I shot out of bed.

  My hand scrambled for a weapon that wasn’t there even as my brain tried to remember where I had fallen asleep. Sudden wakeups and I really don’t get along well.

  The door rattled under the hammer of a fist again.

  It took a second or two for me to remember the night before, Kris and her apartment. Where was she? I scrambled out of the pile of blankets that had been my bed the night before and poked my head into the closet sized bathroom. Nothing.

  Had she sold me out? Had my bitter ex slipped out in the middle of the night and brought the Wotanvolk right to my door? I shook my head, trying to clear the last of the sleep from it as I tried to reason through what was happening. Before I could get there, the door started to open. I ducked into the kitchen, grabbing a knife as I did so.

  “Thomas,” Kris called gently into her apartment. “You can come out. I’m here with a friend.”

  “Why were you knocking on your own door?” I asked, still making sure to stay hidden.

  “Because I remember how… disoriented you could be when you first wake up. I didn’t want to surprise you with a stranger.” Her voice carried that sour note that let me know she was getting annoyed. “Come out, and be polite.”

  “Guten tag,” I said nonchalantly as I popped up from my concealment. I made sure to have a smile on my face… and the knife hidden along my forearm.

  “Hallo,” grunted Kris’s companion. He was a solid, blond block of a man. Stereotypical German right out of a central casting department down to a tough looking scar on his right cheek. He wore the shabby, secondhand clothing of a common laborer one could see working the fields around the city but he carried himself with the confident ease of a man that was used to violence.

  “Tom, this is Jan,” said Kris, her tone was relaxed but I could see tension lurking in her eyes. “He can get you out of the city.”

  “Wunderbar,” I replied. “Are you a smuggler?”

  “Something like that,” he said, his thick lips curling slightly in distain. “Know that I can get you out of the city, Yankee. Once you get out of the city though you are on your own.”

  “Not a problem. When can we leave?”

  “Right now, we have to get you out of the city before nightfall. Terrible things happen in the dark.”

  “Well, I’m already packed,” I patted my nearly empty pockets. “Kris?”

  “Give me a second,” her eyes roved around her apartment. I expected to see some sadness there, some regret at leaving this place she had lived for years. Instead, I saw determination and more than a little satisfaction. “I will grab a few things.” She wasn’t kidding, she took only long enough to throw a few useful items, some food and a couple knickknacks into a small backpack. “Let’s go.”

  A beat-up VW van waited outside the door to Kris’s apartment. The vehicle looked like it had been cobbled together from a dozen different cars. It was an irony of the times that the true masterpieces of German engineering; the Porches, Mercedes and BMWs had all rapidly expired as their specially made parts and computer chips broke down leaving their wealthy owners on foot or horse. Yet the doughty Volkswagens kept chugging along on bailing wire and vegetable oil, still dragging the poor saps who owned them from place to place despite the end of the world. This particular specimen had a wood gasifier attached to its roof and looked like it might rattle apart at any second, but it still meant that my new friend, Jan, was a man of means.

  “Get into the back, quickly!” Jan commanded, still in German, as he opened up the van’s rear doors. Inside, there were no seats. The back of the van had been stuffed full of crude shovels that look like that they had been knocked together in one of the small factories that had popped up in any of the cities that were still standing. Such products were one of the ways for the urban areas to get food from the countryside without resorting to force (though force was usually used anyway.) Jan pulled one of the shovel handles and with a slight click a small door hidden within shovel parts opened. The opening was small, too small.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I groaned.

  “Get in or die,” snapped Kris while giving me a shove. I grumbled but still contorted my way through the small opening. The compartment itself was a little less confining but only a little. I drew my knees up into my chest to fit myself inside but at least I didn’t have to hunch my back and shoulders. I was just thinking that the drive out of town would be survivable when Kris climbed in next to me.

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  “Oomph,” I grunted when her knees and elbows dug into tender parts of my anatomy. “Why don’t you ride up front?” I asked plaintively.

  “Because, Jan is known to transport goods out of the city but is not known to have a woman partner. It is better that I ride back here.” Her face pushed up against mine and I could plainly smell that she had bratwurst for breakfast (damn you, German food!) Being crammed into a tight space with an old flame could have been romantic, but in reality, it was uncomfortable and awkward. I was fully aware of the fact that I hadn’t showered in three days and I am sure that Kris was aware of it too. The van’s engine started in an arrhythmic rumble and we soon found ourselves feeling every bump and crack in the poorly maintained streets as we jostled along.

  “So…” I said in a game attempt at conversation as Kris’s left elbow threatened to punch through my bellybutton, “…how do you know Jan?”

  “He’s a friend,” Kris muttered back at me after a few seconds.

  “What did you have to offer your friend to get us out of the city?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” she repeated with more emphasis.

  “So, he is smuggling us out of Dresden purely out of the goodness of his heart? That doesn’t add up.”

  “I said he is a friend.”

  “Yeah, but there are friends and… friends,” I made sure to add a little extra emphasis for effect despite the fact that I could not use my hands to make quotation marks.

  “He is not my boyfriend, if that is what you are asking.”

  “I wasn’t,” though that was good to know. “I just need to know his motivations.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’ll make it easier for me to trust him.”

  “Shouldn’t you have asked that before you climbed into this box?”

  “You guys rushed me,” I complained. “Besides; I really had no other way to leave your apartment without getting caught and my soul devoured.”

  “Ok, Jan is not just a smuggler… I mean he does smuggle, but that is not all that he does. He is also part of the Resistance.”

  “Hmmm…” I said meditatively as I processed that information. “So, he’s crazy then. Good to know.”

  “He is not crazy, he is brave man and a patriot,” Kris protested over the van’s ailing engine. “We cannot all have it as easy as you Americans.”

  “Maybe, but for someone to still be in the Resistance they have to be a lunatic… or some kind of religious fanatic.” I felt her stiffen beside me, I had struck a nerve.

  There had been massive amounts of resistance to the Old Gods when they first appeared. Modern humans had not been ready to bow to what most had considered figments of their ancestors’ imaginations. That soon changed; there were only so much mass murder a population could take before it stopped fighting back.

  I knew that the Agency had played a major role in supplying and advising Resistance efforts around the world in the early years after the Surge. It was not long though until all the dumb and brave resistance fighters were dead and all the smart and cowardly ones retired. That left only the crazy ones with what could be called an overdeveloped sense of vengeance. They also tended to be religious fanatics. Only people who thought they had God on their side would try to take on what they saw as imposters.

  “Jan is very… focused,” said Kris, obviously trying to put a positive spin on what normally would be considered a psychiatric condition of some sort. “His wife was sacrificed to One Eye back in the early years and he has fought back ever since.”

  “I guess I should be asking what the Resistance will want then.” I narrowed my eyes at her though the gesture was lost in the gloom of the compartment.

  “I imagine they will want help from your government; intelligence, weapons, military aid, things of that manner.”

  “Things of that manner?” I parroted back. “It seems like you know all too well what the Resistance wants and needs.”

  “I might have an idea,” Kris replied, even though I could not see much in the dark of the smuggler’s hold I knew she was adverting her eyes away from me.

  “Ah shit, you’re one of them, aren’t you?” I accused, “You’re with the Resistance. That’s why you agreed to help me, you just want to use me.”

  “So, what if I am?” she challenged. “Are you afraid that makes me a fanatic also?”

  “A little bit… ouch,” I yelped as she dug her elbow into me.

  “Like I said,” Kris snarled. “We cannot all have as easy a lot as you Americans. My choices were to resist and die or submit and live. I chose to trust in God and resist. And I don’t think you are in a position to insult the only people who can help you.”

  I opened my mouth to ask when she had become religious. When we had dated, she had been as solidly atheist as Richard Dawkins. A lot of people had found religion after the Surge and that was baffling to me. The only God that hadn’t come back was the one the monotheists worshipped, yet that just made people believe in him all the more. I didn’t understand it, but Kriss was right. It wouldn’t do to insult my only sort-of allies on the continent. I elected to say something more diplomatic.

  “It just would have been nice to know from the outset, is all I am saying.”

  “I could not trust you fully. Perhaps One Eye’s agents are using you to find us?”

  “Have you decided you can trust me now?”

  “No, but now we can kill you if we need to.” We let the threat hang in the dark and smelly air of the small compartment until it was torn and tattered by the cacophonic clatter of the van’s engine which only made it more ominous.

  “Well, this is awkward,” I said in a lighthearted attempt to clear the air only to be met with a stern and very German silence from my ex. “How much longer do we have until we get to wherever we are going?” I asked a few minutes later.

  “Probably three or four hours,” Kris grunted back.

  “Cool…” I replied, making sure to draw out the word uncomfortably. “And if I try to escape you will kill me, right?”

  “Yes. But I will not enjoy it.”

  “Good to know. I would hate to die thinking that someone else enjoyed it.”

  We maintained an uncomfortable silence until the van abruptly stopped.