“The authorities are gonna be closing in fast. I hope your ride is speedy enough to get you outta here before the whole town gets locked down.”
Gio gave me a who-the-hell-you-think-you’re-talking-to look. “The beauty we boosted’s a 1970 Torino fastback with three hundred seventy-five horses under the hood. Only thing she can’t pass is a gas station.”
“Good. Take Kate with you. Keep her safe.”
Kate: “Hey!”
Gio: “We’ll take her, but we can’t promise she’ll be safe.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
It was Theresa who answered. “You think we been hiding out this whole last year? Well fuck you very much, Sam Thornton, cause we ain’t been running, we been fighting. In case you somehow failed to notice, shit’s gotten rough out in the world of late. Angels and demons and everything in between so intent on bashing in each others’ skulls, they no longer seem to care who gets caught up in the middle. I’m talking ordinary people caught up in shit they shouldn’t be — in a covert war that ain’t theirs to fight. So we been out there helping ’em, wherever and however we can. Kate wants in on that, she’s welcome, but she for damn sure won’t be safe. Wouldn’t blame her for saying no.”
“Actually,” she said, “count me in.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Yeah?” asked Gio.
“Yeah,” said Kate. “You can see how far hiding got me. Mayhap it’s time for me to fight.”
Booted feet like hoof-beats as the cops stormed the front door. Not SWAT, I thought — not yet — just uniforms. The three’s window for escape was closing. Mine had closed already. Someone was gonna hafta delay the police, after all.
“This place got a back entrance?” I asked the kids.
One nodded, and pointed toward backstage. “Out the door and down the hall,” he said.
“Thanks.” Then, to my friends: “Go.”
“But Sam–”
“There isn’t time,” I said, biting back tears. “Just go.”
Kate hugged me, sobbing into my neck. Gio put a beefy hand onto my shoulder. And then the three of them took off, leaving as the cops came in.
The story I told the cops made no goddamn sense. I’d been eating breakfast at the pancake place. Three crazy people — all freaky and messed-up looking, like out of a horror movie — crashed a goddamn semi into the dining room, and made ground beef of half the patrons. They fled across the street to the school. Me and a couple other patrons followed them, trying to stop ’em before they could hurt the kids. Two we did. One we didn’t. But the kids were braver and tougher than the last one musta thought, because they defended themselves, and — thank God — came out on top. And I had no idea what happened to my fellow Good Samaritans.
They held my meat-suit for a week. He never once after I abandoned him contradicted my story. Nor did the children. And the sad state of the Brethren bodies aside, the physical evidence didn’t, either. Security cameras caught some of what transpired, and eyewitnesses supplied the rest. Eventually, they let him go a hero. I saw him on Barbara Walters a few months back. He said you never know in those moments how you’re gonna react. Said the whole thing was a blur. True enough for him, I guess.
Some shit I seen, I wish like hell it were true for me as well.
THEN
The sun rose over the battleships to the east of me, dull patches of pale gray amidst a sea that blazed with the full spectrum of the sun’s rays, scattered to rainbows by the undulating waves. Gun battlements flanked me by some fifty yards on either side, two points in a dotted line that studded the white-sand beach as far as the eye could see, guarding against surprise attacks from Japanese fighter planes eager to steal this hunk of rock back from Uncle Sam a second time. A little nothing of an island in the tropics by the name of Guam — two hundred square miles of beach and rock and jungle on which many men on both sides had lost their lives. I hadn’t heard of it before this morning, although I hear tell the US has occupied it since the 1890s; Lord knows why the Empire took it from us in the first place back in ’41. But in the wake of Pearl Harbor, them taking it was enough to make us want to take it back. So take it back we did — ten months ago, this was, in ’44 — landing Marines at beaches north and south and pushing back the Japanese until they ran out of ground to hold.
Strategy or vengeance, I wasn’t sure. But it sure was a pretty place to watch the sun rise, so long as you don’t mind the warships mucking up the view, or the B-29s juddering overhead as the runway spit them northward toward Japan. Word around the mess hall was a few hostiles had taken refuge in the jungle, living wild and popping out every now and again to slash Jeep tires or trash supply sheds. Consensus was they wouldn’t last out there for long, though history would prove that consensus wrong. The last holdout would not surrender until ’72, nearly three decades after we reclaimed the island, and even then, the fella came in under duress. Turned out he’d been living in a jungle cave the whole time, certain there was a war still on, and that the Americans who’d by then put their conflict with his nation in the rearview were still the enemy.
Amazing the conditions folks can live through. The fear. The loneliness. The constant struggle to survive in hostile territory. I guess any situation becomes your normal if you live it long enough. Though I couldn’t help but wonder how relieved he felt when, instead of a trip to the brig, he got loaded onto a commercial airliner bound for home. Maybe not back to the world he left behind, but one that wasn’t trying to kill him at every turn, at least, or turn him into something less than human.
The sand was cool as night beneath my well-worn military fatigue pants as I sat, tank top-bared arms hugging knees, shivering beneath the waxing light as it chased the stars westward. But it wasn’t on account of the sand’s chill my new vessel — a Marine named Seamus Scanlon, according to his dogtags — was goosebumped and trembling.
No, that was on account of Hitler.
When I closed the door to his bunker office wearing the flesh of his betrothed, I knew I didn’t have long to make my move. The anemometer supplied to him by his apparently quite mystically inclined science advisor Mengele may have shaken itself apart, but there was still the pesky matter of me not speaking a goddamn word of German. Not to mention the fact I was inhabiting the body of the most evil man in all of history’s new bride; if that icky motherfucker got all randy on me, there’d be no stopping the barf-fest that ensued.
Actually, come to think of it, I thought as I clicked shut the door behind the guards ushering an unconscious Goebbels to the brig… and then I puked all down the front of my housedress.
Son of a whore. Lilith warned me that’d happen every time, but even after Goebbels and the Hitler Youth getting all ralphy on me, I still didn’t see it coming.
When I threw up, Hitler was by my side in a flash. At first, I thought the jig was up once more. Maybe Mengele had warned him this was a side-effect of possession, and he was planning to attack me, or summon a fresh batch of guards. But instead, he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close asking, “Bist du in Ordnung, meine Liebe?”
And though the nuance of his words was lost on me, I got the gist. This human garbage was worried about me, and hoped I was okay. Hard to say what specifically he thought had gotten to me. Maybe the poisoning of the dog he’d made me watch, maybe the cold-cocking of a dear friend. But one thing was clear, this fucking stain on our whole species, this monster who’d rounded up Jews and dissidents and slaughtered them en masse and who’d caused bloodshed the world over, was deeply concerned about his new wife’s tender tummy.