Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

unannounced purposes were, and they had no desire to attract her attention. What this bitch had in mind could never be good, even in the best of times when we had plenty of food and fresh water.

I climbed out of the pile, willingly relinquishing us both to her. I got to my feet, made difficult by the growing detritus of metal and glass shards on the floor, the remains of the highest form of technology by the most advanced civilization on the planet.

Except for the occasional swat with her rod, Sister Kathe ignored me, focusing instead on dragging my twin brother by the wrist, who limped, and sometimes hopped to keep up, out of boy’s dorm into the hallway, turning left, past the apparently empty Mädchenwohnheim6, past the group showers where the SS guards helped soap up the little glistening white and brown bodies of the children, boys and girls together, lingering at the fleshy parts, back when soap and hot water were plentiful, and the children still had fleshy parts.

Grasping Pyotr’s wrist in white, bloodless knuckles, she dragged him, with me stumbling behind, over debris hiding in the shadows that were cast with each flash of the remaining lights. We weaved through the broken overturned furniture, not worth looting, and over a corpse, an SS guard who held an empty vodka bottle in one hand and used the other to shoot himself in the mouth using what must have been his pistol, but which had since been looted, along with everything in his hastily ripped pockets.

I recognized the dead man as the SS guard Boltoff, but the children knew him as Flasche Mann7, because he showed off his strength to the Die Kuppel residents by wrapping an empty vodka bottle in a towel, crushing it in the left fist, reminding with a boast to the startled audience, that he was right-handed. We also knew him to be fond of bedding with the polio girls and even with the Schwesterkriegerine, according to one boy whose name I forget.

“Power does what it wants,” he would say, as he leered at the staff, or us.

With a bit of irony, I noted that Boltoff had met his demise before his vodka bottle had. The numerous remaining empty vodka bottles of Die Kuppel were a bit safer now, even as his former audience, now desperately trying to escape, certainly was not.

I did not linger on the damage the 9 mm bullet had rent to the back of his head, and had to catch up to Sister Kathe, still dragging Pyotr down the corridor, herself not pausing to mourn the corpse of her former tryst partner. Pyotr’s resistance was noticeably waning; Sister Kathe was winning this battle. I turned a corner in the corridor just in time to see the pair enter the Iron Lung Training Lab, where the nine-year-old cohorts spent most of our waking time.

The white and black enameled steel training cylinders were standing on end, laced like corsets with electrical and hydraulic cables, and studded with controls and instruments used by the scientists to test us, the patients, inside them. The entrance was a round lid, like a manhole cover, but with robust moving deadbolts of the type found on lids of a pressure cooker, or hatch on a submarine, with the diameter of a wheel of gouda that Pyotr and I, along with our mother, would make on the farm, a diameter only a thin nine-year-old could wiggle through. There were several of these cylinders in the room, each looted for anything of value that could be traded on the outside by the fleeing SS guards and scientists, which was the penultimate act of abandoning Die Kuppel. Stripped bare for purposes of possible barter, these enameled training machines, allegedly there to save our lives, were not even able to save their own.

The final rite performed by the guards and scientists was to replace their uniforms and lab coats with the apolitical vestments of office workers, tradesmen, even farmers. I remember one bulky guard seeking to join the sisterhood, cock swinging as he slipped a nun’s habit over his head. I did not know or particularly care where the Schwesterkriegerine who previously owned it might have been. I took note of his being careful to rip off the Eagle and Swastika before wading through the muck on the floor, still wearing very un-nun-like jackboots, seeking the nearest egress whose locations were closely guarded, and knowing on the other side were Russian soldiers in terrible humor.

I tripped over the cables and broken glass, falling to the floor as another blast shook it from underneath my feet, and was not able to reach Sister Kathe or Pyotr before the pair disappeared behind a steel door, being held open by one of the scientists whom I recognized as Herr Dr. Todtenhausen. I lurched forward thinking to squeeze through the slight gap, but he promptly slammed the door shut, nearly on my fingers. This was the last I would ever see of Pyotr, and the first time we had ever been separated in all our nine years of life.

This was not, however, my last encounter with Sister Kathe, nor was it the last the world would know of Pyotr.

Nicolaus: May 1st, 1945

I slumped down on my side of the iron door, while calling Pyotr’s name in a quiet whimper. The few remaining intact lightbulbs pulsed as dying embers through a spectrum of browns, then yellow, then out, then a burst of unnaturally bright white a few seconds later. I imagined them gasping for electricity as a drowning man would for oxygen.

Listening against the door, I could hear sounds of metal against metal—gears grinding, doors clanging shut, and motors spinning up to speed then slowing down. I could hear muffled voices, picking out some of the words yelled above the machine noises, such as “surgery,” and “Sequenzer8.” I sat up as I realized that the fluids on the floor, smelling of turpentine, sewage, ammonia, with overtones