Bombshell by Max Collins (most life changing books .TXT) 📗

Just past Republic Square, they caught sight of the student delegation—nearly one hundred in all—approaching the steps of the Parliament Building, where a de facto government had hurriedly been put into place.

He and Eva were walking arm-in-arm, with a bounce in their step, when they first heard the brittle mechanical sound, shattering the peaceful morning, and it took several seconds before Jonas recognized it as machine gun fire.

The crowd of students—at first confused, then yelling and even screaming—tried to scatter, but were cut down by Russian soldiers materializing from all around them like uniformed ghosts. The hand-held machine guns made a terrible drumming, and the students marched to it, the air misted red with blood, the cobblestones streaming with it, crimson battle ribbons of dying surrender.

Within seconds, they were all dead—all of them—many still clutching the white resolution papers, now speckled and spattered with red.

Half a block away, Jonas and Eva froze in their tracks—they did not seek cover … they were not in the path of the invaders; like Stalin’s headless statue, they stood there, stunned and horrified, witnessing the massacre like some abstract theater piece, a grotesque ballet of blood.

But this was nothing abstract—not when their friends were dying. Eva gripped his arm and turned away when a boy fleeing toward them turned out to be Pluck, his eyes wide not with enthusiasm but terror; then his body was riddled with bullets, flung to street like so much refuse.

The machine guns stopped.

The street was scattered with puppets whose strings had been snipped; the acrid stench of gun smoke floated on the wind, a ghastly echo of last night’s bonfire.

Some of the soldiers prowled the perimeter, while others— snouts of their machine guns curling smoke—began climbing, two-at-a-time, the steps of the Parliament building—to assassinate the renegade government inside. Jonas and Eva were taking this in when, over the top of the building, a Soviet MiG fighter came streaking down.

Jonas grabbed Eva’s hand, spun her around, and pulled her roughly back down the street.

“Truck!” he said, meaning the overturned truck could provide a barrier from bullets.

He wasn’t sure she had heard him, though she kept pace at his side; he could hear the plane bearing down on them. Behind them, bullets chewed up the street and spat up powdered cement, spraying their feet. The bullets were stitching the street at their back as they dove behind the truck, Jonas throwing his body over hers.

“Oh, God … Oh, Jesus …” he moaned, on top of her, like last night. “Where the hell did they come from…”

But the body beneath him was so motionless, not even trembling with fear, that he knew. He knew.

He raised himself up enough to look down at Eva, who was on her back, blue eyes staring and empty and, yes, she was dead. Then before he could even sob, much less cry out in anguish, he felt his head explode, or seem to—the butt of a Russian rife had come down on the back of his skull, to put him temporarily out of his misery, and he lay on her one last time.

When Jonas regained consciousness, he was on his side on a flatbed truck, arms and legs bound, face encrusted with dried blood, like the crisp sugary surface of a pudding. He wasn’t alone: the back of the truck was filled with other boys, some of them very young, all of them bruised and bloodied.

Jonas’s tongue was so dry he couldn’t speak, but a youth next to him, who was similarly bound, answered the question he could not pose.

“They’re taking us to Russia,” the boy whispered, his eyes large and frightened. “For rehabilitation.”

A burly Soviet guard near the cab stirred and moved toward them.

“Shut up down there,” the guard snarled in Russian, pointing his rife threateningly at them. His eyes were as black as Pluck’s and as dead as Eva’s.

Jonas lay his throbbing head back down and closed his eyes. When he awoke again, it was dark. He was still in the truck, bouncing along a rutted dirt road. He soon realized, due to his position, that he could probably throw himself off the truck—his first thought was to try this, not to escape, but to die. Something else deep inside, burning like some foul food that refused digestion, pushed him instead toward escape and survival; he did not know it yet, but his life had a new engine now—not history, not poetry, not freedom, not Eva … revenge.

Slowly, inch by inch, he moved his bound body toward the edge of the flatbed, and when the guard wasn’t looking, took a deep breath and rolled off.

A peasant woman found him along the roadside the next day, took him in, and dressed his wounds. After a few days, he set out on foot for Austria. There, the American Embassy helped him— along with hundreds of others like him—get to the United States, where he remained in New York, working at various menial jobs, his childhood baking skills proving helpful…

But with each passing day he became more restless; America was a great country—they had freedom, though they did not seem to appreciate it—and, anyway, it wasn’t his country. And the language was hard to learn.

He hopped a train, sharing a boxcar with hoboes, fitting in fine, eventually landing in Los Angeles because that was as far as the rails could take him. Then the Holy Cross Mission helped him put down some roots—an apartment, a bakery job—which gave him some semblance of peace. But at twenty-three Jonas could never really see himself finding a wife better than Eva, or raising a family, or even becoming an American citizen. No matter how hard he tried, these universal visions, once precious to him, would never materialize. Something had died with Eva; the only thing still alive in him was that hot coal of revenge, which never went out … cold as the rest of him might be, it always glowed hatefully at his core.

No,