two sheep grazing by themselves in a field, oblivious to the Soviet planes roaring overhead and the artillery blasts a mile or two behind them.

  Cal slowed to a walk. He cradled the baby in two arms and rocked it. Poor thing was red-faced and drawing in shuddering gasps.

  “There, you’re all right. Shh.”

  His voice sounded strangely muffled, and he touched his right ear. Sound was fuzzy on that side, but thank God he didn’t appear to be deaf. And there was no blood anywhere on his body, no injury except for the throbbing ankle from the initial plane crash.

  It was time to approach the Russians. He only had to find a way to surrender and explain that he was an American while not under fire. And then hope he didn’t fall into the hands of the combat swine. At least he was no longer responsible for a pretty girl and her unfortunately attractive mother. Only this child, and surely the bastards wouldn’t injure a baby. Not when they had to look into that tender, innocent face.

  He followed a footpath through the meadow and past the sheep, who lifted their heads to watch him. “Dumb beasts. You’ll be roast mutton by dinnertime.”

  #

  Cal heard the crackling fire of the burning barn before he came around the hedgerow and saw the flames shooting skyward. No sign of who or what had set it ablaze.

  A few hundred feet away, the farmhouse itself lay in a heap of blackened beams and windows blown into scattered diamonds of glass. The chimney still stood, and there was a spot excavated from the ruin, where someone had pulled away rubble as if to search for an injured party before abandoning the property.

  He avoided the burning barn and warily approached the farmhouse, bending beneath a clothesline that still held the wash, blowing in the breeze. The baby, now settling down, reached out a hand and grabbed a sock in her fist as they passed underneath.

  “Don’t chew it up too much. It may be doubling as a diaper if I don’t get rid of you soon.”

  Which was a good point. He scanned the clothesline to find an actual diaper, and his eyes settled on a white sheet, and that gave him an idea of how to solve the more urgent question of the safest way to surrender to the Russians. He pulled off the sheet and lifted it to his nose. It smelled like smoke.

  A loud crack sounded to Cal’s rear, and he started, but it was only the center beam of the burning bar
n collapsing into the flames. A cloud of sparks burst skyward.

  He tucked the sheet under his arm, and then moved around the ruined house to the spot where rescuers had dragged away broken boards and chunks of plaster to form a pile next to the chimney.

  He was looking for a standing wall, where he could make a little hiding place that might last until evening and then through the night. Come morning, the battle would have pushed past—hell, the entire war might be over at this pace—and he could come out waving the white sheet in one hand and holding out the baby with the other.

  But instead, he saw a bulkhead door in the center of the cleared rubble that led from the outer foundation into a cellar. Why the cellar? Not to rescue an injured family member, he thought, but maybe to scavenge food. In any event, the cellar would be a perfect place to hide, especially if he could conceal the bulkhead doors.

  He set the baby to one side, bent, and heaved open the heavy wooden bulkhead doors with a crash. White, dirty faces looked up at him, together with half a dozen pairs of eyes that blinked from the darkness. He flinched in alarm.

  “Cal?” a voice said. “Is that you?”

  He looked closer. It was Greta. And her mother. And several other women.

  Their faces shined with new hope, and they looked at him as if he were their savior.

  9.

  “Oh, no,” Cal said. “I can’t. I’m done, I’m going to surrender to the Russians, soon as I figure out how to do it without getting shot.”

  The baby fussed where he’d set her, and he picked her up to rock in his arms, the motion automatic by now. The women chattered in excited, almost manic German, and he followed their train of thought from the fussing baby, to the soothing gesture, to the implication that Cal was a softie, that this American wouldn’t abandon them when they were so desperate.

  He started to back away.

  Greta ran up the stairs after him. “Please, you must stay. You must.” She flinched as an airplane roared overhead. “The Frontschweine will find us here. You are the only one who can save us.”