Highlander - Donna Lettow [79]
“Cover me,” she told MacLeod, hurrying toward the access tunnel. “And be ready to get the hell out of here!” MacLeod followed her up the tunnel. Behind him, he could hear Avram directing the others to do the same.
As she reached the door to the outside, Miriam unbuttoned the top buttons of her shirtdress until the tops of her breasts were visible. She licked her lips and ran a hand through her hair. Then she threw open the door and ran out into the smoky street.
“Hilfe! Don’t shoot!” she cried out in fairly good German, good enough at least to catch the German squad’s attention. “Help me, bitte! Der Juden, those horrible Jews, they kept me prisoner. Please, save me!” To add impact to her performance, Miriam dropped to the ground in a swoon.
The squad started down the street toward her at a trot. As they drew near, Miriam reached into the pocket of her dress and wrapped her fingers around the prize secreted there—her last grenade. She and the other ZOB fighters had spent days working on this drill, she could do it in her sleep. She pulled the grenade from her pocket in one fluid motion, pulled the pin, and pitched it expertly into the center of the squad. Leaping to her feet, she took off running in the opposite direction.
A second later she could hear the explosive erupt behind her. Almost instantly, the shock wave caught up with her, knocking her to the ground.
MacLeod watched the explosion from the mouth of the bunker. Soldiers in the air, arms, legs flying apart from bodies. The air was filled with blood and the screams of maimed and dying men. Not a German was left standing. Immediately, he began to pull Landau and the others from the tunnel, pushing them toward the street in the opposite direction. “Run, run, hurry, move!” Rubenstein followed after the Singer family, carrying the little boy out of the bunker. “Go! Hurry!” Avram brought up the rear, herding them all toward a nearby alleyway.
Only when everyone was out could MacLeod turn his attention back to Miriam, who was rising to her feet with a huge smile. Thank God, MacLeod thought, as she gave him a thumbs-up to let him know she was fine.
“How was that?” Miriam called out, nearly laughing from relief. She began to run to catch up with him.
“You were magnificent. Now let’s get out of here.”
She’d nearly reached his outstretched arms when, blam, a single shot rang out. MacLeod watched helplessly as Miriam’s body jerked unnaturally in the air, then hit the cobblestones at his feet with a sickening impact.
“MIRIAM!” he screamed, dropping to his knees, reaching out for her, heedless of any danger to himself as two Germans rounded the corner at a run, their rifles firing. Her eyes stared lifelessly into his own and he could see the light was gone. The bullet had shattered her spine, ricocheted into her brain. Death had been instantaneous. “Oh, God, no,” he whispered, and closed her sightless eyes with hands dripping with her blood.
A shot whizzed close to MacLeod’s head. Before he could even respond, another rifle fired, this one from behind MacLeod, and the closest German fell, one side of his face blasted away.
“C’mon, MacLeod, she’s gone. We have to go!” he heard Avram shout behind him as he fired again. “Let her go.” He knew Avram was right. He gathered up his rage and grief and managed to fire a shot straight through the heart of the second German before the tears came and blurred his sight. He staggered down the street, toward Avram and the others.
* * *
Midnight. The near-constant shelling from the artillery outside the Wall abated, and the streets of the Ghetto were once again quiet, a quiet broken only by the sporadic burst of gunfire and the shuddering collapse of buildings still aflame.
MacLeod and Avram were still trying to make their way across the Ghetto to rendezvous with the ZOB leadership. It was little more than a mile as the crow flies from Tzaddik’s outpost at the edge of no-man’s-land and the malina on Mila Street where they were to meet, but the route was thick with German patrols,