The Bomb Chaser

That's where the bomb chasers came in.

When the bombs fell, all of Cologne was shaken. Blocks away from the impact, windows rattled and flakes of plaster snowflaked to the floor. Greta knew to wait until the whine of aircraft began to fade but, while the earth continued to lurch with dull thunder, she dressed in wool and coarse leather. The knife in her boot was for protection. The scalpel stolen from a ruined surgery was for cutting out the chips.

Once the bombing ceased, Greta covered her nose and mouth and walked out into the silence. The streetlights were dark and the haze of smoke and dust blocked out the moon's weak glow, but the zones of destruction were easy to find. They were the gaps in the once-cluttered streetscape and the places where flames parted the night. She could see that the worst of the attack had focused on the industrial area to her north. She walked south, to the place where the families lived.

Greta was small and underfed. She couldn't lift rubble like some of the other chasers could. There wasn't time to move bricks one by one, not when the authorities could arrive at any moment or when the victims' chips were counting down towards their own detonation. She had to go in. When buildings crumpled, they left pockets of space between fallen walls and broken beams, warrens of tunnels that sometimes led to chips and sometimes led to death. Once, she'd been caught in a ruin when a bomb had exploded belatedly in a nearby street, bringing the debris down around her. A uniformed Luftschutzpolizei volunteer had dragged her from the building's remains. Even when tangled around clumps of plaster, her blonde hair had ensured that her chip had been only cursorily scanned. She had been lucky. She had been lucky many times.

Greta recognized the mess of rubble in front of her as the broken bones of two large buildings that had been divided into scores of one-room flats. There were several patches of slow-burning fire, but the damage was mostly the result of the bomb's direct hit. The left building was razed, its stone shattered into slate-colored sand. The right struggled to stand, its back wall upright but amputated at the second floor. There was no sign of the Orpo, so Greta crawled inside.

The first time Greta had seen a dead body, she had cried for the woman's lost potential and endured weeks of nightmares about the unnatural angles of the corpse's legs. Now she was hardened. In her first tunnel, she found the body of an elderly man who had been skewered by a falling beam. His blood was still wet and it coated Greta's gloves as she cut into his wrist, removing the chip and then wiping it down before taping it to the inside of her leg. She could see the lower half of a wrinkled arm nearby, probably belonging to the man's wife, but there was no way to reach it. She wriggled out and found another path.

The child's body appeared undamaged. There was no blood, no broken limbs--just a stillness that Greta knew too well. She checked for a pulse before cutting, keeping her gaze away from the young girl's face. Her heart pounded with hopeful excitement. Children's chips were rare finds. She had been searching for a girl that young for months, but every time the bombs fell she had found only dead adults instead.

When Greta emerged from the building, four chips taped to her leg, she could hear the sound of the Feuerschutzpolizei making their way through the crumbling streets. They were not far away, so she lit the trails of kerosene that she had poured out through her tunnels and ran until she heard the first explosion. Then, she unwound the scarf from her face, brushed off her clothes, and walked sedately into the night.