Sky Ghost (36 page)

That’s why it was so strange that, when the next morning dawned, the skies were clear, the sun was bright, and the temperature balmy.

When Hunter woke up, the first thing he saw was a cow.

It was lying right beside him, eyes open, tongue out, water lapping at its chin. It seemed to be smiling at him.

Hunter lifted himself up slightly. It was painful but he had to see where he was this time, Heaven or Hell. His eyes cleared and he could see far enough to realize that he and the cow and tons of rubble were all clinging to the top of a very small mountain peak, which was now an island in the middle of a very big, very wide Teutonic lake.

He was somehow able to lift himself up further, to his knees at least, where he took a deep breath, and then collapsed again. His mouth went under water when he did, and the cold water shocked his system enough to have him scramble up some logs to the rocky peak itself.

Heaven
or
Hell, he didn’t want to be in the water anymore, ever again.

He crawled up to the driest patch of land on the peak, dragging his backpack with him. He took in many deep breaths now. He looked down and saw the cow’s head was without a body. Only then did it hit him. He was breathing. He was alive.

He had survived what tens of thousands hadn’t.

He spent the next day there, clinging to the one tree left on the peak, drying out both inside and out. He’d dispatched the cow’s head soon upon arrival, but more stuff came floating along, and some of the bigger pieces were drawn in by the eddies around the new island. There were some body parts mixed in here too and they didn’t all belong to cows. But Hunter found out soon enough that the water was moving very swiftly and if anything disgusting did wash up, it usually washed away again very shortly afterwards.

So he ignored the flotsam and concentrated on the eerily magnificent lake before him. He was at least 100 miles downstream from where the dam broke, of this he was sure. And he seemed to be very high up too. In the distance he could see smoke plumes, rising up from many places. To the north and east of him were many new lakes, one being particularly enormous, about 10 miles away.

It was a miracle he had no broken bones, no major cuts or bruises. He spent much of this day drying out the contents of his backpack and trying to calculate exactly how he had made it here, to this place, alive. Had he caught a hold of a piece of driftwood—or had some driftwood snagged him? If so, how had he been able to keep his head above the water? And how did he manage to avoid getting crushed, like the cow, in the thousands of uprooted trees and logs moving so swiftly in the fast current?

He didn’t know, and after a while, he didn’t care. He was here. He was alive. He was unhurt and still reasonably sane.

But now what? He had to get off the small island. But how? And where would he go once he’d left?

He made getting off his first priority. He wasn’t too keen on trying to snag a large piece of driftwood and hoping it would serve as a raft. And it really was way too far in any direction to attempt a swim.

What to do? He finally realized that if he just sat back down and watched the long line of debris float by, eventually the answer would come to him.

That’s what happened just as the sun was rising on the second day.

Like the previous one, the sky was crystal clear, and the sun rose warm and dry. He was experiencing his first hunger pangs when he looked off in the distance and saw it. Floating among sodden bales of hay and an army of black wooden boxes, was a boat.

It was small, and it was upside-down, but it was still afloat, and that’s all Hunter needed. He watched it for hours, tracking its movements like radar, urging it on as it bumped and skidded and stalled and made its own way through the flotsam.

Finally it reached a point about 100 yards off the east end of the island. Hunter didn’t even think about it. He plunged into the very chilly water and started swimming. Twenty exhausting minutes later, he reached the boat and managed to flip it over. Then he threw in his back pack and climbed inside.

He bailed with his hands for the next two hours, darkness fell, and the sun’s warmth went away. He got to the point where he could bail no more. There was still six inches of water in the 12-foot scam, but he was so tired, he just lay down in it and went to sleep.

When he woke the next morning, he was three miles away from the island that had saved his life.

It was the beginning of his third day without food, but this did not bother him much. He felt that in his previous place, he’d gone for long stretches of time not eating too. This was just another one of them.

He floated along somewhat peacefully, bailing routinely, moving with the still-rushing water, no need for paddles or oars. He passed church steeples, the tips of monuments, empty flagpoles he imagined were sitting atop a submerged school or hospital. He saw floating caskets and thought that perhaps they might be a little more seaworthy than his leaky boat. But he had no intention of playing Ishmael. He let each casket pass him by without a second glance.

Hunter drifted for hours like this. He came to imagine that the entire Ruhr Valley had been filled. Was that possible? How big was the Ruhr? He wasn’t sure; to him it was a distant point of history. Ruhr Valley. Lots of people. Lots of industry. That’s where it ended for him.

At about noon that day, he had some luck. He caught a fish, with his hands and his shirt as a net. It was a big one—God knows what type. And it was probably a little stunned from the sudden turn of events in its formerly peaceful watery world, and this made for an easier prey.

Hunter had been to Japan several times, but he didn’t remember any of them. Still, he knew enough to slice open the fish, and skim the inside of meat and throw the rest away. Then he allowed these slices to dry for about an hour and then he ate them. It was good. Freshwater sushi.

He’d just finished his feast when the water took him around a steep, dark bend. He was now passing by a towering mountain that still had snow at its peak. It had been spared being covered by the flood by 3000 feet or so.

He turned the bend and then something caught the corner of his eye. Suddenly he was hand-paddling the boat madly towards the shore.

Sticking out of the far side of the mountain was a chalet. It was built of stone, was colored yellow, had many spires and towers and windows. It was very German, almost like the picture on the wrapper of a candy bar.

He reached the shoreline, and very carefully secured the boat to a partially uprooted tree trunk. Then he moved quickly but silently up the embankment and was soon peering over the short yellow wall that surrounded the place.

This wasn’t a military installation. There were no gun turrets or spotlights or any sign of a guardhouse or guards. The place looked empty, and maybe was so even before the flood came. Hunter scaled the wall and went inside.

The first thing he found was the gun. It was a monstrous carbine, hanging from the wall, with a full belt of ammunition. Hunter took it down and was surprised by its weight. Not only was it huge, it had a barrel that flared out like a blunderbuss. He sniffed one of the bullets. It was dry. He sniffed the barrel. The gun hadn’t been fired in a while. He immediately took it and draped the ammo belt around his shoulder.

So far, so good.

He went through the hall, through a dining room, where the table was set, and into the huge kitchen. There were mountains of food in here. He started grabbing anything that came in a box. He wound up with a lot of crackers and a container of chocolate. There was a man’s sturdy denim work coat hanging from a hook on the back of the door. Work pants, too. Hunter quickly got out of his uniform and into these clothes. It was the first time he’d been dry in almost four days.

He stuffed his mouth with chocolate and then discovered the liquor cabinet. He took some brandy and a bottle of Schnapps. His load was getting heavy and he didn’t want to stay too long. The house didn’t look very used; still he felt like someone had been here recently. A photograph on the wall showed a family. Father, mother, young daughter with red hair, infant son. They were well-scrubbed Nordic types.

He scooped up more candy, but then saw a cruel clue as to the whereabouts of the owners. There was a pair of very tiny shoes at the back door. Beside them the shoes of a young girl. Beside them, a woman’s sports shoes. And a pair of men’s work boots.

Hunter took a step into the backyard—and that’s where he found the family. They were in the swimming pool, all four of them, in bathing suits, floating face down. The water had come up to this point so quickly, it trapped them, and then receded.

He looked at them for a long time. Then he took the work boots and left. Hunter returned to the boat, cast off, laid down in the back, and ate chocolate and crackers and drank the brandy.

Night fell, the stars appeared overhead. The glow from the hundreds of fires all around him lit up the sky on every horizon.

He could hear explosions going off in the distance and the sky above him was filled with moving lights. Some white, some red. Some were very high up; others were not.

Hunter sipped the brandy and just watched the lights go back and forth. He was sick, not in his stomach, but in his heart. He wasn’t exactly sure why. After all, he was a soldier, a military person, he knew that much about himself at least. Yet all the death he’d seen recently, especially up close, was like a claw in his chest, ripping at him. How could he be a soldier and yet have all this death bother him so much? It sure didn’t seem to bother anyone else he’d met. But then again, he couldn’t exactly look into the soul of everyone.

He drank more brandy and ate more crackers and loaded up the gun and began shooting at the lights overhead. Would he ever know exactly what had happened to him? How he’d gotten here? Where he’d come from? He fired off another round at a red light skimming above him. Would he ever know whether he was married or not? Or if he had any kids?

He didn’t think so…

There was one thing of which he was certain: the German resurgence began shortly after he, and the other two people in the water with him, arrived in this world. At least one of the other two was picked up by the Germans. Had this person been the instrument for the German turnaround, as Zoltan had indicated? Hunter had guessed it back then and was even more sure of it now.

He loaded the gun and fired it again; this time the target was a very white light flying very high above him.

In their subsequent conversations, Zoltan had also told him that certain things might jog his memory as to what had happened before, but he was finding those things few and far between. Many times he’d just closed his eyes and tried to conjure up some piece of his past, but it was nearly impossible to do. And every time he closed his eyes now, he saw those four people face down in the pool and wondered how many more he’d killed. And those were things he was sure he’d never forget, as much as he wanted to. He fired the gun again, this time at the planet Venus. Then slumped further down into the boat and went to sleep.

It was the sound of someone else’s gunfire that woke him the next morning.

He was still sick and groggy and his new dry clothes now seemed wet and old. But he was smart enough to stay low, and listen closely to the sound of guns going off nearby.

There were several different kinds. The pop-pop-pop of a high caliber rifle. The sustained boom-boom-boom of a large machine gun. Then many, many cracks, indicating pistols.

Hunter got his own weapon loaded and ready and then finally peeked over the side of the boat.

He was approaching a narrows between two mountains and people on one side of it were firing at people on the other. They were German soldiers.

He squinted in the morning sun and found it to be a very confusing scene, at first. Why would these German soldiers be firing at each other?

He drifted a little bit closer, not daring to paddle or move at all. Then he saw what the fight was about. Stuck against a rock between the narrows was a very valuable commodity—so valuable, a small internecine war had broken out for it.

It was a boat. It was smaller than Hunter’s, and more narrow, with a wrecked motor still attached. But it could float and that was the important thing. Apparently, one group of German soldiers had been stuck on one mountain, the other group on the other. Now they were fighting each other over which side would get the skiff.

Hunter sank back down behind the gunwale. This was not good. If the Germans were desperate enough to kill
each other
for a boat, what would they do to him for his?

He looked in every other direction, searching for a way out of this sudden predicament. But there was none.

He was one with the water and he had to go where it was going to take him, and at the moment, it was taking him right into the thick of this strange battle.

But as he lay there, looking up into the sky, trying to come up with a plan, an unusual sound came to his ears. Above the din of the gun battle now just 100 yards away, above the sound of the distant explosions, still going off like rumbles of thunder, he heard another sound.

It was so familiar, but he wasn’t sure why. Whirring. Mechanical, but soft, almost.

Like a whisper.

He lifted himself up and looked off to the clouds in the west and way, way out there, he saw the outline of an airplane. Long flat wing, jumbo-booted landing gear, plowing its way through the air, as opposed to flying through it. Zebra stripes on the tail wing and fuselage.

It was the Lysander!

Hunter was astonished. How could this be? He’d seen the airplane tumble by him a second after the dam broke. Even then it had been breaking apart and the two crewmen just seconds away from death. But now there it was, about two miles off to his left, just flying along as if it were on a pleasure flight, same zebra-striping, same 333 tail numbers. Hunter watched it go, wondering if this would be finally, the last unsolved mystery of his strange life.

The gunfire got his attention again and a peek over the bow found him not 50 feet away from the battle. Some of the German soldiers were up to the waists in water now, shooting at their comrades across the gap of 40 yards or so. Others were throwing rocks. The Germans on the left had a small cannon, a single-shot affair they were using with mixed results. The gun had a loud
whoomp!
for a report, followed by the scream of the shell and then the dull explosion of the impact