The Vines by Shelley Nolden (ebook and pdf reader .TXT) 📕

him. Repeatedly. The sting of those memories still felt as fresh as the day they’d happened.

Cora released a single, strangled sob of self-pity.

Come on, woman. Get a grip. You. Are. Strong.

Mary. Cora closed her eyes and imagined her old friend beside her. If she were here now, she’d make sure neither of them starved. Cora should have paid more attention to Mary’s chatter about the foods she’d once prepared or preserved.

Far more than her cooking, though, Cora missed her companionship and bold spirit.

Mary would have thrown a brick at those technicians.

But Mary was dead, Cora reminded herself, and an intense wave of sorrow and loneliness deluged her.

She brought her palm to her mouth and concentrated on the coolness of her breath against her skin. It’s only air. Not water.

She visualized the supplies in her two secret caches, which she’d accumulated over the past three months. The food, toiletries, and batteries would make her less reliant on Ulrich initially, and the tools, clothes, blankets, and kitchenware should last for decades.

The iciness within her receded. Once again, she could feel the sun baking her backside. She returned to the spyhole facing the ferry. Most of the two dozen laborers were awaiting the “all aboard” call. Many were smoking, and almost all were shirtless.

“We forgot the flag!” hollered a guy with Coke-bottle glasses.

She dropped her head to the asphalt. The hot, rough surface pricked the side of her face, and its stench filled her nose.

If they found her, they would make her leave with them. She’d be dead within days, and shortly thereafter, a large portion of Gotham’s population would join her. The spread wouldn’t stop there: the passenger planes that thundered overhead from LaGuardia would carry her invisible assassins to England, France, and every other country on her atlas.

The sound of muffled conversation interrupted her thoughts. Cora raised her head and heard laughter.

“No way I’m setting foot in there, no matter who fought in Korea. It’s full of spooks.”

“Don’t be such a candyass.”

“Boys!” said a sharp voice. “The scheduled departure’s in . . . three minutes.”

Cora’s mouth felt like it was filled with sand. She put her eye back to the gap and located Ulrich, in a white lab coat, which had to be for her benefit alone.

Last night, from this same roof, she’d watched him stroll aboard the ferry to spend the night with Angela and Greta in their new apartment on the Upper West Side. He hadn’t arrived with the crew this morning. So how had he gotten here?

“Boss says I have to fetch the flag,” protested a man whose large biceps were covered in tattoos.

“Until that ferry’s unloaded in the Bronx, you work for me,” he declared, waving a clipboard authoritatively. “The flag stays.”

She wished she could believe that Ulrich had inadvertently saved her, but everything he did was premeditated. He must know she was up here. How long had he been avoiding her surveillance? Likely long enough to have made his own preparations before the movers began boxing up the medical supplies.

“Grab a dolly and two of your buddies,” Ulrich said. “There’s a backup battery in the plant that needs to go. We leave on schedule.”

She spat out a curse. Ulrich had helped her, only to increase her suffering. He’d told her about the hypothermia experiments his colleagues at Dachau had conducted on the Jews, and so he knew exactly what that battery meant to her.

The McSorleys’ apartment hadn’t been wired for electricity. Cora’s mother had heated their watery soups, rarely containing meat, over a coal stove, and the three had eaten beside a kerosene lamp. At the time, Cora hadn’t known life could be better.

Now that she’d become accustomed to those luxuries, she didn’t know how she would go without. And Ulrich knew that. He wanted her entirely dependent on him. Her head burned fever hot, and her muscles twitched. She despised that man.

If for no other reason, she would survive to spite him.

I know who you are: the descendant of a great Celtic warrior.

O’Toole. Expecting to see him, Cora whipped her head around. “No,” she said, sharing her anguish with the empty rooftop. “He died fourteen years ago.”

But maybe he’d been right.

Fisting her hands, Cora decided that she would do more than endure: she would best Ulrich. Instead of agonizing over the ways he might torture her with no one around to intervene, she should be viewing the island’s abandonment to her advantage. If she fought back, there would be no one nearby for him to harm in retaliation.

Her grip tightened on the shaft of an imaginary javelin. She would love to drive a spearhead into the back of his graying head the first time he returned, but that would be akin to killing herself. Her revenge needed to be carefully crafted.

First, she would get through a full cycle of the seasons, which she couldn’t do without his assistance.

Second, she would figure out how to survive on her own.

Third, she would exterminate him.

Fourth, Cora unclenched her fists. Rollie was nothing like his father. As far as she knew, to him, she’d been merely a groundskeeper, part of the island’s scenery. Whenever he’d passed her, he’d smiled and waved. Since she’d always worn a wide-brimmed hat and kept her distance, he couldn’t have noticed that she hadn’t aged as he’d grown.

But now that he was a premed student at Columbia University, she had to assume that Ulrich had shared with him the details of their family’s spezielles Projekt.

A thud, followed by the reverberation of metal, drove Cora’s attention back to the physical plant. Three of the laborers were maneuvering the battery, strapped to a dolly, toward the dock, with Ulrich snapping commands to keep them lumbering in the right direction. With age, his limp had worsened. Ever since learning that he’d sustained the injury to his right knee while at the concentration camp, she’d fantasized that a Holocaust prisoner had fought back, and wounded him—proof he wasn’t invincible.

Cora moved to the other wall