And so to that end, I reach back into the cab of the truck and pull out an RPG I took from the crates. It’s surprisingly light when you consider the damage it’s capable of causing, but then again, that’s the idea, isn’t it? Light and easy enough that even a child can operate it.
I slop through the mud to the far end of the yard, hoist the thing to my shoulder, and align the crude sights on the center of the truck. There’s a simple safety switch, no different from the one on my pistol, and I flip it with my thumb.
From the truck I hear more shouting, and the plinking of bullets hitting iron. One of them has thought to bring a pistol and is trying to shoot the lock through the door.
The noise of the grenade launching forward frightens the hell out of me. That something so loud and powerful—it nearly knocks me off my feet—could be achieved with a single, simple pull of a trigger boggles the imagination. And it would be a point worth pondering, had the thought lived more than a half second. But it dies in the roar that follows the whoosh, the white-orange avalanche of fire that slides and rolls and tumbles out from the fractured truck. I feel my body lifting, and it suddenly seems as if I’ve badly miscalculated how far away I needed to be. I feel my body lifting and moving backward, and I think that death in this manner doesn’t really hurt as much as one would expect.
I’m unconscious for a few seconds. Then I open my eyes and see sky above me, a leaden blanket sky, a sunless, lifeless sky. I feel the dull pain of impact, though I don’t remember the impact itself.
There’s something strange about my vision as I pull myself to my feet, as if the world is sharper than before, as if I can see more clearly. The truck is now a flaming skeleton with only a hint of its former shape, and I think it’s beautiful. The men inside it are dead, and my only regret is that they never saw the blade coming. I check my body for wounds, for holes, but aside from the mud, I’m clean.
Dropping the launcher and pulling my pistol from my pocket, I start toward the jail. Five guards climbed into the back of the truck, not the six that Emil said usually manned the place. That means there’s one still somewhere in the tábor, and I have to be ready for him.
The entrance and hallway are empty, and so is the kitchen. I knock the radio—the sole means of communicating between the camp and Prague—to the ground and pull the wires from the open back in great handfuls. Then I paw through the drawers until I find a ring of heavy iron keys for the cells below. I stuff these in my pocket and help myself to a handsome, nasty-looking Kalashnikov assault rifle someone left on the table. Finally, I rummage through the pockets of the jackets hanging from pegs, pulling out car keys for the vehicles outside.
With the rifle’s safety off, I slip from the kitchen to the stairs, descend them quickly, and sweep into the corridor outside the cells. Again, the sixth guard is nowhere in sight. I open the hatches to all the cells but the last one, my dad’s, and find them empty.
I end at my dad’s cell and open the hatch slowly, not wanting to see, not wanting to find that after everything I’ve done, he’s been moved, too. But he’s there, on his feet, pacing, throwing worried looks at the door. No doubt he heard the explosion and felt it rock the building. At the sounds of the keys in the lock, he backs up to the far wall, terror evident on his face.
I twist the handle of the latch and pull the door back.
He sees only my muddy clothes and the Kalashnikov. Not that he’d recognize me absent these things. The girl he left in New York was soft and lived in fear of the world, and the woman I am now is nothing like her.
He raises his hands in front of him, expecting to be shot. It’s the first thing the guards would do if the camp were ever raided. But when the bullets don’t come, he peers at me between his fingers. Then his face softens—I see it even through the beard—and he cants his head to the side. My dad squints at me, and I hear a little breath escape his lips.
“Dad,” I say.
But this word is a riddle to him, like a word in a foreign language he remembers hearing but has forgotten the meaning of.
“Who are you?” he says quietly.
“Dad, it’s me,” I say, gently as I can. “It’s me. Gwendolyn.”
His arms tremble in the air for a moment, then fall to his sides as if whatever held them in place was suddenly snatched away. He shakes his head side to side, refusing to believe that my presence here is anything but a hallucination.
I step forward, just a baby step, and he recoils. “I’ve told you everything,” he pleads. “Where the passcodes were, I told you. I told you.”
“It’s me,” I repeat. “It’s Gwendolyn, Dad.”
He turns and presses his face into the wall. I hear him sob. “I don’t have anything more. I don’t. You have it all.”
I raise a hand and move it forward tentatively, but when I touch his shoulder, he recoils. Then I touch him again, more forcefully this time, one hand firmly on his shoulder, another on his upper arm. He pulls away, and I feel what little muscle is left on him tremble.
“Dad. Dad, it’s me. Listen to my voice, Dad.”
His lips—cracked, swollen—begin to move as if he’s trying to say something. He closes his eyes, then opens them again, then lifts a hand and presses it to the side of my face. His palm and fingers are wet with sweat.
Now it’s my turn to close my eyes, pinching them shut against the tears. He wraps my head in his thin arms, and I can feel his breath against my scalp as he says, “Gwen, it’s you. Gwen, my girl.”
“I’m here to take you away, Dad.”
“How did you—how did you get here?”
“I did terrible things, Dad.”
He squeezes me tight, the whole story of what I had to do, the whole everything, no doubt appearing in his imagination in a sudden burst of heat and light.
Twenty-Seven
We have an unspoken truce on questions. He will not ask them of me, and I will not ask them of him until we’re away from this prison. The sixth guard may still be around, and we’re both smart enough to know this isn’t over yet.
He is malnourished but still in good enough shape to move with haste. Thus, he insists on taking the Kalashnikov from me like any good father would, some instinct telling him I might hurt myself with it. Though I shouldn’t be shocked by anything anymore, I’m surprised to see that he’s clearly handled a weapon like this before. He checks it over, cocks it, and, with the stoic face of an experienced soldier, nods to the open cell door. I follow closely behind him, my pistol out and ready as we ascend the stairs and sweep through the ground floor.
But the stoic face drops away as we exit the building and he catches sight of the still-burning hulk of the truck. He is, I can see, heartbroken. Daughters ought not have to rescue their fathers, and ought not have to become murderers to do it.