Stormfuhrer (7 page)

Karen sprayed the syringe of fluid into the air to eliminate the air within.  A pointless life-saving gesture, but still there was protocol to follow.  She took the syringe and bent toward the unexposed thigh of the thin Lithuanian woman who quietly pleaded for mercy.  With a quick swing of the arm, she embedded the needle deeply into the leg, the liquid filling the muscle of a hard thigh in dark pants.

The soldier fell, gasping, grabbing his leg and yelling “
Helf mir! Helf mir!“
while Karen struggled to cover his mouth with a hand towel.  Gradually, he lay unconscious just inside the tent, staring sightlessly into the dark canvas roof.  The young Lithuanian woman stared at the nurse in horror.  It would mean all their deaths.  So pointless.

As Karen emerged from the tent, she emerged from the cardboard cave and the game, throwing her backpack over her right shoulder, almost tripping over the cables.  The bell rang for second period while another much louder bell rang in a distant camp, 83 years in the past.

With a sigh of relief, Lionel hopped off the horse and watched as his fellow countrymen attacked a group of German tanks from horseback with primitive lances and muskets.  The explosions seemed amplified by a choking black smoke rendered from a nearby pit.  Between ear-ringing bursts, grinding mechanical beasts plodded forward on tracks, setting off their own projectile explosions emitted from the dark pipes protruding from mobile engines protected by a thick layer of
dunkelgrün
steel.  But those were still some distance away, too distant for Lionel to consider much as his horse contorted itself oddly and landed upon his thickly clothed body while his antiquated musket flew off in another direction.  He struggled to get free of the horse, which already lay unconscious across his chest and shoulders.  He pulled himself out between mud and horse, just enough to watch the advance of the green metal beasts.

Mounds of singed cloth and scorched human and leathery animal remains lay thick in the fore while the tanks continued their unrelenting climb, interminable in their approach, towards the foothills of Warsaw.  Before the fall, Lionel had just about given up, seeing most of his comrades beaten into the dirt by the rapid fire of the small tanks and the pistols aimed by men riding solo in the side-cars of buzzing three-person motorcycles.  Lionel closed his own eyes, expecting to die at any second, when everything went dark.

A chirping could be heard, a hum, the feel of a cooled breeze hitting his face, the smell of a house and dry farmland that he knew well.  He was back home, it was early morning, and he had played most of the night.  His laptop was on his chest as he lay in bed.  He smiled.  He had done it!  Hayes’ special browser was now his to use.  His to spread to a few others of the senior class--attached to an anonymous email, of course.  It would take a few days to package it as an executable installation file so that just anyone could download and install it on their own machines in a few clicks.  Granted, their machines would have to be high-end, like his, and most seniors at the impoverished campus didn’t possess much along those lines.  But a few did.

On presentation days, Perry, the tall, thin English teacher across the hall, would combine his classes with those of Hayes.  On these days, usually once or twice a six weeks, they would pack Perry’s classroom, with students sitting on desks, the backs of chairs, each other’s laps, and the floor along the walls. 

Hayes enjoyed working with Perry on these collaborative endeavors though they didn’t get a chance to collaborate much, both teaching seven-period marathons each day with 30-minute lunches and a period off to temporarily decompress.  Still, Hayes told Perry everything he needed to know about the game for the joint project to be successful, which, in reality, wasn’t very much.  He knew Perry wasn’t much of a gamer though and would likely consider it as merely another interesting teaching tool.  Hayes was right, but Perry did like the idea of applying games to learning, and the history component of this particular game, and knew what to do with it in terms of applying it to his own course.

An overweight boy in baggy pants and close-cropped hair pulled his speaker notes from a front pocket and unfolded them, his left forearm tattooed from his wrist to his elbow in a way that made the arm look cybernetic, with cables and metal gears seeming to snake through the flesh.  He looked at his audience, looked down at his feet and gave an embarrassed grin through reddened eyes.  “Don’t laugh because I already know it sucks.”  He paused.  Then he began giving his report. 

“I was a horse trainer in Poland.  I am now thin with long arms, so I’m having a difficult time with the cold.  My character doesn’t heal well.  He has a cut on . . .”

Perry cleared his throat from the side of the room.  “Remember the rules, Pete.   Refer to yourself as the character, not to your character in the third person.”  Pete nodded and continued.

“The camp is surrounded with barbed wire and towers.  On one side runs a track with regular trains blowing and screeching to a halt before a long platform of men with the two lightning bolts on their collars.  It comes and goes twice a day.

“
I sleep in the second tier of bunks with two other guys.”  A few giggles came from the middle rows.  “It's not always the same guys though.”  Giggles.  “I mean, some die right next to you while you’re sleeping, and then you wake up and they're staring at you with their dead eyes and you can’t wake them up so you just push them off the bunk so you can go back to sleep.”  There was silence in the classroom again.

“Of course, most of us have a choice of bigger and better things in the camp, particularly if we carry the dead—and the soon-to-be dead.  I haven’t done that.  Or if we can convince the people that they’re only getting a shower when they’re taking off their clothes.  I haven’t done that either, but you hear things from other players during the game.”

“
'
Inmates
.'  Don’t refer to it as a game.  Talk about your experiences as if they are real.”

“
Inmates. . . .  OK, Devices.  First, imagery. My ribs show through my loose skin and my bunk, filthy with lice, is only five feet long.  I work at the digging spot with nothing but the pathetic striped clothes.  The pants are loose and they just come to my calf.  They took my shoes away at the train platform and gave me some brown ones that don’t even look like shoes any more.  More like pieces of muddy beef jerky with strings.  My feet are always worse off than the rest of me, dried mud between my toes.  Like others, I tried wrapping them in whatever I could get, newspapers mostly.  The Germans have separate trash bins, but I quickly realized that the more generous of them—and one is actually generous—leave some of their trash in cans where some prisoners can get at it.  I almost starved once except for that can.

“OK, Simile.  A few prisoners are like the dogs that some of the guards walk around with, wanting to bring you down to build themselves up.  They just want to please the guards—they have it pretty good and it makes me want to volunteer for their jobs, the ones that take away your humanity.”

“
Very good, Pete,” Mr. Perry encouraged.

             
     “Personification.  My sad feet.  Once they                     are gone, the rest will very quickly follow.

“
There is a guard.  Herr Spiegel.  The guards just call him Spiegel.  He sometimes inspects the area where we work and even dropped a part of his sandwich by a prisoner once, the prisoner in the worst shape who was about to die.  He always tried to volunteer for stone-cutting or carrying or setting it, but he couldn’t even lift his own head.  Because if you can’t work, you are taken behind the ovens and shot in the back of the neck and then you fall into one of the pits that I help dig.  I’ve seen it many times.   They don’t even kill you and drag you--they walk you to your grave and shoot you there.   Less work that way.

“
Spiegel has the fewer medals and patches than most of the other guards I’ve seen. 

“
Metaphor.  He doesn’t bark orders like the others.  Just patrols, mainly the workers’ areas.  Once, he accidentally dropped his wallet beside a rock that I was chopping at with a broken spade.   It fell open and a picture of his family showed.  There was a blonde woman in the picture, overweight, holding two babies.  I picked up the wallet and handed it to him.  He put it in his front pocket, nodded to me, and walked on.”  At this point Pete lifted his fleshy chin off his chest and looked at his audience for the first time.

“A nod?  What am I?  Just a Polish Jew.  A nothing.  And here is a member of the great Master Race, no, one of its inner circle, nodding to me as if I were more than a pigeon crapping on his favorite car.  Spiegel became my favorite Nazi from that point on.  He acknowledged that I have a self, that I am not a burden, an animal to be kicked out of the way because it doesn't serve a purpose, or a bunch of physical characteristics that even some of the Germans themselves have.  He also shows me that not all Germans regard us as non-human.  But if they let on, they’d be in here with us, so they play along, kicking, yelling.  The rest just beat us for fun.  You can tell the difference.  I’m not sure, but I think he smiled when he handed me the wallet.”

The boy returned to his seat in the front-row beside a red-headed girl with braces.  The speech over and no one clapped.  No one moved or said anything.  Then the clapping began in the middle rows and spread to other students.  Finally, the whole room was all howls, whistling, and clapping.  Pete turned to the girl with the braces, looking past her, grinning.  “I told you it sucked.”

A sizable jock wearing a gray t-shirt started to stand up in the back row, staring fixedly at Pete, thought better of it, and then sat down again, working his hands together while staring at the fake wood grain on his laminate desk.  He began to stand up again and sat back down, shaking his head.

“
Oh my God.  Oh . . . my  . . . God,” repeated Herr Spiegel’s human counterpart.

CHAPTER 4

Dana watched as the smoke seethed through the hastily-built chimney’s chinks.  She saw fire behind a semi-rusty grate with “
achten
” chalked across it and was soothed by memories of her grandmother’s cabin in the cold, windy woods of Maine.  She could somehow smell the wood fire behind the black metal door.  She couldn’t move anything but her left hand and arm.  The right arm seemed broken and useless.  She brought up the dirty left hand and held it before her eyes.  It was real enough, but not quite, in some respects.  The spaces between the bony fingers were dark along with the fingers themselves, all stained with dirt, but the hand was not in pain, nor was any other part of her emaciated body.  The metal door of the furnace, rounded at the top, was pulled open by the spindly fingers of a hand protruding from a dirty, striped uniform.  The
Sonderkommandos
tried to work quickly but often stumbled from lack of sleep.  Their stumbling was often rewarded with sharp yells from a few SS soldiers watching from a distance, but not from kicks or rifle butts.  They were too important.  They were even kept separate from other inmates, housed in rooms rimming the crematorium, warned to speak to no one.

The flat iron gurney upon which she lay was fixed to move in only two directions, its wheels seated atop two rails.  Her naked feet became warm and then very warm as her body was rolled toward the small, opened door, feet first.  Her feet were catching fire, already sizzling and blistered, joining with the bits of charred bones already in the oven, superheated in the orange and yellow shimmer.

Dana reached for her tightening throat, finding that she could now move her arms freely, and as she did so a different awareness penetrated her mind, cooling her skin, and the angle of her body gradually inclined until her upper body was vertically positioned.  Dana found herself once again seated in the dark box, at a student’s desk, before a now black monitor that slowly closed to its hidden, horizontal position.  Her feet still tingled as if just removed from the flame.  She removed the headset that covered nearly her entire head and became aware of a square of light around her sandaled feet.  Shaken, she heard the end-of-class bell and soon passed through the little makeshift cloth door and beyond, grabbing her backpack, dragging her feet down the hall, almost tripping down a flight of stairs, then to the left, past a row of blue lockers, and into the classroom where she would sit through a period of Calculus Fundamentals, nauseated and very weak.

She knew that she would be assigned another avatar, one in a similar situation, if Hayes was correct about how things worked.  Her death was so terrifying, however, that she didn't want another avatar.  A guard had died.  Her avatar had been punished for something neither she nor the avatar had done, sent into the crematorium oven . . . still conscious.  Right now she just wanted to sleep.

Dana's Calculus Fundamentals teacher, Mrs. Villarreal, sat beside the overhead projector and called on students at random to grade the homework of their peers, a daily procedure.  Having switched papers with Julia, the quiet girl with long black hair sitting next to her, she dug for a red grading pencil from her small, orange purse and wrote her name on the back of the single sheet of paper that had been torn from a spiral notebook and handed to her.  Julia's homework was only half-finished, so she kept her regular pencil out in case she could squeeze a few right answers in without Mrs. Villarreal noticing.  Dana's and Julia's handwriting weren't that different.

Dana couldn't focus on the mathematics.  Her mind kept drifting back to the game, what she may have done wrong that resulted in her avatar's death.  Maybe she didn't do anything wrong.  The inmate's death may have simply been unavoidable—she was fragile, skinny, weak . . . and pregnant—had been all of these when Dana first began using her in September.  The cards were stacked against her from the start.  She knew that dying early wouldn't cause even a point deduction in Mr. Hayes' class, but still it kinda sucked that some students could be guards, some politicians, some military police, some soldiers, and she had to be a pathetic little Lithuanian Jew stuck in Dachau, skinny and pregnant.

There had been that German nurse that saved her life, the one with the syringe who killed the guard.  They were going to take the baby then, she thought, or maybe kill her and the baby with one injection.  But kill a guard?  It was stupid, really.  What would the German nurse accomplish by wasting her own life in that way?  And what was Dana supposed to do about it?  Certainly the nurse knew that she, the inmate, was going to die either way.

She wondered whether or not the girl who saved her was an avatar or just a computer character.  Maybe
everyone
in the game
was
a person behind an avatar.  It was even possible, she thought, that hers was the
only
avatar in her game, with all the characters simply being computer-generated, and that everyone in Mr. Hayes' classes were simply playing their own independent games.  He never came out and said that this
wasn't
the case.  She whispered to herself while appearing to be attentive: “He rarely talked about the inner workings of the game, only about how we should report on our own experiences, what we were learning, how it applied to history and our own lives.”

Dana was called on to work one of the problems projected on the screen.  She worked it without having to look either at the book or at her own paper sitting on Julia's desk beside her.  Julia had left the problem unfinished.  Dana's answers, however, were perfect.  Another student was then randomly called upon to work the next problem.

Her mind drifted back.  Thankfully, she wasn't “in” her avatar when they took the fetus the next day.  She had simply logged in and was lying on a brown straw mattress on the floor of a small cell.  There was no more pregnancy, just a wide bandage.  She had been relieved that her avatar might then have a chance in the camp, but she was sad, very sad.

When the grading session was over, Dana handed Julia's paper back to her.  It had no marks on it.  Julia smiled.  Though Dana didn't fill in blank answers with correct ones, she at least didn't mark the ones wrong that actually were.  Julia knew that it would be Dana's ass, not hers, if Mrs. Villarreal happened to look at some of Julia's answers and notice the grading errors.  Dana didn't care.

Apart from a few exceptions, no one knew the identities of any others in the game.  The European war involved millions. There were literally thousands of camps both inside and outside of Germany, and there were only 143 seniors.  Not all found themselves in camps, but most somehow ended up in one, one way or another.  Some students had been to several camps by the end of the first semester, and it was all in real time, so an eight-hour drive in a truck took an actual eight hours; a week on a train took just as painfully long. 

Students also knew that closing the browser didn’t mean everything would continue as it was when you opened it again.  Things would happen in your absence, during the other 23 hours of the wakeful day, and you’d have to catch up, without letting on to other characters in the game that you weren’t actually there, for unnatural behavior was often rewarded with long imprisonments and sometimes a phenol injection.  Afterward, one could expect to see a black screen for days and then finally appear as someone in a very similar situation, surviving in a camp perhaps a thousand miles away, though stuck in much the same circumstances as before.  The roles did not change much.  If you were a prisoner and died, you came back as a prisoner of the same gender under essentially the same conditions.  If you were a politician, a clerk, a bus driver, the rules were the same no matter how you died . . . or how you chose to live.  Still, for every player, no matter how mundane his or her avatar's life might seem,
scenarios always came up that involved life and death situations—and real moral choices had to be made, always tied in some way with the War.

One day, on a day Hayes had decided to leave all the lights in his classroom on, which he did on occasion, though it didn't matter to those in boxes one way or another, a storm made the lights in the room flicker.  Soon, the lights went out altogether, and the classroom and certainly the inhabitant of each box, was plunged into a rumbling darkness.  Rain smacked the window glass almost sideways and the students from within the boxes became immediately unsettled.  The lights would flicker as the electricity would briefly return.  Then nothing.

After several instances of such flickers, the fire started.  Behind one of the boxes, near the wall, there was a dim glow that began to dance in the darkness, and the sound of a small crackling and then a larger crack could be heard.  A flame began jumping along the wall to the ceiling.  Near the flame, a small male student with black hair fell out of a box, nearly swathed in the black hangings that fell around him as he crawled frantically to the back of the room.  He climbed a small mound of backpacks and looked around as other students emerged from their own cardboard cocoons.

The smell of burning plastic filled the room.  The fire then went out as quickly as it had begun and the room was again pitched into darkness though a weird glow from the affected wiring remained.  Luckily, the unit affected had been under repair, so no student had been stationed there and its cardboard box had been removed.

As students stood against the opposite wall, more upset at the disturbance in game-play than afraid, some coughing, Hayes’ flashlight lit up a smudge darkening the holes at the rear of a Raven-7700’s burned out wooden cabinet and a black smear covering a portion of the wall.  Closing the classroom door, Hayes had the students line the hallway, under the faint emergency lights, until the electricity was again back on.

A few days later, after most of the students had left campus, Dave from Technology came in with an armload of long, thin, white boxes and replaced the burned out parts.  Hayes had not seen the inside of one of these particular machines before--though he had traded out parts between his old computers on many occasions.  For these there was no need--they ran like clockwork.  He watched over the man’s shoulder.  The central, gray box had been pulled out from the unit and wires hung in colorful array from both the inner part of the door and from an upper box inside the unit.  Burned out parts related to the power module were replaced with new ones.  The tech also replaced one of the short, thick, cloth-coated cables that connected a copper-wrapped cylinder to a box inside the upper part of the unit.  It had clearly been burned pretty badly; blackened, twisted copper hung out in places.  Hayes waited impatiently for the man to finish.  His students had been even more impatient since no use of the computers had been allowed until the team from Technology could check things out.

It had become ritual for Hayes to turn off all the lights in the classroom when he played after hours.  Entering the station just repaired, Richard wanted to make sure the unit would be ready for tomorrow.  There was still a faint smell of burning plastic.  Plunged into the darkness of the box, he pressed a helmet over his head, creating an inner darkness.  He deftly connected the video and audio wires of the helmet to the back side of the unit and slipped on the gloves from the side cavities.  Richard watched as the wide screen in his helmet hummed into a picture.  His fingers touched the keys and mouse ball. 

Soon, there was movement just inches from his eyes.  He was in a small, dark room littered with stacks of clothes that were more like piles of old rags.  There was a girl lying amongst them wearing the white smock of a prison nurse over the gray stripes of a prison uniform; she turned slightly.  Lying on a mound of clothing or linens, she ran her thin fingers through her own cropped hair and then, startled, brought the hand back down, looking straight into Richard’s eyes.  She was frightened, only just aware of his presence.  Several other forms were nestled in the rags, half-buried in the dark mass.  Richard pulled a Zippo lighter from his pocket and snapped it into use.  The woman, seemingly not younger than 30, though the conditions of the camp aged people quickly, females especially. She could have easily been 20.  She rolled over, shielding her face from the light--or perhaps from the stench of the burning naphtha that fueled the lighter.

He stepped over two of the women that were sleeping along the wall and approached her.  She was still in a fetal position.

“Savina?”

“
Hnnnn?”

“
Savina.  That’s your name, right?”

The girl turned and her face looked up at him, at first perplexed, and then she scooted crablike backward to a wall behind her.

This was the second time Richard Hayes had seen the woman.  The first time had been very brief, some nights before, and he had overheard her talking with another kitchen worker tied in with the prison hospital somehow, so her name had stuck in his mind.  “Are you hungry?” he asked and almost simultaneously heard his own voice in German: “
Haben sie hunger?
”   Her eyes widened.  She seemed even more confused.  Richard felt around in his coat pockets and found a candy bar and a small tin of crackers.  He handed these to her.  “My name is Richard Hayes.  I’m not who you think I am . . .”  It was a ridiculous thing to say.