Authors: Aric Davis
CHAPTER 71
“How long are you going to let her sleep?” Terry asked, and Darryl sighed at the question.
Terry had asked this at least three times, and Darryl was tired of hearing it. The little girl had lost her parents, been kidnapped, and been snapped out of a bend by being yanked out of range. Any one of those things could have shut down the most robust adult for a good long time, and Darryl knew firsthand how painful the last of the three could be.
“We’re going to let her sleep until she wakes up,” said Darryl. “It’s not like there’s some rush to get her up.”
“I know, but we need to switch cars soon. Everybody and their mother is probably on the lookout for us.”
Darryl grimaced. Terry was right. They’d only turned on the radio for a minute, but that was long enough to confirm that the wolves were already out, claiming that he and Terry had killed the two people back at the apartments and had taken a little girl hostage. Darryl hadn’t expected any less, but it was still troubling to hear. As was the fact that the body count only totaled two. The old woman was completely still—how could she possibly be alive?
Darryl felt sick when he thought about the black trucks and van that had passed them on the way to the apartments. They might as well have crawled directly out of his nightmares. And if they were that secret group he’d imagined snapping at their heels, they had to be pretty happy about seeing their net tightening around their prey.
Twisting away from that vision, Darryl looked out the window, and what he saw flashing past made him want to scream. A parked state trooper was sitting in a speed trap, and even though Terry was watching the limit, Darryl knew the cop was going to pull out.
“Shit,” muttered Terry, eyes wide in the rearview.
When Darryl turned, he saw the flashing lights behind them, the siren already starting to wail.
“Pull over,” he said, “and don’t say a word. I’ll do all of the talking.”
Oh fuck
,
thought Darryl,
you are done.
Terry did as Darryl said, and Darryl watched the cop roll up behind them and then shut off the sirens, leaving the lights on to alert other drivers. The cop opened his door slowly and began walking toward them, his semiauto visible in his hand.
“He knows it’s us, Darryl,” said Terry. “He knows who we are, and you need to do something!”
Darryl shoved the cop and the man staggered, and then Darryl hit him again, making his legs march him across the two southbound lanes. The cop made it across both of them but didn’t have the same luck with oncoming northbound traffic. A semi whose driver was insufficiently impressed by the cop car’s flashers across the median came ripping toward him. The driver tried to turn at the last second, and Darryl watched the scene in what felt like slow motion. Its grill suddenly covered in cop and its driver working the wheel with decidedly limited results, the semi slid hard to the far shoulder before lurching back across the road in a horrible overcorrection and then blowing over the median and into oncoming traffic. Another oncoming truck blared its horn, and then the two trucks collided head-on. Their trailers buckled like massive accordions, the cabs all but disappearing between them. The noise of it was louder than anything Darryl had ever heard, the sound of gods fighting, a world war on the highway. Cars began to pile up behind the wreck, minor accidents resulting from the trucking cataclysm, and then Darryl was pounding Terry on the shoulder, begging him, “Drive, drive!”
Terry did as he was told, and a few seconds later they were the only moving car in sight. Good Samaritans from both sides of the highway ran toward the trucks, while less civic-minded motorists could be seen shouting at one another on the side of the gridlocked road. Darryl looked back to stare at the wreck, the sight of it almost as awe-inspiring as the mess at the docks, and then the twin trucks fireballed in a massive explosion. Even across the hundred or so yards they’d put behind them, he felt the hot wind buffet the car. Darryl could see people in the median begin to stand, lucky folks who had been blown clear of the blast.
I bet there are a lot of them who weren’t so lucky
,
thought Darryl. When he looked down at Cynthia, he found the little girl somehow still sleeping.
“You just want me to stay southbound?” Terry asked, startling Darryl into breaking his gaze from the slumbering bender next to him.
“Yeah, keep on south,” said Darryl. “The sooner we’re out of here, the better. At least that mess back there should slow things down.”
“It might,” said Terry, his eyes locking with Darryl’s in the rearview mirror. “They’re going to look at that cop’s dashboard footage, and they’re going to know it was us. I don’t think it matters anymore, but they’re going to know we’re going south.”
“We change trucks, head east once we’re out of this fucking hellhole, and we’re gone.”
“They’re going to catch us, Darryl,” said Terry, sounding somber and oddly calm. “We took it too far when you grabbed that girl. That’s the kind of thing that the media will never let go of. Nothing we do can make that go away, especially when they come up with more ways to tie all of this to us. I don’t want to turn myself in, but I don’t want to die, either.”
“We’re not going to die, and we’re not going to be turning ourselves in.” Darryl was stroking Cynthia’s hair. She was going to make all of this worth it, he knew it.
If she can get in your head, she can do anything.
Darryl could see his friend shaking his head, and though he wanted to remind Terry how this whole mess was started, he kept his mouth shut. There had been too much blood spilled since then to worry about old transgressions.
“Yeah, you’re right,” said Terry. “Just head south. We’ll be fine.”
Darryl frowned at Terry’s bizarre change of heart and then looked at the air between them. He and the girl were bending—
Or weaving, she called it weaving—
Terry without even realizing it. Darryl closed his eyes, relaxed into the seat, and hoped the peace would last for just a few more minutes.
CHAPTER 72
1945
My dream is impossible, for in it I can see.
As I wake, however, I realize that this is no dream. Katarina is kneeling over me, my face grasped in both of her hands, and I can see her as plain as I can see the moonlight through the slats in the timbered walls. I’m frozen there in the hayloft where we have hidden, frozen and waiting for her to say something, to explain my sight the way that she has been able to explain everything else in my life that has never made sense.
“Katarina, what are you doing?” I finally ask her when she doesn’t volunteer the information, but she just clamps my head tighter in her hands, and then I feel her thumb wavering over my neck, dancing there over my throat. Fear races through me, a rocket of terror unlike anything I have felt since Dachau, even when the war was raging around us.
“Our journey is done,” says Katarina. “Your war is over.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, but I know the answer already. The camps have taught me that. Edna Greenberg, my mother, my family—all the dead and nameless, ever-filling pits with their twisted bodies and endless buckets of ash, have taught me never to trust one of these devils. I did, though. I trusted Katarina, and now I am going to suffer for this mistake.
“I mean, I need you, Ora, more than ever before,” says Katarina.
I struggle against her, but the woman has an iron grip, and what I’d mistaken for a slim, almost frail body is actually very powerful.
“Hold still, kike. You need to hold still or things will get very bad for you.”
/ They can’t be any worse /
I send the words like a missile, my lips never wavering as the thought leaves my mind. Katarina felt it, though. I think she expected little Ora to just roll over, do as she wished and then die, but I still have some fight left in me. I am exhausted, weakened from the years in the camp, starving, and dehydrated from our run from Dachau, but there is one thing I have been practicing every day.
Before Katarina can recover from the shock of my scream in her mind, I blast her as hard as I can, shoving her with my mind exactly as she’d been showing me. The second the wave of energy hits her, I lose my vision—it is as if I never had sight at all. Scrambling to my feet, I use what for most would be a second sight but for me is the only sight I ever really had. Katarina is struggling to stand, and I can see her pain in the pulse of her tendrils. Most of them are purple and red, but there are a few black ones, and some of the black ones are dead looking and limp and hang from her like thick braids. As Katarina works her way to her feet, I hit her again, even harder this time, and she shrieks both in my ears and between them.
I fall to my knees at the noise, willing myself to recover more quickly than she does, but as I look up, Katarina is already closing in on me, her threads filling the space between us with an ugly mass of fear and rage. I suck in air, ready myself to shove her again, hopefully to kill this monster and send her to the hellfire that she so rightfully earned, but before I can do so she is on top of me.
Katarina powers me to the ground with a blow from her fist and then a second from her mind—
/ Down /
—and I drop from the force of the combination. Katarina falls near me, begins battering my face with her hands and my head with her voice, that awful rage that threatened to tear my mind in half. I fight back, lifting my hands up, trying to give her another push to send her into the void, but it is too late. One of her hands is on the side of my head, and the other drags something cool across my throat. Numbness overcomes me, numbness so that I can’t feel as much of my own death, but I can still feel my lungs begging for air and hear the screech of my ruined windpipe.
My vision comes back then—the worst time in the world for a blind girl to catch another glimpse of the world—and what I see is far worse than the broken feeling in my mind or the ragged feeling in my throat. Katarina looks like me. No, not good enough: Katarina is me, the exact vision of how I’d always pictured myself as I ran my hands over and over my face. Her eyes are milky white, now she is blind little Ora Rabban, and everything becomes clear. Why she helped me. Why I needed to run with her. Katarina has a special trick.
How many times has she used it?
“More times than you can imagine,” says Katarina. “More times than you want to imagine. Hundreds of times over hundreds of years, but you might have been the sweetest person I’ve tricked.”
I struggle, grabbing for her, but she stands, then unrolls the backpack she’s been carrying and pulls out her uniform.
“Don’t worry, though. I’ll only look like you for a few years, then I’ll need to find someone else.”
Her fingers go to work on me, and the seconds feel like hours. Above me, I can feel the sunlight through the slats in the barn’s worn roof, and I know that she’s taking her time with me, doing everything methodically, and unhurried. The light is fading as she begins to strip me, but as she pulls the Nazi jacket over my head, the last of my energy is gone. She has won, and I am just one more dead Jew in a country that is full of them. As she leaves me to my last breaths, I watch her struggle from the hayloft with her lack of sight, and the last thing I see is Katarina descending the ladder, a smile on her face.
CHAPTER 73
Mrs. Martin woke with a start in a tunnel of a room.
The walls were covered in medical equipment, a good deal of it hooked to her and humming, wheezing, and beeping away, all while red dots and lines flashed and flickered. A man wearing the same odd yet familiar helmet and visor worn by the men in the van passed in front of her, and everything came back. Cynthia’s father, the gun, the kidnapping, and her own trip in the van. The helmeted man passed out of her peripheral vision, and Mrs. Martin attempted to lift an arm and found that it was strapped to the bed. Attempts to move her other arm, legs, and head proved that it wasn’t just the right arm that had been restrained, and Mrs. Martin did the only thing she could think of.
Nothing happened. For the first time since she could remember, Mrs. Martin had tried to leap from her body but nothing happened. The man in the visor and helmet walked in front of her again, a camera dangling from a cord around his neck. He lifted the camera and took a picture, and Mrs. Martin tried to dive into him, an easy task at this proximity, but again nothing happened. The man looked at the back of the camera, then nodded and walked away again.
I’m broken
,
thought Mrs. Martin, and then the door opened at the end of the trailer, and her worst fears were realized.
The raven-haired woman who walked inside was wearing a black jumpsuit and a headset and was unarmed. Mrs. Martin recognized her immediately and was gripped with terror. She had called the police but had never imagined that doing so could bring this upon her.
“Katarina, how have you been?” The woman in the jumpsuit asked the question like she was talking to an old friend, but they weren’t friends, not even close. “You remember me, right? Does the name Jessica Hockstetter ring any bells for you?”
“My name is Henrietta Martin, Miss Hockstetter, and I think you must have the wrong person. I was never called Katarina, not even when I was a child. You must have me confused with someone else—”
“Ora Rabban, I know,” said Jessica. “We’ve done this dance before, Katarina, remember?” Jessica walked over to the man wearing the helmet and took a file from the table he was working on. “Ora Rabban before—poor little Ora, who was so lucky to escape the camps, remember? My predecessor, Sam Claussen, wrote up this report, and I know old Sam would recognize you if he were still with the agency. Hell, I know I do, and we met twenty years after the war. Of course, we didn’t know then that poor little Ora was dead outside of Dachau and that you were actually Katarina Kaufman. Of course, the Mossad prefers the title you enjoyed at Dachau, don’t they?”
“Miss Hockstetter, please. You have me confused with someone else,” said Mrs. Martin. “I have never heard of Ora Rabban or this Katarina Kaufman, and you and I have never met. This is all a misunderstanding, and I will be happy to help you clear it up. You must believe me. I’m just an old woman, but the child I was watching was taken. She—”
“The sooner you cut the bullshit, the sooner we can help her,” said Jessica in a singsong voice. “I want Cynthia Robinson in safe hands as much as you do, although . . .” Jessica paused and then said, “You probably don’t really care all that much that she’s safe.” Jessica flipped open the folder, skimmed a couple of pages, and then stopped and tapped one of the loose sheets of paper. “If you’re back to your old methods—and why change what works?—then she is a TK like you, and you and Cynthia have been using your maps, haven’t you? We’ve worked with a lot of high-level telekinetics, Katarina, but no one can build a map like you. Of course, you had plenty of practice in Dachau and the other camps you were helping to make more efficient, right?”
“My name is not Katarina,” said Mrs. Martin, “and nothing that you say makes any sense. Forget all of this. Just try and find the girl, bring her to safety. She is with a pair of monsters right now, and God knows—”
“From one monster to another,” said Jessica slowly. “That’s the way I see it, and as far as I’m concerned, she’s lucky that she ran into Mr. Livingston when she did. We both know what can happen to a child under your watch.”
“I have never hurt a child in my life,” said Mrs. Martin. “Never. These are lies, all lies, and—”
“Facial recognition software has her at a 99.98999 match,” said the man in the helmet. “Still waiting on DNA, but Hartford will have something for us within the hour.”
“Lovely,” said Jessica. “Do we really need to wait for the DNA, Katarina? You and I both know who and what you are, so let’s cut to the chase. Either you’re going to help us find Cynthia, or I’m going to have you on the first plane to Israel. I don’t think they’d really want to keep you there, but I know they’d love to have you as a guest for at least a little while. Maybe long enough for a trial. That shouldn’t take long, though. Your war crimes are well documented.”
“You need to get her from those men.”
“We will, eventually,” said Jessica, “though with your help we could find her faster.”
“I’ve never had that sort of ability,” said Mrs. Martin. “I am not who you think I am, and my little parlor tricks will do us no good in finding Cynthia.”
“Well, you’re wrong about that, Katarina,” said Jessica. “We had no idea we’d manage to ensnare you in the middle of the sting we were setting up to trap Darryl and Terry, but sometimes things just work out for the best. Now that we have you, we can use your connection with Cynthia to help locate her, and you must have inadvertently drawn the men here as well. Four of you in one place is a godsend, but not likely to happen without a little prodding. Time is of the essence, of course. I’m sure wherever the three of them are moving, they’re headed there as fast as possible.”
“I cannot help you. I’m just an old, lonely widow, not this monster that you have invented.”
“The problem seems to be,” said Jessica, “that you think there’s a chance I’m going to believe you. I assure you I don’t. I don’t need facial-recognition software or a DNA test to know that you’re Katarina Kaufman. You killed Ora Rabban once you were far enough away from the camp that you could steal her identity and attempt to defect. You hid in survivor camps for weeks, and then what happened?”
“I have no idea.”
“You were recognized,” said Jessica. “The Death Angel of Dachau was spotted by some of her former inmates. It took ten years, but eventually you were found, just like so many of the Reich runaways. Oh, they must have been overjoyed to see you carted off, Katarina. But then they would have been sick to learn that the US government wasn’t going to execute or even punish you but instead keep you comfortable and put you to work. It wasn’t a waste—you were very helpful during the Cold War, after all—but then you ran.” Jessica smiled. “You ran, and now we have you again, and if you don’t help me find Cynthia, I’ll see you in Israel by tomorrow night. This is your last chance.”
“What if I help you?” Katarina asked.
“Then you get to live a little longer,” said Jessica. “I don’t want to sugarcoat things, Katarina. You’re a monster, and the US government doesn’t need monsters nearly as much as it did forty years ago.”
“That girl isn’t going to listen to anyone but me,” said Katarina. “If you want her to be a good little angel and do your dirty work, you’re going to need me.” She smiled. “I brought them here to me, the girl and her idiot mother. And the two men, too, though I hadn’t intended to. Too bad for them, but more proof of what I can do. You need me.”
“I guess we’ll have to see about that,” said Jessica, before turning to the man in the helmet and saying, “Get her prepped for REC/RES—the sooner the better.” Jessica smiled at Katarina. “Just remember, this can end badly for you at any time. You play nice, and I will, too. If we get that girl back and you try and corrupt her, I will see that you suffer. The Jews are still hunting people like you, and they are not in the least bit sick of it. If I called Israel, they’d have agents on a plane before I hung up the phone. Are we clear?”
Katarina nodded. The time for lies was over. She was caught back in the web of the TRC.