Heroes by David Hagberg (reading cloud ebooks TXT) 📗

He looked back again as he walked, but from here he could no longer see the depot. There might not even be another train until daylight. In that case he’d have to keep going on foot. He’d end up having to hide himself in the woods or perhaps in a farm field.

Around the west shore of the lake, Deland left the path and took the broad stairs back up to the main square, which branched to the north around a low marshy ground and to the southwest out toward the open countryside. A truck loaded with lumber rumbled along the southwest road, and Deland followed it, his stride long, his body leaning into the effort.

There had been roadblocks at several spots back in Berlin proper. But out here there didn’t seem to be any military activity of any kind. It was peaceful. As he walked, he kept looking over his shoulder, as if he expected someone to be sneaking up on him. But besides the lumber truck, he saw no other traffic for a long time.

Deland pulled his coat collar up against the cool air. The residential areas gradually gave way to scattered vacant lots, and finally over a hill was a thick stand of trees, beyond which were the open fields, the railroad tracks to the left disappearing into the woods.

Deland went another half-mile before he crossed the highway, scrambled across the ditch beside the road, and climbed up into the woods. The railroad tracks ran through a clearing fifty yards from the highway, just below a sharp hummock. He leaned up against a tree above the track bed. From where he stood he could make out the tracks in both directions, as well as the highway half a mile back toward the city.

Normally, he thought, the night sky toward the northeast would be ablaze with the lights from Berlin. But this night the sky was dark. No lights shone from the city. It was as if Berlin were a gigantic ocean liner whose power had failed. She was adrift now in a very dark, very dangerous sea. All her passengers were doomed. It made him very sad.

Half an hour later the eastern horizon did seem lighter. Only it wasn’t the city lights. It was the sun. Very soon it would be daylight. Deland could feel panic rising up inside of him.

This was no place for him to spend the day. It was too exposed. Anyone could come along and spot him. Yet there was no train.

He almost missed the single headlight coming up from the city. He had been staring down the tracks. But then the bobbing motion caught his eye, and he straightened up.

One headlight stabbed through the predawn darkness, coming around a curve in the road and disappearing in the shallow valley below the hill for just a moment.

At first Deland suspected it was a car or a truck with one of its headlights gone out. But as he watched, he could see that the headlight flashed back and forth too fast for that, its motion too erratic, and he understood it was a motorcycle.

A courier, possibly. With a uniform. With a travel pass. A legitimate reason to be out on the highway, day or night.

Deland shoved away from the tree and raced through the woods back to the highway, desperately searching, as he ran, for a downed tree limb. A branch. Something he could use as a club.

But the woods had been scoured clean. Every scrap of firewood had been picked up.

The motorcycle topped the rise about three hundred yards away as Deland hesitated beside the ditch. There wasn’t going to be a thing he could do about it. The motorcycle would pass and that would be the end of it.

Deland’s eye finally lighted on a pile of loose rocks around the opening of a drainage culvert that ran beneath the road.

He could hear the sharp roar of the motorcycle now as he ‘<&&

scrambled down into the ditch, grabbed a fist-sized rock, then crouched low, ready to spring.

The headlight flashed high on the trees and then the bike was passing.

Deland straightened up, bringing his arm back, and he threw the rock, leading the helmeted driver by several feet.

Deland got the impression of a pair of goggles turning toward him just before the rock struck the driver in the side of the head.

The man’s left leg went up into the air; the bike went straight for about ten yards, but then it swung sharply to the left, bumping over the edge of the road at the same moment it fell over on its side and skidded into the ditch with a tremendous crash, sending the driver tumbling end over end into the ditch.

The motorcycle’s engine raced wildly for a second or two before it suddenly sputtered and died. The silence encompassed everything.

Deland was on his feet, racing up the ditch toward the courier, the night suddenly too still.

The courier lay on his back, his right arm twisted impossibly beneath him. Deland pulled the man’s goggles up. The driver’s eyes were open. His tongue lolled out of his mouth. Blood covered the side of his face. His neck was broken. He was dead.

Deland looked both ways down the highway. No one wa coming. Yet. But the sky was definitely getting lighter in the east.

He dragged the driver along the ditch back to the culvert.

There he stripped the man’s leather jacket, leather trousers, and boots, then put them on.

When he was finished, he stuffed the body deep inside the culvert. Certainly no one from the road would be able to spot the body. And only someone down on his hands and knees directly in front of the opening would see a thing.

All that had taken less than ten minutes, but as Deland hurried back to the downed motorcycle, he knew that he was seriously pressing his luck. Sooner or later another vehicle would be coming along the highway.

He lifted the bike and