Needles & Sins (25 page)

The hands went up then.

Tiny hands.

Pale and small. Nervously trembling in the dim light. She stepped out of the shadow behind a small, unmade bed.

They were the hands of a child. And the face of an angel. Ice-blue eyes beamed through the murk like Northern Lights. She was scared, but stepped forward.

“You are friends?” she said in a voice smaller than a doll’s. “Momma said Der Fuhrer would send soldiers who would protect us.”

“We’re here to protect everyone,” Dietz said. I could hear the lie poisoning the gentleness of his words. I wondered if the girl could. His falseness seemed so blatantly obvious to me.

But she only smiled. “Did you talk to mama?” she asked.

“Yes,” Dietz said. “She said for us to come up and keep you safe.”

“I heard guns outside,” the girl said.

Dietz nodded. “It would be best for you to get into bed and stay there, so we can take care of it,” he said.

The little girl picked up the hem of her long, pink nightgown and did just that, slipping under the thin covers to lie down in her bed. As she did so, five German soldiers moved closer to the mattress, knowing but not saying what they knew they had to do.

Dietz’s plan called for a sacrifice. An innocent.

“I don’t think that we should…” Lichtmann began to say. And then he doubled over with a grunt, as Dietz’s rifle butt met the lower portion of Lichtmann’s gut.

“This is war,” Dietz hissed. “And you’ll do what has to be done.”

I felt the tears brimming to the surface as I stepped near enough to the bed to touch the child’s foot.

“We’re here to take care of it,” Dietz told the child again. His voice was as chilling as a reptile’s hiss. “We’re here to save the motherland. To support Der Fuhrer,” he said.

“You’re good then,” she said, in that tiny little voice that only little girls can have.

“We try,” he breathed, just before he slipped a hand over the little girl’s mouth.

She only struggled for a little while.

In short, sharp commands Dietz told us how to tie her and how to set up the candles and then place the cross upside down above her bed.

When we dedicated her soul as a gift to Satan, we were all near tears.

But nobody shed as many as the little girl, whose glowing eyes threatened to explode from her tiny head with every horrible word that Dietz pronounced.

He never even said, “I’m sorry.”

Dietz never said how he knew the words to say, and nobody questioned him. We did as he told us and held the girl down. We dipped our fingers in the blood from her neck and painted our faces with her life. We licked our fingers and professed our allegiance to Satan, if he would only support our cause. And when she screamed that last, awful cry, I swear I felt the cold kiss of the devil brush my lips and neck.

When we descended the ladder, each of us holding a piece of the girl in our hands, I believe we were all shaking. We’d seen plenty of horrors on the front, and far more blood. Yet, this was the worst atrocity.

Certainly the ladder trembled as I descended, rung by rung, until I stood again on the rough plank floor and looked at the broken body of the woman on one side of the door, and the still form of Peter, who had apparently bled to death on the other.

“Peter,” I whispered.

Dietz bent to nudge him. “It’s ok,” he said. “We have the devil on our side now.”

Again I felt the chill in the air as he spoke, and I stifled an urge to run. I knew that no matter how far I ran from this spot, it would always be with me. I was now a prisoner of the ultimate sin. Upside down crosses and the murder of a young girl didn’t make my heart feel victorious and positive, despite having pledged with the rest of them. I said nothing. I wondered who else felt duped by Dietz.

He didn’t show an ounce of fear…or compassion. With hooded eyes and a too-wide grin, he flipped his thatch of jet-black hair towards the door.

“The power is ours,” he professed, and stepped outside.

When Dietz stepped outside of the slaughterhouse, he was only followed by two. I think of them now as the Devil’s Trinity. They fully bought into his plan, without reservation. They believed.

Dietz had slid his knife across the poor trusting girl’s neck, as Kretz plunged a dagger into her heart. And Schuster had taken the direction to split that poor thing from breastbone to pubis. Her poor wool nightgown changed from a protection of purity to a blossom of gore in seconds. We all listened to Dietz then, to get it over with quickly if nothing else, as her cries echoed through the dark attic space. At his direction, we numbly reached inside the steaming cavity of her body—on the devil’s behalf—and harvested her heart, her liver, her kidneys. I held one organ, something small in my pocket, now. Its death warmed my breast with guilt.

Somewhere I could hear laughter in the back of my head that would not stop.

Bullets rang again outside.

But moments after Dietz, Schuster and Kretz stepped out of the slaughterhouse and into the fire—the fire stopped. In the silence, Private Lichtmann and I slipped out of the door of the house and dove for the ground to evade bullets. But none came. Instead, standing in the center of the dirt path in front of the old house, Dietz held his hands to the sky and called out something in a foreign tongue. Maybe Latin. Next to him, Schuster and Kretz stood at the ready. But there was no need. Somewhere in the brush gunfire erupted again, but this time the enemy was not the threat but the victim.

An American exploded from the bushes and ran toward Dietz, but not to attack. “Please, no!” the soldier screamed, his face a rictus of terror, before a machine gun erupted again and the soldier’s back suddenly exploded before us into a confetti of red rain.

When he collapsed, another soldier emerged from the bushes, with a muzzle still trained on the fallen man. Lichtmann and I grabbed for our guns but a motion from Dietz stilled us. Our comrade returned his hands to the air and whispered something guttural and dark. The American responded with a gale of laughter, just before he raised the automatic weapon to point back at his own face, and pulled the trigger. His face sprayed the trees with gore.

“What the hell?” Lichtmann gasped, when the echoes subsided.

Dietz put his hands down from the sky finally and grinned at us. “You can get up now,” he said. The derision bled from his lips like vinegar. “I told you, the devil is on our side.”

Dietz wasn’t lying.

Over the next several hours, we worked our way back through the forest, back to the place where our full-scale retreat had begun. All around us, gunfire erupted, seemingly at random. We all flinched and dove to the ground the first few times the deadly noise broke the silence. All of us but Dietz. With every sound of war he only smiled and raised his hands in the air, as if advertising himself as a target. But the bullets never came close. Or if they did, they didn’t touch him. Instead, screams followed our march. Sometimes I saw the enemy, from yards and yards away, chasing each other through the brush. Brother stabbing brother. Friend killing friend.

They all wore American green. There were no Germans attacking the Americans. They were eliminating themselves, inexplicably.

They killed each other violently, without remorse. Whenever we were in range, the enemy turned instead on themselves. A strange, but effective curse Dietz had wrought. The enemy became our weapons.

We camped for the night in the same field where, just the day before, half our company had died, mowed down by merciless shrapnel and vindictive lead. But we returned as if guarded by an invisible shield.

Before we turned in, Dietz called for us to place hands on each other’s fists near a small campfire—a sign of brotherhood and allegiance. “Tomorrow,” he promised. “Tomorrow we will take back what is ours.”

I slid into the musty cold fabric of my sleeping bag and despite the evidence of the past hours, I doubted. I had seen strange events today, there was no question. But the visions of men gunning down their brothers failed to sway my heart from a new singular obsession. Every American soldier’s death replayed itself in my mind as I lay in the dark on the cold, hard ground. In my mind I saw them running through the Black Forest, desperate for victory. Desperate for life. They found neither as their own countrymen gunned them down. At the climax of every murder, I saw neither victim nor executioner. Instead, I saw the innocent face of a young German girl, pinned for sacrifice by five desperate German soldiers. I saw fragile, wide blue eyes.

I saw my damnation.

I rolled and kicked on the ground for hours before sleep finally took me. Nearby, I heard the telltale snores of Dietz and Schuster. It was a miracle they hadn’t gotten us killed by now simply because of their nasal passages. But tonight, those sounds ultimately lulled me to sleep. At least for awhile.

Until she came.

For awhile, as my conscience taunted me, there was blackness, and a cool breeze. The empty air felt pregnant with abandoned hope. And then a hand touched my shoulder. And then my cheek.

I opened my eyes and rolled fast to the side, reaching for my gun. From the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of pink flesh. And the round curve of a rosy cheek. Then she was there, right in front of me, frowning as if about to cry.

“I don’t want to stay here,” she whispered, as a tear did finally begin to trail down that perfect face. “Please let me go.”

I stopped feeling around in the bag for my gun and instead asked “Stay where? How can I let you go?”

“It’s dark,” she whispered. “And he keeps hurting me.”

“Who?” I asked. “Who is hurting you?”

“I want momma!” she cried, and then someone was punching me in the shoulder. I looked over and Kretz was there, a scowl on his face. “The devil may be on our side, but you don’t have to invite the enemy to test it,” he hissed. “Shut the hell up.”

“Was I snoring?” I asked.

“No, you idiot, you were talking in your sleep. Keep it down.”

After he left, all I could see in the dark was the afterimage of the sad eyes of the sacrificial girl’s face.

The next day, we broke camp and headed out of the dark embrace of the Black Forest. We followed Dietz, whose gestures alone seemed to bring the enemy to a strange and divisive end. Again and again the soldiers on the line turned on each other as we stalked by, shooting their comrades instead of ever training a gun on us, their true enemy.

I wondered if the situation was only an ironic metaphor for our own plight. In my heart of hearts, I suspected the devil would not be content with the soul of a sad little girl for long.

Gunfire mixed with screams and the smoke of the front lines floated heavy with the iron reek of blood as we stole through clouds to kill and kill again, never once lifting our own guns.

At midday, Dietz signaled a break to our march, and we camped near the cool fishy musk of the Rhine. As I chewed the rations from my pack, I tasted sawdust, and heard the continued cries of dying men in the distance. Near a small green-barked tree, the face of the murdered girl slipped from nowhere to here. I had found no Lorelei in the Black Forest, but I had gained a haunt.

“Let me go?” she implored. She shimmered in the air just a couple feet away. I could see her clearly, yet, I could still see the forest beyond.

I closed my eyes and let my head slump, wishing her guilt away from my heart. When I looked up, the girl was gone, but the guilt still hung heavy as a boat anchor from my soul.

“What are we doing?” I asked Dietz. He looked at me in complete incomprehension.

“There are five of us,” I said. “We can march around the Black Forest and up and down the River Rhine all we want. And maybe every soldier we see will shoot their comrades and the air for miles will be thick with the smell and flicker of meat flies. But we
cannot
turn the tide of a war waged by thousands and thousands of men in theatres from here to Japan. What are we doing?” I repeated.

Dietz’s lips raised in a quiet sneer. “Do you think this is about killing a man at a time?” he whispered. “Do you think we are doling out drops of death?”

He laughed, and slapped me on the shoulder. “The devil is on our side now. We cannot be defeated. And these drops of death that we sprinkle will soon grow to a tide and then a tidal wave. Our march has only begun…and when it is ended, the blood of Americans and English and Russians will coat every trail, every street we pass in red rivers. The power of demons has just begun to grow and manifest through us. In days, we will be more deadly than any company you have ever known. Our rage will loosen the guts of the enemy like cannon fire in a stadium of civilians. Believe,” he said. “Believe in the power of the devil.”

I wanted to ask him about the girl, but something told me to let it be. The glow in his eyes said any answer I received would not be helpful.

We camped that night in a perverse calm in the eye of a bloodbath. During the last hour of sunset, squadrons of the enemy had charged our position, but we only sat there, complacent and mute as they advanced. Score by score, they shifted their guns from aiming at us to pointing at each other. Dietz only sat there, thin pale lips drawn in a dismissive smile of derision that never wavered. When the last shots finally stopped ringing, and the last dying American bludgeoned his captain before turning a knife on himself, we built a small fire to cook dinner. Dietz claimed the meat came from a freshly killed deer he’d found nearby, but I didn’t believe him. There was too much meat piled all around us on the ground for him to have gone game-hunting. This was American meat, I knew. His
coup d'état
. Murder your enemy without lifting a finger, and then devour him as the ultimate victory. I stifled the urge to taunt him with the cliche “you are what you eat” and instead chewed on my bar of rations and turned in early. I heard him whispering to the others outside, but I didn’t care. I knew he was talking about me. No doubt setting me up as the next victim for his altar. Inwardly, I shrugged. I would kill the enemy. But I would not
eat
him in a perverse communion.