“Good for you,” said Santiago.

  “No, not good for me,” said Becker. “Good for my mother. She was the kind heart of my family. She was like her mother, and her sisters were like her. Kind and generous, in part because it was their nature and in part because they remembered hunger and want.”

  “These cakes smell delicious,” said Gomez.

  “Do they? My mother would be pleased that you think so.”

  “Then let us each have one in honor of her,” suggested the big blond man.

  “Of course, my friend, of course.” Becker leaned across the table and picked up a cake, careful not to crumble the delicate crust between his fingers. He set it on a small plate and placed it in front of Gomez. He repeated the action for Santiago. Then he took one for himself and sat down.

  Santiago nodded toward the empty side of the table. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Becker glanced at the untouched plates of food. “Ah. So courteous. But, no, my friend, soul cakes are for the living.”

  “Oh,” said Santiago, clearly not following.

  “One more thing,” said Becker as the other men began reaching for their cakes. “A last bit of seasonal ceremony, if you’ll indulge me. I like to follow the traditions in form as well as spirit.” He crossed to a cabinet and removed a small lantern, checked that it was filled with oil, and brought it to the table. “Do either of you have a match?”

  Gomez produced a Lucifer match from a pocket, scraped it alight on the heel of his shoe, and leaned the flame across to Becker. The old man’s eyes twinkled with blue fire as he guided Gomez’s hand toward the lantern wick. The flame seemed to leap from match to wick and at the same moment Gomez twitched with a deep shiver.

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked Santiago.

  “I … nothing,” said Gomez. “Just a chill. It’s gone now.”

  Becker adjusted the flame and placed the lantern on the table close to the untouched plates of good. “So, the souls of the dead can find their way here to join our feast.”

  “Forgive me, Herr Becker,” said Santiago, his faux Spanish fading in favor of cosmopolitan German, “but isn’t that a bit ghoulish?”

  “Do you think so?” asked Becker, looking surprised. “How perceptive.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. A joke.” Becker refilled their glasses with the last of the final bottle of Riesling. He placed his palms flat on the table and let out a long, satisfied sigh. “Now, my friends,” he said, also speaking German. “Before we partake, let me tell you something of these cakes. There is magic in baking. A special sorcery that can transport us to other places and times with a single bite. That is why I invited you both here.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Santiago. “Why us?”

  “Because you are no more Argentinian than I am, nor even Deutschargentinier. You are sons of Germany, as I am a son of Austria. No, please don’t deny it. We are all friends here. We are safe and alone here and we may be who we are. There are no spies here. No Americans or British. No hunters from the new state of Israel. We have nothing to fear from each other and that allows us to take a breath, to be real, to be ourselves.”

  “And what if we are German?” asked Santiago, his tone dangerous, his eyes cold.

  “Then I am among countrymen,” said Becker. “I invited you here to share my holiday feast because I knew—I knew—that you would appreciate it as only sons of the Fatherland could.”

  “How do we know you are not a Jew?” demanded Gomez.

  “Because I have eaten pork with you,” said Becker. “And beef with cream sauce. Because I say that I am not a Jew. Because if I was a Jew there would have been a dozen armed men waiting for you in here and not a feast and good wine and hospitality.”

  “He’s not a Jew,” said Santiago.

  “No,” agreed Becker. “I am a baker from Austria and my family has lived in Hallstatt for generations.” He touched the surface of the soul cake on his plate. “I asked you here to share in this special and sacred celebration. To break bread with me, to feast with me and the spirits of my family because I am alone and lonely and I knew you would understand. Neither of you have families here, either.”

  “No,” said Santiago. “Mine were killed in Dresden.”

  “Um Gottes willen,” blurted Gomez, but Santiago shook his head.

  “Enough, Erhardt,” said Santiago. “He is right. We are alone here. We are safe here, if nowhere else.”

  “I … I …”

  Santiago turned to Becker. “My name is Heinrich Gebbler and this is Erhardt Böhm, and we are happy to share this table with you. God! How good it is to be myself, even for a moment.”

  Gomez—Böhm—cursed and slapped the table hard enough to make the wine in all of the glasses dance. “Then be damned to all of us. Yes, yes, I am Erhardt Böhm. There, I said it. Are we all happy now?”

  “Very happy,” said Becker. “And I thank you for your trust. Believe me when I say that it is a secret that I will take with me to the grave.”

  “You had better,” warned Gebbler. “We are taking a great risk.”

  “Now can we eat these damned cakes?” asked Böhm.

  “Wait, wait,” pleaded Becker. “Everything must be done exactly right, as I have said. To eat a soul cake is a very serious matter, especially in such a moment as this. After all, we have each seen our world burn. We have each lost so many of those we loved during the war, have we not?”

  The two Germans nodded.

  “Then should we not honor the dead by inviting them to join us at this table?”

  “Sure, sure,” said Böhm, “invite Hitler and Himmler and Göring for all that I care. The dead are dead, and I am hungry.”

  “The dead are dead, but they are hungry, too, Herr Böhm,” said Becker. “I have lit the lantern so that they can find us, and I have prepared food for them, because the dead are always hungry. Always.”

  “You’re being ghoulish again,” muttered Gebbler.

  “Perhaps.” He gestured to the cakes. “Did you know that the moment grain is milled it’s possessed of its greatest life-giving potential? The dough for the soul-cakes must be made when the flour is fresh and alive. It must contain life in order to be worth consuming.”

  “I don’t follow,” said Böhm.

  “You will,” said Becker. “Now, please, try the soul-cakes.”

  The Germans shared another glance, then shrugged, and picked up the cakes. They each took small tentative bites.

  “This is delicious,” said Böhm.

  “I’ve never tasted anything so good,” said Gebbler.

  “How delightful!” cried Becker, clapping his hands. “Have another. Have as many as you like.”

  Böhm pulled the plate over and pawed four more of the cakes onto his plate, then offered what was left to Gebbler. Despite the heavy meal, they ate with relish, their faces dusted with sugar and crumbs falling onto their shirts. While they ate, Becker spoke quietly of the holiday.

  “During Allerseelenwoche,” he said, “the souls are released from their graves and they wander the earth as hungry ghosts. Lanterns like this invite them to dine with us in the hopes that they can feast well enough to ease their hunger and gain a measure of peace.”

  “So, you keep saying,” said Gebbler, pausing with a fresh cake an inch from his mouth, “but quite frankly, Herr Becker, I am not a very good Catholic. I never was, and less so since the world fell apart. Everything that I cared about burned down. The damned Russians and British and Americans have taken it all from us. Our hopes and dreams and every single thing of worth that we owned. We are the ghosts haunting a world in which we no longer truly live.”

  Becker nodded. “To be equally frank, Herr Gebbler, I am not a very good Catholic, either.”

  “But not a Jew?” asked Böhm, his cheeks bulging with soul cake.

  “Not a Jew.”

  “Then if you’re not Catholic,” asked Gebbler, “why do you go to such lengths to follow these rituals?”

  “Because I am a kind of Catholic,” said Becker. “My people tend to adopt the customs of wherever we live. It is how we survived all these years. Well … how we once survived. Clearly, we did not blend in well enough. They still came for us and rounded us up and took us away. It’s not really something that can be blamed on the war, though. My sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts, cousins … they all died far from the battlefields. I doubt they ever heard a shot fired or saw a bomb fall.”

  The two Germans suddenly paused in the act of chewing and looked at him with sudden suspicion.

  “What does that mean?” demanded Gebbler quietly.

  “It means that I am not a Jew or a homosexual or a Pole or a Slav or any of those groups, nor were any of my family, and yet they all died in the camps. In Bergen-Belsen and Sachsenhausen, in Buchenwald and Dachau, in Mauthausen and Ravensbrück.” He leaned slightly forward and smiled a sad little smile. “I am Romani.”

  “A damn gypsy!” Böhm spat the half-chewed cake onto the table. “This is a trap. He’s poisoned us.”

  Both Germans shot to their feet.

  “No, no, no,” said Becker, holding his hands palms out. “I would never pollute my family’s recipes with poison. There is nothing hidden in the meat or bread or anything else. Did I not eat it along with you?”

  “You didn’t eat the cakes,” snarled Gebbler. He took a threatening step toward the baker.

  “No, but not because they are poisoned, which they are not,” protested Becker, still seated, “but because they were made specially for you. For tonight. They were made in celebration of Allerseelenwoche.”

  “This is a trap, Heinrich,” said Böhm. “Let’s see how much of him we need to cut off before he tells us who else knows about us and—”

  “No,” said Becker. “You will not need to do that, Oberscharführer Böhm. Oh, don’t look so surprised. Do you think I picked you at random? I came here to this town to find you and Obersturmführer Gebbler. I came looking for both of you because you were at Mauthausen, where my mother and grandmother were taken. You took the gold from their teeth and cut the rings from their fingers. You worked for the commandant, Franz Ziereis, and under his direction you worked them and starved them until they dropped, and you buried what was left of them in mass graves. My brothers and sisters, too. And my father. All of them. Starved to death and buried like trash.”

  Becker’s voice was soft, quiet, unhurried.

  “So, they died,” sneered Gebbler. “So what? You Romani are trash and you have always been trash and the world is better off without you. You’re worse even than the Jews. At least they never renounced their faith even when we held their children above the flames of a bonfire. You gypsies would forswear anyone and anything to try and survive. Your mother probably offered to spread her legs for us and maybe did.”

  “Maybe she did,” said Becker. “Maybe she begged and maybe she said that she renounced her faith, her culture, her people. What else could she say? Why would she—or any of them—not try anything in order to survive? What is a proclamation of renouncement except words? How is that more ignoble than slaughtering innocent people by the hundreds of thousands? By the millions?”

  His tone never rose beyond that of mild conversation, and he wore a constant smile of contentment.

  “We’ll see what you are willing to promise,” said Böhm, reaching for a serving fork with two long tines.

  “No,” said Becker. “We won’t. Or, rather, it won’t matter. Nothing you can do to me will matter at all. Not now. Not anymore.”

  Böhm and Gebbler glanced toward the windows and doors.

  “Don’t worry,” said Becker, “no authorities are coming. Argentina doesn’t care who or what you are or what you did. That’s why so many Nazis came here. It was a safe haven. However, ‘safety’ is a funny word. It is conditional on assumptions about how the world works.”

  “You’re babbling,” said Gebbler.

  “No,” said Becker, “I’m explaining. The assumption is that you are politically safe, and you are. The assumption is that you cannot be extradited, and you can’t be. The assumption is that no earthly power is likely to harm you here, and that is almost certainly correct.”

  “Then what the hell is this all about?” demanded Gebbler.

  “The fault in the assumption,” said Becker, “is that I have any interest in relying on earthly powers to punish you. I don’t. I have no faith at all in governments and agencies and courts.”

  Böhm pointed the fork at him. “Talk plain or—”

  “Shhh,” said Becker. “Stop for a moment and think about where you are and what I have said. Think about the time of year.”

  The Germans stared at him.

  “My lantern is not very bright,” said Becker, “but it is bright enough. Oh yes, it is bright enough for the spirits of my beloved dead to follow, even though their bones are buried on the other side of the world. What is distance to ghosts?”

  The lantern flame suddenly danced as if whipped by a breeze, but all the windows were closed. It threw strange shadows on the wall. Becker smiled.

  “I have been a good host,” said the baker. “I have prepared the very best dishes from the recipes of my family, and you have fed well. Very well. Some celebrations require fatted calves, but I think fatted pigs will do nicely.”

  Böhm shivered again, and now Gebbler did, too. Their breaths plumed the air of the dining room. The flickering shadows on the wall looked strangely like silhouettes of people. Many people. Old and young, short and tall, male and female. Everywhere, all around the table.

  “The dead are always hungry,” said Becker. “And you will be, for them, a small taste of the old country.”

  He sat back, still smiling, and watched as the shadows fell upon the two German officers. It was a quiet street and the windows were shuttered and if anyone heard the screams they did not come to investigate.

  My Rot & Ruin series is my second biggest fictional world (with the Joe Ledger thrillers accounting for the largest number of books and short stories). There are, at this writing, seven Rot & Ruin novels, including a book of short stories. This tale is set in that world, and explores the backstory of one of the characters, but was written for an anthology where I could not reasonably assume readers would know of my teen series. And so, this is written as a standalone.

  Sisters

  -1-

  It rained the day the world ended.

  That’s how she remembered it.

  The rain fell cold and hard. That day and every time the world ended. For Lilah there wasn’t just one apocalypse. They kept happening to her.

  And each time it was raining.

  -2-

  The first time was when she was little. Too little to really understand what was happening. She was just learning to speak, barely able to walk, hardly able to form the kind of memories that could be taken out later and looked at. She remembered a woman’s face. Her mother’s, but Lilah didn’t really understand what that meant. George had to explain it to her later.

  Lilah remembered her mother holding her and running. And other people holding her. And running.

  And the monsters chasing.

  Grabbing. Tearing. Taking. Biting. Eating.

  Always.

  One of them had bitten Mom. Lilah had seen it happen but did not know what the bright colors and loud shrieks meant. Not then. Not until later.

  She remembered the house where her mother and the other grownups had hidden. She remembered her mother screaming. Mommy, with her big, swollen belly. Screaming.

  That’s when Annie was born.

  Lilah did not understand birth, either.

  Or the death that followed.

  Or what happened when Mom woke up.

  She saw what the others did, though. She understood it on some level that ran so deep age didn’t matter. She screamed louder than the newborn Annie. She screamed louder than the people who swung clubs and pipes as Mom tried to bite them.

  She screamed so loud it made her spit red.

  After that Lilah didn’t have much of a voice. A whisper. The first words she learned to speak were said in that whisper, and every word since then. Every single word.

  It had been raining that night, the drops thudding on the roof and tapping on the windows and knocking on the door. The rain hissed in the trees outside. Lilah recorded it without having labels for any of those things. Despite the rain, those memories were burned into her. She was too young for any of it, but the world ended anyway.

  -3-

  It rained the day George went away.

  George.

  Lilah never knew his last name. Last names didn’t seem to matter much. People in books had last names, and people in the stories George told. And maybe he even told her his last name, but she forgot because there was no need to remember it.

  George was the last of the grownups. The one who didn’t die.

  The others did. They went out of the house, one by one, over the weeks. Looking for help. Looking for answers. Finding nothing, it seemed, except the end of their own stories.

  George stayed with Lilah and the baby. He named her Annie. After that it was Lilah, and Annie, and George for years.

  And years.

  Sometimes George did go out, but never too far and never for too long. He waited for times when the biters weren’t so thick around the house and then he’d slip away, quiet as a mouse and vanish in the tall grass. Those were bad times. At first. Lilah would try hard not to cry because it scared Annie when she cried. So, Lilah forced her raspy voice to be still, blinked her tears away, held the screams in, and waited.