Return From the Inferno (8 page)

"It was a very hot evening and the wet blanket cooled me considerably. I fell asleep and enjoyed my longest slumber in months, despite my many injuries.

"But when I awoke . . ."

At that point, the man's voice trailed off. Hantz resented the break in the testimony.

"What happened?" he demanded of the man, glancing to make sure his restraining belts were secured to the bottom of the bed. "You awoke and found what?"

The man tried to fight off a bout of tears, but lost the battle.

"I awoke . . ." he said in a halting, raspy voice, "to find that I'd been healed."

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The two enormous oak doors opened slowly to reveal the opulent living quarters of the First Governor.

Two heavily armed Nicht Soldats stood in the doorway, their powerful CETME

G3-J rifles up and ready as always. Between the soldiers stood two teenage girls. Both were dressed scantily. One was wearing the tightest of bikinis. It looked small against her young, well-developed body. The other was clad only in a T-shirt and high heels, an unlikely combination that nevertheless showed off her alluring, if petite, figure.

The two girls had been selected from the vast pool of "talent," that was always available to the First Governor and the top officers of his high command. They'd been sufficiently liquored up and each had been given a codeine tablet for passivity. Exactly what awaited them depended solely on what the First Governor's substantially deviant imagination was conjuring up at the moment.

The soldiers nudged the two girls forward, escorting them across the vast room and toward the pillow filled corner which was known as the First Governor's so-called "recreation area."

The Fourth Reich high commander was sitting on his throne-like chair poring over a ream of paper as the girls and their escorts approached. Lost in the sea of documents was the Daily Situation Report, a written summary of the previous

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day's activities within Bundeswehr Four. It carried three main items-one was a preliminary report which indicated that the crashed air pirate jumbo jet was probably shot down by unknown forces. Another reported an air strike by forces unknown on the city of Cleveland, which was now a major manufacturing center for parts and ammunition for the Fourth Reich's gigantic terror gun, the Schrecklichkeit Kanones.

The third item was a report on a so-called special prisoner who escaped from one of the work farms over the night. The man, who had been sentenced to death by crucifixion only to have his execution botched, had been recovering on a work farm to the north. He'd somehow managed to sneak out of the heavily guarded camp and was now the subject of a massive search. He'd left behind a note indicating that his purpose of escape was not a flight to freedom.

Rather, he wanted a private audience with the First Governor.

Despite the potential implications of all three reports, the First Governor had barely given them a cursory glance.

He was too busy drawing pictures.

A small, moleish man, dressed in the uniform of a Fourth Reich propaganda officer, was uncomfortably perched on a huge satin pillow below and to the left of the large chair. He was surrounded with a myriad of artist's supplies-crayons, rulers, French curves, several large erasers-as well as a sea of crumpled pieces of paper.

"Excuse us, sir," one of the Nicht Soldats said with a sharp salute. "I believe you requested these visitors?"

The First Governor barely looked up.

"Can either of you two men draw?" he asked, his voice unnaturally restrained and struggling in English. "With pen or ink?"

The soldiers looked at each other briefly and both gave nonmilitary shrugs.

"No, sir," came the crisp reply to the odd question. "You are in need of an artist?"

"I have an artist," the First Governor declared, nodding toward the moleish man; his voice regaining some of its former voracity. "I need someone who can draw."

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There was a confused silence as the mole man shifted even more uneasily in his pillow seat, scattering some of his artist's crayons in the process. It was obvious that the First Governor had desired his illustrative talents for a specific purpose but that the man was missing the mark. Perhaps dangerously so. The tension was only sharpened by the roar of two Fourth Reich Jaguars taking off from the Aerodrome's auxiliary runway, barely a half mile from the Reich Palast.

Once the roar died down, the uneasy silence returned to the huge room. It was broken finally by an unlikely source.

"I can draw," the young girl in the T-shirt and high heels said, her voice sounding very unsure and barely above a whisper.

The First Governor looked up for the first time and examined both girls. Then he turned to the propaganda officer.

"Please supply her with a pen and paper," he told the man in German. "And then everyone else is dismissed."

The officer did as told, and then joined the pair of NS men and the relieved bikini-clad young girl as they briskly exited the room.

"If I tell you a vision, can you draw it for me?" the First Governor asked the young girl, his heavily accented German sounding nearly incomprehensible.

She nodded bravely if uncertainly. "I can try."

The First Governor smiled and gently stroked her light brown hair.

"Sit," he said, gently prodding her to her knees right in front of him. "Let us see how good you are."

As the young girl took pen and paper in hand, the First Governor leaned back in his regal chair, closed his eyes, and wet his lips.

"The other night, I saw a ghost. . . ." he began.

Twenty minutes later, the young girl was putting the finishing touches on her drawing.

"Let me see it," the First Governor ordered her, his impatience getting the best of him.

She slowly turned the piece of paper over and held it out before her.

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The First Governor was at once delighted. It was all there. The apparition of Finn MacCool, almost hovering above his bed. The midnight dark clothes. The strange black helmet beneath the hood.

"Perfect!" the First Governor declared, taking the drawing from the girl with the care and sensitivity of someone handling a Van Gogh. "You have captured it completely."

The young girl smiled.

"You are now my official illustrator," the First Governor told her, never taking his eyes off the eerily accurate drawing. "You will live here with me, and you will draw what I see in my dreams."

The young girl didn't know what to say.

"What is your name?" he asked her.

"Seventy-three," she replied.

"I mean your real name," he said, for the first time taking his eyes off the drawing. "Your given name . . ."

The girl shrugged sadly. "I don't remember."

The First Governor squinted slightly. An unlikely bolt of compassion ran through him. He actually felt sorry that the young girl could not even remember her name.

"From now on you are Bridgett," he declared, looking down at her as a grandfather might his first granddaughter. "And from now on, you have nothing to worry about."

Outside the Reich Palast, at the small concrete building that served as the main guard post for the palatial seat of the occupying government, a man boldly approached two sentries. He was shirtless, thin, and wearing only tattered socks on his feet. He had red hair and a bare hint of a beard. His face was dirty, with long tracks in the grime made by a recent onslaught of tears.

"I must talk with the First Governor," the man told the grimfaced soldiers.

Already in bad temper due to the searing heat and their heavy wool uniforms, the NS guards simply ignored him.

"I must see him," the strange man insisted. "Now."

"Leave, sputnik, or we will shoot you," one of the guards barked at him in thick, German tortured English.

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"If you do not let me see him, it will be you who are shot," the man insisted.

The soldiers lowered their G3 barrels and pointed them directly at the man's heart. They'd summarily executed others for less.

"Even if you shoot me," the man began, somewhat cryptically, "I will still live."

"We shall see," one of the guards interrupted, his finger wrapping tightly around the rifle's trigger.

"I have met the man of water," the strange man went on.

The words froze both soldiers. They knew the First Governor was on an almost religious quest to find a "man of water." Everyone inside Bummer Four did.

Indeed, the day before, their entire guard company had spent 18 hours walking from house to house inside the city, asking citizens if they'd seen or heard about a man in their midst who might be able to perform some rather incredible feats. With each question, they were either answered with blank, confused stares and just a slow shaking of the head. (The real story, the citizens whispered when the guards were gone, was that the First Governor was quickly going mad.)

Now this strange man was claiming he might hold a key to the First Governor's frantic, bizarre search.

"What proof do you have?" one of the NS demanded.

The man stared at both of them for a moment. Off in the distance, two Mirage fighters were coming in for a noisy landing. One at a time, the man turned the palms of his hands up and displayed them for the soldiers. Each one had a huge scar in its center, scabbed over but obviously healing quickly. The man then kicked off his battered socks and revealed similar wounds on his feet.

"Who are you?" the other soldier asked him.

The man smiled broadly.

"Who do I look like?" he replied.

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The Wabash River was flowing easily in the midafternoon summer sun.

Fitzgerald looked up from his position on the near bank to see two of his young students dive into the small pool of calm water close to the shade of the bridge.

"Look out for them now!" he called out to the two oldest students, both of whom were eleven years old. They were his lieutenants in supervising this rare outing for his schoolkids. "We don't want them to be swept away."

Although there was little actual danger of that, the two older kids waded into the shallow water of the natural pool and stationed themselves between the younger kids and the deeper Wabash. His mother hen instinct thus sated, Fitz lay back down on his blanket and took another sip of wine.

He'd been planning this outing for two weeks, knowing it would be a cure for restlessness among his twenty little charges. He'd told the NS officer in charge of reeducation within Bummer Four that the purpose of the field trip was to collect samples of "wild vegetables," with which to start a garden in back of the schoolhouse. Someday, he told the officer, the garden might provide vegetables for each kid, an attempt at resource-saving efficiency that nearly brought a tear to the fascist officer's eye.

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That fact that Fitzgerald didn't even know if there was such a thing as wild vegetables had no bearing. The NS officer not only approved the trip, he allowed Fitz the use of an old beat-up military truck to transport the twenty young students.

So now here they were, jumping and splashing in the cool Wabash just like kids had done for generations.

Fitz didn't want them to see him imbibing so he had skillfully disguised his wine bottle to look like a simple water container. He took another long slug and then closed his eyes. The woman down the road who sold him his homemade wine had done an especially good job this time. Though she could have strained it better, its alcohol content was about double her normal wares, something Fitz was too polite to complain about.

In the midst of the gathering wine buzz, he searched for a tidbit of relaxation somewhere in the back of his mind. But there was none to be found.

Even on this perfect summer day, with his extended family of youngsters enjoying themselves immensely and another two wine bottles back in his hut, Fitz could not find one iota of peace. Instead, his thoughts were filled with the unexplainable incidents of the past few days. The two people in the river.

The wounded sputnik from Gary. The man hanged on the cross.

How could these things possibly be happening to him? Could there be only one answer?

Could he be going mad?

They heard them before they saw them.

It was just a low, dull tone at first; somewhere, way off in the distance, behind the trees, back toward Bummer Four.

But the noise steadily grew, expanding into the mechanical timbres. Soon it was so loud, it was competing with the trickling of the Wabash and the rush of the wind through the nearby trees.

The kids heard it all at once, and right away they were concerned. Fitz stood up, and from his perch atop the riverbank, circled around in all directions, trying to see anything that

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might be associated with the growing noise.

"Look!" someone yelled. "Up there!"

The twenty kids and Fitz all looked toward the southeast to see the sky filled with menacing black dots. As they watched, the dots began growing bigger, and the noise got louder. By this time, the kids were running out of the water, their concern growing by the second. Now, running up the bank, they huddled around Fitz, shivering slightly in the sudden cool breeze, wondering what was happening.

Fitz watched with increasing trepidation as the aerial dots turned into helicopters. At least ten of them, all heading their way. The screech of their engines was now loud enough that the youngest of the young kids were crying.

Fitz tried to gather them all closer to him, praying -literally praying-that the chopper force would simply pass right over them, on its way to some far-off, undetermined site.

But soon enough, Fitz knew they were heading right for the bridge.

Thirty seconds of their ear-splitting roar and the first of the two choppers was circling high above them. These were the OH-58Ds, a scout and command aircraft. The next chevron consisted of seven UH-60 Blackhawks, traditionally gunships and troop carrying copters. Bringing up the rear, even more ominously was a UH-1 Huey medivac copter.