After the Downfall

was a way out, any way out… What he’d told Pemsel was true for himself, too. Wherever he went, how could he be worse off?

He turned and, half upright, scrambled toward the Omphalos. Half upright turned out to be a little too high. A burst from a Soviet submachine gun slammed home between his shoulder blades. He went down with a groan, blood filling his mouth.

One hand reached for the navelstone: reached, scrabbled, and, just short of its goal, fell quiet forever. And none of the tough Russian troopers who overran the museum cared a kopek for an ugly lump of rock they could neither sell nor screw nor even have any fun breaking.

When the Omphalos seemed to stir beneath him, Hasso Pemsel wondered for a heartbeat if he was losing his mind. He hadn’t really expected anything to happen. He hadn’t really believed anything could happen. But what he believed didn’t matter, not any more. He’d mounted the stone with hope in his heart. That was enough – far more than enough.

He hung suspended for a timeless moment. What did Hamlet say? O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. That came to Hasso only later. At the time – if time was the word for this flash of existence apart from everything – he knew only that, whatever else it was, it was no dream.

And then he was back in the world again – back in a world, anyhow – and he was falling. He dropped straight down, maybe a meter, maybe two: surely no more than that, or he would have hurt himself when he landed. Or maybe not. He came down in a bog that put him in mind of the Pripet Marshes on the Russo – Polish border.

Training told. As soon as he knew he was hitting water and mud, his hands went up to keep his weapon dry. A Schmeisser was a splendid piece when it was clean, but it couldn’t take as much crud in the works as a Soviet PPSh or a British Sten.

He floundered toward the higher ground ahead. The setting sun – or was it rising? – flooded the unprepossessing landscape with blood – red light. And that was one more impossibility, because it had been the middle of the day in Berlin.

Hasso shrugged and squelched on. Maybe he’d got shot the moment he plopped his can down on the Omphalos. Maybe this was nothing but a mad hallucination before the lights went out for good. But he had to act as if it was real. He’d spent too many years fighting to quit now. He’d been wounded three times. He was damned if he’d throw in the sponge for no good reason.

“Maybe I’m damned anyway,” he muttered. He shrugged again. If he was, he couldn’t do anything about that, either.

He hauled himself up onto dry land. As he did, he realized it was artificial, not a natural feature of the swamp at all. It was a causeway, long and straight and not very wide, with a well – kept dirt road atop it. Somebody needed to go from Here to There in a hurry, and the swamp happened to lie athwart the shortest way.

Somebody badly needed to get from Here to There in a hurry. This causeway would have taken a devil of a lot of work to build.

He stooped to examine the road. The long shadows the sun cast (it was setting, definitely setting) showed no trace of tire tracks or tread marks from panzers or assault guns. They did show footprints and hoofprints, some shod, others not. And there were unmistakable lumps of horse dung.

Hand tools, then, almost certainly. Which meant…

Hasso Pemsel shrugged one more time. He had no idea what the hell it meant. It meant he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. He’d seen The Wizard of Oz when it got to Germany, just before the war started.

A flash of motion on the road, off to the east. Before Hasso consciously realized he needed to do it, he slid into cover, sprawling on the steeply sloping side of the causeway. All the time he’d spent fighting the Ivans had driven one lesson home, down at a level far below thought: unexpected motion spelled trouble, big trouble.

Ever so cautiously, Schmeisser at the ready, he raised his head for a better look. As he did, he wondered how many magazines for the machine pistol he had left. Four or five, he thought. And what would he do once he used them up? He grunted out a syllable’s worth of mirthless laughter. He’d damn well do without, that was what.

Somebody was running up the road toward him. No, not somebody. Several somebodies, one in the lead, the rest between fifty and a hundred meters behind. The leader ran with an athlete’s long, loping strides. The others pounded along, showing not much form but great determination. The dying sun flashed off sharpened metal in their hands. They were armed, then. The man in the lead didn’t seem to be.

A few seconds later, as the leader drew closer, Hasso sucked in a short, sharp, startled breath. That was no man running for his life. It was a woman, running for hers! She was tall and blond and slim, and the rags she wore covered enough of her to keep her technically decent, but no more.

If she hadn’t been very weary, weary unto death, she would have left her pursuers in the dust. Her build and her gait said she was used to running in a way they weren’t and never would. But her sides heaved; sweat plastered her fair hair to her face. Plainly, she was at the end of her tether. How many kilometers had she run already, knowing it would be the end if she faltered even once?

Hasso’s hackles rose when he got a good look at the men who thudded after her. They were short and squat and dark, with curly black hair and the shadows of stubble on their cheeks and chins. One of them carried a hatchet, one a pitchfork, and the third what Hasso at first took to be a sword but then realized was a stout kitchen carving knife.

The woman glided past him. Her head didn’t turn his way; she must not have seen him dive for cover. Not surprising, not with the sun in her face the way it was. She didn’t look back to see how close her enemies were. All her attention was on the way ahead. He admired that even more than he admired her elegantly chiseled features. She would go on as long as she could – so she proclaimed with every line of her body. But her harsh panting said she couldn’t go on much longer.

Her pursuers were worn, too, but not so worn as she. They could still talk to one another as they ran. Their harsh, guttural language meant nothing to Hasso. He didn’t think it was Russian … but then, he hadn’t really believed these were the Pripet Marshes, either.

Deciding what to do and doing it were quick, easy, almost automatic. Just before the three shambling men came abreast of him, he rose up a little and gave the leader – the one with the pitchfork – a short burst in the chest. As the fellow crumpled, Hasso shot the man with the carving knife.

The swarthy man with the hatchet showed admirable presence of mind. He flung the weapon at Hasso just before one more burst from the Schmeisser caught him in the midsection. The Wehrmacht captain ducked. The hatchet spun past, less than half a meter above his head. It splashed into the swamp.

He scrambled to his feet, ready to finish off any of the three who still showed fight. But they were all dead or dying fast. He looked down the road in the direction from which they’d come. Were more like them trotting along in their wake? He didn’t see anybody else, not for a couple of kilometers.

Slowly, he turned toward the woman. She’d stopped when she heard the gunfire. Now she was trying to catch her breath, her head down, her hands on her knees. After most of a minute, she straightened, looking at him with as much curiosity as he felt about her.

Curiosity wasn’t the only thing he felt. She’d seemed striking as she ran past. Now he saw that striking was much too mild a word. She was improbably, outrageously, beautiful. If she was only a product of his wild imaginings in the split second before the pain of a mortal wound seized him, he had more imagination than he’d ever imagined.

She said something. Whatever tongue it was, he didn’t understand a word of it. He didn’t care. He could have listened to her forever, no matter what she said. Her voice was a honeyed caress.

But she stopped and waited expectantly. He realized he needed to answer. “I’m sorry – I don’t understand,” he said in German. A tiny frown creased the perfect skin between her eyebrows – she didn’t follow him, either. He said the same thing in French, remembered from school, and then in bad Russian acquired at the front. She shook her head each time.

She slowly walked toward him. Little by little, he realized what a mess he was: filthy, unshaven, in a wet, muddy, shabby uniform. He would have apologized if only he knew how.