Decimate, p.22
Decimate, page 22
Her sister’s helpless cries drifted toward her through the night, and Agatha found herself running in response. It was a strange urge, the desire to protect an infant with a barely formed brain from all she’d just seen in the basement of the guesthouse. But it was more than that, she realized. Her sister was alone with Hilde, alone with a housekeeper who spoke a language her mother had secretly spoken for years. A housekeeper who’d reacted with barely restrained fury at the suggestion she was not family.
Inside the house, she heard Hilde’s footsteps upstairs, creaking the floorboards as she hurried toward Catherine’s nursery. Before Agatha could stop herself, she went to the gun case in her father’s library and removed the brand-new Ruger Security-Six he’d proudly displayed to her when it arrived. She was a child of the mountains and had been taught to use guns from an early age. Their cowgirl daughter, they’d always called her, no matter how much she hated it. It always sounded like a joke about her weight, even though they meant it quite differently. Her parents wanted to believe their decision to raise her in Montana had turned her into something admirably unique, and different from them. Heartier stock compared to their privileged upbringings.
Now she feared everything they’d told her about their upbringings had been a lie.
The nursery door was halfway open. Light spilled from a porcelain lamp close to the window. Agatha pushed the door open the rest of the way with her foot, the Ruger raised and shaking slightly in her grip. Catherine was in Hilde’s arms. She’d stopped crying, and her big blue eyes gazed up at the old woman as she gripped one of her fingers with several of her tiny ones.
“Are you mad, girl?” Hilde whispered.
“Put her down.”
Hilde didn’t comply.
“Put my sister down. Now.”
Without taking her eyes off Agatha, Hilde set the tiny baby into the crib. Agatha took another few steps forward and opened her other palm, revealing the word she’d written there earlier.
“What does this mean?” Agatha asked.
The old woman’s lower lip trembled. Her breath left her in a long, stuttering exhale. She was trying to be strong, Agatha could tell. She didn’t answer, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the ink across Agatha’s palm.
“Tell me what it means,” Agatha repeated.
“High-altitude testing.”
“And that’s what he did?” Agatha asked. “At Dachau?”
Hilde stumbled to the windowsill, gripped it with both hands, her back heaving as if the mere mention of the concentration camp’s name had sent fire coursing through her veins.
“What did she tell you?” she finally whispered through stuttering tears. “What has she told you?”
“Who are you?” Agatha asked.
Hilde whirled. “They will kill her, do you understand? They will kill her if she does not stay silent.”
“Who?”
“You must stop, Agatha. You must stop this.”
“She said I have to stop him, but that I’ll never forgive her. Why? Did she work at the camps?”
“No! She worked for the party in Berlin.”
“The Nazi Party.”
“We were Germans,” she whispered miserably. “We were Germans in a time of war.”
“He was doing experiments on prisoners at Dachau. He wasn’t just a German. He was a Nazi.”
“He was to find ways to keep pilots alive. In the sea. High in the air. In the cold. They told him to use whatever means necessary.”
“Who are you?” Agatha asked again.
“I am your grandmother.” Hilde’s eyes filled with tears.
“Who’s . . .” Agatha’s words were stolen from her, as if she tried to form a sentence while diving face-first into cold water. “Who’s . . .” She could hear her breaths whistling in her nostrils, but she couldn’t feel them. Her lungs felt both empty and small.
“Your mother,” Hilde said. “Your mother is my daughter.”
Agatha shook her head. The revelations in the basement should have prepared her for this, but those were revelations about abominable crimes in a country far away. This was a crime—a deception—that had unfolded day in and day out, and an arm length’s away, in the years since.
“All of this was for you. All of it, so you and your sister could have a life. So you’d never know what it meant to live on the losing side of a war. Your father was not supposed to be brought over; he was too close to the Führer. After the war, the scientists who had been close to Hitler were to stay in Germany and do their work on behalf of the Americans there. But your father told the Americans he’d discovered something tremendous, and they feared he’d give it to the Soviets if they did not bring him and his family here.”
“What? What did he discover?”
“It didn’t matter. He couldn’t re-create it once they brought him here. They let him go. Him and your mother. And they let him bring me over then.”
“Todes Puls,” Agatha said.
Hilde’s breath left her in a defeated groan. “She is mad. She is mad to tell you all these things.”
But in the hospital her mother hadn’t sounded mad at all. She’d sounded focused and clear. As if gouging out her own eyes had given her a newfound clarity. And if Hilde assumed Agatha’s mother had shared this word with her, then it was possible the old woman knew nothing about her father’s secret office, and Agatha wanted to keep it that way.
“What does it mean?” Agatha asked.
“Death pulse,” Hilde answered.
“What is it?”
“He found a moment in the dying process, a second, where the body gave off a form of energy that had never been documented before. But he said it was like a door that opened an inch which he had to hold open so he could capture it.”
“How did he capture it?”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t—”
“How did he capture it?” Agatha bellowed.
“He could do anything he wanted to any of the prisoners. His lab was designed to keep people alive under terrible stresses. He said the pulse was stronger when the body was subjected to certain forces. Drowning. Suffocation. Strangulation. When the struggle was greater, when the pain was greater, there was more Todes Puls. But when they brought him to America . . .”
“They wouldn’t let him torture people and kill them.”
Hilde’s answer was in how heavily she looked to the floor.
“They let him go,” Hilde finally said. “They gave him a new name and they paid for all this.”
“Why didn’t they send him back to Germany?”
“He’d have told everyone how they broke their own rule bringing him here in the first place.”
“And my mother?”
“Your mother was a German in a time of war.”
She knew, Agatha thought, her heartbeat aflutter. She was part of it.
“But now she says I have to stop him,” Agatha said. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying. You were with her all day. She told you everything. You gagged her to keep her quiet.”
“He made it work.”
“Made what work?”
“The capture device, he calls it. It took him years, but he finally found the moment, the precise second, when the death pulse is strongest across all forms of death. And he didn’t need to torture anyone to do it. She wouldn’t let him. But it is a millisecond from the time of death itself. And your mother . . . she offered up herself as his test subject. She let him bring her closer and closer to the end. Last night he went too far. He had to bring her back. But it worked. The capture device is still charged. It’s working.”
“What does working mean?” Agatha asked.
Hilde just shook her head.
“What do you mean, it’s working?”
“It means your father will have an incredible power.”
The man in the photos would have that power, the man who tortured and butchered prisoners of war, treated them as pin cushions and lab rats.
“Why does he want it?” Agatha asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to know.”
Hilde met her gaze. “Neither do you, girl.”
“Tell me what she did. Tell me what my mother did.”
“She’s lost her mind. You saw yourself.”
“Over there! What did she do over there?”
“Nothing. She obeyed her party. She filed things. She was a secretary.”
“She blinded someone.”
“This is nonsense! She threw gravel into the eyes of a Jew who grabbed at her dress as the Gestapo took her away. She did not blind the woman.”
In the silence that washed over the nursery, it seemed as if Hilde herself heard the ludicrousness of what she’d just said, presenting her mother’s assault on a woman doomed to die in a death camp as if it were no more than a brief tussle.
“Your mother has lost her mind and her reason. And now she hurls the truth upon her daughter with no thought of the consequences. You will be mad to do her bidding in this moment, Agatha.”
“She died. She died and she saw what was waiting for her. She saw what she’d done. She felt it. She felt the hurt she caused, and it changed her.”
“Her brain is damaged, nothing more. And now her eyes.”
When Agatha started for the crib, Hilde stood up straight and stumbled back a few steps; then, when she realized Agatha only meant to collect Catherine into one arm, she went still.
“Where are you taking her?” Hilde asked.
“Where is he?” Agatha asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying. Where is my father?”
“You cannot take Catherine to him now. Leave her here with me. She’s safe with me.”
“I don’t know you! Where is he?”
“He’s not alone.”
“Dr. Hall’s with him?”
“And others.”
“How many others?”
“Agatha, this is madness. You cannot.”
“Where are they?”
Finally Hilde gave up their location. She was weeping by then because Agatha had closed the distance between them and placed the muzzle of the Ruger against her sweating forehead.
She was still weeping when Agatha took to the stairs, realizing that it was the feel of her baby sister’s warmth in her arms that turned her into someone willing to threaten another’s life.
Her grandmother’s life.
When Lucy Merriweather saw Agatha standing on the other side of the glass holding her bawling baby sister in her arms, she raced for the front door, hurriedly tying her bathrobe closed as she went.
The story came tumbling out of Agatha with tearful ease. Her mother had been rushed to the hospital. Hilde had a fever and shouldn’t be near the baby. Could they just watch Catherine for a few hours while Agatha went back to the hospital to check on her mom? They didn’t question her. Ethel Merriweather took the baby, and suddenly Lucy, one of Agatha’s closest friends in the world, threw her arms around her. The embrace, rather than a comfort, felt like a hot, sweaty prison. She was the daughter of a death doctor, and if Lucy held her too long, she would feel this poison in her blood.
Hilde had given her the location of an old ranger station. Agatha and her father had hiked to it years ago, right after it was abandoned by the construction crew that had taken it over from the Park Service.
She could go to the hospital. She could sob her way into the ICU, demand more answers from her mother. But the fact was, she could not face her mother yet.
Was Hilde right? Was Agatha mad to follow the commands of a woman who’d gouged out her eyes, who’d concealed her true identity from her own daughter, from the world, for years? In the end, she drove into the mountainous dark not because she thought a resolution might await, but because everything behind her had been ripped from its foundations. With each passing minute, there was nothing to go back to.
Her father was not some small-town doctor; her mother was not an heiress. Their ranch hid subterranean secrets that could destroy all their lives if made public.
Her father was still the man who’d put her on his lap when she was a girl and read children’s stories to her. But now she remembered his insistence that he would only read to her from those books with illustrations that were tasteful and beautiful. Now she realized what those two words really meant. No fairy tales unless all the characters therein were porcelainlike children with cornsilk blond hair and pale, white skin. This little flash of memory made her stop on the side of the road.
Sobs ripped from her with humiliating force. And with them, withering self-judgment. Had she been a fool not to sense these secrets writhing beneath the surface of her life? She was barely seventeen. Did all adults eventually suffer some moment like this? Would the other juniors at Whitefish High have a night where their innocence was stomped underfoot like twigs beneath horse hooves? Or was she doomed to enter a special class of people, an exile class?
The answer terrified her, so she started driving again.
As the world lost its sharp edges beneath a star-crazed sky, Agatha felt the comfort of numbness. Then she reached the turnoff she knew would take her to the old ranger station, and her heart started to pound with enough force to make her fingertips pulse.
On that long-ago hike with her father, they’d nosed through its three empty buildings, widely spaced across an open meadow fringed with tall pine. And he’d wondered aloud then if the sockets were still wired for power or if the construction crews had severed the lines after they’d left.
Power, she thought. He’d been looking for a power source. An abandoned one.
She killed her headlights, rolled slowly down the gravel road. It was so overgrown in places that branches played a chalkboard song along the Pinto’s roof. Then she came to the opening of the meadow. It took her several minutes to adjust to the darkness because not a single light came from any of the three buildings. Their exteriors, she knew from her previous visit, were weak attempts at an imitation Swiss chalet, but at night they looked like lava domes of dark earth.
Ruger raised, she started for the main building.
When she stepped inside, a breeze hit her that told her all the building’s doors were open. She wondered if this was a deliberate act to get rid of the scorched rubber smell that filled the interior.
When her foot caught on something, she almost fell, managed to right herself. Her flashlight had landed on a thick black snake of cable that ran across the hardwood floor to an outlet nearby. From the outlet a black scorch mark traveled at least three feet up the wall. She figured the same ignition event had seared through the cable where it had once been plugged into the wall. She turned slowly, following the cable’s serpentine path across the floor, found the other end close by, also seared through, and a similar black burn covering the floor underfoot. She took several steps back, held the flashlight’s beam in place. After a few seconds, she found three other matching cables, also sheared through from similar ignition events. The quartet of scorch marks on the floor outlined part of what must have been the base of something that had protected the floor from the little explosions.
The words capture device thundered through her memory, blended with the sounds of Hilde’s wretched tears.
Whatever the case, it was gone, moved. This entire place had been abandoned. Recently and with haste.
A force struck her from behind. Her feet went out from under her, and she slammed into the floor face-first. Involuntary screams tore from her, a combination of rage and terror brought forth by the entire night. She was trying to organize them into cries for help, when suddenly her attacker stopped trying to pin her facedown and rolled her onto her back.
Not her father, not Dr. Hall, but Edward Proctor, the nurse from their office, the one who always gave her appraising looks, as if he thought he might have a right to her body if her father approved of his job performance. Her mother and father joked that she should marry him someday, even though fifteen years separated them. His severe handsomeness had never enticed her because it was always offset by his icy nature. Discovering herself alone with Edward in any other circumstance would have disturbed her. Now it terrified her.
As if he’d done nothing more than tug on her shoulder, he said, “You can’t be here.”
He was about to speak again when Agatha pressed the muzzle of her gun into the center of his chest. Edward’s full-lipped mouth became a silent O. Crouched down, he backed away from her as she got to her feet. And he kept backing away, despite the gun.
She had, in a second, crossed the threshold from self-protection to threatening his life, and Edward’s wide-eyed glare seemed to indicate he was just as astonished by this choice as she was.
“We’re working on something very important. But it’s not ready, Agatha. You need to—”
“Where is he?”
“They left.” Realizing he’d just given her too much information, he winced, but he didn’t stop backing up.
“Who is he with?”
“Agatha, there’s no need for this. Put the gun down and let me—”
Suddenly he turned and grabbed for the shadows behind him. For the first time, Agatha saw a table there. But before he could grasp whatever weapon he’d gone for, a dark silhouette rose up from the doorway next to him, and Edward let out a desperate-sounding wheeze, sustained by pure pain as he hit the floor. Then Hilde was lowering the shovel she’d struck him with.
“Cunt,” Edward hissed through gritted teeth. “You fucking cunts. What are you—Jesus!” The young man erupted into a chorus of agonized groans. He was down on all fours now, trying to crawl forward, but the blow from the shovel had both stunned and injured him.
“Where is the capture device?” Agatha asked.
The words silenced Edward immediately. Head hanging so heavily she wondered if some part of his spine had been damaged, he said nothing.
Hilde tossed the shovel aside, and its metal blade thunked hard against the floor. Edward jerked but didn’t try to get up. She drew a gun, not as new as the Ruger Agatha had stolen from the case.
