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Germany, outside of a dozen big cities, was as bucolic and serene as Rio’s own Sonoma County.
“What are we looking for?” Chester asks.
Rio turns to Rainy, who says, “I don’t know for sure. A camp of some sort, a string of camps around a central facility.”
“Like refugee camps?” Chester asks.
“No,” says Captain Schulterman.
“What is that smell?” Jenou asks, wrinkling her nose.
They drive on, veering around three cows being tended by a small boy with a stick.
“Must be those cows,” Jenou says doubtfully.
Rio smells it too. And as a woman raised around cows, she knows this smell is nothing to do with cattle. There is something wrong with this smell, this stink that carries sense memories of corpses within it. It’s a smell that even Rio, who has spent days within arm’s reach of rotting corpses, feels seeping into her, unsettling her.
She looks back at Rainy and for the first time in a long while is afraid, because Rainy’s face shows that she smells it too, and she, unlike Rio, guesses at what it might be. The G2 officer’s face is as blank as a marble statue, like her cheeks and mouth have never moved. But her eyes . . .
Suddenly a creature lurches onto the road. Chester slams on the brakes and the jeep skids to a stop. Rio swings her Thompson up to firing position and trains it on . . .
on . . .
He is naked but for a scrap of what must once have been a shirt. His penis and testicles are visible between legs so thin that at first Rio believes he’s been skinned down to the bone. His knees are huge knobs. His thighs are gone, just nothing, just human leather over sticks.
The man raises an arm so emaciated that the two bones of his forearm are clearly visible. Skin sags where muscle had once been. The shirt is open, revealing ribs and collarbones. His head is a skull with eyes so deep they are invisible.
The four Americans sit frozen in the jeep.
The man, the walking skeleton, the stick figure, collapses, falls to his knees, and tries to clasp his hands as if in prayer. But his strength is gone, and he falls onto his face. His bare buttocks are empty sacks of flesh, all fat long since gone.
Rio forces herself out of the jeep, advancing as she unlimbers her canteen. She turns him over, shocked at the feel of his body. He cannot weigh seventy pounds. He might as well be a child.
The man whispers something, words maybe, but no language Rio knows. She kneels and holds her canteen to his cracked lips. He seems almost to smile as the thin trickle of water glides down his throat.
He speaks again.
“I don’t understand,” Rio says.
“Zenen ir faktish?” Rainy says, standing behind Rio now. “It’s Yiddish. He’s asking if you’re real.” Rainy kneels, takes off her helmet, and sets it on the road. She speaks in the same language, the never-quite-learned and largely forgotten language of her mother and father.
“We are real,” Rainy says in Yiddish. “Americans.”
The man looks at her with eyes terribly large in his fleshless skull. As he looks at Rainy, his breathing stops. And slowly the faint spark in his eyes goes out.
Chester is there now, and Jenou. “I’ll help you move him out of the road,” Chester says.
Rio shakes her head. “He weighs nothing.” She slides her hands beneath him and stands up. He is a broken doll in her arms. They leave his body by the side of the road for graves registration, and without a word between them drive on, guided by the terrible stink of filth and death.
They pass another body, also no more than bones in rags.
And then, a barbed wire fence and a gate that stands open. A guardhouse is unoccupied. Beyond that gate men in rags, men with sunken cheeks, with every bone visible, men so emaciated they surely must be the fantasies of sick minds.
“What is this place?” Jenou asks in a voice Rio has never heard before, the voice of a frightened child, an angry, disbelieving child.
No one answers.
They drive into the camp and the specters, the human wreckage, stagger and drift toward them, ghosts of men on toothpick legs, men with flesh scarred by sores and wounds, men trying to speak and unable to raise their voices above a whisper.
