“Her.” Trudi keeps her head down, but her voice refuses to submit. “Her!”
Johannes Schmitzden backhands her again, then again, then a third time. His fingers fold into fists now, and he keeps them rainin’ on her. She tries to ball up, to protect herself, but the awkward way she’s strapped to the bedpost makes that nearly impossible. He keeps hitting her until she finally slumps to the floor.
Her nose is bleeding now, and she’s beginning to show bruising under her right eye, a grotesque match for the work the mercenaries did on her left eye earlier. Finally Dr. Schmitzden’s work is done. He steps away from her and turns toward me. He’s breathing hard, but he looks satisfied.
He reaches a hand in my direction, and I flinch. I seen what he just done to Trudi. Is he gonna do the same to me? But he don’t. He don’t hit me at all.
He strokes my cheek gently.
Like a mother caressing a child.
He kneels down so our eyes are level. I see Trudi watching from the bunk. She’s finally stopped eggin’ him on, but I see the anger in her jaw. And the worry. He brushes a strand of hair from my face and looks deeply into my eyes.
“It.”
He says it tenderly, but the force of the word hits hard just the same. To this man, I’m just an experiment. A prototype. A lab rat. Nothing more. He stretches to full height and returns to his seat across from me at the table.
“It won’t be long now,” he says to no one in particular. “Once my men have eliminated Samuel Hill and his companion, we will leave this place. We’ll return to Iraq where”—he nods in the direction of Trudi—“you will have to be a peace offering to my employer. He won’t be happy to know that you killed his nephew. But having your writhing body for revenge will do something toward appeasing him.”
The old man’s eyes sparkle with possibilities when his gaze returns to me.
“And, of course, having you back in our possession will keep the money flowing too.” He looks at me, and I see a kind of hungry joy flooding his eyes. Like Christmastime when there’s lots of presents under the tree.
“There is always some kind of war going on in that part of the world,” he says, “and anyone who can perpetuate that war is valuable to certain men. Your blood will help us perpetuate any war. The vaccines we extract from it will keep the ranks of jihad fighters swelling, healing their wounded, demoralizing their enemies with endless numbers of men who keep coming back from near-death to fight again and again.”
“It won’t work,” I say. I’m surprised my voice ain’t trembling. “Your experiments are flawed. My mother saw it. She saw it, and that’s why she wanted to leave.”
“It will work.” Schmitzden seems to be stating a fact, not trying to convince me or anybody that what he says is true. It’s like he’s saying the sun is hot or two plus two is four. As far as he’s concerned, it ain’t even a question of faith, it’s just plain, hard fact. “Your blood, it’s different. Special.”
“Okay, yeah.” I nod. “I know there’s something different about my blood. Maybe it’s from that stuff you mixed into my DNA. Or maybe it’s just funny blood. Everybody has different things about ’em. That don’t mean my blood makes miracles.”
“It doesn’t understand,” he says to Trudi, daring her to contradict him again. She don’t. Not this time.
“My mother understood,” I say. “You said yourself she was brilliant. She said it wouldn’t work. That she’d made a mistake. That it was all a mistake.”
Schmitzden don’t respond this time. He just looks at me, like he’s trying to decide if I’m a space alien or a cow’s udder turned upside down and put on display in a carnival madhouse. He leans forward, both elbows on the table.
“Tell me,” he says after a minute, “what else did your mother say?”
“Lots of things,” I say. Awful things, I think.
“These were in a book she left you, yes?”
“Yes.” I don’t know what Dr. Schmitzden is getting at, but I don’t like the way he’s suddenly interested in what I’m saying.
He holds out his hand. “Give me the book.”
I’m frozen in my seat. It never occurred to me that he’d want to take the book from me. Something in me can’t let it go. It’s the only connection I have to my life. Truck’s gone. My mother was stolen from me. How can I give up the plain, black book that whispers her words in my ear?
He slams a hand on the table, making me jump in my seat, and I see he’s pleased by my reaction.
There’s a threat in his eyes. He wants me to know that he’ll beat it outta me like he just beat Trudi if I don’t give him my mother’s journal.
“Why?”
I’m stalling, I know it. But I can’t think of anything else to do.
“It will provide important perspective on the beginnings of our experiment. Perhaps she kept some thoughts to herself that I should take into account.”
She said it wouldn’t work, moron! She said your whole experiment was bat-crazy! That God alone works true miracles, not men! I want to scream it, but instead I say, “Bitte.” Please. “I want to keep it. Bitte. I need to keep it.”
He looks annoyed. “It wants to keep Mommy’s journal,” he mimics. Then he resumes his demand. “This book belongs to me. Anything It has belongs to me. Give me the book.”
“I don’t know where it is.”
He shakes his head mournfully. “You hear that, Ms. Coffey? It doesn’t remember where the book is. Do you think It wants me to hurt It?”
“Give him the book, Annabel, honey,” Trudi says. “Give the crazy man the book. We’ll get it back from him later.”
“I think,” Dr. Schmitzden says, “the book is here, right here in this bunker. I think if I start looking for it, I will find it. What do you think?”
I want to look away from him, but his eyes won’t allow it.
“Give me the book.”
I feel walls crumbling inside me, fortresses that kept me safe, disintegrating under his gaze.
“It’s in the drawer,” I say at last, motioning to the table in front of me. “In here.”
He extends his hand, waiting for me to bring out the book and deliver it to him. I know it’s over. I slide open the shallow drawer on my side of the table. When I look inside there, I see Marelda Gregor’s journal, a few pens, my translation notebook, my own notebook journal.
And a Walther PPQ semiautomatic pistol.
A man’s gun.
Loaded.
Barrel aimed straight across from me. Pointing directly at the midsection of Dr. Johannes Schmitzden. Aimed at the man who is responsible for my life, and for the death of my mother. And my uncle.
I look at Dr. Schmitzden. He’s waiting. He frowns and shakes his hand toward me, tapping the palm of his right hand with the fingers of his left. I know he won’t wait much longer before simply pushing me out of the way and taking the journal—and the gun—for himself.
I look to Trudi. She’s watching me closely. Worried. Her right eye is almost swollen shut, but she don’t seem to notice. Give him the book, she mouths. She’s worried this old man really is gonna hurt me.
I see one of them ghosts suddenly reappear in this room. It’s just a flash of light in the corner of my eye, but I see it clear as day. There’s a man sitting at the table. Both hands out, palms pressing down on the surface. Neither Schmitzden nor Trudi see him.
In my head I hear a sound. It’s an animal dying, howling after me, begging me not to leave him in the muck and ash of a burned-out forest.
Then the world collapses around me until there’s nothing but me, my mother’s book, the gun. And Dr. Johannes Schmitzden.
I take a breath, filling myself with oxygen.
I reach inside the drawer.