The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (27 page)

She shook her head. “You
wouldn’t understand.”

Perhaps I wouldn’t, but I try,
and I Remember things. Almost everything since the Destruction. I’m not sure
when I started Remembering, or when I realized that not everyone did. I wasn’t
that old when the world died, but I know more than a lot of the older kids. I
don’t remember Before much, but when the others tell me things, I remember it
all.

Now Karla is one of the things
I have to remember. I will keep her memories too, for me and for Timo.

Timo and I have scavenged
enough bricks and wood to make ourselves several rooms among the ruins of
Quadriga at the end of Unter den Linden. It’s cold in the winter; the wind
whips through the shelter we’ve built between the columns, tearing at our
clothes and hair. But out here it’s not as easy for the Hunters to trap you as
in tumbled down halls and rooms.

We didn’t always live here. We
used to live not far away in the remaining wing of a big building with Karla
and a couple dozen other kids, a building she said was once a university—like a
school, but a place for adults to learn. I had never been to school, but Karla
had, Before. I asked her everything, and she taught me how to survive. But I
have always been better at hiding.

I wish she had been better at
hiding too.

It was summer, so we had
berries and roots and vegetables to eat along with the pigeons and squirrels we
caught and cooked. Since we didn’t have to scavenge as much, we had more time
to play. That day we were playing school in a room where one wall was missing;
Andrea with the six fingers, Ingo with the sleeping head on his left shoulder,
Fatima with the glowing feet, and maybe half a dozen others besides me and
Timo.

Karla marched in front of us,
teaching us a song in words we didn’t understand. She said it was a language
people all over the world used to speak. “Now you try. If any of you ever leave
here, it would be good to know English.”

I didn’t see how any of us
could ever leave or where to go if we tried since, as far as we knew, the whole
world was like Berlin now. But we all liked Karla and we sang along.

“Three blind mice,

“Three blind mice

“See how they run,

“See how they run!”

It struck me that she was
turning into an adult, and I wondered if we would still be able to trust her
then. Some adults are not Hunters, like Frau Decker, the old lady who told me
about the war that killed the world. But you never know; it’s best to stay away
from adults.

Karla would be one of the
different ones, I was sure. I couldn’t imagine having to hide from her.

“They all ran after

“The farmer’s wife

“She cut off their
tails

“With a carving knife

“Did you ever see

“Such a sight in your
life

“As three blind mice?”

We were having too much fun and
making too much noise, and we didn’t hear anyone coming. Karla was writing the
English words we didn’t understand on the wall with a charcoaled piece of wood,
so none of us was facing in the direction of the missing wall.

Mistake.

Karla turned to explain the
words she had just written down—and screamed.

The rest of us turned to find a
pack of Hunters, white like Karla and Timo, not brown like me. A wall of mean
adults in place of the wall that had once been there. The only escape was
through the single door next to where Timo was sitting cross-legged on the
floor.

I grabbed Timo’s hand and
pulled him up, yanking open the door and running down the hall. The rest of the
kids streamed out with us.

The faster kids were already
far down the hall; Timo and I would have to hide. Timo was really big and
strong for his age, but he was slow. I hadn’t seen any dogs with this group of
Hunters, so we just might have a chance. I dashed through an empty doorway and
up a flight of stairs, my hand still clamped tightly around his. The stairs
came out on emptiness, and we made our way carefully through the rubble to what
was left of some walls. Once behind them, we sank down to the floor.

Below us, I heard screaming.

Karla.

Timo clapped his hands over his
ears, and tears began to seep out of his eyes. Bad things always hurt him so
much more than anyone else. It’s one of the reasons I have to protect him.

I motioned to him to stay put,
and he nodded. I crawled over to the edge of the building where there was still
a fragment of wall and peered over, trying to see what was going on.

Six of the Hunters were
standing around laughing, four men and two women, but I couldn’t see Karla,
only hear her, screaming and pleading. The Hunters were all looking at the
ground, not up, so I leaned a little farther out.

Karla was underneath a seventh
Hunter, pounding on his shoulders while he pounded her. The high whine she was
making hurt my ears.

And then she saw me, and for a
moment it stopped, somewhere between a hiccough and a shriek.

The Hunter stopped pounding,
got up, and a second unzipped his trousers and took his place between Karla’s
bloody thighs. Karla’s eyes were pleading with me, a message I didn’t want to
understand. When Timo and I did that, what the Hunters were doing with her, it
didn’t make me cry, it made me happy.

And then she screamed again.

I couldn’t take it. I lugged
the biggest piece of wall I could find to the edge, right above the man on top
of Karla.

I pushed.

There was a high pitched
scream, male this time, and then silence.

Without peering over again to
see what had happened, I grabbed Timo’s hand and ran through the ruins for the
next stairwell.

“Frau Decker, Karla is dead, I
killed her!”

Timo followed me into the old
woman’s apartment, crying more than I was, loud jerking sobs that only made it
worse.

Frau Decker sat on what was
left of the sofa in what was left of the apartment on Jägerstrasse. I once
asked her why she stayed in a place with no roof, and she just said where was
she to go, an old woman like her when all her family was dead?

“You can find a house with a
roof at least,” I had said.

She shook her head. “This is my
home. My children grew up here. It is all I have, even if I must sleep in the
hall.”

But Frau Decker would not be
able to comfort us this time or ever again. When I came around the front of her
sofa, she was gazing out at the ruins of Berlin with empty eye sockets. I had
no one to learn from anymore.

How was I to keep
Remembering—and keep Timo safe?

The only one who could help me
now was the Beast.

I became more careful and more
afraid, as we all did. I once asked Frau Decker why so many adults were
Hunters, but she didn’t know either. She said that they were the hopeless,
which didn’t make much sense to me, since it wasn’t any different from the rest
of us. It seemed to me that the Hunters killed for fun, which meant that if we
stayed out of their way, maybe they would kill one another. We children began
to report to each other when we found bodies—it told us where adults were
hunting, the places to avoid.

We couldn’t stay hidden all the
time, though, since we had to eat. One late summer day, Timo and I were tending
our garden near the Reichstag when we heard a loud whirring in the sky, like
thousands of wings beating the air at once.

We hid among the trees at the
edge of the field and watched as a huge metallic bird with wings as fast as a
dragonfly’s landed straight down in front of the ruined building. The wind it
created flattened the long grass in all directions.

Slowly the whirring wings
stopped and several figures jumped down from the flying metal thing. They
looked like people, but their heads were funny round things resembling the eyes
of an insect.

This was something I did not
Remember.

“Yasmina, should we run?”

“Shhh. They might hear us.” As
big as he was, Timo was always scared. I should have been too, but I couldn’t
tear my eyes away from the strange people and their machine.

One of them waved something
shiny in the air and then reached up—and took off its head.

Timo gasped, and I clapped my
hand over his mouth. “Look, Timo, they’re normal adults!” I whispered.

After the first one had taken
the bubble off, the rest did as well. There were only six of them—if they were
Hunters, it was the smallest group I had ever seen.

And every single one of them
was darker skinned than the darkest Hunter I had ever seen.

Timo took my hand off his
mouth. “They’re almost black,” he said, remembering to whisper this time. “A
lot darker than you, Yasmina.”

I nodded.

Another one began waving
something shiny in the air as well. It stopped, the piece of metal pointed
straight at us.

The strange, dark people began
walking in our direction.

“Run!”

Timo didn’t need any more
encouragement. We dashed out of our hiding place. “Not back to the Beast!” I
yelled. “We don’t want them to know where we live!”

We pounded through the grass
for the ruins of the Reichstag.

“Wait, we want to help!” one of
the strangers called out in German. The words sounded strangely different. “We
are from Africa, a place not destroyed in the wars!”

The voice was that of a male
adult, but I couldn’t be sure if I had understood what he said. The words were
all off in a way I had never heard. Sometimes Hunters spoke Turkish, words that
brought back scraps of a life little more than a dream, my life Before. When
those Hunters spoke German, the words sounded different too—but not as broken
as that of the dark strangers trying to run us down.

We hid among the ruins of the
Reichstag until nightfall, and then crept back to our home beneath the Beast.

I dreamt of Africa, a name I
had heard once for a place far away. Africa and wars and dark skinned people
with their heads in round bubbles.

That night, we were startled
awake by shots and screams.

Timo and I held each other
until the night was quiet again and then drifted back to sleep.

When the sunlight crept through
the cracks between planks and concrete and woke us, we crawled out and looked
around in every direction. The sun shone, warm and strong on our faces, and there
was no movement except for the squirrels and no sound except for the birds.

I wished there were not so many
empty spaces, but we made our way to the field in front of the Reichstag
without meeting either Hunters or Strangers. The huge flying thing sat there, a
burned-out shell, and all was quiet. Some of the tomato and bean plants in our
vegetable garden were trampled. There were bodies strewn around the flyer,
Strangers and Hunters both.

But more Hunters than
Strangers. And the Hunters were mutilated in ways I had never seen before, or
at least not before I had started to Remember.

Timo was
whimpering, and I put my arms around his waist. “Shhh. We must try to find some
of the other children so that we can bury them.”

And then another voice called
to us in the strange German I had heard the day before. “Is there someone
there?”

I froze for a moment. But no
one here could harm us, and I followed it, Timo following me.

One of the Strangers still
lived, barely. Bearded—a man.

I knelt next to him, and he
gripped my hand. “Please,” he said in the same odd German as the one who had
chased us.

“When more of our kind come,
you must trust them.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Timo knelt next to me and took
my other hand.

The Stranger did not answer my
question. Instead he gave me a message. “Tell them, the ones who come after,
tell them to save the children.”

He was an adult, but he was
dying. He couldn’t hurt us. I took the head of the dark man in my lap and I
began to sing.

“Three blind mice,

“Three blind mice,

“See how they run.”

Perhaps it was the right thing
to do. The Stranger looked at me with wide eyes and smiled.

I continued to sing. When he
died, he was still smiling.

Most of the kids who used to
live in the university before Karla died were still somewhere along Unter den
Linden, scattered in twos and threes, in places where it wouldn’t be as easy
for the Hunters to find.

Timo and I went from hiding
place to hiding place, telling them what had happened, so we could bury the
dead before they started to stink and rot in the summer sun. Many of us had
garden plots on the edges of the field next to the Reichstag, and no one wanted
decaying bodies there.