The Tesla Experiment

Prologue

Celeste felt her stomach churn as she pulled the rope toward her, slowly. They could never detect her movement or she would be done for. Her small hands nervously reeled in the thick roughness of the rope while the group of shouting men passed the inferno from which she had just escaped. Her goat bleated in panic as she tugged on its restraint, but the men did not hear it over the din of the burning barn. What if they saw it? They would certainly follow the fibrous cord and discover her!

Her blue eyes stretched open in anxious observation as she took note of the detail before her, holding her breath. Their uniforms looked like the dirt of the ash fields and their black rider boots reached up to their knees over the thick fabric. On their collars and arms, in red and black, different symbols bent into words she did not manage to read.

Oh, Celeste could read just fine, but not these writings. They spoke some language the symbols she knew could not be employed in. There were cloned lightning sigils that could have passed as ‘s’ in her alphabet, but on their arms the men wore a terrible symbol inside a black circle. She had no idea what it said, but she knew very well what it represented — DEATH.

Every time she saw this symbol there was only fear and death in its trail. Every time it appeared there would be much praying amongst her people and now she knew why. From under the massive horse cart where she was hiding Celeste watched her village burn, the people she knew now dead, their prayers silenced. Above the black smoke ascended to the heavens as if the terrible men who marched through wanted to tarnish heaven with their evil.

Among them she noticed a tall, slender man. His eyes were light and his hair fair, but he did not engage in any of the cruelty. In fact, he looked as lost as she felt, wearing no uniform even though he was one of them. It struck Celeste as very peculiar that he seemed to find the atrocities unbearable, yet he did nothing to antagonize the uniformed men or help the villagers. Suddenly his eyes caught hers. Celeste gasped.

It felt as if her little heart was going to burst with fright when he locked onto her, yet he did not move. Her goat bleated and stumbled about for fear of the fire, but she paid him no mind now. The man she was staring at sank his hands into his pockets and pulled from them a notebook and a pencil. Celeste cringed as a pair of shiny boots stopped right above her head, raising up dust into her face.

She needed to sneeze, but she knew it would be the end of her if she did. Her dirty little hand pinched her nose. Her goat got away from her and rushed out into the gravel road, but Celeste allowed him his escape from her, rather than to be foolish and pursue. The man who stood in front of her obscured her view of the other man she had been looking at and she rolled over to her left to get a better look. But he was gone.

Celeste tucked her little body back, deeper under the cart and closer to the wall it was standing against to utilize the shadows. From there she studied her surroundings, looking for the fair haired man. The black boots turned just as the cart began to shake. Celeste’s eyes filled with tears as the uniformed man started scuffling with something on the cart she could not see. Terrified, she knew she could not whimper in her weeping, not a sound to escape her lest she ended up another body on the burning pile a few meters off.

In her nostrils the stench of burning bodies choked her and she fought not to vomit. Horror filled her as she watched them burn, people she had known since she was an infant. Their faces were twisted, their eyes sunken away in their cavities and their lips curled back in death, revealing their teeth aside protruding tongues. Father Bleux’s skin was black, chafing against the blistered breasts of Madame Marie, Celeste’s first grade teacher. The nine year old girl thanked God that her parents were already dead a year before this hideous happening struck their town, because they would never die as horribly as the villagers they knew so well.

The sun was setting, but it looked like night already. Everywhere over the department of Haute-Vienne an evil loomed and the sun was blacked out by the snaking smoke of iniquitous butchery. Celeste pinched her eyes shut until the furious shaking of the vessel over her ceased. A bubbling death rattle sounded above her head and she saw a strong rain of blood stain the shiny boots of the soldier who had blocked off her escape before. At once, the rest of him fell to the ground, limp and bloody. Celeste started at his glaring blue eyes as they pierced hers, but soon she realized that they saw nothing anymore. He was dead from the gaping wound in his throat and his blood was streaming over the arid ground towards her amidst the screams of women and children still trying to flee the burning church they were locked in. Machine gun fire smothered their cries instantly.

A little piece of paper feathered down from the top of the horse cart, there where Celeste could not see. It landed just to the inside of the shadow where she hid. Before the rivulet of blood met the paper, she scooped it up and read the scribbling on it.

The young Celeste was perplexed, but grateful for the help. Although she was not certain if the note could be trusted, she did as it had dictated. It was a strange piece of paper, the true reason for her confusion. It looked like a ledger, perhaps a letter head of a doctor or a business. But it did not look like anything from 1944 at all. Even to her juvenile eyes it was clearly peculiar. Ripped and stained by soot, she discerned only some letters and numbers on what used to be a notebook heading.

“2015?” she frowned.

Celeste tucked the note inside her dress pocket and elected to believe that the numbers could not possibly belong to a date. Whatever it stood for, her savior was associated with it and she vowed to remember him forever, even if she did not survive World War II.