Highlander - Donna Lettow [90]
Rivka looked up at him and the veil of terror left her eyes. “Duncan?” She stopped struggling, but he could feel her heart beating out of control against him. “Duncan?” she said again, not believing what she saw.
He touched her face. “It’s me, Rivkaleh.”
The twelve-year-old melted against him, her relief so great she could barely stand. “Duncan…”
“Hey, look what I found,” MacLeod heard Avram say behind him. He turned to see Avram pull a little girl, no more than five, from the midst of the charnel. She’d had a quiet little cry, as if she no longer had the strength, but it had been strong enough to lead MacLeod to her. Avram settled her on one hip and she wrapped her arms gratefully around his neck.
“That’s Zara,” Rivka explained, still in a daze. “I tried to get her to stop crying, I tried really hard, but she wouldn’t. I thought for sure the Germans had found us.”
“Rivka, tell me what happened,” MacLeod said.
Rivka looked around the courtyard wide-eyed, the horror still too fresh. She tried to speak, but couldn’t. MacLeod smiled at her encouragingly and held her hand, and suddenly the words came flooding out. “They … they found our bunker. They took people out, a few at a time, and they never came back. They took Zara’s mother. And then they said if we’d tell where the other malinas were, they wouldn’t kill us. But nobody told the pigs anything. I told Zara that as soon as she heard a gun, to fall down and pretend she was dead. And the guns fired and we fell down. Then there were people on top of me and they were too heavy and I couldn’t get them off. And there was blood, there was so much blood…” Rivka began to shake as she looked down at herself, covered head to toe in other people’s gore. “Oh, God, Duncan…”
MacLeod held her close to him once again. “Shhhh, Rivkaleh … it’s all right,” he consoled her. “You’re with me now.” He looked up at Avram. He could see little Zara was holding on to Avram like a vice, as if she’d never let him go. She was quiet now, her head resting against his shoulder, eyes tightly closed. “What do we do?” MacLeod asked.
“We’ve got to get them out of here.”
“Right.” MacLeod started walking out of the courtyard, leading Rivka by the hand. “We’ll get them back to Mendik’s base, then—”
“No, MacLeod, I mean out of the Ghetto.” Avram and Zara caught up with him. “Out of Warsaw. Out of that monster’s reach.” Avram wasn’t sure there was even such a place anymore, a world safe from Hitler, but he knew now they had to try to find it. “Rivka, Zara, Moshe Singer and his family back at Mendik’s base, anyone else we can find still alive. We’ll get them out of here.”
“Avram, there’s no way out” Mila 18 had finally convinced MacLeod how hopeless their situation was. He stopped walking, grabbed Avram by the arm. MacLeod’s face was dark, his jaw firmly set against the frustration that threatened to overtake him. “They’ve got the Wall surrounded, they’ve got tanks at the gates. They’re patrolling the streets in and out of the Ghetto. We’re trapped.” The ache in his voice begged Avram to prove him wrong. “How, Avram? You tell me how?”
“I don’t know. Dammit, I don’t know! But we have to try.” Avram pulled away and started down the street. Zara could sense the tension that hung between them and began to cry softly again. Without a thought, Avram reached up with his free hand to pat her head, whispering calming words, and Zara settled down again.
MacLeod wished it was that easy. He, too, wished he could comfort Rivka and the others, free them from this prison, but how could he give hope to others when he himself saw no hope left? No way out. He’d begun to see that Miriam, Anielewicz, all of them, had been right after all. Theirs was not a choice between life or death. The choice for them was between death or death. Death on their own terms or at the whim of the Nazis.
“The sewers?”
“What?” MacLeod almost didn