Hell's Gate(12)
Recently, though, it seemed that every time he slept, his wonderful childhood memories morphed into an ever-worsening series of nightmares. His cousins now slithered into his dreams, mutated from boyhood pals into goose-stepping monsters, even as the end of the Nazi parade was within sight. And the face of his little sister flashed brightly, then dissolved to air. With each passing night, it became harder to recall what she looked like.
And the worst horror of all was the never-ending haunting by the two words MacCready wished no one had ever put together: If only.
If only I hadn’t been overseas when my family needed me most.
If only having a son fighting against the Axis had weighed more heavily in Mom’s favor than having nephews who became part of that evil.
No one would have believed, before it actually happened, that the same American president who had damned the Axis powers as “apostles of racial arrogance” was condoning, along the entire west coast, the forceful relocation of almost anyone with Japanese or Italian ancestors. Along the east coast, Italian-Americans received a special dispensation from such intrusion, after Charles “Lucky” Luciano’s crime family volunteered to protect New York City’s waterfront from Axis saboteurs. However, along that same waterfront, German-Americans were not faring much better than west coast Italians.
MacCready, who was German on his mother’s side, had been on an assignment with some indigenous allies in the Solomons. And as he came within a gnat’s breath of losing a leg to a poison-tipped lance, thousands of miles away, rogue elements of the government back home brought unspeakable calamity into the MacCready household.
Ostensibly in the name of “protecting children,” some newly empowered faction of New York’s wartime bureaucracy decreed that any American child adopted into the family of a German-American should be returned to its “natural” family. Mac learned that it mattered not at all that his father was an American veteran who had recently suffocated from the long-term effects of mustard gas—thanks to the Germans he’d fought in World War I. Nor did it matter that his mother had been born and raised on Long Island. During what turned out to be more of a condemnation than a hearing, the court sat idle while Amelia MacCready was referred to as “the Führer.” Soon after, Mac’s thirteen-year-old adopted sister, Brigitte, was removed from their loving home and forced back into the snake pit from which she had been rescued a decade earlier—half-starved, with the fingers of one hand broken. This time, the girl did not survive. Mac’s mother soon followed her down, slowly and agonizingly; and since then, the “if onlys” gnawed at him, day and night.
If only I’d heard of this atrocity in time to return home. To try to stop them from taking Brigitte. To call on favors from the people I knew in high places. To remind Mom she still had something to live for.
Instead, Mac lived now with rage and regret, guilt and solitude. For him there seemed nothing left to think about except the death of the innocent, the death of a mother and child.
If only the telegram had found me sooner.
If only Mom had been just a little bit stronger.
In the end, they had given Mom shock therapy. “The most effective treatment for nervous breakdowns and schizophrenia,” the doctors had said, though none of them could agree on a diagnosis.
“Experimental quackery!” MacCready called it, after he first read about it in a telegram from home, a month after it had been sent.
If only I’d been there to stop it.
If only.
In Mac’s current dream, his mother’s face screamed and screamed until it shifted into something grotesque and strange—which revealed itself to be a hideous hand puppet pushing toward him, snapping and biting, at the end of his little sister’s arm.
Brigitte, Mom—I’m sorry. So sorry!
MacCready awoke on the verge of a shout, willed it to stay inside, then looked around the cabin. However uneasy his dreams, he had not been loud enough to stir Richards from his compartment. It was a very small blessing, but he’d take it.
He looked out the tiny window for a few seconds, then dozed off to face the next round of nightmares. On the world below, an immense carpet of trees spread from horizon to horizon.
CHAPTER 3
The Hidden
I ran to the rock to hide my face,
But the rock cried out, “No hiding place!
“No hiding place down here!”
—“NO HIDING PLACE DOWN HERE” (AFRICAN-AMERICAN SPIRITUAL)
Port?o do Inferno, Central Brazil
January 19, 1944
In the forests of the night, nothing existed except life and death in nature’s extinction lottery.
Nothing more.
And nothing less.
A half-billion years of scurrying monstrosities—of entire empires hidden underfoot—had led, here and there, to thoughtless existence. The mind of a tarantula was as close to nothing as anything could be and still be something. The spider, poised to strike at a cricket, was no more thoughtful than a bundle of mechanized neurological responses, no more aware of itself than the digi-comp machines that the Allies were using to break Axis codes. The arachnid had come this far, and not a step closer to sentience. But this was enough. Her kind had been walking across the planet five hundred million years before the first human footprints entered the fossil record; and they would still be here five hundred million years after the pyramids had turned to dust.