Heroes by David Hagberg (reading cloud ebooks TXT) 📗

drove, Schey thought about the honeymoon cottages he and Eva had stayed at. During the day, on the road, it wasn’t so bad, but at night, sleeping on the floor beside the bed, he couldn’t help but see Catherine’s body and hear the baby crying upstairs. It was a nightmare.

It was the afternoon of their fourth day out of Washington, D.C. They were taking Route 66 the remainder of the way out to Albuquerque. Schey hoped only to make Amarillo tonight, before it got too bad.

Great plumes of snow blew across the highway, slowed here and there to pile up where snow fences had been erected.

The Hudson had performed very well for them. The car was heavy, and it plowed through all but the deepest snowdrifts with apparent ease. The only problem it had developed was with its heater, which seemed to give less and less heat the farther they traveled.

At a service station near Oklahoma City, a mechanic had looked under the hood, but he came out shaking his head.

“Mister, not only shouldn’t your heater work; this car shouldn’t even run. If I were you, I’d count my blessings and just keep on going. After all, it is wartime.”

“You can’t fix it?” Schey had asked.

“No, sir; don’t believe Professor Einstein could fix it.”

The heater hadn’t gotten any worse, but it was so cold in the car that at times Schey could see his own breath. It dominated their thoughts.

“It’s cold enough in here to freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” Eva said. They hadn’t spoken for at least an hour, and Schey was startled, but he had to smile. Her language was expressive.

“We’ll be getting into Amarillo pretty soon,” he said.

“We’re going to stop there?” she asked. She was bundled up in Schey’s old overcoat, the one he had worn in Washington. She looked small and defenseless in it. Her nose and cheeks were red.

“We’ll get something to eat and then find a room.”

Despite the weight of the car, it was difficult driving. The highway was very slippery, and often the big car would lurch sickeningly. He was constantly playing the wheel, his nerves coming to the raw edge, his eyes burning.

They were silent for a long time. There had been no other cars or trucks on the highway for the past hour and a half. It was spooky.

“You know, I was just thinking,” Eva said. She glanced over at Schey.

“Yes?”

“Why don’t we just keep going? Let’s not stop in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. Let’s just say the hell with it and head down to Mexico.”

“And do what?”

“Stay there until the war is over. We could live. We have plenty of money, at least for starters. We could get jobs.” She looked out the windshield and scraped away some of the frost with a mittened hand. “At least we’d be warm.”

Schey could understand her. What she was asking was tempting, in a way. But every time he thought about it, he couldn’t help but see himself walking along Unter den Linden in Berlin, or at the beer halls with his friends in Munich, or a dozen other favorite places back home.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I have a job to do.”

“The war is lost, you know that.”

His anger rose. “Don’t say that!” he snapped.

“It is, god damnit, you stubborn Kraut.”

It took Schey a moment or two to frame his answer. He didn’t want to come back at her in anger. In the four days they had been together, he had come to respect her. At times she could be a very strong woman.

“Whether or not the war will be lost, it is not over yet. I have a job to do, and I will do it.”

“It’s useless, Dieter …”

“Robert,” Schey corrected. “Robert Stromberg.”

“Sorry, Bobby, but it is useless.”

“If we all quit now, it would be useless.”

“Christ,” Eva said, shaking her head. “What are you going to get for them in Santa Fe? A new Wunderwaffent’

Schey’s instinct was to lash out at her, but once again he held himself in check. What bothered him more, however, was his reaction—or rather his overreaction—to her. It wasn’t like him, he decided.

He had not told her about his work in Tennessee, although she knew, of course, that he had been spying on a large government installation up there. She also knew about his radio transmitter concealed in a suitcase in the trunk of the car. But it was better that she didn’t know everything, although if they were captured, they’d both almost certainly be hung as spies.

In the distance he spotted a large water tower with a light on top of it. He scraped some frost from the windshield so that he could see a little better, and as they got closer, he could see that they were coming to what appeared to be a small town. There was a diner off to one side and a couple of gas stations farther on.

They passed the sign that said: MCLEAN POP: 879, and went slowly through the pleasant-looking town. There were a lot of cars at the diner, and a number of cars and trucks angle-parked in front of two bars on Main Street. A neon sign was lit on the front porch of a very large house. It said: ROOMS. Several cars were parked in front of the house.

Some Christmas decorations, still up on the streetlights downtown, were being whipped around by the increasing wind.

It would be dark within half an hour or so, and then driving would become very difficult.

“Why don’t we stay here tonight?” Eva asked. “It looks like a nice place.”

They came around a sharp bend, the snow piled up high on either side of the street. “Maybe we should,” Schey said. He glanced in his rearview mirror, although there wasn’t much to see because of the thickly frosted rear window.

“Christ,” Eva shouted.

Schey’s eyes snapped forward. A single police car, its lights flashing, was parked across the highway just at the city limits sign! A uniformed police officer