Marta glanced at her watch, straining to see the face in the dim light, then sighed and resigned herself to wait. A steady drip of water echoed through the cramped space, mingling with the musty scent of decay. She stood in the center of a small mausoleum, designed for a single family but now since violated by generations of grave robbers. Stretching out her arms, she could brush her fingers against the caskets lining each side. Each one had been pried open, their occupants disturbed, their resting place turned into a looter’s paradise.
Scattered remains and the broken panels that’d once shielded the dead carpeted the cold marble floor. A mouse scuttled across the debris, pausing to fix her with tiny, glinting eyes like polished seeds. Irritated, she picked up some poor man’s femur and waved it menacingly. “Get lost,” she ordered.
The mouse gave a defiant squeak in response.
She shot her human roommates a pointed glare. “And nothing from the peanut gallery.”
Rusty hinges groaned as the mausoleum door began to shift, sending clouds of God knew what into her face. She coughed and batted them away, only to flinch as a skull tumbled from an overstuffed shelf, landing with a ponderous thud. The door was encased in copper-sheathed elm and, she knew, awkward as hell. Seconds later, Bill stepped through the doorway, dust motes dancing around him like angry specters. He was dressed incongruously in jeans and a stained hoodie that read Boston College. Glancing around, he tucked a gun into his waistband.
She grunted, relief warring with irritation. “I thought you’d stood me up.”
“Had to make sure no one followed me,” Bill replied, striding over to one of her innumerable crates. Kneeling down, he rifled through its contents, finally grabbing a packet of soup concentrate. He tore it open with his teeth and she watched him eat, consciously not commenting on his manners. After a moment, he fished something out of his pocket and tossed it to her. “This is for you.”
Catching it, she opened her palm to reveal a silver signet ring, a faint beam of moonlight tracing the rune engraved in the center. She squinted at the intricate design, curiosity piqued. “From one of your little crusades?”
He shook his head, chuckling dryly. “This jackass barged in on us just as we were, ah, liberating a few crates of ammo. Commissioned officer, too, so double points for that.” He paused to suck the last drops from the soup packet, then tossed the foil aside. “Snagged his tag as well.”
Marta grunted noncommittally. Americans wore double tags, but she’d discovered during the invasion that Germans didn’t. Theirs was a single disc that split in two; one half went back to headquarters, to help sort out the paperwork mess, and the other stayed with the body. She’d seen them, after the Battle of Boston Harbor, kids who’d probably enlisted the week before sent out to collect little half rounds of metal. They’d stared at their dead friends with their faces drawn and she’d almost felt sorry for them, back when she’d been a lot more innocent than she was now. “What was his name?” she asked. Whoever he was, he’d been rich; she wondered if Bill had been smart enough to check the wallet, not that he’d have told her.
“Don’t know,” Bill replied. “Don’t care.”
The Reich didn’t put names on tags, only numbers; cannon fodder was cannon fodder.
“I like what you’re doing with your hair,” he continued, running his hand over his own smooth crown.
“You’re just jealous,” she retorted, smirking. “Baldilocks.”
“It’s convenient!” he assured her, “considering that I haven’t seen a shower in weeks.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s becoming obvious.”
“Watch it!” He wagged a mock-accusatory finger. “I just gave you an expensive present! Well,” he added, his eyes twinkling, “expensive for someone.”
Expensive, that was a loaded word. If Bill noticed the sudden tightening of her features, he gave no sign. He’d never been observant, when it came to her, or cared about the things she cared about. She’d clung to the tavern like a lifeline, a vestige of her grandfather’s aspirations when he’d arrived here from Poland, even as it’d bled money and hope. Bill, a longshoreman before the invasion, had scoffed at her stubbornness…then used her storeroom, to hold his meetings. Even his scorn, though, had been preferable to the suffocating silence after his disappearance.
Voight was to blame, the scheming spider, leaving Bill no choice but to run—and her to stay behind, fabricating tales of abandonment. To the world, she spat venom about a husband who’d left her to fend alone in a city overrun by monsters. Voight should’ve bought the act, everyone else did; when he’d all but broken down her door, almost four months ago now, she’d been completely flummoxed. What—or who—could’ve possibly tipped him off that she knew where Bill was?
The answer presented itself, soon enough. She’d languished in that hellhole the Gestapo called a jail for almost a week, Alex even longer, being beaten and starved; Zelda had gone home the same night, without a scratch on her. Even so, she’d been willing to extend Zelda the benefit of the doubt—until her former bar girl swapped dishrags for couture, reappearing as Voight’s peon.
Marta knew full well that what her husband did disgusted people, but these women were not innocent. They passed on information to their new boyfriends, men who could afford Dior pumps, just like Zelda had obviously ratted out Bill—and her. She’d given Zelda somewhere to go, during the invasion, but Voight’s private car cost more than a house and simple values like friendship couldn’t compete. She’d been a sucker, pure and simple. And with each word Bill spoke, with each flash of all she’d seen in her mind’s eye, her hatred crystallized. This was about more than survival, it was about purging their home of evil.
She didn’t want to kill, but Zelda and her sister had chosen to forsake humanity. She did feel bad for them, and all the other women, she even felt bad for that florist and her stupid runt. But this was war, she concluded bleakly. And, in war, mercy was always the first casualty. Asking Bill how he felt, however, took more bravery than she had. So, instead, she slipped the first ring he’d ever given her onto her finger and pretended that she’d liked his joke.
“I’m a real romantic,” Bill declared sardonically, reaching for another packet of soup.
“You proposed to me over a bowl of chili,” she retorted accusingly.
“It was good chili,” he countered, making a face as he swallowed another mouthful of the thick, slightly gritty paste. “Unlike whatever this is supposed to be.”
She surveyed the cache of food she’d been stockpiling now for years, a testament to her foresight. Distintegrating hardwood sagged under the weight of German field rations, augmenting her already impressive stores. The SS’s so-called Iron Portions were supposedly the best, but even those maniacs called the tinned hardbread plate armor, and she wouldn’t feed a dog the Leberwurst.
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“How is the good old Green Dragon holding up?” Bill inquired, a hint of nostalgia in his tone.
She flashed him a half-smile. “Better. Alex’s ideas aren’t as terrible as I’d expected, and his schnitzel’s popular. Lucky for him, you don’t need perfect vision to work a fryer. Still, he acts like he’s above us all, with his big education.” Her harsh laughter sounded suspiciously like a snort.
“Get out the world’s smallest violin.” Bill’s tone was dry.
A troubled light entered her eyes. “If I were him, I’d be mourning the nursing career I’d lost. Or, you know, my goddamn eye.” But Alex wouldn’t listen to reason; he’d convinced himself that Zelda was a victim. Voight must have some hold over her, he kept insisting, she’d never be in the same room with him otherwise. “When he’s not working,” she complained, “he’s plotting how to rescue her—and giving me migraines, with his incessant whining!”
Bill spat disdainfully. “Makes you wonder how long that little trollop has been feeding us to the wolves.”
Zelda had never truly loved Alex, Marta knew, despite his hopeful delusions; she’d merely entertained his affections out of boredom. But now, she and Bill faced more pressing issues than some teenager’s emotional games. She popped open a tin of Scho-Ka-Kola, breaking off a wedge-shaped piece of the bitter, caffeine-laden chocolate. It tasted like feet, but any port in a storm. “Little Tommy’s caused us a world of trouble,” she ventured.
Bill stood abruptly, his restlessness palpable as he began to pace the confined space. “I still can’t figure out how that bastard stepfather got the drop on me,” he growled in frustration. “I was in Tommy’s room—kids are loud and unpredictable, so it’s best to deal with them first.” He gestured dramatically, mimicking a slicing action. “But before I can, out of nowhere, this half-naked fool comes flying at me! I never even heard him until his fist connected with the side of my head. Fought like a man defending his own blood,” he fumed, the disgust evident in his voice.
Marta felt her stomach lurch. “You almost got caught.”
“I did stab the stepfather,” Bill recounted grimly. “But he kept screaming, warning his wife to escape. Instead, the dumb bitch charged right in! I nearly lost it all right there. He was reaching for my gun, and damn near had it, too.” He stopped, as a smile spread over his features. “Fortunately for me, the snot-nosed brat picked that moment to help his new daddy out.”
Bill hadn’t wanted children, and Marta hadn’t been able to have them, and she tried to shut the scene from her mind. Instead, she opened a roll of salty licorice and began to eat her feelings. Lying on top of a box stamped with the Reichsadler was her latest acquisition, one of the posters that’d gone up all over Cambridge. It depicted the newly minted Müllers, captured in a family portrait just a month before the murders. In the dim light, their smiles seemed almost haunting, Tommy clutching his stuffed elephant as if holding onto a fragment of normalcy.
“After that,” Bill finished with a grimace, “the wife was hysterical. It was a lot easier to finish her off.” Bending down to inspect Dassel’s latest piece of saccharine propaganda, he frowned. “Maybe we should print up some of these fliers for Ted Hood.”
“We know who killed him,” Marta pointed out tersely. The Butcher of Marblehead wouldn’t face any trial for his crimes, a bitter truth that gnawed at her. Voight had stolen their last hope too, the printing press, cutting off their voice. She licked the sticky candy residue from her fingertip, her mind racing. “Dassel isn’t even the worst of them,” she mused, her tone grim. “Have you heard about that new camp they’ve set up in Williston, Vermont?”
Bill was about to reply when a sudden noise halted them: a tile skittered above, a sharp, foreboding sound slicing through the night. Marta’s heart leaped into her throat as her husband, instinctively gripping his gun, melted back into the darkness without a word. Alone, Marta’s senses heightened, her fingernails digging crescents into her palms as she braced against the creeping terror.
As seconds ticked into eternity, she could almost feel the eyes of their pursuers scanning the shadows, relentlessly searching. In this moment, she felt a kinship with the ghost of Ted Hood, imagining him retreating into the same tunnels once traversed by the Minutemen of Salem, rallying his men in a doomed last stand. She could almost sense his silent rebuke, his spirit watching her from the corner. Hood had never compromised, and never would have harmed a child—anyone’s child. His lofty ideals, emblematic of everything Americans were meant to uphold, now seemed not just impractical but increasingly dangerous. Here, in the gritty reality of survival, such principles were luxuries that the resistance could no longer afford. Hood was a martyr, his legacy a stark tribute to the ultimate cost of idealism. And yet, as much as she resented this imagined disapproval, it was his failure that justified her ruthless pragmatism—he was everything the good guy was supposed to be, and he was gone.
In the shadowy confines of this house of the dead, each sound loomed as a potential harbinger of doom, each moment stretched thin like a tightrope over an abyss. Frozen, nerves jangling like alarm bells, she counted her own heartbeats. Then, she hesitantly followed Bill outside.
The cemetery lay bathed in moonlight, its sprawling Victorian monuments seeming to hunch amidst the lush landscaping. It was a scene pulled straight from a gothic novel—sylvan and serene, yet charged with a lurking foreboding. Spreading trees, their leaves silvered by the moon’s glow, whispered secrets on the wind, their branches scratching at the sky. Bill had climbed onto the roof of their hideout, searching for whatever interloper had made that noise. Marta scanned the underbrush while he strode back and forth across the rotting tiles, half-expecting to catch the gleam of eyes or the whisper of voices. Instead, rustling to her left revealed only a raccoon, fixing her with a disgruntled look before turning and shuffling off.
Part of her wished someone would leap out from the shadows and break this tension; she could almost believe, standing here, that the men hunting them were yet more ghosts, that she had as little to fear from them as from this place’s other residents. Bill clambered down, looking less like a fugitive and more like an untalented actor doing his best Van Helsing impression. His expression was grave, though, as he approached her. “Maybe we shouldn’t come back here again.”
The raccoon, the whole atmosphere, seemed to mock her paranoia. “Do you have any idea,” she snapped, “how long it took to build up those supplies?”
Bill frowned. “There are more important things than food.”
“And we can’t fight if we’re dead of starvation,” she objected. “We need that food, and moving it? We might as well shine a spotlight on ourselves!”
He stared straight ahead, his gaze fixed on the weathered stones of their grim sanctum sanctorum. “We can’t keep running like this,” he said eventually, his voice low and tense. “It’s only a matter of time before they catch up, no matter what I do.”
“We need a real solution,” she agreed. Her gaze drifted to the cemetery’s wrought-iron gates, veiled in mist. “These piecemeal attacks won’t change anything, not long-term. Cut off the hydra’s arms and they just grow back, you know?” Her mouth pressed into a determined line as somewhere, an owl hooted. “We need to end this, and soon. We need to go for the head.”
“And you think that’s Voight?” Bill turned, looking at her sharply. “I can’t touch him.”
“Not Voight,” Marta countered. “Zelda. She’s the link. She’s feeding him information, sure, but there’s more to it. I wouldn’t have thought there was room in that twisted, stone-cold heart of his, but she means something to him. Eliminate her and, at the very least, we’ll buy ourselves the time we need to escape.” Attacking Voight directly would be like attacking a tank with a slingshot, Bill was right about that, but Zelda? She walked to and from work, alone.
Even so, Bill’s scoff was dismissive. “Too risky.”
“It’s necessary,” Marta insisted, her eyes holding his. “If we don’t do this, none of us are safe.”
Bill looked away, his jaw clenched. After a long pause, he nodded slowly. “Alright. We do it your way. But we have to be smart about this. No mistakes.”
Marta felt a chill run down her spine, not from the oppressively warm night air but from the gravity of their decision. “No mistakes,” she echoed, her resolve firm despite the sinking feeling in her stomach. They stood together in silence, the weight of their plan settling like a shroud. As they turned to go back inside, the branches overhead cast long shadows, stretching out before her like dark fingers, as if trying to pull them back from the grave they were digging for themselves.