“Go. I’ll be right behind you,” Martin yelled as he prepared a spring line.
Onshore the giant drift of black smoke rose up into the air and darkened the whole sky. I ran to my father’s factory through several blocks of untouched homes and buildings closer to the village, where gasoline burning from the bombs choked my lungs through the damp rag over my mouth and nose.
At the main square of town there were dirt craters where the Germans had set up their camp. Beyond that was the leveled pile of brick that had been the school. What was left of the church was on fire up on the hill. Shell-shocked soldiers wandered around town with guns held out in front of them like they could fight off the smoke and fire. One of them had blood running out of his ears. Another’s face was burnt and his skin looked like raw chicken. Ash fell over the street. Several more soldiers ran past me with their hands covering their faces, and I feared they’d taken in some poisonous gas.
I stopped running and tumbled toward what was left of the factory. The office part of the building was a pile of rubble. The factory’s tall steel-sheet- and wood-sided walls stretched the length of half a football field but had nothing of their previous form standing upright. Pieces of steel jutted out from the ground in concrete piles. There was a large chemical fire toward the back corner where the gases were stored. A sour smell that drifted from the chemical vat stung my eyes and left a sulfuric tang at the back of my throat. The flame lapped up at the sky and shimmered in iridescent green and red undulations. The heat had twisted the assembly lines into extraordinary shapes. Copper base mounts of unfinished lightbulbs were spread over the ground.
I climbed onto a heap of brick and froze at the lip of the caldera. My mother. Hilda. Ludo. Ludo’s mother. All those people.
Martin staggered up beside me, bent down to massage his wounded ankle, and took in the ruined factory. He ran to the flattened assembly lines. There were bomb-lopped hands, legs, and whole torsos sticking out of the rubble piles. I pulled a hand from the pile and saw the scar crisscrossed deep into the meat of the forearm muscle. Edward Fass, who had shown me how to work on the assembly line all those years ago. I dropped his dead arm and went looking further among the debris, going from body to body, each of which looked like a limp and ashen version of someone I’d once known, digging with my hands into the stone that was hot to the touch despite the frozen air. Every few minutes I fell to my hands and knees and hacked up some chemical gas from deep in my lungs. When I stood back up, I tried to picture the layout of the factory, where Hilda, Ludo and his mother, and my mother would have stood, but couldn’t make sense of what was scattered in ash around me.
The roof had collapsed. Where the ribbon machines had been, a set of legs stuck out. Whoever it was had their pants burned off, and the rubber soles of their brown shoes were sticky from having melted to the floor. I grabbed the legs at the shins and pulled, but the skin tore loose and bunched down at the ankle like a soggy sock. All I could do to keep from screaming and collapsing right there was to wipe my hands off on the front of my shirt and try to disengage from all memory of touch.
Martin breathed in and exhaled little puffs of fumes as he crawled through the rubble like an ash-covered spirit collecting last breaths. He scurried from body to body, ignoring the yelps of the living that he found like he’d fallen out of one of Blake’s poems, reaching down with hungry fingers for human souls.
A wide swath of human skin spread flat against a crumbled cinder block, flash-heated and sealed, as if the whole building had been a living thing.
“No,” Martin yelled, then scaled a mound of crumbled cinder block in front of him and started digging at the rubble. When I scaled the mound of brick, I saw him pull my mother into his lap.
Her body hung in his arms. What he held was shattered, bloodied, splintered with shards of steel from the assembly line she must have been standing at. Her cheek was in the light, dirt smudged and bruised along the jawline. Her midsection from her hip bone to her rib cage had been filleted open. A balled knot of skinless snakes poked out of the gaping wound. The kinky knot of intestine was red, purple, and coated in ash. I looked at the white bone and otherness of her torn skin. Blood had pumped out and flooded her clothing. Her teeth were cracked across the top, and the exposed roots nudged out in gummy pink spires; a forehead lump over her right eye split open her small frame, as pale and lifeless as the brick she lay on.
I leaned my ear to her lips. Breath wasn’t good enough. I wanted her voice. An I love you, or just the word love, a word I could feed on forever. But there was nothing.
My ash-covered uncle staggered back with a mad scowl twisted across his face. The tint of his eyes lined up the world around him and made me think he was going to explode. All that he had been holding back couldn’t be contained any longer.
I looked up to the sky expecting more of the bombers. I wished I had been there when the bombs fell, to have opened my mouth and swallowed their ordinance. Then spit it all back at them. I hated them for their ability to fly, for what they had done. I wanted to match my uncle’s rage with my own, but who was there left to hate? The only choice was to hate everyone. Martin undid his jacket and covered my mother with it. Then he scooped her body off the ground.
Hilda with her fading bruises and half-inch-long hair. Ludo with his half-limp arm. Ludo’s mother with her nine lost pregnancies. The men and women whom I’d worked with and my father had employed for almost two decades. Their lives. Their stories. I didn’t want to look and find them. I didn’t want to find scraps of their bodies, the certainty of their death. If I didn’t look, there was a chance they had survived.
“We’ll take her home,” Uncle Martin said. He walked past me in the wreckage and started toward the house.
I followed him in a numb haze until we got to the back of the Protestant church where the body of a German officer lay face-down in the dirt. When no one watched, I walked up to him, rolled him over, and pretended to check his pulse in case any other soldiers were near. Then I unclasped the front of his heavy jacket. The officers carried Lugers on their belts, and when the dead man’s jacket opened, I pulled out the Luger and shoved it into my pocket. The only person around me was my uncle, carrying my half-opened mother home. Her head dangled loose from his arm.