In the last chapter Ohmie learns that he a natural marksman. Ohmie comes to terms with killing. They need to get to Berlin where Ohmie can get a false passport.

“How do you feel?” Dad asked. His eyes told me that he didn’t have much hope. In my skivvies I look pretty pathetic – skin and bones. We were in the Warsaw hotel. It was the middle of the night. It was a routine thing for me, though routine only lasted a week or so, before morphing into something different. I got up to pee, knowing I didn’t have to go. But the pressures, or whatever sensations I had, made me not want to risk wetting the bed. I got up and saw that Dad was in the room’s only chair, sitting there looking at me. Either my noises, thrashing, or just my sweating ran him out of the bed. He probably wanted to escape the room altogether, maybe the entire hotel. He probably thought about how easy it would be to smother me and walk away. The cops would think he was a murdering perv who picked up some kid off the street. I sat down to pee these days. Better than falling down and making a huge mess.

It dawned on me that he’d asked how I felt. I decided to be honest with him. If he’d asked before I killed two men, I probably would have had some sassy retort, “With my fingers. How do you feel?” But I didn’t. “Tired most of the time. Low grade fever all the time. Night sweats, as you can see.” I snapped the soaking wet band of my skivvies.

“Is it too early to shower, or will you be sweating some more?”

“Don’t know. What time is it?”

“Here, it’s almost five, In D.C. it’s eleven AM, yesterday.”

I calculated. Dad got home on Sunday morning. I don’t know when, but the arguing brought me down at about seven in the morning. We were in the air for London by eight. I killed two men during the London lunch hour and killed a tree before dark – Sunday. It was five AM Monday here, but for Mom, if she ever came home, it was still Sunday night.

“My body thinks the night has just started. But I don’t know. Changes come faster all the time.”

“By the time we knew you didn’t feel well, you were at stage four.” Dad’s comment could have sounded like an excuse for bad parenting, but I let it go.

“I know. Just the breaks. Nothing on my tablet but short stories.”

Dad winced. The little left lip upward twitch was a right lower lip downward shrug along with a tiny involuntary wink of his right eye. “Shower, dress. We’ll get something to eat and get on the first train outta here.”

“Where to?” I asked, knowing he’d already said Berlin. But that might’ve been misinformation, just in case I was nabbed.

“Anywhere but east. We have to kill a day or so. I… we need to enter Berlin a couple hours before daylight.”

+++

The train wasn’t anything like what you see in the movies. The sleeper car barely had room for a single wide cot. There was another cot above it that dropped down, but the first person had to be on the lower before the upper could be accessed. Then if there were two suitcases, they had to be stacked up. I was laying down while Dad worked with the upper. I guess it was jammed a bit. There were all sorts of noises, what with the train rolling, bobbing and weaving and such, but Dad froze and listened, his ear cocked toward the door. I don’t know how, but I felt movement that wasn’t the train’s motion. Dad’s eyes were focused on the door handle. He didn’t need to raise his finger to me. I wasn’t going to make a sound.

As the door handle turned downward, Dad slammed his shoulder into the door, bursting it open. I couldn’t see very well, Dad blocking my view, but within a second, it seemed, Dad had a guy who resembled the other two inside the compartment and on top of me. I both heard and felt a suppressed gunshot. I think it went into the floor. Dad had the guy by the throat, his fingers drawing blood as he clawed into the dude’s windpipe. Dad was on his left knee, his right leg wrapped around the dude’s up on my cot. The guy’s struggling seemed like forever but couldn’t have been more’n a minute. Dad found the pistol on the floor and put a slug in the guy’s brainpan without blinking, just picked it up, arced over and fired.

“You all right, kid?” he asked, pulling the guy to my side like he and I were lovers and he lay there spent. Only the dude was leaking blood on my pillow.

I nodded. My squeak sounded something like an answer in the affirmative.

“We’ll give it a few, then get this guy off the train. I was glad Dad hadn’t given our passports to the conductor. Most people did. Dad told him, in German, that we would be getting off and on. We were touring.

Surprise, surprise. I never knew Dad spoke anything but English.

I figured the routine was for the conductor to have the passports stamped at borders, saving passengers from having to wake up at every crossing.

Our problem was getting this guy off the train in broad daylight.

Dad wrapped the guy’s head with the bloody pillowcase. He took the other one and pulled it over the top of the wrapped head, tying it at the guy’s neck. Dad’s hand told me to put the bloody pillow into the suitcase. I tried my best to fold it in an effort to contain the blood. Turns out I needn’t have bothered. The whole thing was getting trashed.

“When they announce the next stop, we chuck this guy out the door, and proceed through the next car to the next door. The conductor sees a signal that a door has opened and will come check it out. We get off and walk, briskly without running, through the station house. We’ll take a taxi to another taxi, and then to another. We’ll have to find another way to Berlin.”

I nodded like it all made perfect sense.