Four Days on the Danube: Chapter One

    The first notice Rita had that something was amiss was on the startling side. The front door to the small apartment in Ingolstadt’s military headquarters that she and her husband Tom had just finished settling into was blown in by an explosion. A splinter from the door sliced open her left arm just below the shoulder. Another splinter flew into her side and stuck there like a pin, just above the hip.

    The blast itself sent her stumbling back. She tripped and fell into the fireplace. Where her dress caught fire.

    A man came through the door on the heels of the explosion. He had a wheel-lock pistol in his hand which he leveled at her and fired.

    That was pretty much the low point of the evening. Luckily for Rita, the door hadn’t been completed blown off the hinges. Half of it was still hanging in the entrance and a jagged edge caught the man’s sleeve as he brought up the gun. His aim was thrown off and the bullet went into the fireplace instead of Rita’s chest.

    Squawling with fear and anger, Rita scrambled out of the fireplace. She started slapping at her dress to extinguish the flames licking at the hem. Then, seeing that her assailant was bringing out another pistol, she left off trying to extinguish the flames and turned instead toward the mantelpiece. Her husband Tom kept his shotgun up there.

    She wouldn’t make it, she realized despairingly. By the time she –

    Another crash drew her head around. Tom had burst in from their bedroom. The front room of the apartment doubled as a dining area. Tom disarmed the gunman by the simple expedient of driving the dining table across the floor into the man’s hip.

    Tom Simpson was a former football lineman. If anything, the years since the Ring of Fire and his military service had put still more meat and muscle on his immense frame. And he certainly hadn’t lost any strength. The table smashed into the assailant like a battering ram, smashing his hip and slamming him into the door frame. His eyes rolled up and he slumped into the room unconscious.

    Now that he was out of the doorway, Rita could see another assailant coming right behind. This one had a pistol also.

    “Watch out, Tom!” she shouted, as she brought the shotgun to bear.

    Rita had been raised a country girl, the daughter and sister of coal miners. She’d been handling firearms since she’d gotten a .22 rifle for her eighth birthday and had been hunting pheasant and quail with a shotgun since she was ten.

    That had been a 20 gauge, of course, suitable for a small girl. But she’d graduated to a 12 gauge long since.

    Tom had the gun loaded for war, not hunting. The heavy slug punched the man back with a hole in his chest. If he wasn’t dead already, he would be soon — and either way, he was out of the action.

    A third man stood behind him in the corridor, a look of surprise on his face. He had his dying companion half-supported with one arm while he tried to bring his own pistol to bear with the other.

    Rita pumped in another round. Since she didn’t have a clear shot at the man’s center mass, she aimed at his head instead. Later, she’d realize that she could have taken the much easier center mass shot. At that range, a solid slug fired from a twelve gauge would have blown right through the man standing in front. But this was her first gunfight — and it was a mistake even experienced gunmen probably would have made.

    The head shot missed, not surprisingly. But the man she’d fired at, who was also not thinking clearly, frantically pushed his dying comrade aside so he could bring up his own pistol and fire.

    And miss. The shot went completely wild, in fact, striking the wall of the corridor and never even making it into the room Rita was standing in.

    Now she had a center mass shot. She pumped in another round and fired.

    And missed. Her intended target, at least — but the shot went high and struck her opponent on the side of the head. A chunk of his skull was torn off and the corridor was splattered with blood and brains all the way to the outside entrance another fifteen feet further down the corridor. The man spun completely around, dropping his pistol, and then collapsed on top of his companion.

    Rita jacked in another round. The next thing she knew, she was doused with cold water.

    “Hey!” she squealed, spinning around to face this new attack. Just in time, she managed not to point the shotgun at her husband.

    “Don’t move, dammit,” Tom growled. “You’re on fire.” He had the faucet running in the basin and the saucepan under it. A couple of seconds later, he threw half the contents over her dress.

    Looking down, she saw that there were still some flames flickering along one edge.

    And her leg hurt. She’d been burned, she realized.

    “Ow,” she said.

    Tom took the time with the third panful to lift up the hem of her dress and carefully pour the water over the still-burning and smoldering spots, instead of just splashing it on her.

    “You’d better see to your wounds and change clothes,” he said, setting the pan down on the table he’d used to disable the first assailant.

    Who, for his part, issued a groan.

    Tom leaned over, lifted the man to his feet with one hand, and slammed the back of his head against the door jamb again. Then, let him slump to the ground.

    This impact was far more savage than the first. The man would be unconscious for hours. If he wasn’t dead — Tom was in a quiet fury and he was very strong.

    “I’ve got to go see what’s happening, hon,” he said, reaching for the jacket of his uniform hanging by the door.

    For the first time, Rita realized there was a cacophony of shouts and gunfire coming from outside. It sounded like the whole city was under attack.

    It finally dawned on her that this hadn’t been a house invasion by criminals.

    “What do you think…?”

    Now, Tom was buckling the holster with his sidearm around his waist. He’d had that hanging by the door also.

    “At a guess, the Bavarians are attacking.”

    “But how’d they…”

    “Get in? Treachery, I figure. Has to have been, as many as there are from the sounds of it.”

    His gun holstered, Tom stepped forward, reached out and plucked out the splinter above her hip. That was her first realization that it was there.

    “That’s probably nothing to worry about,” Tom said. “It’s hardly even bleeding, from the looks of your dress. But you’d better see to your arm.”

    For a moment, he seemed to be dancing back and forth, obviously torn by indecision. Rita shook her head.

    “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Go see to your men.”

    A moment later, he was gone. After giving the corridor a wary glance, Rita put the shotgun back on the mantelpiece and drew her left arm across her chest to get a better look at the wound.

 

---

 

    It was bleeding a fair amount, but she didn’t think it was really all that serious. The proverbial “minor flesh wound” — except that now it was starting to hurt, damn it all.

    They had some first aid supplies in a small chest in the bedroom. It was under the bed, since there wasn’t much room in the apartment and the kit wasn’t something they expected to be needing regularly. She went in, knelt down and looked under the bed. Not to her surprise, she discovered that the first aid kit had faithfully obeyed the Iron Law of Anything Put Under A Bed. By whatever mysterious means, it had migrated to the very center.

    So, an already torn, dirty and blood-stained dress got a bit more wear and tear on it, while she half-crawled under the bed to drag out the kit. By the time she got it out, she was worried enough that she almost gave up the effort halfway through. The sounds of fighting from outside were unmistakable now. That was a pitched battle being waged out there, with rifles and grenades — even an occasional cannon shot — not some sort of raid or minor incursion.

    With the kit finally in hand, she hurried to the apartment’s basin. The military housing had running water, even if it didn’t have electricity. Fortunately, there was enough light being shed by the fire and the two lamps in the room for her to start working on her wounds.

    The one on her side proved to be minor, sure enough. The dress itself had absorbed most of the impact. But the wound on her arm was a different matter. Once she washed it off and could see the damage clearly, she winced. That gash was big enough and deep enough that it ought to be closed with stitches. But there was no way she would be able to manage that herself, one-handed. She’d just have to be satisfied with a pressure dressing. She wasn’t worried about blood loss, as such. But without stitches, she’d wind up with a pretty nasty scar on her upper arm. She tried to console herself with the thought that sleeveless dresses weren’t in fashion in the year 1636 anyway.

    There was a small bottle of concentrated alcohol in the first aid kit. She used that to sterilize the wound — which really hurt — and then started awkwardly wrapping some (theoretically) sterile cloth around it.

    Sounds coming from the corridor drew her attention away from the task. She snatched the shotgun off the mantelpiece.

    Hearing female voices, she relaxed a bit. There was far too much fighting going on for there to be any enemy camp followers moving around. Then, recognizing one of the voices, she relaxed completely.

    “In here, Willa!” she shouted. “I’m alone, and there’s no danger!”

    She glanced down at the two dead men in the corridor. “Well, no immediate danger, anyway,” she added.

    A few seconds later, the shapes of three middle-aged women appeared in the corridor. They minced their way across the two bodies, taking care not to step on them.

    Their gingerly manner had nothing to do with squeamishness. The nickname given to Willa Fodor, Maydene Utt and Estelle McIntire was “the Three Auditors of the Apocalypse.” Tender-hearted, they were not. But they were also no longer lithe and athletic girls, if they ever had been, and the sprawled corpses in the narrow hallway were not minor obstructions.

    Fodor was the first one into the room, followed by Utt. As her sister-in-law Estelle came in, Maydene knelt down and checked the pulse of the third assailant whom Tom had smashed into the door-jamb. Then, reached behind his head.

    “Well, he’s with the Lord,” she announced. “Or wherever. What d’you do? Hit him with a train? The whole back of his skull’s caved in.”

    “Uh… Tom slammed him into the door. He was really pissed.”

    Grunting, Utt heaved herself back on her feet. She was a big woman. Not fat, particularly, just very heavily-built. “Well, I guess a really-pissed Tom Simpson will pass for a pretty good train imitation. Where is he now?”

    Rita nodded toward the door. “Out there, somewhere. He left to see what was happening.”

    By then, Estelle had come up to look at Rita’s arm.

    “Hold still,” she commanded. After a quick examination, she said: “You got a needle and thread in that first aid kit?”

    Rita was tempted to say no. Sorely tempted. McIntire was about as skinny as her sister-in-law was hefty, but they shared the same temperament. It was the sort of middle-aged female Appalachian temperament for which phrases like quit your whining and stop being a baby came trippingly off the tongue. Estelle would sew up the wound without worrying much about minor issues like agony.

    “You got medical training…?” Rita ventured, half-hoping she might fend the woman off.

    Estelle sniffed. “Who needs medical training for something like this? I’ve been sewing up torn clothes since I was six.” She turned her head. “Mary, give me a hand.”

    For the first time, Rita realized that two other people had followed the three auditors into the room. The one to whom Estelle had spoken was Willa Fodor’s niece, Mary Tanner Barancek. The girl had graduated from high school a year and half earlier and had gone to work in Dr. Gribbleflotz’s laboratories in Jena. Some sort of clash with her boss had led her to quit and she’d come down to the Oberpfalz to work for her aunt. She had some sort of dignified-sounding down-timer job title, but she was really a combination gofer and clerk.

    The man standing next to her, on the other hand, had a job that actually matched the title. Johann Heinrich Böcler was the private secretary for the Upper Palatinate’s new administrator, Christian I of Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler. He’d held the same position for the previous administrator, Ernst Wettin, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, before Wettin had been reassigned to Saxony.

    Böcler was a certain type of German official, by now quite familiar to Rita after four and a half years in the seventeenth century.

    Physically, he was unprepossessing. He was in his mid-twenties. On the short side, fattish — not obese, just plump — with a pug nose, brown eyes, and a prematurely receding hairline. The hair itself was that indefinite shade of gray-brown that so often signaled a prematurely receding youth.

    With respect to his skills, he was very competent. As you’d expect from a man who’d gotten his position because of those skills, not because of any great social standing. He’d been born in a small town in Franconia whose name Rita couldn’t remember. His father had been a Lutheran pastor; his grandfather, the down-time equivalent of a high-school principal. A respectable family, certainly, but not a high-placed one.

    In short, the sort of fellow you’d want at your side to keep track of the complex details of a political and commercial negotiation. Not the sort of fellow you particularly wanted at your side in the middle of a city that was being overrun by enemy soldiers.

    While Rita had been contemplating these matters in order to avoid thinking about the proximate future, Estelle McIntire had been preparing that future with Mary Barancek’s assistance.

    “Okay,” she said, “this going to hurt a little.”

    The needle went in.

    “Ow!” Rita squealed.

    “Don’t be a baby. It’s just a few stitches.”

    Again.

    “Owowowowow!”

    “Oh, quit whining.”