Blood of Vipers (6 page)

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.

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 barn 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.

“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.”

“No, I’m not. Not this time.”

“Shh,” she said in a soothing tone, as if he
were the baby.
“That is good. You come down. Where it is safe, yes?”

He let her lead him to the head of the
stairs. Women rushed
up and held out their hands for him, pleading, begging for him
to come
downstairs. One woman took her daughter of perhaps ten or
eleven, and pushed
her forward, as if insisting that he look, forcing him to
imprint the child in
his mind.

It worked. He couldn’t do it, couldn’t leave
them.

“Okay,” he told Greta. “But first I’m going
to put up my
surrender flag, so the Russians can find us.”

“No, you must not.”

“Yeah, really I got to do it. They’ll find us
anyway. I want
it clear ahead of time that we’re surrendering. And when they
come I’ll tell
them I’m American. That’ll stop them, at least for a minute.
They’ll get an
officer, and then...well, I hope I’ll be able to keep you safe
until I
reestablish contact with the U.S. Army.” He looked down at the
child in his
arms and held her out. “Can someone take her, please?”

A woman with sad, dark eyes held out her
hands for the baby
girl. Grateful, he bent and handed her down into the cellar.

“Come on,” he said to Greta. “Give me a hand.
It will go
quicker with two.”

She followed him around to the front of the
house, where Cal
pulled out the sheet he’d taken from the clothesline, still
tucked under his
arm, and gave her one half. “We’ll climb onto the rubble and
spread it out as
wide as we can.”

“Would it be good idea to write something on
the sheet?”

“How do you mean?”

“Do not shoot, maybe?”

“Good idea, but I don’t have anything—” he
began, but she’d
already let go of her half of the sheet and ran around the
corner of the
destroyed house.

She came back with a bottle of ink. “I saw
this earlier. I
could not find a pen.”

“Good thinking, and forget the pen. We don’t
need it.”

They spread the sheet on the ground and Cal
dipped his thumb
in the ink and wrote in big letters.

DO NOT SHOOT

AMERICAN SOLDIER WITH PRISONERS

When he finished, he stared at the sheet,
worried it
wouldn’t do any good. Forget English, the Russians didn’t even
use the same
alphabet. They wouldn’t know this from German.

He had an idea. He freshened the ink on his
thumb, and then
sketched a big rectangle below his surrender message, with stars
in the upper
left corner of the rectangle and stripes across the rest. When
he finished, he
had a fairly good approximation of an American flag in black and
white.

Cal and Greta scrambled up the side of the
ruins, over empty
window frames, charred mattresses, and broken slate shingles.
They spread the
flag on the north-facing side, toward the road and the battle,
and pinned down
the corners with piles of broken slate until the ends stopped
flapping in the
breeze.

Greta climbed down, but Cal hazarded a glance
across the
fields before following. Dense columns of smoke sat in a row in
the direction
of the road, which he couldn’t see through the hedges and
windbreaks of trees.
The sky had an acrid smell like burning rubber. Flakes of ash
spiraled down
like gray snowflakes. The last wall of the burning barn
collapsed with a crash.

When they returned to the cellar, Cal looked
for the woman
who had taken the baby. She sat in the corner, dress slipped off
one shoulder,
nursing. The baby lay still and placid as she ate, eyes closed,
and mouth
moving rhythmically. The implication hit him—the woman was ready
to nurse, yet
had no child with her except the one he’d given her.

Helgard gathered Greta and pulled her down,
and then helped
Cal shut the bulkhead doors.He sank to his haunches in one
corner to watch the
women and their children through the shafts of light that
penetrated the broken
flooring above them. Four women, three teenage or nearly teenage
girls. A
toddler with a bandage around the eyes. The nursing baby. And a
single boy, who
looked about nine. Plus Helgard and Greta, of course.

He’d never seen a more miserable-looking
group in his life,
and it struck him as unfair that now, at the end, the men who
had started the
war were dead, dying, prisoners, and here were their wives and
children,
waiting for the final, cruelest cut of the scythe. These people
had nothing to
do with this war; couldn’t it leave them be?

But no, that wasn’t quite right, was it? The
war didn’t
start in a vacuum, and women had their place in enforcing the
natural order.
Back home, when a young man failed to show the proper
enthusiasm, girlfriends,
sisters, mothers, even elderly women in the street joined forces
to heap scorn
until the young man did his duty and enlisted. How much worse
would it be here,
under the oppressive boot of a fascist regime?

Women had lifted their hands in the Nazi
salute, had taught
their sons about national honor and hatred of Slavs and Jews.
And Cal had no
doubt that women had stood by silently while the Gestapo rounded
up anyone who
dared stand against the regime.