CRYERS (24 page)

Lawson had to
shout over the roar of the crowd. “I won’t be walkin’ away from the challenge
tomorrow, Sara. I’m too old and battered to fix up… They’ll bury me out here.”

“I’m sure you
still have a dirty trick or two to use. I wouldn’t be surprised to see you
stumbling back to Burn in a few days on crutches.”

She tried
sounding optimistic for Lawson’s sake, but he could see the hopelessness of it
in her eyes. “If you can, watch out for them two brothers I dragged into this.
Raise ‘em into men.”

“Is that
everything? I’m not quite finished raising our daughter yet.”

The crowd made
a collective gasp of disbelief and started to curse. They moved on in search of
a third match. The two fighters had tapped out simultaneously after a brief bit
of contact, and had both been disqualified from competing further. Cobe,
Willem, and Trot hung back and saw the lawman still deep in conversation with
the woman. Cobe rolled his eyes and pulled the other two after everyone else.
Tog and Remee followed obediently, their clubs trailing behind them in the
dirt.

“I’m sorry,”
Lawson said. “It’s askin’ plenty after not being in yer life for so long.”

“Don’t you
start apologizing now… it’s too late for that.” Sara didn’t need to tend to the
men that had just fought. Neither one of them had a mark on them, save the
minor scratches on their hands and knees from falling against the ground. They
looked at the lawman’s pulverized face and scurried off ashamedly into the
throng that had abandoned them. “I’m not prepared to look after two boys. I’ve
got my hands full looking after an entire town of scrapping men. I don’t need
to see them become a part of all that.”

“They’re
Freeda’s.”

Sara turned
her face up to the cloudless sky and groaned. “Shit…I thought the one with one
arm looked familiar.” She closed her eyes and considered things for another
half minute. “I’ll look after the boys. I’ll see them become men…I promise.”

“That ain’t
all I need you do.”

She sighed.
“Of course it isn’t.”

“We found
something in the west…deep underground. People from a long time ago are
startin’ to wake up.” Another fight behind them ended and the men gathered
round cheered. One of the combatants had strangled his opponent into
unconsciousness before he could tap out.
 
He’d kept on throttling the man until he was dead. “It was my fault. I
never should’ve taken the boys below. The people—the things living there… They
ain’t like us anymore.”

“People
waking up underground? What are you talking about?”

A booming
voice called out, instructing the men back to work. The morning preliminaries
had come to an end. Lawson saw Lode working his way down from the boulders.
“When the Rites are over, you have to leave. Promise me you’ll take Kay and the
boys and leave Rudd.”

“Leave town?
Lawson, what trouble have you kicked up this time?”

Tog and Remee
were returning with the others. Lode was pounding across the levelled earth
towards them. “You think the Rites are bad? Folks ‘round here ain’t seen
nothin’ yet. They’re coming, Sara…the folks from Big Hole are comin’ fer all of
us.”

Chapter 40

Lothair knew
the place well. It was different, as places in dreams always are—familiar
though not quite the same—but it still felt like coming home. He was walking
along the underground hallways beneath Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Few
people outside Nazi Germany’s expanding borders knew the camp in Oranienburg
existed, and even fewer were aware of the experimental hospital located thirty
metres beneath the barrack huts.

This was the
place where he had conducted his experiments on children from the summer of
1942 until spring 1945. His name wasn’t Lothair Eichberg back then. He was
Gernot Penzig.

This isn’t the middle of the twentieth century.
It’s 3066…This place no longer exists.

But he was
here
.
This
was
Sachsenhausen—only different.

Lothair
(Gernot?) studied the back of his hands as he walked. These were definitely
Gernot’s hands—long, slender fingers, skin with color. He ran them through his
hair and giggled.
I haven’t had a full
head of hair since I was in my thirties.
He didn’t need a mirror to know it
was jet black. He was young again. He was
young
again.

Why do I feel like this? Why do I
feel
?

It was a
tight sensation balled up at the top of his stomach. Excitement. Elation. Joy.

I’m human again.

He could hear
the steady tap-tap-tap of his shoes along the floor. He looked down and saw
them—shiny and black, the laces tied in perfect little double loops.

Where am I going?

He passed by
familiar doors without slowing. These were the rooms where Gernot had conducted
his work. Hundreds of youths had been led down this corridor by reluctant
guards to see him. Very few left alive. It wasn’t guilt that kept Lothair from
entering the familiar offices and laboratories now. He still felt that he had
only been doing his job—that he had been fulfilling a noble, scientific task.

Jenny. I’m looking for my great-great
granddaughter and her mother. They haven’t been honest, and I’m going to find
them…see what they’ve been up to.

Lothair had a
better sense of where he was trying to get to. The long hallway would end at a
steel door. Behind the door would be a set of stairs leading up into an
aboveground officers’ latrine. But it wasn’t a latrine. It was a secret exit
leading out of the underground installation that remained locked from the
inside. So where was the steel door? Why was the hallway so long?

Dreams are like this.
His shoes continued tapping along the tiles.
They’re familiar but confusing. The door is
up ahead. I will find it.

Lothair
started to run. The doors on either side of him became a blur.

Too many rooms. They have to end. I have to
find the door. I need to find the way out.

The corridor
stretched ahead of him without any end in sight. It made it seem like the walls
were closing in—that they had become alive and were slowly preparing to crush
him. He knew it was a dream, but still Lothair could hear the moan rising in
his throat as he sucked in a great lungful of air. He was going to scream.

One of the
hallway doors on the left opened further ahead and Lothair’s scream was choked
off. He stopped running. A small boy, no older than seven or eight years, stepped
out into the corridor and faced him. All he wore was a diaper. The cloth sagged
between his frail legs, filled with urine and stinking of excrement. He had a
guilty, long face, and there were black patches on his cheekbones where the
skin had frozen away.

“I’ve been
waiting like you told me, Dr. Penzig…”

Lothair
remembered all of the names of the children he’d worked with. “Anatoly.”

“I’ve been
waiting for a very long time, sir. I waited on the table like you told me for
years. I’m sorry I disobeyed… It was so cold. I can’t feel my feet anymore.

Most of the
boy’s toes were gone. All that remained were little black stumps. Anatoly
shuffled towards him leaving tracks of dead skin behind. “I waited and waited
and waited. I can’t wait anymore. I want to go home, Doctor…I want to be with
my parents.”

“Do you know
where that is, Anatoly? Do you know where home is?”

He held his
hand up to Lothair. The tips of his fingers were missing up to the first set of
knuckles. “I think so…but I’m afraid.”

Lothair took
the little hand in his. It felt like holding dry ice. Anatoly led him down the
hallway and the steel door appeared. The boy peered up and through the small
glass window set into it. “I can see the sun.” There had been no window in the
door that Lothair could remember. They shouldn’t have been able to see the
light of day from here. The Russian child tugged at his hand insistently. “We
can see what we want to see here. I don’t have to be scared anymore…now that
you’re with me…I’m not alone.” Even in a dream the child’s innocence remained
pure. He had no clue what Gernot Penzig’s goals had been in the
nineteen-forties. He trusted the doctor. He was an adult.

Lothair
looked for the handle that should’ve been there but wasn’t.

“Push,”
Anatoly said.

Lothair
pressed his free hand against the door and it opened. They walked together,
side by side, hand in hand, up the narrow stairway. “You said that you were
afraid, Anatoly. Are you afraid of me?”

“I’m not
afraid of you, Doctor. You gave me candy that first time we met.”

He looked
down into the boy’s brown eyes. Most of his hair had fallen out, and the trails
of snot trailing from his nostrils and down the sides of his mouth remained
frozen.
Still so trusting—after all this
time.
Lothair did something then that he hadn’t done since he was Anatoly’s
age. He began to cry.

They stepped
out onto green grass. Lothair shut his eyes in the sun’s glare and heard
Anatoly squeal with warm delight. A light wind fell across Lothair’s face and
he could smell flowers. Somewhere behind him Lothair heard doors opening. A
flood of frozen, dead children were leaving their rooms and rushing up the
stairs. They pushed by him, escaping the dark, and fleeing into the light.
There were hundreds of them—laughing, crying, and free.

Lothair spotted
Anatoly in the crowd running across a playground. He fell into the arms of a
woman. A bearded man was with her, and he hugged the woman and Anatoly
together. Anatoly turned back and saw Lothair. He waved with a hand now
complete with all of its fingers, and smiled. His face was clean and glowing,
his complexion pink and healthy. The boy was saying something to
Lothair—mouthing two words over and over.

Thank you.

“No!” Lothair
shouted. “Don’t say that to me! You don’t understand.” Even after all of this,
he still felt he’d done what was necessary in the name of science—but he
definitely knew these children shouldn’t be thanking him for it.

Anatoly and
his parents turned into three wisps of white smoke and disappeared into the
breeze. Children all around him were finding mothers and fathers. Loved ones
left waiting for centuries were reunited with their sons and daughters. One by
one they all blew off into the wind until Lothair was left alone, standing in
an empty space of grass surrounded by see-saws, slides, and swing sets.

But he
wasn’t
alone.

At a picnic
table sitting next to a series of rubber tires hanging from ropes were Edna and
Jenny.

“Took you
long enough to find us,” the younger girl said. “Where did all those kids go,
Lothair? Did your life’s work just vanish in the wind?”

The guilt was
pushed back. It was difficult for Lothair. He hadn’t experienced emotions such
as regret and remorse in over a thousand years, and even then—as a younger
man—they never came all that easily. He ignored Jenny’s comment altogether.
“Edna…You look quite well here. My surgery inside your head seems to have done
wonders.”

“I’m whole
here,” she answered. “We
all
are.”

“We’re human
again,” Jenny said, “no thanks to you.”

Lothair
continued ignoring her. He didn’t want to give the smart-mouthed girl any sense
that her opinion mattered. He studied their surroundings. The empty canvas
swing seats were still swaying gently back and forth—the chains holding them up
squeaked in need of oil. A circular wooden platform where children had once
spun around rocked in the wind on a loose bearing at its center. A wide groove
in the dirt below the outer edge had been worn away by thousands of pushing
feet. “This isn’t just my dream anymore, is it? I’m no longer at
Sachsenhausen.”

“You’re
nowhere near Germany,” Edna said. “We’re in a school playground outside of
Minneapolis, Minnesota. I sent Jenny here one summer to spend time with
relatives when I was busy with work.”

“Our
relatives—more Eichbergs?”

“Stropes.
Michael’s parents.”

Lothair sat
at the far end of the table on the same side as Edna. “Why are you here now?”

Jenny
pictured the subterranean chamber where she’d first found her mother in dream.
The rows of cryogenic tubes and the things waking inside terrified her still.
She blocked the image from her mind. “This is a nice place. I feel safe here…Or
at least I did.”

Lothair
stared at the girl. He had seen something—a place. A single word flashed in his
brain. “What is a cryer?”

Finally Jenny
had nothing more to say. She looked down at the table, trying to break the
intrusive hold her great-great grandfather suddenly had on her.

“Leave her
alone,” Edna said. “She doesn’t know anything.”

“Oh, but she
does…you both do. There are no secrets here, are there? Our minds, our
thoughts…they become one, don’t they? I see what you were up to, Edna.” His arm
snapped out and he grabbed her around the back of the neck. Lothair forced
Edna’s face into the table. “Show me everything, dear. Show me
more
.”

“You
bastard,” Jenny screamed.

She tried pulling
his arm away, but Lothair pushed her away. More images became available to him.
“Not yet—not until I know everything there is to know about the secret
installation. Oh my…illegal experiments…involuntary test subjects. You truly
are an Eichberg. Where is it, Edna?” He was behind her now with both hands at
her throat. He pounded Edna’s forehead into the table surface. “West…it’s out
west. Where?”

Pain shot up
Lothair’s leg. He looked down and saw Anatoly again. The boy was digging his
way up through the grass and had sunk his rotting teeth into Lothair’s ankle.
His eyes were gone. The sockets were now filled with soil and wriggling worms.
More hands broke through the earth around Lothair. Small, grey fingers clutched
at the air. A dozen frozen children climbed out of the dirt and clawed their
way towards him.

“
You’re
doing this,” Lothair shouted at
Jenny. “You’re bringing them back!”

“I can get
inside your head just as easily as you get in my Mom’s.”

Lothair
released his great-granddaughter and the dream ended. He opened his eyes and
saw the collection of skulls Gertie had hung about the interior of her tree
home. He crawled out of the roots and went to the opening.

Colonel
Strope was standing outside, his powerful, scarred arms folded over his chest. “Is
everything alright?”

Lothair saw
Jenny under the tree with her mother. The girl’s head lifted, her eyes looked
dull and sleepy. She saw him and scowled. “Everything is good, Michael. It’s
amazing what a simple nap after a millennium of staying awake can do for a
person.”