Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (36 page)

Klaus rematerialized. Stumbled over the doctor’s body. Howled. Spun. His gaze paused on Marsh for an instant, just long enough to recognize him, but Gretel and Kammler were the targets of his rage.

“You sick bitch! And you, you fucking retard.
What have you done
?”

He rushed them.

Marsh pointed. To Kammler, he said, “Crush.”

*

Gretel’s bombers had arrived at Coventry. Stealth was out of the question now. I left the headlamps on and drove like a demon while the Luftwaffe unleashed hell behind me.

The bombers came in waves, the heavy thrum of their engines creating a basso profundo counterpoint to the hysterical soprano shriek of the sirens and kettledrum percussion of ack-acks. This wasn’t a routine bombing run. They’d come to pulverize the city, burn it to ash, salt the earth. They’d come to redraw the map.

Gretel wasn’t taking chances. She was thorough. And who was I but a scarred and sweaty madman railing against the woman who twirled history around her fingers like so much yarn?

Explosions like flashbulbs strobed the night and shook the earth. Thunder rolled over me. The steering wheel danced in my hands, tried to shake free of my grip.

On I drove.

*

The farmhouse disintegrated.

Klaus disappeared into a cyclone of debris. So did the floor, wall, and ceiling behind him. The agitated yelling became screams of panic, shrieks of the injured.

The blow from Kammler’s Willenskräfte tore through wood and glass and stone with equal ease, squeezed the shattered pieces together, then flung them apart like confetti.

It didn’t disturb one hair on Marsh’s head.

Cold night air swirled around him. Overhead, beyond the missing ceiling, a faint cloudy halo wreathed the moon. Firelight shone on the training field. Kammler shivered. The floor shifted underfoot. One of the doctor’s bookcases toppled into the jagged hole where the floor had been, followed by the chair Marsh had used to barricade one door.

A handful of mundane soldiers—those who hadn’t been standing where Kammler had smashed part of the balcony to flinders—burst into the room.

“Crush,” said Marsh. And Kammler did. An invisible, impenetrable wall punched down from the sky like the fist of God. It slammed down on the men and most of the farmhouse behind them, crushing three stories of farmhouse into a volume not two feet tall. Kammler swung his open mouth toward Marsh, wanting another peppermint stick.

Gretel yelled, “Raybould!”

Searing heat rolled over them. Kammler mewled. Marsh glimpsed Reinhardt blazing with fire and fury. But then the devastated farmhouse shifted again, and the floor lost its fight against gravity. It tossed the trio into the hole. Marsh lost sight of Reinhardt.

He landed on what was left of the floor of Heike’s room. Kammler slammed atop him, hard enough to bruise bone and empty lungs. Gretel landed on the mattress and bounced daintily to her feet.

Kammler wailed. He rocked back and forth, crying.

Marsh couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t get his lungs to work, not with Kammler rolling on top of him. He’d been pierced by debris in a dozen places, and something in his chest was fractured. He looked to Gretel. Her face shrank at the end of a dark tunnel. Above him, the ragged remains of the doctor’s study burned like a torch. The fire had no shortage of debris on which to feed, and an open sky from which to breathe. It inched downwards.

Gretel took Kammler by the hands. The large man rolled away from her, which made the pain still worse, but it freed Marsh. Air trickled into his lungs. The spasms in his chest stopped, and he sucked down a lungful of breath in one explosive inhalation. Razor-sharp pain in his ribs threatened to flay Marsh wide open.

Night became day. All around them, klieg lights bathed the Reichsbehörde in stark white brilliance. The light streamed through the void where Heike’s outer wall had been. So, too, did shouts, screams, orders. LSSAH troops scurried back and forth. Pabst was there, shivering in the cold without his topcoat. Under his orders, the soldiers took positions in a loose line surrounding the farmhouse.

The colonel called for Buhler. The captain and the colonel’s brief discussion ended with Buhler running toward the farmhouse. They recognized the pattern of destruction. Perhaps they lacked a complete picture of the situation, but they certainly knew Kammler’s work when they saw it.

Marsh stood, then took Kammler’s arm over his shoulder again. The mentally deficient man left a thick red smear on everything he touched. Gretel’s ribbons had come undone in the fall.

“Hold him up,” said Marsh. He slipped off his belt, flipped it around Kammler’s leg, and pulled until the large man cried. It wouldn’t hold forever, but it was better than the ribbons. Tears and snot traced wet trails down Kammler’s face. His skin had gone gray.

“Get us outside.”

They couldn’t demolish the rest of the house from inside. Any one of them, or all three of them, could have been impaled on debris in the fall. Another blow from Kammler was likely to bring the rest of the burning structure down on their heads.

“G-g-g—” Kammler mumbled to himself. “T-t-t-t.”

Gretel led. Kammler—shivering, weeping, and limping—was a heavy burden. Marsh pushed as hard as he dared, but he couldn’t move very quickly while supporting the confused telekinetic. It would have been impossible to descend the servants’ stair side by side, but Kammler’s assault had torn away several load-bearing members, so the stairs now sloped away from the remains of one interior wall. It made the stairwell precarious but passable.

The damaged house fell apart around them. Overstressed timbers creaked and snapped; warped windowpanes spat shards of glass. They passed the doctor’s laboratory, the incubator rooms, the kitchen. Their footsteps crunched on fragments of the stained-glass window. Marsh swept the floor with the soles of his boots; Kammler was barefoot.

Kammler’s confused mumbling trailed off. He grew heavier, partially owing to Marsh’s exhaustion, but mostly because the man was weak with blood loss. He shivered with cold and the onset of shock. Marsh doffed Pabst’s coat and put it on Kammler.

Stay alive. Just a few more minutes. Please.

Buhler’s voice called from deeper in the ruins. “Kammler! Where are you?”

“B-buh-buh!” Kammler perked up. He squealed and clapped, weakly.

Marsh pulled von Westarp’s Luger from his belt. Gretel reached up and covered Kammler’s eyes with the palms of her hands. Buhler crept around the corner, flinching at every groan from the slumping farmhouse. Marsh put two bullets in his chest. Gretel pulled Kammler away before he glimpsed his dead handler.

They paused to check the gauge on Kammler’s battery. A bit more than half its original charge remained.

Marsh glanced out the window. Another line of soldiers had formed up along the gravel drive, rifles at the ready, facing the main entrance. Marsh started to point through the window, but Gretel stopped him.

“He needs an unobstructed line of sight. He’ll think you want him to break the window.”

“They’ll fire the second I kick open that door.”

“No, they won’t.”

Gretel opened the door. As one, the soldiers aimed. Hands up, she stepped into the glare of the kliegs. “He’s taken Kammler!” she said. “He’s going to destroy the farm.”

The soldiers hesitated. Which bought Marsh just enough time to pull Kammler into the doorway. Gretel dove aside as Marsh pointed. “Crush.”

Kammler pounded the soldiers into the ground like tent pegs. Another blow extinguished the spotlights and snapped the masts like matchsticks.

They pulled shivering Kammler outside. Marsh took him by the hand, coaxed him deeper into the darkness toward the forest. The sack of von Westarp’s journals slapped against Marsh’s leg, threatening to trip him. But they needed distance. The more Kammler could see of the farm at once, the better.

“Smash,” said Marsh. “Crush!”

A final blow flattened the burning farmhouse into a raging bonfire. A funeral pyre. Next, Marsh directed Kammler’s willpower against the chemical hut where batteries were manufactured: two blows to destroy it, a third to grind it into powder. The debris cloud roiled with black smoke that carried the eye-watering sting of ammonia.

Spotlights swept the grounds, accompanied by the chatter of a machine gun. Soldiers had turned the heavy armaments from the training field toward defense. They didn’t rush Marsh’s position; instead, they hung back, keeping to the shadows behind the lights. Nobody wanted to be caught in the open where Kammler could see them.

A light raked across them, swept back, pinned the trio in its glare like butterflies beneath a stickpin. The defenders unleashed a fusillade from rifles and pistols. Marsh tackled Kammler aside as bullets sizzled through the night. The light followed them. Kammler sobbed in pain.

He pointed and yelled, but Kammler just gaped at him. Gretel snapped a peppermint stick and waved it under Kammler’s bloody nose. He stuck out his tongue. She placed a fragment of candy on it.

The next blow took out the spotlights and the gun emplacement.

Barracks: destroyed.

Surgical ward: pulverized.

Each flattened building revealed the portions of the farm behind it, bringing more structures into Kammler’s field of view. Some structures, like the icehouse and pump shed, weren’t worth the expenditure of battery life.

Marsh pointed to the battery storage shed. “Crush!”

Kammler scowled at the low brick building. It shuddered, then nothing. Spittle trickled from one corner of his mouth, faint pink in the moonlight.

“Crush!” Again, nothing. The defenders got another spotlight up.

Marsh checked the gauge on Kammler’s battery. Just about empty.

The light slewed across the grounds, carving zigzag patterns in the darkness in its search for the assailants before another blast of Willenskräfte destroyed the light.

The light hit Marsh just as he undid the latch on Kammler’s harness. “There they are!”

Marsh dropped the dead battery into his sack, then tackled Kammler again. Gretel tossed him the spare. He fumbled it. The soldiers unleashed another fusillade.

Somebody, perhaps Pabst, called an order to kill the spotlight. They’d reacquired Marsh and company, but didn’t want to provide Kammler with another target. The light died, yet still the darkness retreated, as though the night had suddenly come to fear the farm.

Marsh inched forward on his stomach, toward the battery he’d dropped. Night became day. He looked up, dreading what he’d see.

A figure stood in the center of the training field, sheathed in a swirling corona of violet flame.

Reinhardt blazed like a vengeful sunrise.

*

My world was chaos. Peals of man-made thunder deafened me, suffocated me, slapped me. My eyes burned from constant readjustment to darkness and light. As the bombers overflew me, so, too, did their payloads catch up, then surround me. Every explosion strobed the night and etched a still life of the dying city into my eyelids.

Miles behind me, a massive detonation turned night into day. I knew, before the shockwave hit, that the Jerries had punched through the roof of a munitions factory. The swirling fireball rose over the city, large enough for me to see in the mirrors. Its light outraced the thunder, but the concussion reached me a few seconds later. The earth shook with such violence that the Mulliner’s wheels left the road. I lost control.

Drive wheels pushed to starboard, I steered to port as I skidded into a roundabout. Stephenson’s car slid right across it and slammed to a halt against the empty fountain at the center. My door dented inward, head-butted by a cherub with pursed lips. Shattered window glass winged through the cabin like grapeshot. A jagged crack appeared in the fountain’s empty basin. My arm felt as though I’d just been kicked by a pony.

The dent had me worried I’d permanently beached the car on the fountain. Not so, though freeing myself did mean shearing off most of the paint on that side of the car. So much for the old man’s beloved car.

I rejoined the race to find Liv and Agnes before the Luftwaffe got them. A spur off the roundabout took me speeding into Stoke Aldermoor. Residential. Everything looked the same to me. The headlamps didn’t do a damn bit of good. I needed a bloody street sign. But of course they’d all been taken down as a precaution in case of invasion.

The Rolls Royce made short work of the first postbox I came across. Letters and envelopes went fluttering into the deadly night. I chased them. Another ton of ordnance rained on Coventry while I sifted through the addresses for a clue to my location, and Liv’s. I read by the glow behind me as Coventry burned and dwindling searchlights crisscrossed the sky.

It took five more postboxes, but I found Liv’s street. Question was, where was Liv? I’d passed a few municipal shelters on the way through. Had she scampered to one of the brick bunkers dotting the neighborhood? Or did this place have an Anderson?

I’d expected a terraced house. But this was nicer than our place in London, I was sorry to see. Nicer than anything I’d ever been able to give her. Set back from the road a bit, lined with a little privacy hedge, brick pathway curving through the gate. Cedar shingles, new paint. The kind of place we’d always assumed, wrongly, we’d make our own one day. That we wouldn’t be stuck in Walworth forever. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I left the car running and didn’t bother to knock. Anybody still inside—assuming they’d be that daft—wouldn’t hear it over the whistling and concussion of Hitler’s bombs drawing closer with every second. A gas main went up a few streets over. The explosion slammed me against the door. I tasted blood. Compared to the resulting fireball, the headlamps from Stephenson’s car were a candle flame held against the sun.

“Liv!” I shouted. No response.

The foyer took me to a den. There Agnes’s bassinet lay tumbled sideways on the floor, draped with a swath of pink elephants. I snatched her baby blanket on my way through. The fibers were damp. My daughter had sicked up. Liv hadn’t had a chance to wash out the stain.

“Liv!” Empty house.