Dragon Sword (13 page)

I feel like I’m still underwater,
drowning. I turn my head to look at A.J. for some kind of
explanation.

“
I guess they got here first,” he
says. “I guess Dan gave them everything they wanted.”

“
Quiet!” the snotty kid snaps. “I
am a captain in the
Drachenjungen
, and you are our
prisoners. Except we probably won’t keep you.”

That’s when I notice what he has in
his hands. The other guys are holding guns, pointed at A.J. and
Charlie. But Museum Boy is clutching the White Stag’s stolen
antlers.

“
We will add these to our
collection,” he announces.

“
All this trouble for a pair of
deer horns?” I ask.

“
Not just horns. We have some
tidying up to do.”

It doesn’t sound like he means
pitching in to clean up trash on the beach, and the picture of the
mother and child keeps swirling around in my head, like a song I
can’t get rid of, only this one keeps reminding me how messed up
the world is. And here’s this big jerk, acting like he’s a
superhero or something, and all he wants to do is make things
worse.

“
You think you’re so tough.” It
sounds kind of lame, as soon as I say it.

“
We
are
tough, Roy Rogers.”
We’re both talking like we’re stuck in a Comnet game or something,
but that doesn’t faze Museum Boy. “We’re
Drachenjungen
. The
finest young Aryan men in the world.”

“‘
Dragon Youth,’ son. That’s what
the name means,” A.J. translates, and you can hear in his voice
he’s been hurt. “They’re special soldiers. Young ones.” For all
A.J.’s trouble, one of the goons hits him in the ribs.

I move to help him, but Museum Boy
knocks me down into the wet sand.

“
The finest young men in the
world.” He grins. “And I am their leader. Rolf Royd.”

Rolf? Well, Rolfie thinks he’s
tough. But if we could just do something about those goons with
guns, I bet we could take him.

“
And after tonight, these fine
young men will be famous,” he continues. “Stay a little longer and
see why. We’re waiting for the fort to blow up.”

The fort.

Mom.

“
I’m sorry, Eli,” A.J.
says.

“
For what?” I’m so worried, it
sounds like I’m snapping at him.

“
I think they’ve given Dan some
kind of bomb to plant in the fort to blow up the time machine. Now
is the time to pray for your mother’s safety.”

“
Sei ruhig!
” Rolf spits, and
this time he personally kicks A.J. in the leg.

“
Stop it! There aren’t any time
machines! Time machines haven’t been invented yet!” I’m standing,
almost shouting, and A.J., Charlie, Rolf, and his Boy Scouts are
all staring at me.

“
How do you know, son?” A.J. says
quietly.

I never get to answer. We hear a
large
KABOOM
from the other side of the bluffs. Every- body
turns to it, but without even thinking, I dive at Rolf. He swings
the antlers at me, hard, and they scratch my face.

He can really fight, and I can’t,
and I guess I’m about to get my butt kicked, but I’m still thinking
about that soldier shooting the mother and her kid, and now maybe
my own mom could be hurt, or worse, and all I wanted was to bring
her
home
—

“
Good Lord!
” I don’t even
know who says it, and I don’t want to look, but I glance out of the
corner of my eye and see it, too.

“
A flying saucer!” A.J. is
pointing.

Flying over the Golden Gate Bridge
is a ship. It looks like a time-vessel.

A Saurian time-vessel.

But not Clyne’s. Not
quite.

That was the explosion we heard —
the boom of the ship entering this time and place.

An air-raid siren screams to life,
and it’s not a drill. All of us stand, watching the ship fly
circles around one of the tips of the Golden Gate’s
towers.

History had changed
again.

Chapter Fifteen

Thea: Thunderclap

Early 1940s C.E.

The man named von Braun was still
holding my chin. Tears wanted to flow from my eyes, but I held them
back, refusing to let him see.

If Eli was there somewhere, would
we be led to him? If he wasn’t, then how did we come to be
there?

I tried to find an answer, to take
my mind off the pain from von Braun’s grip. Perhaps Eli’s rendering
of a mechanical man had something to do with bringing us to a place
of destructive science? Could the ship have misinterpreted the
Barnstormer Robot Man drawing? More and more, the new Saurian
time-vessel seemed to be operating with an intelligence of its own,
which neither I nor K’lion were privy to.

Von Braun let go of my chin. “This
is all a ruse. A trick. Take the girl away. Take the serpent man to
the medical doctors, and let them run their tests. I’m sure if you
go out and look at that so-called ship, you will find it made of
nothing more than lies and balsa wood. I’ve already lost one of my
best young rocket scientists to the
Drachenjungen
so that he
could volunteer for that suicide mission in San Francisco. This
stupidity has to end somewhere. We don’t have anything to fear from
these people”— and then, with a glance at K’lion —“these beasts.
Our science is, and will always be, superior to theirs.”

The
praefectus
nodded. “My
thoughts exactly, von Braun.”

Things might have gone very badly
for us just then if the vessel hadn’t swooped into the Hammer Cave,
humming so loudly it no longer gave off music but seemed to
shriek.

That shriek was matched by the
shouting and screaming from the soldiers inside the
cave.

Von Braun and the
praefectus
went white, then ran out to see what was happening. In their rush,
several bindings, parchment holders, and pictures were knocked from
the table to the ground.

The images and writings were some
kind of documentation about what these Nazis were doing in places
other than the Hammer Cave. To people not as “lucky” as the slaves
there. The images are still with me:

Bodies lined up by ditches — men,
women, young, old. They lie still in holes in the ground. Piles of
them.

Buildings of fire, with people
naked, withered, haunted, and hurt beyond reason — prodded by
soldiers to march inside.

And I saw the mother.

It was a lone image, there on the
ground below me. A man, a soldier, was in a field. He’s holding his
gun, aiming it at the back of a woman, a mother, pressing her child
to her chest. They are waiting for this soldier to ignite his gun,
to follow his “order.”

To murder them.

I know all about people following
orders.

My mother, Hypatia, was murdered by
people following orders in Alexandria. And that is who these
“scientists” are in Peenemünde, with their new machines. Killers of
children.

“
Thea!” It was K’lion.

“
Escape now please!” He motioned
for me to come with him.

Numb, I picked up the picture of
the woman and child — I don’t know why — and slipped it inside my
tunic. I staggered out after K’lion.

We found ourselves on a platform
overlooking much of the cave below. But the
praefectus
was
there, too, running at us, weapon raised.

K’lion hissed like a cat, and
appeared ready to leap at the
praefectus
, but I knew my
lizard friend couldn’t possibly survive those kinds of weapons.
They weren’t mere blades he could jump away from.

But suddenly the
praefectus
was knocked forward and cracked his head on the ground.

A soldier had come to our aid — the
one who was so panicked about us being “Ancient Ones” from the
middle of the Earth.

“
Leave! Get out of here!” he
yelled. “Get out of here! Go! Tell the Fuerher we helped you and
not to harm us! Get out! Get out now!”

And then the vessel rose, like a
fish breaking water, next to the railing where we stood. It was
still wailing — a loud, pervasive sound of agony like a whole
chorus groaning at once. K’lion grabbed me and leaped off the
railing, hurling us through the opened ship’s hatch before it
slammed closed.

The ship glittered briefly, like
river water reflecting sunlight, then disappeared from the Hammer
Cave.

I knew we’d left, because the
colors of the Fifth Dimension swirled around us.

I was exhausted, drained. Why
did
the ship bring us to Peenemünde?

Was Eli there somewhere, and did we
fail him?

Suddenly we were shaken by what
sounded like claps of thunder, as if we were riding through a
storm. I’d never had that experience crossing the Fifth Dimension
before.

“
Rough times ahead!” K’lion
shouted.

As I looked through the ship’s
translucent sides, it seemed as if
we
were the thunderclaps:
We were skittering across the Earth in quick random bursts,
appearing and disappearing in an instant — first a land battle
below, then somewhere at sea with ships fighting, then over a great
city, bombed from the sky, and then…

The noise subsided, and we hovered
above a field. Bodies lay scattered, just like in the images in the
Hammer Cave. But this was real. I looked down — the floor had
become translucent, too — and saw her below me:

The mother, holding her child. She
kept her son’s face buried against her. I saw the soldier behind
them. He didn’t look up. But she did.

She saw me. It was a look of such
profound sadness and resignation that I expect it will always haunt
me, no matter how many eons away I am.

“
K’lion!”

It all happened so fast. The woman
turned away to bury her face against her child’s neck.

Thunderclap.

We were back in the Fifth
Dimension.

No wonder there was no surprise on
her face. In a world where such things can happen, a mere
time-vessel is small cause for alarm.

Chapter Sixteen

Eli: Unsilent Night

December 24, 1941 C.E.

“
We interrupt our evening of
Christmas carols to bring you another report on the unidentified
flying object sighted at the Golden Gate Bridge. Authorities
confirm that the bridge is currently closed to all traffic, but
they say this is due to unusual and dangerous wind conditions from
the Pacific Ocean. Newspaper reporter Herb Caen has phoned us,
saying he could definitely see lights in the sky and would try to
get closer, noting he had an invite to a Christmas party at the
Officers’ Club in the nearby Presidio. ‘Anyway,’ to quote Mr. Caen,
‘maybe it’s Santa.’ We will provide more details as we get them.
Now, back to the Samuel Gravlox Orchestra’s recording of ‘Silent
Night.’”

I turn back to Mom. “How can they
keep this quiet? There’s a Saurian time-ship flying around up
there! My friend Clyne could be in it! How do you cover up a flying
saucer and a dinosaur!?”

“
All they have to do is keep
newspaper pictures from getting out, Eli. There’s just radio and
newsprint here, no television and no Comnet.” She shrugs. “But even
when you have those things, you’d be surprised what can be covered
up.”

She takes another sip of her coffee
and strokes my hair over my forehead. It’s like I’m eight years old
and I’ve been out in the snow too long. I’m sitting, shivering,
with a big bulky green army sweater over me, trying to get
warm.

It’s great they want to get me all
cozy, and that I finally found my mom, but I need to be outside
right now, out there on the bridge, seeing if that’s really Clyne
in the ship and if he needs my help.

But they won’t let anybody out of
the fort.

After the time-ship appeared, Rolf
began yelling to his pals on the beach. As soon as the searchlights
came on, they ditched their plans to take off in the boat, and
headed toward the bluffs instead. I think they wanted to stick
around to make sure they heard the explosion they came for — their
own bomb going off.

One of Rolf’s goons figured they
ought to do something about us, and the best idea he could come up
with was to shoot us.

He pointed his gun at A.J., who
started to say something about valleys and death, like a prayer,
with his arms raised in the air. Suddenly, though, Charlie sprang
to life, like he’d been waiting for the right moment, and kicked
the guy just as his gun went off.

A.J. started hopping around, and I
realized he’d been shot in the foot.

A.J. began cussing. Rolf and the
other goon were already off the bluffs, scrambling through the
brush.

Jumping on one leg, A.J. made his
way over to the Germans’ boat.

“
I know how to drive one of these
things,” Charlie insisted. “Like the fast boats we had in Hawaii to
hop between islands.” We all climbed in, and Charlie took the
wheel. “Where’s the starter?”